VSLive, the premier conference for .NET Developers, is returning to it's roots!  It has been over 10 years I believe since VSLive was last in Boston.  Boston it is June 28 - July 1st at the Westin Copley Place Hotel.

The plan is to split into two tracks: a Smart Client track and an ASP.NET track.  I have been asked to head up the content selection for the ASP.NET portion of this show. 

Please send all proposals to me and include VSLive Boston in the title so that I spot them.  Treat this as the first call for proposals.  I need all proposals sent to me by March 7th so I can get a preliminary matrix setup. I need proposals for both 60 minutes sessions and all day workshops. 

Each proposal should include:

Session Title

Three-Four sentence abstract

Your Bio

Thursday, February 24, 2005 9:54:30 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

Does anyone know of any solutions for licensing applications running on the compact framework?  I have an application that I want to release as a time limited demo.  You should then be able to purchase a key to unlock it and have it function as a full version of the application.  Xheo has some interesting tools for the full framework but their compact framework version is a ways off.  I need a solution in the next month or two. All suggestions very appreciated.

Wednesday, February 23, 2005 1:43:24 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

I have been doing quite a bit of Enterprise Library development as of late so I decided to go ahead and aggregate links to a number of resources:

Enterprise Library Configuration Part 1

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottdensmore/archive/2005/01/28/362579.aspx

Enterprise Library as non-Admin

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottdensmore/archive/2005/01/29/363202.aspx

Manage Application Settings Using Enterprise Library Configuration

http://blog.hishambaz.com/archive/2005/01/30/197.aspx

Logging with Enterprise Library

http://blog.hishambaz.com/archive/2005/01/30/202.aspx

Enterprise Library Logging - Rolling File Sink

http://blog.hishambaz.com/archive/2005/02/14/317.aspx 

Windows Integrated Security Providers for Enterprise Library

http://wah.onterra.net/blog/archive/2005/02/01/220.aspx 

String Resource Generator v1.2 now with support for Enterprise Library SR.strings files

http://wah.onterra.net/blog/archive/2005/02/01/223.aspx

New release of String Resource Generator with multi-language SR.strings support

http://wah.onterra.net/blog/archive/2005/02/09/258.aspx

Getting Started With Enterprise Library

http://blog.hishambaz.com/archive/2005/01/29/194.aspx

Exception Handling Block in Enteprise Library

http://geekswithblogs.net/drewby/archive/2005/01/29/21416.aspx

Enterprise Library Samples from a User Group Meeting

http://wah.onterra.net/blog/archive/2005/02/18/288.aspx

Configuraiton Storage Providers - Smart Client vs Server

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottdensmore/archive/2005/02/15/373165.aspx

Thursday, February 17, 2005 9:10:27 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [1]  

I have been lobbying for this for quite some time.  The compact framework seems like an ideal platform to extend with blocks given the limited surface area that the base framework covers.  Turns out the P&P guys are looking at this platform and want some feedback.

Please hit the survey here and give them some feedback!

http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?p=WEB2244VE2K3ZT

Thanks!

Thursday, February 10, 2005 12:36:20 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

Well I just finished my ASP.NET Live! session about an hour ago.  As promised in the session here as my slides and samples.

EntLibSamples.zip

UsingEntLibWithAsp.pdf

Thanks for coming!

Wednesday, February 09, 2005 5:01:55 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [1]  

I run a small colocation with a few friends and needed a way to track whose servers were chewing up our Bandwidth.  I needed something a little cheaper than Solarwinds which many ISPs run. 

I lucked into Paessler PRTG Traffic Grapher which will figure out the bandwidth in and bandwidth out of most devices that support SNMP. It also can track things like CPU load, disk space, etc.

Great utility.  Check it out.

Tuesday, February 08, 2005 9:19:36 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

We have a windows forms control that we host in a browser that we needed to make a drop target. This control is granted fulltrust already based on our strong name.

Based on this we thought this setup would be trivial.  Well we ran into two issues I want to get in the google index for others that hit them.

1. In our _DragDrop handler we only received the name of the first file that was dropped even with a multi selected drop.  Come to find out this is because the framework after grabbing the first file name does a FileIOPermission Demand assuming we are going to eventually do something with the file.  In our case however we just need the filename.  The Demand fails and the framework silently catches it returning only a single filename.  This has been reported as a bug.  The fix?  Make sure that you assert FileIOPermission on your _DragDrop handler like this:

[System.Security.Permissions.FileIOPermission(System.Security.Permissions.SecurityAction.Assert, Unrestricted=true)]
private void UserControl1_DragDrop(object sender, System.Windows.Forms.DragEventArgs e)

2. When setting .AllowDragDrop=true in the InitializeComponents section of the control an exception was raised during initialization of the control.  When I looked at the call stack I realized it was a message that was being received by the controls WndProc during initialization of Drag & Drop that was missing UIPermission.  To fix this I added:

Thursday, January 20, 2005 4:26:56 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

I have been chatting with friends as of late about the penetration of the Flash runtime vs. the .NET runtime.  I had recently seen Flash stats but hadn't seen any .NET stats.  Brad Abrams drops some of them on his blog:

1.      More than 120M copies of the .NET Framework were downloaded and installed (using either Microsoft downloads or Windows Update)

2.      More than 85% of new consumer PCs sold in 2004 had the framework installed. More than 58% of business PC had the .NET Framework preinstalled or preloaded

Those were his top two and can only bode well for those of us shipping .NET applications out in the real world...

Friday, January 14, 2005 8:58:09 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

PC Magazine finally published an article that I pretty much agree with based on thoughts I have been seeing on other blogs about the demise of the venerable thinkpad.  Check it out.

Thursday, January 13, 2005 11:45:28 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [1]