Dave Bost

It can now be told...

DaveBost — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 20:23:00 GMT

…that I too am joining Microsoft. I was fortunate enough to land my dream job, Developer Evangelist for the Midwest district. That means that if you live in the states of Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin and you are a developer, it is my job to make sure you have the information and resources you need to become a better Microsoft developer. I will also be your sounding board for all of your feedback on Microsoft’s tools and technologies. If you have any thoughts and/or complaints on what we’re doing or where we’re heading, I’d be more than happy to talk with you.

I’m highly looking forward to my new career endeavor and look forward to working more closely with the Midwest developer community.

[cross posted from http://davebost.com/blog/archive/2005/09/19/3427.aspx]

Beta2 Bits up on MSDN Subscription

DaveBost — Sat, 16 Apr 2005 02:26:00 GMT

I'm jumping over here from my regularly scheduled blog to let everyone know (if you don't already) that the Beta2 bits are up on MSDN subscriptions. Let the downloading begin!

My First MSDN Article Has Been Published!

DaveBost — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 23:49:00 GMT

Sorry... I had to jump on over to my weblogs blog from my permanent home to announce this exicting news.

For everyone who has struggled with installing the Dec CTP release of Team System can now find a step-by-step guide (compiled by yours truly) to help you through the process. It's geared towards installing the tiers in a virtual environment but it's easily tranferable to a non-virtual environment. Leave me a comment over here if you have questions.

Enjoy!

Blog Has Moved

DaveBost — Fri, 15 Oct 2004 12:49:00 GMT

This blog has moved over to http://www.davebost.com. I'm doing this for a couple of reasons. First, that is where my original blog began; right after attending the BOF session on blogging at the PDC and before I found out about http://weblogs.asp.net. Secondly, I would like to have more control on being able to customize the .Text application to fit my needs better as well as have more insight into the readership of my blog through the log files. And Thirdly, cross-posting was getting to be too much of a burden and trackbacks were becoming a mess. Just ask Rory. I seem to have polluted his comments section on a few occasions. Sorry, Rory.

It's going to be tough to find readers outside of the http://weblogs.asp.net space but hopefully I can post some useful and insightful content that will drive interest over to DaveBost.com.

I want to thank ScottW for hooking me up with http://weblogs.asp.net and I hope to see everyone over at my new (old) home.

I'm "Live Enabled". Are you?

DaveBost — Fri, 08 Oct 2004 17:42:00 GMT

ESPN NFL 2K5	ESPN NHL 2K5	Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge

Links 2004	Top Spin	Project Gotham 2

NBA 2K3	MechAssualt

Day of .NET 2004

DaveBost — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 20:56:00 GMT

The Chicago .NET Users Group is putting together a one day mini-con appropriately named "Day of .NET".

We've worked hard trying to pull together an agenda that will cater to all levels of .NET Developers. Whether you're a beginner or a certified guru, there's something here for you. Here is a sampling of some of the session topics:

* NUnit - Test Driven Development
* Build Management tools
* Overview of Visual Studio 2005
* Building Smart Clients with Visual Studio 2005
* Introduction to ASP.NET
* Introduction to Windows Forms
* Advanced ASP.NET

In addition, we are conjuring up two sessions (yes, two!) on ADO.NET. As well as sessions on Biz Talk 2004, Sharepoint and Yukon. I'll be giving the Build Management tools session where I plan on talking about how we utilize NAnt and Strider in our project build process.

So come join me and my close friends as we spend a whole Saturday geeking out to .NET!

Of Music and Movies

DaveBost — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 20:39:00 GMT

[Note: The full post can be found at my permanent blog site. This is a shameless attempt to help drive all my weblogs.asp.net readers to my permanent home. Pardon me while we move.]

As any self professing geek can admit, I spend a lot of time at my computer (much to my wife's chagrin). Whether it's of the 9 to 5 variety or the late night hours feeding my brain with the latest and greatest in .NET Land. I'm one of those types of people who just can't stand sitting in silence. I've always needed some background noise to keep my sanity. 95% of the time, my noise of choice is listening to music streaming off of Rhapsody. I really enjoy my Rhapsody subscription in that it allows me to stream as much music as I want, for as long as I want, for a mere $24.95 every 3 months (or $9.95/mo). Sometimes I bounce around to all sorts of musical genre's ranging from Bluegrass to Folk to Alternative to Punk to New Age to Classical. My musical tastes are all over the board. I've never been that up on Heavy Metal or Rap but I can appreciate a few songs here and there.

Rhapsody gives me the ability to find artists that I normally wouldn't have run across. I'm really hooked on a band that I came across a couple of weeks ago called 'The Secret Machines'. I think I've listened to there latest album "Now Here Is Nowhere" about 30 times. As you can tell, I really dig it and it's nice background noise to work to. As it turns out, The Secret Machines recently had an appearance on MTV2's $2 Bill with The Killers - another group that I happened across on Rhapsody and what can I say, they're Killer. Anyhow, there's a few video clips of these 2 bands from their $2 Bill concert up on MTV2, check them out.

(more)

Everything isn't as it seems

DaveBost — Wed, 22 Sep 2004 23:44:00 GMT

Now this is funny...

When Oprah Winfrey gave away 276 cars last week to the audience of her show, images of people laughing, jumping, crying -- some hysterically -- filled the airwaves and the give-away became stuff of legend...But now some of those eager prize-winners have a choice: Fork over $7,000 or give up the car.

http://money.cnn.com/2004/09/22/news/newsmakers/oprah_car_tax/index.htm?cnn=yes

An issue with Visual Studio Debugging Resolved

DaveBost — Wed, 22 Sep 2004 23:16:00 GMT

In a shameless attempt to help promote traffic to my new permanent blog site (http://www.davebost.com), I will offer up teasers to my posts on my weblogs.asp.net site with a link to the actual post.

On to the post...

I was helping one of the developers on our team with an interesting little debugging issue in Visual Studio .NET today. I thought I share it with my readers (all 3 of you).

One of our developers came up to me today and said he was having an issue with a breakpoint not hitting. This particular situation involved a main web project alongside a class library project under one solution. He was setting a breakpoint in the class project and sure enough it wasn't firing. These are always fun ones to figure out, so I go through my standard questions for debugging web applications:

1.) Are you compiling in Debug or Release mode?

2.) Does the web config have the debug attribute set to true in the <compilation> configuration setting under <system.web>?

3.) Do you have the appropriate permissions? Are you an Administrator? If not, are you a member of the VS Developers and Debugger Users groups?

In this particular case, he answered Yes to all 3. <more>

Project Code Names

DaveBost — Thu, 02 Sep 2004 16:46:00 GMT

A nice little read on project code names. Who would've thought there's much more to it than coming up with a catchy name to put on a t-shirt.

Rory's ode to Chris Sells

DaveBost — Thu, 02 Sep 2004 00:35:00 GMT

Ok… so Rory has only been on the job for a couple of weeks now and he’s already completely lost his mind during his stay at some of the roads finest 2 ½ star hotels. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with during his travels.

Give 6, Get 6

DaveBost — Wed, 01 Sep 2004 17:33:00 GMT

[Update: the 2nd round of invites are all gone.]

I recently gave away my 6 Gmail invites to some of the fine folks in the blogosphere. Gmail seems to be awarding my generosity by allowing me to invite 6 more. If you haven’t already gotten your hands on one of these invites (and who hasn’t) leave a comment and I’ll be sure to pass one your way. As is the standard, first come - first serve.

Final 10 for the .NET Rocks' Tablet PC

DaveBost — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 21:50:00 GMT

[Update: Sorry to say, and no suprise here, but I didn't win. :( I'm completely and utterly bummed. I guess I can perk back up when I get my booby-price.]

Thanks to Carl and Rory, I’m one of the final 10 for the Tablet PC Giveaway over there on .NET Rocks. I reaaalllllllly want to get my hands on one of these bad boys. I’m giddy with excitement on the possible off-chance that I might win. Tune in to tonight’s show to find out.

DotNetNuke @ CNUG - Tonight!

DaveBost — Wed, 18 Aug 2004 17:27:00 GMT

Our very own Jon Henning will be presenting Introducing the DotNetNuke Portal Framework at tonight’s CNUG meeting. Jon is a Senior Consultant with Solution Partners, a DotNetNuke Core Team Member and the inventor of the SolPart ASP.NET Menu Control. Surely an event not to be missed.

The meeting will be held at Microsoft’s Downers Grove office and will begin at 7PM. If you plan an attending, please register at the CNUG website (needed for security purposes). If anyone is interested in participating in any of the CNUG committees, the committees will be meeting at 6PM. As always will all CNUG meetings, free pizza and soda for all!

I plan on coordinating a contingent to toss back a few and have a little geek talk at a local watering hole afterwards. Everyone is more than welcome to join us - the more the merrier.

Losing interest in Mono experiment

DaveBost — Wed, 04 Aug 2004 04:36:00 GMT

It's pretty hard to get Mono installed if you can't even get Linux up and running. On account of Mono 1.0 not including a package for the Mandrake distro, I made the decision to install Red Hat's Fedora Core 2 (more). After a few hours of waiting for the system to install I was finally ready to login and apply the recommended patch for running in Virtual PC. When I booted up the Fedora OS and entered my 'root' login, I was inundated with 'Segment Fault' error messages. That's okay, I thought, because the step-by-step instructions to apply the patch said you could ignore these. Just try and execute the command again and they should go away. (Well, isn't that special)

The gist of the instructions is to copy a ZIP file from another partition that contains the patched kernel. To do this, you need to have Samba running in order to connect to a Windows share. Step (37) of the patch instructions states to run the following command: 'ifup eth0 boot'. When executing this command, I once again ran into my little friend the 'Segment Fault' error. The problem this time around was that it wasn't going away. After 20+ attempts I was pretty convinced that this command wasn't going to execute at all. I don't even pretend to know what the 'ifup' command does but I'm guessing it has something to do with initializing my network card. This would seem to pose a problem in executing step (38), the samba client.

I found another suggestion that says if you have problems with your network card to burn the patch file to a CD. Fine. I did that, but now the system won't let me mount my Cd-ROM. So much for that idea. I've basically given up on this exercise because I feel like I've wasted way too much time trying to get Fedora Core 2 installed.

My last and final step to this experiment gone awry is to take the advice of Andres Bastidas who was kind enough to post a comment on my earlier post on how to get Mandrake to play nice with the Fedora Mono 1.0 package. I'm a bit skeptical but I'll give it one last shot. Something tells me I'll be heading back to my Whidbey work sooner than later. I should have never ventured away in the first place.