Jackie Goldstein's Weblog

The March meeting of the Israel Visual Basic User Group  meeting will be held on March 2, 2005:

In response to the Richard Grimes "controversy", there have been several good responses.  I think I like the response by Paul Kimmel the best.  That is probably because he focusses more on the future, than on the past and present.

Other good responses to Grimes' editorial include:

Dan Fernandez  (C# Product Manager!)

Scott Swigart

Paul Vick

Microsoft announced today the line of versions for SQL Server 2005.  Included in this lineup is a new Workgroup Edition, in addition to the Standard, Enterprise, and Express (MSDE) editions. 

At the same time, a Workgroup Edition was announced to be available for SQL Server 2000.

You can read about it here, here, and see/hear it here.

My interview with DevSource is now available online.

This interview is rather extensive - Esther managed to get me going by asking me about 3 of my greatest passions:  VB, Data Access, and Patterns & Practices.  We also touched on some other topics as well.

We are currently finishing up an ASP.NET 1.1 application for one of our clients.  One of the requirements was to support the FireFox browser.   Now, ASP.NET does a good job of this - on the server.   But where we ran into problems and incompatabilities with IE was with programming the DOM with Java script on the client.

Fortunately, my developer who was working on this tracked down the Gecko DOM Reference for the FireFox and other Mozilla-based browsers.

This is a good link to tuck away somewhere, because if/when you need it, you'll really need it...

If your ISV application, or an application that you love, plans on supporting the 64-bit edition of Windows Server 2003, then you should contact Microsoft here.  They are trying to locate/identify such applications to promote the the 64-bit OS - this could be a good publicity opportunity for you.

This is one of those posts that is hard to imagine writing a few years ago...

If you are developing against an Oracle database, you should check out these resources:

Oracle has redone its Oracle Technology Network (OTN) site and has a new .NET Technology Center.

Oracle has also released Beta 2 of its Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio, which you can download here.

One other fun thing from VSLive, but not directly related to the show.  On Wednesday I had breakfast with Mary Jo Foley.   She is the author of the popular online newsletter Microsoft Watch, that I have been reading for a long time.  If you want a good, centralized way to keep track of what is going on in and around Microsoft, you need to subscribe to this feed.

Mary Jo is an industry veteran and we had a good time reminiscing about the "old days" and the leading companies and people that are no longer around.  Of course, we also shared some interesing thoughts about Microsoft - both the people and the technologies.

While her Microsoft Watch may seem hard-hitting, Mary Jo Foley the person is really pleasant and easy-going.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the big news at this year's VSLive San Francisco conference was Indigo Day.

Although there was alot of noise over a year ago when Indigo was first unveiled at the PDC, Microsoft had publicly been very quiet on this subject since then.   Well, alot has changed since then, but Indigo seems well-baked enough to start talking about it in some greater detail. While it is still too early to start building real systems with Indigo (even for early adopters - we still have a while until we even hit Beta 1), it is very important to start understanding Indigo.  This is because you want to be designing your systems today, so that it will be easy to migrate and take advantage of Indigo when it does become available. 

There have been lots of threads on Web Services vs. Enterprise Services vs.Remoting, but if you want to look at that issue from the perspective of using the best approach today to be ready for tomorrow, then I suggest you review the blog archives from Richard Turner of the Indigo team.  You'll also find some good pointers to other resources, including the new Introduction to Indigo by David Chappell.

I am finally getting a handle on the post-VSlive backlog...

This year's VSLive San Francisco was another good event.  There was the usual fun (and education) meeting old friends and colleagues.  There was also meeting new faces to old acquiantences - such as Sam Gentile, whose blog I always read, but had never met face-to-face before.

My two sessions, VB Worst Practices and Data Access Strategies and Tactics, both went very well, with good attendence, good responses, and good questions/discussions afterwards (especially after the Data Access session).

The Microsoft .NET was OK - not much new for me here.  That is probably because I have heard and discussed all of these topics already, some multiple times.  It was interesting, however, to hear Soma live, as I have been tracking his blog for a while.

The big news of the conference was the Indigo Day - this was basically Indigo's "coming out" party.   I will share my thoughts on this in a separate posting.

Finally, there was some genuine interest and excitement around the release of the Enterprise Library.  I did my part to help encourage this, but I also did some formal and informal lobbying to have the source code available and supported for VB as well, so I wouldn't be so disappointed.