Archives
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INETA Presentations in the Netherlands
Two weeks ago I had the privilege of being sponsored by INETA to speak at a VB User Group meeting in the Netherlands. The meeting was for VBcentral, which has monthly meetings for VB developers in a city called Doorn, which is about a 45 drive (without traffic) from Amsterdam.
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Visual Studio Hot Fixes now available for easy download
If you've ever been frustrated by the process of trying to get access to an available MS hot fix (especially after being frustrated by those bugs/crashes/hangs in VS), join the club. But before you spend too much time lamenting, note that MS has heard our cry and made many/most of the existing critical hotfixes available for simple downloading here.
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TechEd: Developers 2006 (Barcelona)
I gave two presentations at this year's event:
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Israel Visual Basic User Group (IVBUG) Celebrates 9th Birthday
At this month's monthly meeting on November 1, IVBUG, the Israel Visual Basic User Group, celebrated its 9th birthday ! It is hard to believe that it has been 9 years since I founded this group, the first Microsoft User Group in Israel. Many of the faces have changed over the years, but we do still have a few member (besides me !) who were at those first meetings.
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ClickOnce Community Resource Kit
A nice new source of practical and advanced information on building Click Once deployments has been developed by Brian Noyes for the MS Patterns and Practices team. Here is the description blurb:
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SQL Server Compact Edition is Back!
No new software, but a new/old name... The recently renamed SQL Server Everywhere (the successor to SQL Mobile and SQL CE) has been renamed back SQL Server Compact Edition - see the details here.
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Sessions I'll be Giving at VSLive in Boston
VSLive! is coming to Boston this week and I'm scheduled to give 2 presentations:
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Great Interview on the Age-Old questions of "To VB or not to VB "
Check out the ARCast recording of Ron Jacobs discussing VB and lanaguage choices with Bill McCarthy. The whole ARCast series has lots of usefull and entertaining sessions. You should find this one particularly enjoyable and thought-provoking - Bill is a very articulate and passionate fan of VB.
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Internet Explorer 7 - Official Released Version Now Available
If you waited to avoid installing beta software on your production machines, you can now download the official released version of IE 7. Enjoy !
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Speaking at VSLive! This coming Week
I'll be giving two presentations at this coming week's VSLive conference in New York City. One will be on SQL Server Everywhere and the other is on the VB My namespace. If you are at the conference please let me know and/or come by and say hi !
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ADO.NET v3 CTP now available !
If you want to get your hands on the first bits of ADO.NET 3.0, you can download the CTP from here. Pablo Castro announced it over here - here is what you get to play with:
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ADO.NET Best Practices Podcast - One of the best on Dr. Dobbs
I recently received the following email message regarding a Podcast interview I did about 6 months ago:
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Workspace Nirvana - That's my Developer !
Kim has posted some good comments and insights on what makes up a good working environment for software developers.
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Special July IVBUG Meeting with Juval Lowy
The July meeting of the Israel Visual Basic User Group will be held at a special location and special date this month, since we are honored to have Juval Lowy as our special guest speaker.
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Amazing set of tutorials on Working With Data in ASP.NET 2.0
You really must check out this new set of 15 (with even more to come soon) detailed and easy to understand tutorials on working with data in ASP.NET. It covers many of the common, and often not obvious, tasks that you'd want to accomplish with data in ASP.NET 2.0. All of the tutorials are available in both C# and VB and are full of screen shots showing what needs to be done.
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My ARCast Recording on Occasionally Connected Clients now available online
Ron Jacobs has his own little corner of Channel 9, where he stores all of his ARCast podcast recordings. These are 30-45 minutes interviews/discussions on various different topics related to computer architecture.
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Kim Major is Blogging !
Well, it took a little bit of prodding, but Kim Major is (finally!) blogging. Kim is an amazing developer (and a great guy), and always has some interesting insights. We always have great design and programing discussions. You can see the results of some of these discussions in his post on Serializing with .NET 2.0 Generics
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Want to be a Software Architect ?
If you answer Yes to the question of "Do you want to be a Software Architect?" or you just want to learn more about this aspect of software development, check out the new website Skyscrapr (yes, there is no 'e') at http://www.skyscrapr.net/. This is the latest effort from Ron Jacobs and is very informative in a fun and varied fashion.
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Official Release - Visual Studio 2005 Web Application Projects
This is add-on for VS 2005, offers the project model for web applications like we had for VS 2003 is available as a free download here. There is also another great bonus included in this package - Edit and Continue for web applications !
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A look back at McNealy Zingers
It has only been a day since Scott McNealy announced he is stepping down as CEO of Sun, but the retrospectives have already begun!
Be sure to watch the video offered about half way down the page, in addition to reading the text quotes. -
ASP.NET 2.0 Provider (inc. Membership, Role Management) Source Code Released
Microsoft has released the source code for the built-in ASP.NET 2.0 Providers (Membership, Role Management, Profiles, Web Parts, Site Navigation, etc, etc).
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Renaissance's SQL Express / Visual Studio Starter Kit Now Available for Download from microsoft.com
The SQL Express / Visual Studio Starter Kit that we developed for Microsoft is now available for download !
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New Release Versions of SQL 2005 Express
Along with SP1 for SQL Server 2005, a new set of downloads for SQL 2005 Express have been released as well.
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Double the Speed of your IBM Thinkpad in Less Than a Minute!
One of my developers noticed that his new IBM T43 Thinpad seemed to be running rather slowly. Upon talking to IBM Support, he was informed of a great power-conservation feature of the Intel Centrino CPU - SpeedStep Technology - which runs the CPU at half speed when running on battery. It may also run at half speed even when you are on AC - depending on your power management settings!
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Build an Application with SQL Express and/or Visual Studio Express - Win $10,000
Look here to get the details on the Made In Express Contest. Write a cool app - win cool money !
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Up-to-the-Minute Info on What is Happening With ASP.NET
Scott Guthrie and his ASP.NET team have been extremely forthcoming with their plans and interim builds for ASP.NET.
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April Israel Visual Basic User Group Meeting
This month we take a step away from the depths of code and try to take a higher-level look at developing applications.
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New SQL Express CTPs just Released!
Community Technology Previews (CTPs) of new versions of SQL Server 2005 Express are now available from here.
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Microsoft Products Developed in .NET
One of the questions/issues that comes up periodically is "Is Microsoft using its own platform/tools (.NET) to develop its own products ?" While we could have a great discussion about the correctness of writing an Operating System totally in managed code, there are many elements and products from Microsoft that do already incorporate alot of .NET code.
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Software Factories ?!
Here is an interesting, and quite humerous, opinion on the question of software factories, posted by Benji Smith on Joel Spolsky's discussion forum. I think that like most things, especially engineering, it is a matter of using good judgement to pick the tool / technology / architecture that best needs the requirements and constraints.
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Are we getting too addicted to RSS feeds ?
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ASP.NET 2.0 Membership, Roles, Forms Authentication, and Security Resources
Another great, extensive post by Scott Guthrie. We have already done work with the ASP.NET 2.0 Membership and Roles, both in Winforms and Webforms, but I sure wish I had this list of resources when I started !
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Patterns & Practices Security Training Modules
J.D. Meier's (from the MS Patters Practices PAG team) blog entry points to some short and useful security videos given by Keith Brown.
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Free Online SQL2005 Courses
You can now take online SQL Server 2005 courses for free - here.
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In Case You Missed it - TechEd Europe has been moved and reformatted
Since 1999, I haved looked forward to attending and speaking at the annual TechEd EMEA at the beginning of July. It normally took place either in Barcelona or Amsterdam - both fun places to visit. Well, the format of the show is being changed and moved to November. The official announcement is here. You can read Hans' take on it over here.
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Step-By-Step Guide to Converting Web Projects from VS 2002/2003 to VS 2005
Here is a nice article on upgrading your ASP.NET 1.1 / VS 2003 web sites and applications to ASP.NET 2.0 / VS 2005
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8 Free eBooks from APress
[From Ohad]
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Speaking at Seattle .NET Developers Association
I am happy to be back in Redmond and speaking again at next week's meeting of the Seattle .NET Developers Association. I'll be doing a presentation "Designing Data Access Components and Passing the Data Through the Tiers". I have given variations of this session in the past, but this time I will also be incorporating some new ideas and lessons learned from a distributed architecture framework that we have been developing.
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ReportViewer: A great control - but beware...
One of the coolest controls in VS 2005 is the ReportViewer control. It is a powerful control for previewing, printing, and exporting (XLS or PDF) reports based on data in your database. However, this control is something of weird animal - it is not part of the .NET framework, but is an add-on control that is part of Visual Studio. This fact results in 2 main issues:
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More Interview Segments on Upgrading to VB.NET and ADO.NET
In addition to the first segment that I mentioned was posted last month, there are now a total of 4 segments of that interview available here for your listening pleasure - let me know what you think!
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ASP.NET Product Team in Israel Next Month
Yosi Taguri from MS Israel posts that the ASP.NET product team will be visiting Israel next month. There will be a public seminar on March 13th (see Yosi's post for the agenda). There will also be an opportunity for a few teams to work directly with the ASP.NET team on migration their existing 1.1 applications to 2.0. Contact Yosi (yosit@microsoft.com) if you think you have a candidate project.
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More Info on the Soon-To-Be-Released ASP.NET Project Model Update
Back in December, I mentioned (with great excitement) an effort within the ASP.NET team to return to VS 2005, the ASP.NET web project model that we knew and loved from VS 2003. Alot of progress has been made on this effort - you read all of the details in this post by Scott Guthrie himself.
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February Israel Visual Basic User Group Meeting
This month’s speaker is no stranger to IVBUG members, but the topics he is going to cover, may be relatively unknown to you. He is going to cover two different, interesting topics:
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First parts of .NET Cast interview now online
Back in December, I had a great time chatting with Mark Baker on as they interviewed my for a series on Upgrading to VB.NET that they were doing for their .DevNet .NET podcast series. The interview is posted in approximately 15-minute chunks and the first 2 segments are already posted on CMP Media sites including DotNetJunkies, SqlJunkies, DDJ, Byte, Software Development, etc. You can also go directly to the series home page at http://devnet.developerpipeline.com/podcasts/dotnetcast/
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SQL Server Management Studio Express
This isn't really new news (it is 2 months old) but I wanted to make sure people are aware of it.