March 2003 - Posts
I am really looking forward to doing a talk on .NET at one of the computer user groups in IBM land - Poughkeepsie, NY - in April. I have talked to them in the past about what it is like to be a contractor - after a big round of layoffs. There are a lot of incredibly smart people there. I have heard there is even (only?) one person currently delving into .NET.
So I get to spread the word - on my own terms, in my own way and from my own perspective - without having to pose as "an expert".
www.bestweb.net/~collier/meetings#030421
I am really looking forward to it! Maybe a few will catch the .NET bug! Who knows, maybe a new .NET User Group!
uh oh, I have been found out!!
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Sent: Monday, March 31, 2003 3:10 PM
To: Julia Lerman
Subject: Re: [aspnet-admin] Re: debugging just disappeared
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Okay so I have been known to be a bit foul mouthed at times (comes from not having kids in the house I guess) but I really don't think I said anything bad about DNS in that post.
I had to add a new report to an old ASP application. This entailed getting a recordset from SQL Server, iterating through the recordset and building an xml file line by line and then building an xsl file to transform it into a report. All in Visual Studio 6 IDE (just to be safe). I had forgotten what it was like to write code without intellisense, how it hurt my shoulder to reach over to my server to do the debugging, etc. Sure I could have built this part in asp.net but I had thought - "oh, this will be quick..." To quote Dana Coffey - "OMG!!" How did we put UP with that!! Thank you Thank you Thank you
Having fun with Fritz Onion's book as well. I wasn't ready for a lot of this information when I started with asp.net, even though had read it. I have taken a lot of "leaps of faith", so to speak and just started coding. Now that I have used this stuff for a year, the "how & why" it works makes SO much more sense. I love that I can just jump right in at page one and find enlightenment. As my friend Ali said, the book has a good ROI.
And Fritz lives in Maine and Maine's not far from Vermont. I'm thinkin' User Group presentation here....
1) Switch from Earthlink to DirecWay service. $100 startup fee and $30/month additional fee over earthlink service. This will be a very very slow connection. I would have to purchase an emergency or travelling dialup account to supplement this.
2) Purchase $2500+ dollars worth of software - server side software is $2500, client side is $100 each (Ground Control) Direct and fast (My client, though hardly stingy, will likely not go for this option)
3) Purchase $700 worth of equipment (and get it installed at my client's site) plus $120 - $400 monthly service fees (SkyCasters) Direct and fast
4) Use a dialup return (still with satellite download) to get around the IP masking (NAT) which screws up my authentication on the server. Currently I get 20 hours free dialup a month. So I would have to buy an additional dialup account from earthlink and pay for my local phone calls to dial up - you pay for local in Vermont. Also, I will not be able send large files over this VPN method because I connect at 24.4 on my dialup. So I would have to upload files to my domain first and then vpn and then download on the other end. Yet, this seems like the simplest option.
drag drag drag - plus, though we are house hunting, I have not seen cable or DSL at any of the places we have looked at so far. Can't have my cake and eat it too, I guess.
Earthlink refuses to tell me how to adjust my satellite settings so that I can VPN to my client. The sys admin's who handle my clients say I MUST move to VPN. What to do what to do? I rue the day Earthlink bought Pegasus. Pegasus tech support was SO great. Unless you can get up to the escalated status at earthlink, you have to deal with complete morons who are reading from scripts.
Finally showed my 2nd winforms to webservice app to my client.
I am still smiling from their exclamation of "Awesome" when they saw how I had worked out a simple looking method to achieve their complex goal. But more so because of my own surprise at seeing the webservice do its thing. We were both doing test data entry. I am in Vermont. The person that was testing was in Mass. The webserver and data are in New York. We were working together over the phone.When we refreshed our screens, I saw my data AND his. It was a little shocking. I was the one saying "awesome"! It's just so unexpected with a Desktop application. I'm sure I could have done this before .NET, but it almost seems like it was unfairly easy. (Not counting the learning curves...
13 months ago, there was no developer community in Burlington or our region in Vermont. Now some of the folks in VTdotNET are banding together to create a SQL Server group. I didn't have to encourage them too much , and they are really going for it now. It's great to see. They chose to make it a SIG for now and stay under the wing of the VTdotNET user group, though I told them they'd have my 150% support either way. And it's also great because it won't be a one man band. There are six people working together on this. Six people who did not know each other before VTdotNET! What can I say, this makes me really happy!!
Mitch Rupp blogs:
Is it just me or does it seem like there is much stronger feeling of community and a greater amount help from the community than with ASP 3.0? Whatever it is, it sure is great.
I was not really involved with ASP -- but I was a FoxPro programmer in the way old days before I moved to VB. I really missed the FoxPro community. That is why I started the VTdotNET user group and modeled it after what I loved about the way I remembered things were in the FoxPro world.
That is what is going on with .NET all over the place now. And you're right Mitch, it really is fantastic.
I was really happy to see the Windows Forms Forums come alive. There was definitely a hole in that arena, now a community is evolving around that as well, thanks to Mike Harsh and Erik Porter and others. And that they did a major sample app (TaskVision) for Windows was also bringing the desktop developers into the fold, so to speak.
From: jd@hevanet.com [mailto:jd@hevanet.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2003 3:34 PM
To: aspnet@aspadvice.com
Subject: [aspnet] RE: .NET - when to switch
It seems like the people really raving about NET are the ones selling books or teaching NET classes or wanting to "drive their gas hogging SUVs all over the landscape and talk emission control differences". . . . .
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It wasn't satisfying enough just responding to him on the list serve - so he's gettin' blogged!
After all of the struggling to get my winforms/web service app deployed, I finally went to show it to my client today and it was sloooooooow as molasses. Real impressive! After a few more hours of trying to figure out what stupid thing I did THIS time, I finally found out that it was the cable service - Road Runner - that was having troubles in the region where the webserver lives. I am redeemed! (for now)
It really does get complex troubleshooting web stuff - you have code, client machine proxy settings, web server settings, web server application settings, config files, internet connections etc. all as puzzle pieces to this architecture. It certainly is a different world then developing win32 apps!
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