A couple of people have asked about Hands-On-Labs for EntLib (aka "Enterprise Library of Application Blocks"), so I asked Tom Hollander who replied with:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=B9BFF619-236C-4BBB-9AA1-2E7BC562C7F5&displaylang=en
These are for EntLib 1.x; new ones are under development for 2.0.
I'm the host (the TechEd schedule says "speaker" <sigh>) for "Migrating VB6 to VB.NET" at TechEd on Tuesday night from 6:30 to 7:30. Of course, we're going to talk about migrating applications, not the VB product itself...
One of the things I'm planning to have available at the BOF <fingers crossed> is the first few chapters from the upcoming Microsoft patterns & practices guide on this subject, which is currently in production and should be available - with a couple of corresponding planning tools - by the end of July.
Folks from the patterns & practices team, the Visual Basic team, and some of the "usual suspects" in the VB community have all promised to be there so I urge you to come by if this is a subject that interests you (no Karl, we will not be discussing what Microsoft "should have done" <grin>).
I just got an email with the above subject line. Hmm...really? Gee...I know they've been promising a lot, but "everything"? Wow. Then I looked at the sender...I just got spammed by Pottery Barn. <smile>
I too have been a victim of this dreaded problem, likely caused by installing and uninstalling various beta versions of .NET 2.0 frameworks and tools. A great post by Gregg Miskelly (a dev on the VS debugger team) offered tons of promising looking tips, none of which worked. (note: Does anyone know how to interpret the output of DebuggerDiagnostics.exe?).
Of course, Setup - removing, repairing, or reinstalling - all failed. Finally, I just deleted all the files in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\VS7Debug (stop the Machine Debug Service first), copied fresh ones from my MSDN DVD, and restarted the service. Bingo.
I mentioned Alan Cooper's keynote at the patterns & practices Summit a couple of weeks back. Alan's talk about "Ending the Death March" was - as expected - outstanding. Here's a picture from the kickback room after his talk with some of our speakers - including Ward Cunningham, Gregor Hohpe, and Rocky Lhotka (headless, on the left) - sitting with Alan and some of attendees:
Alan Cooper agreed this weekend to keynote the upcoming patterns & practices Summit in Mountain View. Alan's an old friend who's going to talk about creating "software that doesn't suck". Which reminds me of a story...
Seven or eight years ago at VSLive/SF I did a session on good and bad UI design. And Alan did a keynote there on software development. Of course, Alan's best known as a UI guy whereas most people would consider me to be a software developer. (Note: This was back in the day before I was the conference chair and had some editorial control over the content! <smile>)
So Alan's going down the huge escalator into the "bunker" conference area at the Marriott...he sees me on the other side going up and hollers "what the hell do you know about UI design?" I yell back "about as much as you know about developing software!". We grin at each other.
The interesting part is...I'd been doing UI protoyping and testing at MS (as a contractor) for more than 5 years. I'd spent many days in the usability labs watching guinea pigs (er, “customers”) navigate my creations. I was the tech editor on Microsoft cheif UI designer Virginia Howlett's book. And a session I did on UI design at one of the early TechEds was so popular that they had to schedule a second presentation to accomodate the overflow. Question: When was the last time you saw a UI session at a Microsoft conference? Answer: Chris Tobey (when at Microsoft his alias was "christ") talking about Windows 98 UI at the 1998 Microsoft PDC in Denver. Historic Footnote: Remember how "Search" used to be "Find"? Did you ever get used to doing <Ctrl>+<Esc>, <F>,<F> to bring up the "Find" dialog? And did you happen to notice that <Ctrl>+<Esc>, <F> still takes you to "Search"? Let's just call that my small contribution to society. <grin>
So...back to Alan, the "Father of VB" (written, in part, by legendary programmer Michael Geary who later wrote Adobe Type Manager and was - briefly - hassled by Microsoft legal for "stealing" their code). In those heady days for VB, there were actually a few people on the VB team at Microsoft who resented Alan's notoriety. In those early years we did a Midnight Madness at VBITS (precursor to VSLive) that featured a Microsoft-run "VB Jeopardy" game patterned (meaning "copied") from the popular TV show. One of the answers was "The father of VB", and you can imagine the audience’s consternation when the question “who is Alan Cooper?” was deemed WRONG by Microsoft, who insisted it was a guy named Len Oorthies (spelling?) who was the original PM.
Well…LenO has long faded from view, but I’m happy to say that Alan is as feisty as ever. And I can’t wait to hear his “Ending the Death March” keynote next month at our Summit.
Julie just IMed me to point out that Chris Sells blogged that "I Think VSLive Is *It*". I've been working with Fawcette for a long time - this was my 12th annual show in SF with them - and along the way I guess I just took that for granted.
Then I read where Chris said "... their coverage is top notch for 3rd party Windows developer conferences". Well, now that I think about it, I have to say "Thanks, Chris!". I'd forgotten that I was the conference chair for VSLive (and VBITS). Just tooting my own horn <smile>
It took more than a year, but a piece I wrote reviewing "best practices" security principles as applied to the well-known .NET "reference" applications (PetShop, F&M, Duwamish) finally made it onto MSDN last week. As you might imagine, the security aspects of these applications don't stand up well when a strong light is shown on them. And yet...what else is there? How are developers, designers, and architects supposed to deal with security when all they have to look at is simple marketing-oriented demos or 2,000 pages of detailed guidance, with nothing in between?
There are probably a number of ways to locate this article (and MSDN's infrastructure discourages permanent links), but here's one from the Architecture Center portal that might be good for a while:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/architecture/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnbda/html/ppsecguide.asp
I'm particularly tickled by the ratings / comments. The overall is currently 6.4998 (about average), but you just have to laugh at the distribution (see the graph at the bottom on the article). And what are the comments that accompany the 1 ratings?
"this page sucked"
"This article is full of shit..."
But here's the most recent comment (clearly, from an intelligent and perceptive reader <grin>):
"Told it like it is! The author has created has genuinely useful document that should be required reading for anyone writing secure apps."
My friend Susi Johnston - enroute to the US from Bali, where she's been organizing a major relief effort to Aceh for the past 3 weeks - sent me an email from Narita with the subject:
"Robert Scoble on the Cover of FORTUNE magazine"
Robert's blogged about Susi's relief effort a couple of times now, and we're going to his 40th birthday party this Saturday. Anyway, it looks like he's on the cover of the Asia edition of this magazine, which had this story about blogging. And somewhere in that issue is apparently something about the wiki as well, which was created by Ward Cunningham - who's in the group I work with at Microsoft and is doing an evening kickback session the first day of the next patterns & practices Summit. Small world, huh? Hmm...I wonder if I'm ever going to amount to anything myself...nah, prolly not. <grin>
Robert and Julie have already mentioned this. I've been hard at work all week helping a good friend in Bali - Susi Johnston - put together an immediate relief effort for the Aceh province called the "Aceh Aid Bucket Brigade". Susi credits me with the name, but let's just say it was a group effort. One of the things I can take credit for was setting up her blog on MSN spaces (good suggestion Robert!) to which she can post via email (they have embarassingly slow connections over there). I still have to do the pictures manually though...
Susi's NGO (non-gorvenmental organization) on Bali - IDEP - was resonsible for much of the recovery work from the Bali bombing and the irony is that much of the organization around that disaster is being put to use immediately to bring relief to the Aceh victims. Lee Downey - one of the lead volunteers on the trucks taking in the aid was in fact the volunteer who managed the morgue from the bombing. He's got a digital camera and 2GB of media, so there should be some "on the ground" images available soon.
As you might imagine, getting funds physically into Indonesia can be a bit problematic. So we've set up a PayPal account through the Tides Foundation to channel money to IDEP. Tides is not taking any fees for the service and is a 501c3 non-profit for tax deductability. And on the approved Microsoft gift matching list <nudge>. We are also applying to EBAY's foundation to cover the PayPal fees <fingers crossed>. We're working on getting some additional documentation online, but in the meantime you can send donations via PayPal to acehaid@tides.org with the assurance that the money will actually be in Indonesia, purchasing direct aid, within a few days. Now, quick like a bunny! You've only got 10 more hours (PST) to make it a 2004 deduction!
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