Keith Pleas Blog

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...

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?).

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...

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.

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?

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: