# Tuesday, January 24, 2006
Today is a day for pictures

ActiveNick (Nick Landry) posted a ton of pictures! I'm actually in some of them too.

http://www.infusionblogs.com/photos/activenicks_geekish_celebrity_sightings/picture266.aspx

I'm excited that he's starting to blog again. He's always got something interesting to say - just no time to say it.



Tuesday, January 24, 2006 5:29:28 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #  Comments [0] 

Met up with Miguel Castro in Philly

While on vacation this past fall, I met up with Miguel Castro and Bogdan and had a beer at the City Tavern.

Miguel, Bogdon, Phoebe and Josh at the City Tavern

I gotta say, I liked the Wassle. I had never had that before - but since then, my wife Phoebe had looked up a recipe and we've enjoyed it on several special occasions...

If you haven't heard of it - the City Tavern is where the founding fathers of our country got together for drinks and where they wrote a good portion of the Constitution. It was actually burned down and rebuilt at some point but it's very authentic feeling and the staff is all dressed for the period.



Tuesday, January 24, 2006 4:08:07 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #  Comments [0] 

# Monday, January 23, 2006
Dayton-Cincinnati Code Camp!

The Dayton-Cincinnati CodeCamp was a lot of fun. Jim Holmes organized the whole event. He posts about the event here - http://frazzleddad.blogspot.com/2006/01/dayton-cincinnati-code-camp-big.html.

I did three talks:

ASP.NET Security Whiteboard

This was interesting because I did a hour ten about ASP.NET security and didn’t talk about cross site scripting, sql injection attacks or any of the usual suspects. I just answered questions for an hour plus. Most people talking about security immediately jump to those items, but many of these people just needed to know what a role was and how it applied in ASP.NET and so on.

Roadworthy ASP.NET

In this talk, I talked about ASP.NET for mobile devices. Smaller crowd, but it was a blast.

True Mobility

In this talk, I gave my definition of Mobility which is not just mobile devices. It’s letting your customer/user leverage their data wherever they happen to be. That could be in the car, but a lot of times, it’s at their desk or at a coffee shop where it makes more sense to have a desktop app or web page. All of the different front ends have their strengths and weaknesses so you might have to write more than one UI. Therefore, architect your application so that it can accept multiple UIs.

There were a ton of good speakers at the event – here’s a short list in no real order:

James Avery

Nino Benvenuti

Dave Donaldson

Greg Huber and Jason Follas

Drew Robbins

Craig Utley

Rob Keefer

There were some others that I’ve forgotten or didn’t meet and I apologize to those folks.

I have to say that the event pumped me up to do one here in the Ann Arbor area. I have been wanting to, but this really gave me a lot of good ideas on the scope and such. I think that this is definitely doable. Stay posted here for more information coming soon on the Ann Arbor Day of .NET.


Speaking
Monday, January 23, 2006 9:03:37 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #  Comments [0] 

# Tuesday, January 03, 2006
January Speaking Engagements For Josh Holmes
AACS (Ann Arbor Computer Society)
http://www.ComputerSociety.org
1/4/2006 On the Road Again! Mobility through SQL Mobile and the Compact Framework 2.0
Dayton Code Camp http://daytondevgroup.net/CodeCamp.aspx 1/21/2006 Practical ASP.NET Security
Roadworthy ASP.NET
True Mobility
Rockford, IL
http://www.netrug.net/
1/25/2006 It's All About You! Personalization through ASP.NET 2.0 Portal Framework
VSLive (San Francisco)
http://www.netrug.net/
1/29/2006 - 2/2/2006 Visual Studio Tools for Office: the Agony and the Ecstasy (Smart Client/Black Belt Track)
Thousands of Users, Personalized Service – Portals and Web Parts in ASP.NET 2.0 (ASP.NET Track)


Tuesday, January 03, 2006 4:19:12 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #  Comments [0] 

Speaking at AACS on 1/4/2006

AACSWednesday January 4, 2006
AACS Meeting Time: 6:00 pm
Location: IT Zone Launch Pad.  330 E. Liberty, Ann Arbor MI



Tuesday, January 03, 2006 4:01:11 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #  Comments [0] 

# Monday, October 24, 2005
Deployment issues with the Compact Framework v2.0... (Sorta)
I just tried to deploy an application to a customer's PPC device and was very frustrated because the app looked like it installed and even put a shortcut in the "Program Files". However, when I clicked on it, nothing happened. No error message, nothing. Just silence. Wow, that's informative. The good news is that I called John Hopkins, one of my sub-contractors, and he asked something about the framework version and it hit us both - v2.0 of the Compact Framework was not on the device. Install it and it works great now... :)

The thing that made this blogworthy was the lack of error messages. That was the astounding thing. I'd expect some error message on install or something that would prompt me that I needed to install something else. Oh well. I guess that we can't have everything. It's a fabulous environment to develop in and is light years ahead of previous development environments so I'm grateful for that but it just points out this type of little inconstancy that much more.
Compact Framework
Monday, October 24, 2005 10:44:53 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #  Comments [0] 

Toledo Talk Tomorrow (10/25/2005)
Join me tomorrow at the Northwest Ohio .NET Users Group at 333 N Summit St, Toledo, OH 43604 at 6:00 to hear about Data Binding and Caching in ASP.NET 2.0.
Speaking | User Groups
Monday, October 24, 2005 3:25:52 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #  Comments [0] 

# Friday, October 21, 2005
Generating Bar Codes
I thought that http://www.barcodesinc.com/ was a pretty cool site (the barcode printer: free barcode generator). I needed a couple of sample bar codes to use in some testing so created them on this site and printed them off.


Josh Holmes as a bar code

Friday, October 21, 2005 4:40:54 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #  Comments [0] 

# Friday, October 14, 2005
Connecting VS.NET to Windows CE

My current contract is a Compact Framework application for a LXE device running Windows CE 4.2. I was having some issues connecting to it from VS.NET and so I asked my good friend Google what he knew about it with this query - http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=VS.NET+Compact+Framework+Device+Connection+Issue. Wouldn’t you know that it pops up with my good friend Doug Reilly when he posted about VS.NET Compact Framework Deployment Issues. It turns out that I didn’t have the exact same issue as Doug, but it did fix me because in the download that me pointed me to (Windows CE Utilities for Visual Studio .NET 2003 Add-on Pack 1.1). In there they mentioned that you have to configure VS.NET for the processor type that you are using with Windows CE with ActiveSync.

That’s a real pain, but it fixed me…


Compact Framework | Hardware
Friday, October 14, 2005 7:39:57 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #  Comments [0] 

log4net on the Compact Framework

I was reminded of log4net today when working on a project. The client asked a logging framework and the cool part is that it’s a Compact Framework application. Sure enough log4net supports the Compact Framework.

There are a couple of minor differences that you should be aware of if you are interested in using log4net on the Compact Framework. First of all, not all of the appenders make sense – like the RemotingAppender, the EventLogAppender and the OracleAppender. Secondly, there is no mechanism for retrieving assembly level attributes so you have to explicitly initialize and shut down the log4net engine.

 

static void Main()

{

      try

      {

            //This line configures the log4net engine.

log4net.Config.DOMConfigurator.Configure(

new FileInfo(@"\log4net.config"));

 

            frmLogin loginForm = new frmLogin ();

            loginForm.ShowDialog();

                  Application.Run(new frmMain());

            }

      }

      catch (System.Exception e)

      {

            _log.Error("Main", e);

      }

      finally

      {

            //This line shuts down the log4net engine

            log4net.LogManager.Shutdown();

      }

}

 

The other thing that was interesting is that the online help on http://logging.apache.org/log4net showed conversion patterns with %message%newline to print the message and then put a newline in the file. I had to use %m%n because the first one there printed as

 

My stringessage

ewline

 

which was not quite what was expected.

 

Have fun with log4net, it’s a great lightweight logging framework for the compact framework.


Compact Framework | Development | Utilities
Friday, October 14, 2005 12:47:18 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #  Comments [0] 

# Monday, October 03, 2005
The Origional Dancing DE firesback: Drew Robbins in encore

Since Andrew Duthie fired off his rendition of "Love Shack", Drew Robbins had to come back with his Karaoke rendition of this MC Hammer Song.

MC Hammer he's not but I gotta say that he's learned a step or two since TechEd (The origional Dancing DE). Maybe I should start trying those dancing machines...

I'm not sure who that is singing in the background but they are not bad - not up to Duthie standards (remember that he's damn good) - but trust me there were worse performances at the Karaoke bar at the MVP party at the Science Fiction Museum.

The Dancing DEs

Picture of the Dancing DEs: Andrew Duthie on the Left and Drew Robbins on the right.

So far the count is:

1 to Andrew Duthie for the singing
0.5 to Drew for attempting to Dance
1 to Drew for dancing the second time

Gotta Vote for who's the best - use the comments to vote for your favorite!

So it's Drew up by half a point. Any other contestants out there? Gotta great Dancing DE moment on video that you'd love to share with the world? Let me know and I'll make sure that it's posted!


Dancing DE | Microsoft
Monday, October 03, 2005 10:12:23 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #  Comments [0] 

Another Dancing DE: Andrew Duthie

Drew Robbins was the first Dancing DE... Andrew Duthie has raised the bar with his rendition of Love Shack! I wish that I could have gotten the whole thing on video but I did the best that I could here. This was at the MVP Summit 2005. There was a party at the Science Fiction Museum with a kareoke bar upstairs.

Two extra fun bits:
1) That's his boss, Kim, with him. She's the manager for all of the DE's in the Eastern District of the US.
2) He's pretty good - in fact, he used to have a band before Microsoft took all of his spare time. Oh yeah and he had children so he didn't have time anyway...

Update: I've been corrected - he's damn good!


Dancing DE | Microsoft
Monday, October 03, 2005 9:02:15 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #  Comments [0] 

# Thursday, September 22, 2005
VS.NET Launch in November == Free Goodies!

If you attend the VS.NET Launch in November you’ll get a free copy of VS.NET 2005 and a free copy of SQL Server 2005!

 

Oh yeah – and you’ll get some great content on how to use those two products.


Speaking | SQL Server
Thursday, September 22, 2005 8:07:52 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #  Comments [0]