Hey everyone.... Firstly an apology for not blogging since mid last year. Although I didn't quite fall off the planet I might as well have as I didn't get the chance to blog due to work and other commitments. Anyhow the new year brought a change of job and a lot more flexibility in my hours and work environment. The other bit of news is that my blog is changing location, in actual fact that should be past tense since it has changed to http://community.softteq.com/blogs/nick. SoftTeq is a new consulting partnership that I have been involved in setting up and we do a range of .NET related activities such as mentoring, training, archtectural guidance and prototype development. Although in its early stages now we are rapidly attracting clients and are already busy with a host of new technologies. For more information see the blogs from Alastair, John and myself. Cya on the other site.....Nick

Most people will be aware that the first Beta for Windows Vista (formally codename Longhorn) was officially released to MSDN Subscribers during the week.  As with most people I thought - oh no, not another massive download.  Well I was right, but luckily here in Japan the broadband is ultra fast and it took me just under 20mins to download the 2.4Gb ISO image.  Anyhow, it then took me 40mins to burn it to DVD (slow burner on my laptop) before I could install it on a VPC image, which took a couple of hours.

Once installed it actually loaded relatively quickly and so far has been performing much better than my initial expectations. Being the developer I am I of course wanted to install Visual Studio, so pulling out the DVD I tried to install it, only to be told that the XML parser wouldn't install.  This of course is a primary dependency and VS won't install without it.  Luckily there was a post on the web that suggested just running it from the folder on the DVD - did that and hey presto a couple of hours later we have VS successfully installed.

As a side discussion, one of the interesting things about Windows Vista is that whenever you try to do something that requires Administrative privileges on the local machine, it prompts you to re-authenticate.  While I can understand the logic behind this, it is very infuriating as it re-prompts every time you want to install something (let me know if you find a way to turn this off!).  The most annoying thing from my part is that it doesn't work properly.  I typically log into my domain with a username in the format <username>@<full domain>. For some reason if you use a username in this format it doesn't allow you to continue.  However if you use the NT name (ie <domain>\<username>) it works fine. 

While we are looking at bugs in Vista, the other one is that at login, there doesn't seem to be a way to "dial a connection" prior to logging in.  This is useful if you have to VPN into you corporate network prior to authenticating.  A work around that makes use of a neat feature in Vista is that you can log in as a local user, connect to the vpn and then switch users.  In WinXP you could switch users, but only if you weren't connected to a domain.  Now you can do it with domain users - very cool.  If I'm developing code, I can be doing this as a user with adiministrative permissions.  Then I can switch users to one with minimal permissions to see if my application is behaving properly.

Anyway, back to my installation discussion.  So now with VS installed I realised that I should also install WinFX (which for some reason isn't installed by default - that's Avalon and Indigo) and the appropriate SDK.  Following the instructions in the HTML file on the desktop I successfully install WinFX, but the site that it sent me to for the SDK was particularly useless as there was no obvious place to download it from.  Anyhow a quick google found the appropriate site.

The next problem that I encountered is that the SDK wouldn't install, claiming that I had insufficient privileges.  As discussed earlier, all the other applications I have installed have requested these permissions.  Turns out that you can elect to "Run as Elevated..."  which forces the system to prompt and then run the system with administrative permissions - very cool.

So, I'll leave my installation story there, because I'm still waiting for the SDK to complete installation.  The results for the Yokohama round will be announced this evening, so I will be back later to pass on some additional comments about the competition.

For those who must have missed the news somehow, the Imagine Cup has commenced, and in fact the formal parts of the proceedings are in full swing with only a couple more hours of the Yokohama Round of the SDI to go.  As one of the judges for the competition I thought that I would drops down some thoughts so far.

Most teams arrived in Yokohama either Tuesday or Wednesday morning, being welcomed at the airport by the ever friendly staff from Microsoft Japan.  We then had a 90minute or so bus ride to the hotel (accompanied by the funniest commentary on Yokohama city that I've ever heard) where we were able to check in and relax until the evening.  Unfortunately the Indian team were delayed due to torrential rain.  We are expecting them later this evening and with a bit of luck they will still be able to take part in the competition.

Wednesday evening saw us take a bus to the Welcome Party.  The Microsoft staff gave us all a welcome and we saw some traditional Japanese dancing.  Although the evening was cut short as all the competitors were expected to go back and get a good night’s sleep, it was a great opportunity to meet some of the teams.

As per last year the format of the Software Design Invitational, for which I am one of the judges, is in a number of stages.  Yesterday after the official welcome the students were all given the rest of the day to setup their stands and ensure that all their equipment was ready for the first (Yokohama) judging round.  At 2pm each of the teams were asked to give a 10 minute presentation to the judges that they were to see in the first round.  This acted as an ice breaker and also helped to ease the nerves for the students.

 

After a good night’s sleep (or a late night getting in final rehearsals) the first session in the Yokohama round started at 8:30am this morning.  While we had a few minor technical issues the presentations have been going smoothly all day.  Overall the quality of the presentations has been a cut above those from last year.  While there is still a mix between those that present well and those that don’t, the average is much higher.

 

Anyhow, I’m due to go back in and listen to the remainder of the teams……..

So tonight, in exchange for dinner, I taught my parents about Blogging.....

Avalon and Indigo Community Technology Preview - March 2005

Microsoft has provided a version of the March 2005 Indigo and Avalon Community Technology Previews for the general public. Indigo and Avalon are the codenames for two strategic developer technologies that Microsoft plans to ship in 2006 as part of the Windows "Longhorn" operating system. In addition, Microsoft is making these technologies available on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. The Indigo and Avalon Community Technology Preview (CTP) enables developers to experiment with early builds of these technologies, get acquainted with the development experience, and provide Microsoft with feedback.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=85ab132b-f1aa-4422-b053-272d79863013&DisplayLang=en

This CTP release recently became available to MSDN subscribers and is now being released to the general public in response to numerous requests. More details about these technologies are below.

Note: CTP builds do not go through the same rigorous testing that Beta builds undergo. Therefore, do not install these builds on machines you depend on.

Indigo is the codename for Microsoft’s unified programming model for building connected systems. It extends the .NET Framework 2.0 with additional APIs for building secure, reliable, transacted Web services that interoperate with non-Microsoft platforms and integrate with existing investments. By combining the functionality of existing Microsoft distributed application technologies (ASMX, .NET Remoting, .NET Enterprise Services, Web Services Enhancements, and System.Messaging), Indigo delivers a single development framework that improves developer productivity and reduces organizations’ time to market.

Avalon is the code name for Microsoft's unified presentation subsystem for Windows. It consists of a display engine and a managed-code framework. Avalon unifies how Windows creates, displays, and manipulates documents, media, and user interface. This enables developers and designers to create visually-stunning, differentiated user experiences that improve customer connection. When delivered, Avalon will become Microsoft's strategic user interface (UI) technology.

This preview also contains the WinFX SDK documentation, samples and tools.

Over the last month there has been a raging debate on the Australian .NET mailing list (http://www.stanski.com/services.aspx#dotnetlist) over whether developers and others in the ICT community should be members of a professional society such as the Australian Computer Society (ACS) or Engineers Australia, or any of the other bodies out there.  Despite being a member of the ACS for the last couple of years and currently sitting on the WA branch committee I've often wonder myself as to the true benefit of being a member.  Last night I got my answer.

One of the sub-groups within the ACS is that of Young IT and last night we had Ron Gibson present to a group of student and young professionals.  For those who don't know Ron, he is one of Australia's lead authorities in the area of business networking.

You've presumably all heard the adage "It's not what you know, it's who you know".  Ron took this to the next level by introducing us at the ground level to what makes a successful entrepreneur.  In his overview of networking skills he reiterated a number of times that in order to suceed in business you need to establish true, meaningful relationships with other people.  Of course this requires a bit of hard work and each relationship needs to be maintained.  But the real question, especially from the students, was how do I establish these relationships.

Establishing relationships comes down to how well you market yourself.  And by "market" I'm not refering to getting out there and cold calling people, I'm referring to increasing your "Visibility" and "Credibility".  Ron took these two areas and worked through a number of techniques for improving visibility (for example attending trade show, doing presentations) and credibility (writing articles).

Lastly, there were three points that Ron really drove home:
1) People tend to respond in kind to behaviour of others ("do onto others as you would want done on you" - or something similar)
2) Do a favour to get a favour, without expectation
3) People are more interested in themselves than in you (leverage this by asking questions that involve words like "you" or "your")

Ron's leaving comments were "Make Networking a Priority".  I couldn't agree more.  This is the best way, and might I be so bold to say the only way, to make opportunities for yourself.  These might be future employment, projects, future business or even a date for Saturday night ;-)

One of the biggest benefits of being a member of a professional body, such as the ACS is the networking opportunities that it provides.  Being a member is not enough, you have to attend events, volunteer to help out or even be on the committee to get the most out of the professional body.

I'm open to comments and welcome feedback.  I would imagine that everyone who attended last nights event would agree that the event was well worthwhile.

Ok, so yesterday was extremely action packed in Perth with both the .NET and the SQL user groups having their first meetings of the year.

Omar gave a fantastic presentation to the Perth .NEt Community of Practice (www.perthdotnet.org) on Crystal Reports.  Not only was this presentation free to joe public we also served fresh muffins to get the morning of to a flying start.  The presentation was an entry level discussion on how to get started building reports using the Crystal Reports addin for Visual Studio.  Omar covered the basics of creating a report from a database, along with the heart ache of security.  He also covered using a dataset to push data into a report.  The slides and example application should be available at the community website later this week (please not that the database has not been included)

For the first meeting of the revitalised SQL Server group, Chris Kempster gave a fasinating overview of the features packed into the next version of SQL Server (aka Yukon).  Now I've heard many a developer presentation in and around Yukon, but I never realised quite how many new features were coming in the next release.  Although I must admit I'm not quite sure of how and why you would want to use some of the features, it has definitely given me something to look into.  For access to the slides please visit http://www.sqlserver.org.au/meetings/Perth/2005/02%5FFeb%5FChrisKempster%5FSQL05/

For more information regarding the SQL Server groups in Australia visit www.sqlserver.org.au

How cool is this, the ability to Geo-code your blog:



Check out http://www.csthota.com/blogmap/ for more information on Blog Geo-coding.

Second Wow for the day - 2 blog entries in a day.

I was reading Greg Low's blog and noticed the reference to the vb team's blog.  Not having it in my reader I automatically syndicated it.  I then wondered whether there were any other teams that had blogs that I would be interested in.  After a quick hunt I found the OPML at http://blogs.msdn.com/Opml.aspx.  A quick trawl through found a number of feeds that I was interested in and had no idea existed.

Wow I can't believe its been like 3 months since I last blogged (forgive me father for I have sinned).  So, for those who have probably dropped me off their blog readers I do apologise.

Todays computer history lesson is pretty short, in fact the lesson is actually plagarised of another blog entry.  Anyone interested in where the modern programming lessons evolved from should check out http://www.levenez.com/lang/

So, from this we can track down all those annoying features and identify where they were introduced.  One of the most interesting points from this is the longivity of Fortan.  I had no idea that is preceeded the likes of C and other such languages by so much.  My dad actually used it back then, and depressingly still uses it today (he is an Engineer btw!)

Ok this is going to be one of those complaining blogs, so if you want something that is either interesting or entertaining I suggest you read my next entry which should be one or either (or perhaps both).

Product 1) Together by Borland - doesn't work with VBCommenter.  This is a bit of an issue as a lot of VB.NET developers use this tool to comment their code.  To use Together you have to uninstall VBCommenter.  Apparently there will be an upgrade/patch to fix this in the near future.

Product 2) Visio Enterprise Architect - doesn't seem to work (crashes when trying to open).  Not sure whether this is my system configuration, but I doubt it since I don't have anything particularly unusual installed.  Not only does this product not work, it killed my installation of Virtual PC (which I use all the time).  After fixing Virtual PC and reinstalling Visio it still didn't work.  I tried uninstalling and installing the standard version of Visio and that works fine.

Anyway, i'm sure there is more that I could whinge about, but I think that I'd better get the work, that i'm here on a Saturday to do, done.

So it must have slipped my mind, but I completely forgot to mention that I run the Perth .NEt Community of Practice (aka user group) and that anyone visiting Western Australia - and yup we are back to sun filled days as summer draws near - should definitely take the time out to drop in and attend a session.  We typically meet on the 3rd wednesday of the month and this month we have Jonathan Wells from the .NET Compact Framework team giving a presentation (see www.perthdotnet.org).

On more interesting matters, I finally got a sucessfully installed version of the VS.NET beta refresh (available from MSDN subscriber downloads).  It has all the features that were in beta1 plus the team system stuff (although you apparently need 3 machines to get it to run properly at the moment).  This aside here are the bloggable features that I (re)discovered in the first 30 secs of playing with it:

Document outline window - displays your winforms form as a tree so you can see where the controls are and what their parent is - takes the guessing out of both Z-order and parenting of controls

Testing - wow - this feature is cool, you can actually get VS to not only run your test cases, but also generate them (stubs only) and do code coverage analysis.

Class designer - not the ultimate UML tool, but does a reasonable job of laying out your classes in a visual diagram.

I am soooo looking forward to the release of Whidbey -  more features to come (I think that I will look at the mobile stuff tonight)

So I've taken to reading, and before you get excited and think that I've left the computer the reality is that I've acquired a number of books on .NET 2.0.  In fact there is a whole range of books on the early and beta versions of ASP.NET.  What I've found particularly lacking, at least in my part of the world, are good books on IDE and language enhancements for winforms developers.  However, I did recently pick up a book on VB.NET 2005 which runs through a whole range of cool features that are coming.  So, I thought that I would run through a couple of them....

Generics - strongly typed collections and methods
My Object - quick reference for the OS, File system, Printers, users and more
Operators - the ability to override operators for user defined types
Keywords - Global, Using and Continue make a comeback.
IDE Enhancements - Import/Export settings, F1 help enhanced
Panes - Application, Project, Signing, Reference, Compile, Resources and Settings
Class Designer - what more can I say?
Comments for VB.NET - well about time

So there are a few of the things to come.  There are a whole bunch more, but maybe I'll delve into them in a little more detail next time.

So you might be wondering what is with the title of this blog.  Well, I'll start the story by saying that I was one of a few privileged people to spend last weekend on the snowfields up at Thredbo.  As a reward for their ongoing involvement with Microsoft, Tyson arranged for the the Australian Student Ambassadors to spend the weekend learning how to do some damage to themselves on the OZ ski slopes.  He of course needed assistance managing them (sure, if only this were true), so he called on myself, Nigel, Nadine and Brisvegas girl.

Anyway, now that I've set the scene, here is how the title came about.  On route from TechEd to the mountains (approximately a 3 and a bit hour bus ride), we were discussing everything from computers to cars to snowboarding to.... well a whole bunch of sport/technology/cars topics (generally thought of a guy-stuff).  Anyway, it turns out that Nadine is a total boys-girl.  So mid way through the bus ride it turns out that Nadine likes a particular type of music (or at least I think we were talking about music at that stage).  One of the student Ambassadors comes out with this ripper line: "Me too! Hey, we should date", which of course is line one of the worlds worst pick-up lines. 

So, of course, this became the running joke for the weekend. Everytime someone came across that they liked/did/were intereste in etc, that matched with someone else, of course out rolled this line (regardless of whether the other party was male, female, in on the joke or whatever).

The funniest thing about this was that after arriving home (having stupidly missed my flight - that is whole story in itself, but all I can say was "it's not my fault", well it probably was, but that resturant really shouldn't have opened up especially for us and made those illusion shakers....), I explained this whole thing to my girlfriend.  Of course, these things never sound that funny when you repeat them.  However, later that night, it turns out that we both wanted to go see something at the theatre, so out rolls the line "Me too! hey, we should date".  After about 10 minutes of literally rolling around laughing (in a public place), we realised that we were starting to get really wierd looks so we calmed down, but it was just sooo funny.

anyway, this whole story is probably not funny at all to anyone who wasn't there, so I'm wondering why I bother.  I hope that it makes you laugh.

Oh, just one last thing....Yes I did pay Brisvegas Girl $20 for going straight down the kiddie slope into the rubberised fence, just for a laugh.  I still laugh hesterically everytime I think of it, just a pity we don't have live footage....

So a couple of weeks have gone by soooo quickly since last I blogged (I did warn people that this would happen).  Anyway, I'm at an Internet Cafe, so what better, or more appropriate, than to update by Blog.

As the title suggests, I'm on route to TechEd in Canberra, Australia.  However, I am currently in Brisbane where it is 26 degrees and the sun is shining.  Meanwhile, I'm stuck at a Health Infomatics conference where the average age is 50+.  Interestingly enough though, the level of technology and innovation is exceptionally high.  I think that despite the relatively slow adoption of technology in the past by doctors, the Health industry is going to be one of the largest adopters of technology this Century.

Recently, the average temperature in Canberra has approached 0 degrees and they have had a record snowfall.  So, I necessarily packed my snowboard (and I'm carrying my brothers as well).  This looked really bizzare when I arrived in Brisbane where most people are beach oriented and think of snow as something that happens at the north pole along with Chrismas.

<Shameless Promotion>
Don't forget the Next Week is TECHED in Australia and New Zealand.  I will be presenting on Wednesday afternoon, so be there!
</Shameless Promotion>

Bye for now....