CTTDNUG UG Tomorrow Night: Building Pocket PC Applications with the Compact Framework and SQL CE

As part of the continuing MSDN User Group Tour, I'll be speaking at the Canadian Technology Triangle .NET User Group in Waterloo on Thursday October 7th (tomorrow night). There is a new location for the meeting at Agfa (formerly Mitra) in Waterloo. All the details are here.

Correction: Adam Gallant is going to be the speaker at this event tomorrow night. Sorry for the confusion. It should be a good talk.

Oshawa .NET: Building Mobile Applications

I'm doing a talk at the East of GTA .NET users group tonight in Oshawa. This is the same MSDN User Group tour event sweeping across Canada. I'll be talking about some of the limitations of the Compact Framework and SqlCE. Should be fun - hope to see you there.

Registration Links and slides (afterwards) can be found here.

VS.NET IDE Teaching an old Dog new Tricks

I love hanging out with new VS.NET developers. It's enlightening to hear the troubles the face and their new found energy to solve them. I have to blog more about these - but in general, there are often things that I do out of habit in the IDE or things that I live with because I'm too lazy (or tired or busy) to find a way around them.

Two new tricks were brought to my attention by an associate of mine.

“How do I find all of the references to a class or usages of a member?” or “When I right click on a class and select Go To Reference, it goes to the first one it finds. How do I go to the next one?”.

The best answer is CTRL+SHIFT+1 which will jump you to the next reference. CTRL+SHIFT+2 will take you to the next reference.

I couldn't find this short cut anywhere in the menu's. The complete list of short cuts can be found here.

Which begged another question. Can I put short cuts or favorites in the IDE? Indeed, under View>Other Windows there is a favorites window which is your machines favorites. This is great to have docked right next to your Dynamic Help (if you have it turned on).

A similar question was “How do I find all of the descendent's of a class or implementations of an interface?”. I always using the online help for that, which doesn't help for your own code. One of the solutions I found (and maybe there is a better one) is to use Find Symbol under the Find and Replace menu (ALT-F12).

 

GDI+ Security Vulnerability

There is a new critical security vulnerability that affects a wide range of software that can't be easily patched through Windows Update. The vulnerability lies inside of GDI+ and can allow a maliciously formed JPEG image file to create a buffer overrun and inject malicious code - even through a web page's graphics...no scripting or anything.

Windows Update will go ahead and update major components but you also need to go to the Office Update site as well as update a bunch of other software you might have on your machine.

In particular for developers, the .NET Framework (pre-latest service pack) and even Visual Studio.NET 2003 and 2002 are affected and need to be separately patched.

The full bulletin with links for all the various patches are available here. http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS04-028.mspx

If you go to Windows Update it will also provide you with a GDI+ Detection tool that will scan your hard drive looking for affected components. I strongly you recommend everybody jump all over this one quickly.

VS Live Orlando: Building "Operations-Friendly" ASP.NET Applications with Instrumentation and Logging

Yes, it's the longest title of all VS Live Orlando presentations! It's a big topic and it deserves a big name.

I'm heading out Monday night to hurricane country to deliver this talk on Tuesday morning. I like this topic because when you get into it, it's like an onion. It doesn't look like something terribly sophisticated but as you get into you find there are more and more layers to peel back.

Building Mobile Applications, Metro Toronto .NET Users Group

Tomorrow night I'm presenting at the downtown Toronto .NET users group - topic Pocket PC development with the CE framework. I'll have a new HP 4700 device with a VGA resolution screen for folks to take a look at - courtesy of your friendly neighborhood HP rep. I'll also have my trusty 5650 with the old form factor for you to play around with. Hope to see you there.

Details: http://www.objectsharp.com/oNewsUpdate/ReadingFullStory.aspx?StoryNum=-28

Shorthorn Longhorn

So this will cause a few blogs. I have just heard that....

  • Longhorn slated for 2006. Longhorn server 2007.
  • Winfx, and Avalon are coming to windows xp in 2006. Indigo as well - and on Windows 2003 as well. These are all part of WinFx that is going to be extremely important for .NET developers and companies wanting to take advantage of these improvements.
  • Winfs is leaving longhorn (post release). So that means ObjectSpaces and the Microsoft Business Framework too.

Wow. Never a dull moment. I'm attending a briefing with Jim Allchin in an hour so I might have more I can tell.

But will we also see a delay of ObjectSpaces or the Microsoft Business Framework until after the longhorn release. Those have been recently tied into WinFs - but no specific announcements about that - and I wouldn't be surprised if that changed soon. 

DevCan 2004

I'm co-chairing two tracks of DevCan coming up in Setp/Oct in Vancover/Toronto (exact dates to follow) - see www.devcan.com for more.

I'm doing the architect track and web track. If you have ideas for content you'd like to see, or have a topic you'd like to present in either of those categories, send them to me. You don't have to be canadian, but it helps :)

New Service Packs for 1.0 & 1.1 .NET Frameworks imminent

.NET Framework 1.0 SP3 and 1.1 SP1 are in tech preview at the moment. Had a nagging bug and want to know if it's fixed?

The contents & links to Tech Preview Downloads can be found here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/downloads/updates/sptechpreview/default.aspx

 

Next Generation Developer Training

 
I've been (in some manner) involved in the software developer training business for over 10 years now. Over the past 3 years however, I've really been questioning the value and purpose of classroom training for software developers. So has Don Box. The internet has had a lot to do with that I think and the # of developers taking a week off work to sit in on a class has dropped in recent years. There was a buzz about elearning for awhile - but it hasn't really gone mainstream - and you hear about blended learning now too.
 
Vendor-based classroom training typically amounts to not much more than reference manuals. A component is introduced, a few demo's or scenarios on how you can use it - and a lab to follow. About 80% of what I see in these classes I could find on google. And the best part about google is that I can find it when I need it....just in time, on the job. After I learn something on google, I get to use it in a real life scenario so absorption is pretty high that way.
 
Classroom training has the advantage of taking you outside of your typical day (usually for a week) and forces you to sit and spend some quality time with some new technology on a grand scale. The problem with googling for small bits of information is that you miss the bigger picture and a full architectural understanding of how best to accomplish something. The instructor is an important part and can make the difference between a good class and a great class. But the problem remains with traditional training in that they are really just showing you how to swing their hammer. There is only a small percentage of leeway when an instructor can add extra value above and beyond the curriculum. The good ones do, but there is never enough time.
 
Several months ago we took a hard look at what people really needed and what kind of value we could bring to bear above and beyond what people could learn from reading the online help or googling. That extra value is of course the experiences of the instructor and the resulting set of best practices....stuff that you rarely find in any book.
 
The problem of course with relying on an instructor to make the difference is that sometimes they don't. And sometimes their experiences are different than others. You end up with a very inconsistent delivery.
 
So we decided to create new courses based primarily around the best practices captured from the experiences of several developers. We still cover some fundamental tools & techniques but quickly move beyond that into the best practices of how to apply that. The idea is to have students spend less time on things they can learn on their own time. How often to you get to spend a week with an expert who has been using a new technology for a few years? The idea is to maximize the time for that week.
 
We haven't relied on just our own experiences either. We've decided to lean heavily on the community in this regard, in particular, the content coming out of the MS Patterns and Practices Group. The culmination of all this work was the first delivery of our new courseware based on "Best Practices" a couple of weeks ago. It was also John Lam's first course with ObjectSharp. I had the opportunity to talk to a few students, including a couple of our own instructors who sat in on the course, and I even managed to drop in for about 30 minutes on the last day.
 
The comments are great on the evals too. Our evals are always good, but these evals were awesome. "The most professionally run course I have ever taken." "The best course I've ever taken". Our salesperson told me that she even had a student ask in the middle of the week if we were going to be handing out evals because he wanted to make sure he had an opportunity to comment on how great the course was. I'm really proud of what we accomplished but I'm even happier that we've touched a nerve with our customers and found a way to maximize the value to them for taking a full week out of their lives. I can't wait until I get to teach one of these new courses.