This post fulfills two tasks: 1) to demonstrate (to myself) that I could easily post an entry to my blog through Word 2007 J and 2) to provide a recap of the fun event that was held at the local Microsoft offices here in Salt Lake City.

We took the whole family to the event this evening. I was pleased by the number of people that showed up too; I was somewhat worried that we wouldn't get the turnout we had anticipated. The event was divided into two groups: one group spent some time with an instructor/presenter who talked about Windows Vista and Office 2007 while the other spent some time playing/experimenting with a cool Lego Mindstorm demo. We talked about the MS Robotics 1.0 toolset as well. The Mindstorm demos (which Scott Golightly's kids had put together) had the robot move forward, sense an object (a ball), and pick it up. While I've not had a chance to really see these things in action, they're apparently very versatile and programmable. I'm looking forward to experimenting with them more in the future.

All in all we had a great time, picked up a few tips and tricks, and walked away with a copy of Office 2007. One lucky kid won his own Lego Mindstorm. It was also fun to catch up with friends.

As a reminder, we're having a special .NET Bring Your Family event this Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at our local Microsoft Offices.

The event runs from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM and is intended for you, your spouse/significant other, and children ages 6 or 7 and up. Sure, there's a geek aspect of the event, as there will be discussions on Office 2007 and Windows Vista for the adults/spouses but there is also a fun side with Lego Mindstorm Robotics stuff for the kiddos (and probably some adults too) with a Lego Mindstorm Robot as a raffle giveaway.

Food (probably pizza) and drinks will be provided by Microsoft.

So prepare for a fantastic time and come one and all. With your participation we can definitely plan on having a lot of fun!

Time: 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Date: Thursday, March 29th, 2007
Place: SLC Microsoft Offices (123 Wright Brothers Dr., Suite 100, SLC, UT 84116)

See you there!

I had the fortune (or misfortune depending on how you look at it) of completely rebuilding my development machine from scratch last week.  The unfortunate circumstance of having a corrupted registry and destroyed network settings befell my laptop due to a bad install of a VPN client.  I was able to rescue 100% of my data however, off-loading it to an external USB drive which I love.  I've long been wanting to make the move to Windows Vista but for a grundle of reasons couldn't validate the time it would take to move to the new environment.  Perhaps this was the kick in the pants that I needed.

Once I blew the machine away (paved it, as they say) I set forth to install Windows Vista Ultimate on my Dell Precision M90.  The install went extremely smoothly - I had an operating machine in about 30-45 minutes.  With the exception of the built-in laptop monitor, I was very pleased that the OS correctly identified 100% of my devices.  It was peculiar that Vista insisted in setting the display rotated 90° counter-clockwise after a few reboots.  Until I installed the correct drivers I couldn't shake it of this habit.  Also, it's working great with my secondary Dell 2407WFP monitor   Dual 1920x1200 resolution

I've also installed my customary applications (Office 2007, VS Team Suite 2005 SP1 w/Vista Patch, XML MissionKit, SQL Server Express 2005 SP2 (I decided to use SQL Express rather than the full blown SQL Server AND Express for development purposes - it's proving to be perfect), Photoshop CS2, WinRar 3.7 (you'll need 3.7 for better Vista integration), Resharper, Invirtus VM Optimizer, et al).  Much of my development also requires VS2003 (.NET 1.1) which is not supported by MS on Vista.  I've therefore established a Virtual PC running XP SP2 as my primary .NET 1.1 dev platform and it's working great.  I have it open and running all day long with ne'er a hiccup.

All in all I can say that I'm very pleased with the upgrade and it wasn't the least bit painful.  Also, I can honestly say that I enjoy using Vista as a non-administrator (something I had been doing religiously for about 2 years on XP).  The periodic UAC warnings aren't the nuisance everyone seems to think they are.

That said, it is important to recognize when things are running under admin privileges and when they're not.  For instance, if an application launches following the install, chances are it's running under admin privileges so any settings made aren't going to be for the logged-on user but rather for the administrative account.

I'm loving developing on Vista - it's awesome!

I had a rather unfortunate experience today.  For a variety of reasons which I won't go into here, I was obliged to install a particular VPN client on my laptop.  I was loathe to do so, but did it anyway.  That was a mistake.  Don't you hate it when you attempt to install software that 1) freezes, 2) locks your computer, 3) won't uninstall (opting instead to freeze the computer entirely), 4) hoses your registry, and 5) leaves your network adapters in a complete disarray?

Well, that's what happened today.  Consequently, I am unable to connect to any network (wired or wireless).  Nor can I remove the miniport adapters that it left behind.  As a result, I cannot reinstall any network drivers.  What a pain.

Well, I suppose I was looking for an excuse to pave the machine and install anew.  I've been wanting to get Vista up an running on it (being my primary development box).  I have Vista running on two other laptops here and I'm loving it.

On the bright side, I was able to backup all of my documents, databases, files, and dev projects to an external source and will be able to be up and running in relatively short order.

What a pain though.

A small application that I wrote some time ago just started acting up on me yesterday and today in a manner heretofore not seen.  The program utilizes WSE 2.0 and DIME to perform file transfers between the client and server.  The error was the following:

An unhandled exception of type 'System.Configuration.ConfigurationException' occured in microsoft.web.services2.dll

WSE032: There was an error loading the microsoft.web.services2 configuration section

I felt it bizarre that I'd never seen this error before, despite having installed and run my application hundreds of times in the past.  I was also having some networking trouble with my VPC (on which I was running this application) which correlates to the solution that I found online:

1. Ohad recommends adding your local computer's host name (can easily be discovered/remembered by typing HOSTNAME at a command prompt) to the %WINDIR%\System32\drivers\etc\hosts. file.  (BTW: This fixed it for me)
2. Also, if you have a configuration file (e.g. for controlling the timeToleranceInSeconds settings, et al), you need to ensure that you're using a fully qualified type name to the Microsoft.Web.Services2.Configuration.WebServicesConfiguration type.

I've been out of contact on my blog for several days now because I was in San Diego for Convergence 2007 with Experlogix.  This year we were a bronze sponsor for the event which, among other things, provided us with a 20'x10' booth and let me tell you, it was well worth it.  What a great event!

I've enjoyed the Convergence conferences the past two years for many reasons, but this one has, by far, been the best event for us.  Experlogix was well represented with 5 of our staff members in the expo hall booth at all times and we didn't even have but a moments rest.  Interacting with partners and customers is a great joy (despite the fact that it's also exhausting).  We unveiled our product configurator for GP 9.0 at this event as well as our latest version (with offline sync) for the CRM 3.0 family.

One of the most rewarding aspects of working on a product and interfacing with customers is when you see and hear how much they enjoy using the product.  It just doesn't get any better than that.

I can't wait until next year's Convergence in Orlando; but there still remains the Partner Conference in Denver in July and (fingers crossed) the Convergence in Copenhagen.  I don't think we're going to that one, but that would be a blast!

There are times where you may need to dig into the details of a SQL Server database to retrieve information / metadata about the database itself.  There are many built-in stored procedures that facilitate this (e.g. sp_helpdb), but they don't always provide the information in a SQL-friendly form.  In the case of sp_helpdb, much of the information is returned in a comma-delimited form and parsing it out is a headache, and and unnecessary headache at that.

Suppose you need to retrieve the collation order of the database.  This is quite easily accomplished by calling the built-in function DATABASEPROPERTYEX.  In fact, each of the settings found in the status column returned by sp_helpdb are individually retrievable via the DATABASEPROPERTYEX function.

SELECT DATABASEPROPERTYEX('DbName', 'Collation')

Well, the last of the big hurdles that I was waiting for before moving to Vista on my primary machine was released a couple of days ago.  Microsoft released the Visual Studio.NET 2005 SP1 for Vista.  Now that SQL Server 2005 SP2 has been released, along with this service pack, I just want to get a good, stable Windows XP SP2 VPC representing my current development environment so that I can continue to support .NET 1.1 development (in VS2003) because that will not be supported on Vista.

If you're using VS.NET 2005 on Vista, you'll want to get this patch.  Download it here.

Well, this has been a long time coming, but among the myriad of other projects and goings-on, I couldn't get it up earlier.  As many of you know I've been doing a lot of projects around the house.  In addition to finishing the basement we took it upon ourselves to have the kitchen and upstairs completely redone.  We've never liked the cabinets and flooring that was installed when we originally built the house almost 9 years ago.  So the kitchen, most of all, got an overhaul.

Below I've provided a visual progression from what it was to what it is now.  Note, there is still some work to be done (e.g. the water's not yet connected to the sink/dishwasher, I still need to mount the under-the-cabinet lighting, the baseboards aren't yet up...but it's a work in progress for sure.

I still don't have pictures of the basement up yet.  Those might be forthcoming, provided I can get it organized.  Too many things left undone in all the shuffle.