I have 4 Gmail invites. If you want one put your email addy in the comments section. The first 4 responses win :)
~Jim
UPDATE!
I sent out all the Gmail invites. If you didn't get one I'm sorry, I only had 4 to give out. If I get any more I will start a new thread and it will operate the same way. By the way, Gmail ROCKS!
That's right,
PDNUG's first meeting will be this Wednesday, April 14th. Who will be kicking it off? None other than Microsoft's very own
Rob Howard! A couple of months back I was honored to be asked by
Jason Alexander and
Shane Henderson to be the Secretary & Treasurer for the group. Of course I said yes immediately; what better way to give back to the community I love. With this responsibility comes many challenges and the first has presented itself, so I thought I would ask for some feedback from other
.Net Users Groups.
PDNUG is trying to establish itself much like a business. We want to make it as loosely coupled as possible so that if need be, officers can come and go as the group matures. Because of this vision we need to establish an account, po box, etc... We were wondering how other
groups have done this in the past. I spoke to one groups president and they operate all accounting out of the presidents personal bank account. We don't want to take this route, so I went to the bank this morning and spoke with an account manager. The account manager told me that we will need to register with the county courts and establish
PDNUG as a non-profit organization. Once this has been done we then take the paper work to the bank and they will open up an account under the
PDNUG name. Have any of the other
.Net Users Groups taken this approach? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for the help and I hope to see lots of you at future
PDNUG meetings.
~Jim
It's here, the
updated BizTalk 2004 Documentation was just released. I hope it's better than the last... I'm sure it is!
Jan has a consolidated list of all the updates listed
here. I have been in BizTalk 2004 training all week, and was hoping to blog on my experiences, but I have also been extremely sick. I hope to blog about this weeks training with Microsoft once I return home this weekend. All I can say is that this product ROCKS!
I too am soon to be doing some XML work, thanks to my good friend Dave ;) I'm sure I will need to reference Steve's aggregation of XML Links at some point. Nice job Steve.
Jan Tielen explains
how to create a custom encryption/decryption functoid in BizTalk 2004. For those of you that have not yet checked out the power in
BizTalk 2004, I strongly recommend you look into it. I really think there is going to be a lot of demand for individuals who can architect and implement system integration solutions using
BizTalk 2004.
A little late on this one, but Scott Woodagate has a post on creating a custom functoid in BizTalk 2004. I'm posting this for my future reference.
Jan talks about file name macros in the send port of BizTalk 2004. I found the comments useful for finally figuring out how to keep the same file name on the send port as that which was received via the receive port, thanks Mike. The blogs have proven valuable for us early adopters of BizTalk 2004. Due to the very terse documentation that was released with BizTalk 2004 I have relied on individuals blogs to find answers to my questions. I hope April brings better documentation for BizTalk 2004.
UPDATE... Owen Allen updated Jan's file name macros list. He also reminds us that April 2nd is the date to remember, why, because that is when MS will release the MUCH NEEDED documentation update.
Well after banging my head against the desk, and rolling back to an image on my box prior to a Beta BizTalk 2004 install, I finally found
this KB article related to an error many of us at work were getting when we tried to do anything in the BizTalk 2004 RTM version. The KB article only mentions an issue with Orchestration Deployment, but trust me, it impacts EVERYTHING related to BizTalk 2004. Make sure you update your COM+ Roll-up package for your operating system or you won't be able to do anything in BizTalk 2004 without getting a "Specified cast is not valid" error. I hope this saves others time as spending an entire day on this really hurt.
Well yesterday my company upgraded to the new BizTalk 2004 RTM version. We have been using the Beta and RC versions in a proof of concept with some business clients. After I upgraded some of my maps were not working, I was getting build errors. The errors returned notified me that the logical existence functoid required 2 inputs. I thought this was strange as a logical existence should not need two inputs to evaluate, so I started looking into it. I noticed the following:
In BizTalk 2004 Beta the logical existence functoid properties looks like this:
In BizTalk 2004 RTM the logical existence functoid properties looks like this:
Notice that in the RTM version it requires EXACTLY 2 inputs, but if you read the description of the functoid, it states that it evaluates to true if one or more of the inputs is true. I'm guessing this is a bug in the RTM version, anyone have some feedback? This is a big problem for us because we use the logical existence all over the place, so now our maps are broken in the 2004 RTM version of BizTalk.
Thanks,
Jim
UPDATE...
Scott Wodgate's team emailed me instructions outlining a work-around solution to our problem. Talk about awesome support, thanks BizTalk Team! Anyway, the following fixes this issue:
1st: Under properties select the ellipses next to script type precedence:
2nd: Move the external assembly precedence from the top to the bottom:
select OK and the logical existence functoid should now work correctly. Not sure why this happens, but none the less it does. Hope this helps anyone else experiencing this issue, and thanks again to Scott and his team.
My co-worker and friend Dave McKinstry will be giving a
live webcast this afternoon on Microsoft tools for .Net Performance Tuning. This is a 200 level class so I'm sure most of you will already know this content, but have a listen anyway, Dave is extremely smart.
~Jim
As I'm sure most of you are aware, Rory Blyth is heading to Connecticut to co-host the .NET Rocks show this Friday. What's interesting is that they will attempt this show live, and Rory will possibly be moving to the east coast to co-host the show on a permanent basis. I love this show, and really enjoy Rory's humor; I think this is going to be great. I want to win some of the software giveaways this Friday :-) Good luck Carl and Rory, I'm sure it will be a big hit!
Today I was trying to load an old solution file for a web project on my local dev box. I kept getting the error: "Unable to validate that the file path 'C:\foo\bar\web' matches the URL path 'http://localhost/foobar'. A connection with the server could not be established." I made sure the IIS Web folder was shared correctly, permissions were correct, that IIS was running, and that the virtual directory was pointing to "C:\foo\bar\web". At this point I was scratching my head...
I then remember my dev web server TCP port is set to 1901, not 80, so if everything was set up correctly VS should not be looking for 'http://localhost/foobar' it should be looking for 'http://localhost:1901/foobar'. So I knew a setting was incorrect somewhere. It turns out that the URL your VS solution tries to connect with is stored in the .sln file associated with each particular solution.
I opened up the foobar.sln in trusty TextPad and noticed on line 2 I had: Project("{F184B08F-C81C-45F6-A57F-5ABD9991F28F}") = "foobar", "http://localhost/foobar/foobar.vbproj", "{6FA9C179-A607-4719-AB8F-FE0510DB60FF}" I changed this string to read: Project("{F184B08F-C81C-45F6-A57F-5ABD9991F28F}") = "foobar", "http://localhost:1901/foobar/foobar.vbproj", "{6FA9C179-A607-4719-AB8F-FE0510DB60FF}" I saved and reloaded the solution and viola! It now works. I hope this helps anyone else that might run into a similar situation.
~Jim
Well, I've had this blog for over a month now, and decided to post a short Bio. I haven't been posting much in the past, but I plan to change that soon. Well anyway, about me...
I'm 26, almost 27, and live in Dallas, Texas. I started my technical career with Fujitsu Network Communications about 5 years ago. I worked in HRIS where I mainly dealt with our HR company intranet. This involved developing HR web applications that were used by 4000+ employees to do things such as make donations to charity, fill out personnel action notices... bla, bla, bla... our main employee repository was SAP, so I did a lot of ASP to SAP integration using DCOM.
About seven months ago I decided I needed a change and went job hunting (to find a .Net driven Company). I ended up with two offers and decided on Brink's Inc. Brink's had me right from the start when they told me they were early adopters of .Net starting with Beta 1. At Brink's I'm a developer on a very large web application using ASP.Net with VB.Net. Our application basically manages the day to day activities of Brink's armored trucks. I'm very happy with the direction the company is moving, and I get to be involved in some really cool company ideas and goals.
I'm also a student at the University of Texas @ Dallas. I'm studying Software Engineering, and I LOVE IT! I'm almost finished, but it's taking a long time because I can only take so many hours at night with out being completely over whelmed with business, social and personal commitments.
I must say the community of developers is like no other! I love being attached to a profession that I also call my hobby. I hope as I gain more knowledge every day I will be able to give back to the community I love. Happy Programming!
~Jim
Am I looking in the wrong place? My mother called me this afternoon to inform me that her broadband connection is not working. My father is out of town, and they have a funky setup because they connect into my fathers work (Cisco Systems) LAN, so I couldn't even begin to trouble shoot the problem over the phone. Well, my mom has an MSN account she has kept open for numerous years, even though she does not use it :-) she just never got around to canceling her subscription. I told her to dial into her MSN account until my father returned from business, but she can't remember ANY of her configuration settings, yet alone how to get it set up. I suggested she call MSN Tech Support. She had no way of getting the number, so I told her I would look for it on line. Well, I searched and searched and searched, and I still cannot find a number for MSN Support. Am I looking in the right places, or does Microsoft hide help numbers like a lot of other companies. I don't know about you, but it really pisses me off when a company tries to FORCE you to send an email for support by hiding their phone number. Email support is a joke, for most companies it usually takes 48 hours for a response if your lucky. So tell me, am I looking in the wrong place? Can anyone else find the MSN Support number? If you can, please give me a shout.
Thanks,
Jim
Are you reading this? Well then I guess this pertains to you :-) I LOVE to read, but I am finding it impossible to read all of the books and articles I place in my queue. With information at the click of a google search button there is so much knowledge to be had by all. I would love to be able to sit down in one place and stay up all night and read a book from beginning to end, but I just can't do it. Why? Well, First off, my eyes can't handle it. I find that my eyes start to hurt after about 2 or 3 hours of reading. I also find it very hard to retain everything I read without concentrating really hard or reading over something more than once, and this type of reading takes me a long time. Well, I came across this article Reading Better and Faster by Dennis Doyle. I decided I'm going to keep his five tips in mind and see if they will help me in my quest to gain knowledge at an exponential rate :-) Anyone else have any good tips or links on this subject they wish to share?
[Update] I found this link to be very informative too.
Favorite Quotes
Here are a few of my favorite quotes taken from one of my many books…
“Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke” presupposes that you can’t improve something that works reasonably well already. If the world’s inventors had believed this, we’d still be driving Model A Fords and using outhouses.
-H. W. Kenton
At some point you have to decide whether you’re going to be a politician or an engineer. You cannot be both. To be a politician is to champion perception over reality. To be an engineer is to make perception subservient to reality. They are opposites. You can’t do both simultaneously.
-H. W. Kenton
The fantasy element that explains the appeal of dungeon-clearing games to many programmers is neither the fire-breathing monsters nor the milky-skinned, semi-clad sirens; it is the experience of carrying out a task from start to finish without user requirements changing.
-Thomas L. Holaday
Where is the information?
Lost in the data.
Where is the data?
Lost in the #@%!& database!
-Joe Celko
Init, Use, Destroy. Three procedure calls, six possible sequences, five of them wrong. I am quietly impressed that any nontrivial applications ever work.
-Thomas L. Holaday
Good engineering is the difference between code running in eight minutes or eight hours. It affects real people in real ways. It's not a "matter of opinion" any more than a bird taking flight is a "matter of opinion."
-H. W. Kenton
Well, not .Net related, but for sure tech related, and what can I say, I'm proud of my dad! He made #3 on the Top Ten Movers & Shakers. Congrats Dad!
First, let me say hello, “hello” J This is my first ever blog. I have been reading blogs for quite some time now, but finally decided to contribute. I will post a hello and bio in a few, but thought I would start with this great article by Scott Mitchell. Enjoy!
Jim Martin
UPDATE... The entire series can now be found here.