For those of you looking for the ClickOnce Community Resource Kit I wrote for the Patterns and Practices Smart Client Software Factory team, you may have found that it has disappeared from its old location on GotDotNet.

In case you haven't heard, GotDotNet is slowly fading away (known as dying a slow death in some circles) and CodePlex has replaced it as the place that Microsoft will put community resources.  So if you go looking for something on GotDotNet and don't find it, make sure you do a search on CodePlex.

The download for my ClickOnce Community Resource Kit can be found here:

http://www.codeplex.com/smartclient/Project/FileDownload.aspx?DownloadId=5060

on the Wiki for the Smart Client Guidance.

Wow, is this really my first blog post this year? The year has started off busy busy busy.

But enough about me... this is about you! YOU need to come to the NOVA Code Camp on 14 April! YOU need to volunteer to speak if you have some knowledge you are willing to share with your fellow developers.

I hope to see you there.

Details: http://novacodecamp.org/

We (at IDesign (http://www.idesign.net)) are currently in the middle of a .NET 3.0 Roadshow (http://www.net3roadshow.com) across six cities in the U.S.

In the show, we cover a full day + 1 session of WCF, 2 sessions of WF, 1 session of CardSpace, and 1 session of WPF. I am doing the WF and WPF sessions.

A common question that is coming up is why this weighted mix instead of a more even spread of coverage?

It has nothing to do with the complexity of the topics. WF is equally as complex and capable for what it is designed to address as WCF is for its purposes. WPF is also very complex and capable. CardSpace has a much narrower focus than the others, but has a fair amount of complexity surrounding it as well.

The mix we came up with has a number of reasons behind it, but one of the most important factors was considering how many development organizations should be considering adoption of each technology at this point in time.

WCF is a remote communications platform that is rock solid, easy to use for simple scenarios, yet has a million knobs and dials that you can twiddle to address almost any remote communications needs. My perspective on WCF is that if you are writing any application from this day forward (even though WCF won't release until next month) that needs to make remote calls, you should be using WCF and forget that .NET Remoting, ASP.NET Web Services, and Enterprise Services exist. Obviously that has to be tempered with your ability to get .NET 3.0 deployed to the target platforms. But unless there is an unmovable roadblock to you doing that, it is worth your while to make the switch to WCF as soon as possible. Every application of any significant scale has at least a cross process hop to deal with somewhere in its architecture, and WCF works great for addressing those simple scenarios as well as full enterprise scale SOA apps. So I feel WCF should be adopted by most development organizations as soon as possible.

WF is an extremely capable platform for developing workflow driven processing in your enterprise applications. It is very stable and ready for adoption by those who need it. The only downside to WF is that because of some the capabilities that are built in to WF to address enterprise requirements (persistence, tracking, and scheduling to name a few), I don't think you can really say that simple scenarios are easy to implement with WF. So it takes fairly complex enterprise application requirements to justify the adoption of WF in your application. Additionally, not every application out there really has workflows of any significance (there are a lot of pure CRUD apps still out there). As a result, I think the number of development organizations that should be adopting WF at this time is smaller by at least 1/2 than those who should be looking at WCF.

WPF is a harder one to nail down, and my opinions are likely to incite some flames. I think that there are a lot fewer development organizations that should be bothering with WPF for the near future. The reason mainly has to do with productivity. Even though the runtime bits for WPF will be part of the .NET 3.0 release, the development tools for designing WPF UIs will not. Microsoft is hard at work on a WPF designer for Visual Studio that will hopefully release sometime next year. Alongside that effort is the Expression Suite that includes the Interactive Designer product for allowing designers to put together WPF UIs that they can hand over to developers to complete the hook up of the dynamic behaviors of the application from code. At this point in time and for at least the next 6 months, those products will only be available in a Beta form.

Even with the Visual Studio WPF designer, there is an awful lot missing at this point when compared to the Windows Forms or ASP.NET designers for rapidly designing and implementing UI applications. Even once they release next year, I suspect they will still feel like a v 1.0 designer. Think about how the Windows Forms designer in VS 2002 compares with the VS 2005 designer. Night and day in terms of productivity and producing good maintainable code. Hopefully the gap will not be that large. At the current time, if you want to write WPF apps, you will mostly be banging out XAML markup by hand (thankfully at least with some great intellisense assistance). The current CTP of the Visual Studio Orcas WPF designer does at least work pretty well for visualizing the result of your markup, but it is not really useful for doing a graphical drag/drop layout of your form nor for getting things like data bindings, styles, and resources hooked up.

You also have to consider how bad do you need/want what WPF offers. One of the biggest draws of WPF is that it allows you to write UI applications that are more visually compelling. In short, you could say WPF allows you to create eye-candy that you either couldn't do before or that was orders of magnitude harder to do. What you have to ask yourself is how bad you really need eye candy? If you are building consumer applications, then definitely eye candy is important. The difference between someone buying/using your app instead of your competitors is often a simple matter of whether they look at it, get a glazed look in their eye, and say "Keewwlll....." But if you are building internal enterprise business applications that show and manipulate data, do you really need pulsating 3D bar charts? Maybe, but it is a lot harder to sell that as a "requirement" than "I need my web server to be separated from my application server for security/scalability reasons" (i.e. I need WCF).

Don't get me wrong - I would love to incorporate many WPF features into every Windows app I build from today forward. Using things like styling and subtle opacity animations can make any application look better and more intuitive. Once you have adopted WPF, some of the other features of WPF such as the ability to use Style, Data, and Control Templates is very powerful and will be a welcome new model compared to Windows Forms. But the relative number of apps out there that really need embedded 3D modeling or video I think you can say is considerably less than the number of applications that need to do a cross process, machine, or network hop.

Compounding the problem is the fact that adopting WPF implies that you think you can get .NET 3.0 deployed to all of your client desktop machines to support your application. For an enterprise, that may be true if your organization is savvy about the benefits of adopting new technology and not overly paranoid about the risks of deploying a new version of the .NET Framework. For the open consumer market (yes, the primary ones who would drive you to want to incorporate eye-candy), that is going to be a much tougher nut to crack. For a back end server that you want to run WCF or WF on, having the control to deploy .NET 3.0 to that machine should be a lot easier to satisfy.

So as a result of the current maturity of the tools (equating directly to productivity), the relative importance of the completely new capabilities WPF provides compared to Windows Forms or ASP.NET, and the ability to guarantee that .NET 3.0 is installed on the client machine, I would say that a lot less people should be jumping on WPF for the near term. Once we have a good, near production designer for WPF apps in Visual Studio, my tune will change. Also, for those that really need some aspects of WPF now, by all means go for it. But my primary strategy for most smart client apps at this point would be to build it as a Windows Forms application to address the bulk of your requirements (and complete them in a reasonable timeframe), and then incorporate things like 3D, video, animations, etc. as needed using WPF controls embedded in the Windows application through interop (WPF controls can be hosted in a Windows Forms application and vice versa).

CardSpace's role in the mix is easier to address because it only really addresses one set of requirements: authentication and identity management. It does it well and provides a great new model for identity management that you should definitely be getting familiar with and thinking about how to incorporate it into your applications. CardSpace too faces some adoption challenges since it requires both a service or site that supports CardSpace and a client that has IE 7 or a smart client app designed to work with CardSpace. It definitely warranted coverage in the roadshow and Michele does an awesome session on it. But it definitely did not warrant more than one session compared to overall complexity and capabilities of the technology compared to WCF, WF, and WPF.

These were some of the considerations that drive the mix of sessions we are offering in the roadshow.

I'd be very interested in some comments on other perspectives on WCF, WPF, or WF adoption.

I travel to Europe several times a year, particularly to teach classes in Sweden. One of the nice things about ending up on a European carrier like SAS or Lufthansa has been the availability of wireless inflight. I had hoped that the american carriers might catch on and start offering that too. Unfortunately it looks like there are not enough of us geeks out there who took advantage of the service, and Boeing is dropping it due to lack of interest.

I guess I just have to continue to think ahead and get everything staged to my machine that I need to get work done in flight...

I always cringe whenever I hear about another lawsuit aimed at Microsoft for this or that perceived anti-trust violation or unfair practices. Recent examples include the EU's recent verdict on Microsoft's appeal to the 2004 ruling imposing fines on Microsoft, and Adobe's effort to force Microsoft to remove features from Office 2007 that simply add features that already exist in many other products.

As a developer, I am constantly overwhelmed with the power, capability and productivity that Microsoft puts into developers hands... all of which can be used to develop all kinds of software, including software that might compete with Microsoft's own products. The operating system's open-ness is also both a blessing and a curse. The biggest blight on the ease of use debate between Macs and PCs (highlighted by the recent cute and funny series of commercials by Mac) is really a direct result of the fact that Microsoft is so darned open with the OS - they will let any darn vendor provide software or hardware components for the OS that claim to work fine with Windows, and then when they don't, people blame the OS manufacturer, not the component vendors, yet they fail to see the fact that it is the very openness of the platform that causes the problems. In the next breath, they are cursing Microsoft for trying to squash the competition by running every other company out of business.

The sad fact is that these kinds of lawsuits just hurt the consumer. For those hundreds of millions of us out there who happen to use and like the Windows operating system, we just get less features and capabilities because opponents want to use Microsoft's prominence in the industry as evidence that it must be doing something wrong. How about they create a great product at a competitive price, and that is a hard equation for many companies to measure up to? It also hurts the shareholders and employees of Microsoft (whos numbers are not insignificant) because Microsoft's revenues are burned up in flames in legal costs.

Yesterday Brad Smith, Microsoft General Counsel, gave a talk I wish I could have attended that outlined 12 principles to promote competition. The overview of the talk, the principles, and a vibrant community discussion are going on here: http://news.com.com/Microsoft+vows+to+play+fair/2100-1014_3-6096011.html

I read over this list and it looks to me like things Microsoft has been doing for many years now. Unfortunately it is also being spun as "Microsoft is finally agreeing to play fair", implying that they haven't been doing these things all along.

Whatever the case, I think it is a good thing to have these principles outlined as a manifesto of sorts that people can measure Microsoft and other companies against to try to see if there is any basis for the frequent and invalid claims of unfair practices that get levied against Microsoft. Maybe people can quit spending expensive resources on fighting suits like the EU one and focus on providing what is best for consumers and the economy.

For those who attended, or those who just want the materials, here are the slides and demos from today's MSDN Webcast:

Slides: http://www.softinsight.com/downloads/MSDNWebcasts/SmartClientDataApplications_Jul06.pdf

Demos:http://www.softinsight.com/downloads/MSDNWebcasts/SmartClientDataAppsDemos_Jul06.zip

I gave four talks at the Software Developers Conference in Netherlands this week. This is a very fun and interesting conference that is put on by a large user group organization called Software Developers Network, run by Remi Caron and Joop Pecht.

This conference is one of the most enjoyable conferences I get to do anywhere in the world. It is amazing how professional and well run this conference is, especially when you consider that it is being put on by a user group organization and it is better run than many U.S. conferences put on by companies that are supposed to specialize in this kind of event. All of the user group members that run the conference are volunteers, and yet the quality and professionalism that comes out of that is outstanding.

The attendees are hard core, ask great questions, and make the event fun for the speakers as well. For those of you who attended and find your way to this post for the slides and demos - thanks!

You can grab the slides and demos here:

Build Smart Client Data Apps with Windows Forms 2.0:  Slides   Demos
Build Custom Data Bound Objects and Collections:  Slides   Demos
Present Rich Tabular Data with the DataGridView Control:  Slides   Demos
Drive Application Behavior with Application and User Settings:  Slides   Demos

I spoke at DevTeach  in Montreal Tue-Thu of this week and had a great time as always. If you haven't checked out this conference, you should plan on signing up next year. Great location, great speakers, very well done conference with lots of hard core sessions.

If you attended one of my sessions and want to get the slides and demos, here you go:

NET371 - Drive App Behavior with Application and User Settings:  Slides   Demos

NET391 - Custom Bound Objects and Collections:  Slides   Demos

NET463 - Advanced ClickOnce:  Slides   Demos

MusicLibrary Database Creation Script:   Script

Make sure you sign up and come to the DC Code Camp in Reston VA on 10 June. You can find all the details at http://www.madcodecamp.com. We have a great line up of speakers with 4 concurrent tracks to pick from. Details will be out soon on the session schedules.

It's free!! You can't beat that price!

We will be running a Code Camp at the Microsoft Reston training center on 10 June all day. This is a great FREE event with great speakers teaching you hard core topics on .NET coding. We are looking for speakers, so if you are interested in sharing your knowledge with the local community, you can find the call for speakers here as well as registration information if you just want to attend and soak up knowledge.

Come on out and participate in the DC area developer community!

I gave a talk on Data Binding with Windows Forms 2.0 at the San Diego .NET Developers Group on Tuesday 7 Mar.

Here are the slides and demos:  Slides   Demos

I gave a talk on Connecting Smart Clients at the Microsoft Integration and Connected Systems User Group (MICSUG) last night. I discussed and demoed the basics of using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) to connect applications, using the newly released Feb CTP.

You can get the slides and demos here:  Slides   Demos

In jumping through the hoops yesterday to get my demos running on the Feb CTP, there were a number of changes that I had to get used to compared to previous builds.

The biggest is that if you run svcutil against a service that uses wsHttpBinding to generate a proxy, you get a proxy service contract that uses custom message contracts to wrap the parameters and return values from each operation contract. XXXRequest and XXXResponse classes are defined in the proxy file for each operation, along with an XXXBody class that actually contains the raw parameter/DataContract types.

If you program against the service contract interface like so:

IAccountsManager mgrProxy = new AccountsManagerProxy();

You will have to create the XXXRequest message contract types to wrap all the parameters you pass into the methods, and unwrap any return values from the XXXResponse types. However, they also expose a public method on the proxy class directly that encapsulates these details so that you can deal directly with the underlying parameters and return values.

So instead of calling IAccountsManager.GetAllAccounts for example, you will have an easier time calling AccountsManagerProxy.GetAllAccounts.

This is true for wsHttpBinding because of the message level security involved in the default binding. If you use basicHttpBinding, or turn down the security on the wsHttpBinding, then you will get more straightforward service contract interface definitions on the client side proxy.

The resulting proxy and service contract look like the following:

[System.ServiceModel.ServiceContractAttribute()]

{

// CODEGEN: Generating message contract since message part accountNo requires protection.

[System.ServiceModel.OperationContractAttribute(Action= "http://tempuri.org/IAccountsManager/CreateAccount", ReplyAction="http://tempuri.org/IAccountsManager/CreateAccountResponse" )]

CreateAccountResponse CreateAccount(CreateAccountRequest request);

// CODEGEN: Generating message contract since message part GetAllAccountsResult requires protection.

[System.ServiceModel.OperationContractAttribute(Action= "http://tempuri.org/IAccountsManager/GetAllAccounts", ReplyAction="http://tempuri.org/IAccountsManager/GetAllAccountsResponse" )]

GetAllAccountsResponse GetAllAccounts(GetAllAccountsRequest request);

// CODEGEN: Generating message contract since message part fromAccountNo requires protection.

[System.ServiceModel.OperationContractAttribute(Action= "http://tempuri.org/IAccountsManager/Transfer", ReplyAction="http://tempuri.org/IAccountsManager/TransferResponse" )]

TransferResponse Transfer(TransferRequest request);

}

[System.CodeDom.Compiler.GeneratedCodeAttribute( "System.ServiceModel", "3.0.0.0")]

{

}

[System.CodeDom.Compiler.GeneratedCodeAttribute( "System.ServiceModel", "3.0.0.0")]

{

public AccountsManagerProxy()

{

}

public AccountsManagerProxy(string endpointConfigurationName) :

base (endpointConfigurationName)

{

}

public AccountsManagerProxy(string endpointConfigurationName, string remoteAddress) :

base (endpointConfigurationName, remoteAddress)

{

}

public AccountsManagerProxy(string endpointConfigurationName, System.ServiceModel.EndpointAddress remoteAddress) :

base (endpointConfigurationName, remoteAddress)

{

}

public AccountsManagerProxy(System.ServiceModel.Channels.Binding binding, System.ServiceModel.EndpointAddress remoteAddress) :

base (binding, remoteAddress)

{

}

CreateAccountResponse IAccountsManager.CreateAccount(CreateAccountRequest request)

{

return base .InnerProxy.CreateAccount(request);

}

public void CreateAccount(int accountNo, string name, decimal initialBalance)

{

CreateAccountRequest inValue = new CreateAccountRequest();

inValue.Body = new CreateAccountRequestBody();

inValue.Body.accountNo = accountNo;

inValue.Body.name = name;

inValue.Body.initialBalance = initialBalance;

CreateAccountResponse retVal = ((IAccountsManager)( this )).CreateAccount(inValue);

}

GetAllAccountsResponse IAccountsManager.GetAllAccounts(GetAllAccountsRequest request)

{

return base .InnerProxy.GetAllAccounts(request);

}

public BankingBusinessLayer.Account[] GetAllAccounts()

{

GetAllAccountsRequest inValue = new GetAllAccountsRequest();

inValue.Body = new GetAllAccountsRequestBody();

GetAllAccountsResponse retVal = ((IAccountsManager)( this )).GetAllAccounts(inValue);

return retVal.Body.GetAllAccountsResult;

}

TransferResponse IAccountsManager.Transfer(TransferRequest request)

{

return base .InnerProxy.Transfer(request);

}

public void Transfer(int fromAccountNo, int toAccountNo, decimal amount)

{

TransferRequest inValue = new TransferRequest();

inValue.Body = new TransferRequestBody();

inValue.Body.fromAccountNo = fromAccountNo;

inValue.Body.toAccountNo = toAccountNo;

inValue.Body.amount = amount;

TransferResponse retVal = ((IAccountsManager)( this )).Transfer(inValue);

}

}

I recorded a DNR and DNRtv last week in New London and they are already up on the site.

You can download/listen to the .NET Rocks! epsidode here: http://www.dotnetrocks.com

And the DNRtv here: http://www.dnrtv.com

In the DNR episode, we talk about data binding, ClickOnce and a few other related topics.

This DNRtv shows how to do some of the data binding stuff in the designer. Keep your eyes out for another episode in a week or so on ClickOnce deployment.

Come on out for the inaugural meeting of the Microsoft Integration and Connected Systems User Group (MICSUG) at the Microsoft Reston offices tomorrow night at 7 pm. I'll be giving a presentation on using WCF to connect smart clients in a distributed environment.

Should be a great time!

We have decided to start putting out a periodic newsletter at IDesign with information on the content that we are producing in the form of articles, books, blog posts, and public presentations. There will also be information in there for various events that we are involved in, such as conferences and classes.

If you would like to tap into another great informational resource that just shows up now and then, please subscribe to the IDesign newletter.

I gave a talk on data binding in NYC this Thu night. Had a great time. Lively crowd as always, lots of good questions and interaction.

Here are the slides and demos:

Slides    Demos

Wow. What can I say. Wow. I'm not worthy!

I've been selected for the Microsoft Regional Director program (http://msdn.microsoft.com/isv/rd/) to represent the state of Virginia. Very cool opportunity. More chances for early exposure to new technologies coming out of Microsoft and the opportunity to influence what they become, more opportunities to help the community learn and adopt those technologies, and one of the biggest benefits is being able to collaborate with the other 150 or so RDs, which is quite a brain trust (myself excluded).

I thought being an MVP was a great opportunity, but this makes that pale in comparison!

I gave a talk on data binding at the Sarasota FL .NEt Users Group last night. Had a great time, and it was especially fun to present this topic this time since it was the first time presenting on data binding since my book came out. Gave away a couple copies. It was also great to go have some beers with the group members afterwards, including fellow MVPs Stan Schultes and David Hayden.

You can grab the slides and demos here:  Slides   Demos

I co-presented the Smart Client session at the DC Launch event yesterday at the Washington Convention Center with Marc Schweigert, a Microsoft Developer Evangelist for the Federal Sector. We covered a lot of good material on Windows Forms 2.0 capabilities including data binding and ClickOnce, two topics close to my heart since I have written/am writing books on them. I also spent most of the day in the Ask the Experts booth along with other local DC area experts like Sahil Malik, Randy Hayes, G. Andrew Duthie, Darrell Norton, Jonathan Cogley and Vishwas Lele. Besides being a great opportunity to catch up with all these guys and exchange ideas, it was a great day talking to developers from the area and seeing how much enthusiasm there is around the availability of VS 2005 and .NET 2.0. Most of the people there had spent little to no time looking at the new stuff, so there was the usual "wow!" reaction when they saw all the great features and capabilities that are now available to them.

I think we ended up with over 2000 attendees at the event, with about a thousand or so sticking around to the bitter end for our session, which was last up at 4:30-5:45.

The folks at Microsoft that put together the event (Darryl Schaffer in particular) did a great job organizing and running the event.

Looks like I get to hold onto the MVP title for another year. WooHoo!

Being an MVP has a lot of great benefits, but you need to contribute a lot of time to the community to earn the title. In case people are wondering the kinds of things you can do to qualify, I gave about 35 talks at major conferences in the last year, 14 user group talks, 3 webcasts, wrote a book (Data Binding with Windows Forms 2.0), published about a half dozen articles in various publications, helped run the Captial Area .NET User Group, and participated in 6 Microsoft partner events (SDRs, readiness events, etc.). This is all extra-curricular activity that does not directly earn me any significant money. On top of that I had to continue to earn a living as an architect and trainer with IDesign, which is a lot of fun in itself. Sounds exhausting, but I gotta say I feel pretty lucky to have found something that I love to do so much.

This year I have been moved to the Visual Developer - Solution Architect category instead of ASP.NET because that aligns more with where my primary focus is these days. I'm all about smart clients, but they don't have a category for that yet. I still can hold my own with ASP.NET, but just don't spend as much of my time in that space as with architecture and smart client technologies anymore.

Cool, cool, cool. I feel privileged to count myself part of a very talented community of Microsoft recognized experts!

I am the vice president of the Capital Area .NET Users Group, and help coordinate our speakers and sponsors. If you are interested in speaking at CapArea, or know someone who might be, I am trying to get our speaker line up for 2006 rolling. We need a speaker for Feb 2006, and April-Dec.

Like most user groups, we have no budget for paying speakers or covering travel expenses. This is just a chance for you to share your expertise with fellow community members and teaching them something new about .NET development.

If you are interested, please contact me at brian.noyes(AT)idesign.net.

Thanks

The question came up from several attendees at my MSDN Webcast on ClickOnce yesterday:

"Can I launch a XXX application using ClickOnce?" (fill in XXX with VB6, MFC, etc. - non-.NET applications)

The answer is yes, you will just have to employ a little trick.

What you need is a simple little launcher application that IS a Windows .NET application. So do the following:

1. Create a new Windows Application project with VS 2005.
2. Delete the Form1 from the project.
3. Add the unmanaged EXE and any supporting files to the VS 2005 project, which makes them part of this application from a ClickOnce perspective. As a result, they will get deployed with this application to its cache folder and can be executed by this launcher app.
4. Edit the Program.cs file Main method and delete the current method body (which launches the application and the form) and replace it with code to launch the unmanaged executable. This just requires a single line of code: Process.Start("MyUnamangedApp.exe");

Note: You will need to give the launcher app full trust in the ClickOnce security settings.

Note2: If the unmanaged app relies on ActiveX or COM objects, those need to be added to the project as well, and you will need to add a reference to the COM DLL's to the project to get their reg-free COM information added to the manifest. See this article for more details.

You can download a sample implementation here.

Here are the demos from my MSDN Webcast today on the DataGridView control.

You can find the sample DataGridView chapter for my book here.

You can view the webcast on demand through the links here.

I gave a talk on connecting smart clients with WCF on Tuesday at Boulder .NET. Had a good turnout desipte the proximity to the holiday and had a good time.

The talk covered the fundamentals of connecting applications with WCF since most of the people there had never seen anything on WCF. Then I moved into some of the specific client concerns when using WCF, similar to my talk at VSConnections.

You can get the slides and demos here:  Slides   Demos

I'll be speaking at Visual Studio Connections (part of DevConnections) in Las Vegas from 5-8 November. This is a great and growing conference that happens twice annually in the US, usually Orlando in the spring and Las Vegas in the fall, that I have been privileged to speak at for the last couple years. If you haven't been to one yet, you ought to be hammering your boss for permisson/funding to attend for the following reasons:

• It will rapidly and time-effectively expose you to new solution technologies you might not get a chance to explore on your own
• You will get concentrated advanced training in current and future technologies, getting you up to speed on them in far less time than you can achieve on your own
• You will get presentations from the top speakers in the business
• You will get a chance to network with peers in the industry, learn from others experiences employing .NET technologies, which will make you more effective at employing them yourself
• You will have a lot of fun (OK, maybe don't tell your boss this...)

You can learn a lot peripherally from the conference too by reading the DevConnections blog here. There are posts from other speakers as they develop their talks and their own observations and experiences at the conference.

I'll be presenting the following sessions:

VSM356: Build Custom Data Bound Business Objects and Collections
VSM351: Secure Smart Client ClickOnce Deployments
VID306: Build Event-Driven Applications with Indigo
VID309: Connect Smart Client Applications with Indigo

If you make it to the show (and you should!!), stop by and say hi!

I've got two MSDN Webcasts coming up at the end of November, both part of the "Best Of" series that they are doing surrounding the launch of VS 2005 for those Webcasts focused on .NET 2.0 and VS 2005 that got the highest scores in the last year.

You can click through here to get to the webcasts:

The two I am giving will both be on 29 November:

Presenting Rich Rich Tabular Data with the DataGridView Control
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
10:00 A.M.–11:00 A.M. Pacific Time

Deploy Smart Client Applications with ClickOnce
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
1:00 P.M.–2:00 P.M. Pacific Time

Check them out!!

I gave a talk at LexDotNet in Lexington KY last night on building smart client data apps. It really boils down to a similar talk to my Tackle Complex Data Binding with Windows Forms 2.0 talk, but with a slightly different approach and angle. I did mostly a large progressive demo where I started out with the simple and impressive data binding capabilties for working directly with a database in your Windows Forms app. Then I explained why you should never do that in a serious production application and stepped through how to migrate the functionality to a three or four layer/tier architect without giving up any of the capability of the data binding features in Windows Forms.

Here are the slides and demos that I used.

If you are not already using CodeSmith to avoid repetitive coding tasks, you should really take a look at it. One of the things I use it for frequently is to generate a clean stored procedure layer on top of my tables for doing standard CRUD (SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE) operations on those tables.

Specifically, what you usually need for most tables in your database are:
- A SELECT proc that returns all rows
- A SELECT proc that takes a primary key value and returns the corresponding row
- An INSERT proc that adds a row to the table
- A DELETE proc that removes a row
- An UPDATE proc that modifies a row

I actually prefer to just have a single SELECT proc that takes a primary key parameter that defaults to NULL. If that parameter is NULL, it returns all row, otherwise it returns just the one row requested. That saves on the number of adapters/commands you have to create to do SELECTs.

In combination with these procs, you will want to add a column to your tables if at all possble that can be used for optimistic concurrency checking. You can use a datetime column that gets updated with every modification to a row, a timestamp column, or a uniqueidentifier with the rowguid property set to get it to auto-update.

If you use this pattern or want to, I wrote a CodeSmith template that will code generate all the stored procs for you. You feed it a table name and the name of the column that is used for optimistic concurrency checking. It will then generate the appropriate stored procs to ensure everything gets updated correctly based on the optimistic checking column type. You can download it here.
http://www.softinsight.com/downloads/StoredProcsForConcurrencyColumnTables.zip
Also in that zip is another template that will let you generate all the procs for all the tables in your database. It will skip any tables that do not have the concurrency column name specified, or that do not have a primary key.

This pattern also happens to work beautifully with typed data sets and table adapters in VS 2005.

As an example, if you add a Modified datetime column to the Employees table in Northwind, and set its default value to the getdate() function, you now have a good column that can be used for optimistic concurrency checking, as long as you wrap it in stored procs that update the Modified column on updates. The template I wrote generates the following code with the click of a button:

/****** Object:  Stored Procedure dbo.DeleteEmployees    Script Date: Wednesday, September 28, 2005 ******/
if exists (select * from dbo.sysobjects where id = object_id(N'[dbo].[DeleteEmployees]') and OBJECTPROPERTY(id, N'IsProcedure') = 1)
drop procedure [dbo].[DeleteEmployees]
GO

/****** Object:  Stored Procedure dbo.GetEmployees    Script Date: Wednesday, September 28, 2005 ******/
if exists (select * from dbo.sysobjects where id = object_id(N'[dbo].[SelectEmployees]') and OBJECTPROPERTY(id, N'IsProcedure') = 1)
drop procedure [dbo].[SelectEmployees]
GO

/****** Object:  Stored Procedure dbo.InsertEmployees    Script Date: Wednesday, September 28, 2005 ******/
if exists (select * from dbo.sysobjects where id = object_id(N'[dbo].[InsertEmployees]') and OBJECTPROPERTY(id, N'IsProcedure') = 1)
drop procedure [dbo].[InsertEmployees]
GO

/****** Object:  Stored Procedure dbo.UpdateEmployees    Script Date: Wednesday, September 28, 2005 ******/
if exists (select * from dbo.sysobjects where id = object_id(N'[dbo].[UpdateEmployees]') and OBJECTPROPERTY(id, N'IsProcedure') = 1)
drop procedure [dbo].[UpdateEmployees]
GO

SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON
GO
SET ANSI_NULLS OFF
GO
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Date Created: Wednesday, September 28, 2005
-- Created By:   Generated by CodeSmith
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.DeleteEmployees
 @EmployeeID int,
 @Modified datetime
AS

DELETE FROM [dbo].[Employees]
WHERE
 
 [EmployeeID] = @EmployeeID
 AND [Modified] = @Modified
GO

SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER OFF
GO
SET ANSI_NULLS ON
GO

SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER OFF
GO
SET ANSI_NULLS OFF
GO
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Date Created: Wednesday, September 28, 2005
-- Created By:   Generated by CodeSmith
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.SelectEmployees
 @EmployeeID int = NULL
AS

 IF (@EmployeeID IS NOT NULL)
 BEGIN
  SELECT
   [EmployeeID],
   [LastName],
   [FirstName],
   [Title],
   [TitleOfCourtesy],
   [BirthDate],
   [HireDate],
   [Address],
   [City],
   [Region],
   [PostalCode],
   [Country],
   [HomePhone],
   [Extension],
   [Photo],
   [Notes],
   [ReportsTo],
   [PhotoPath],
   [Modified]
  FROM
   [dbo].[Employees]
  WHERE
   [EmployeeID] = @EmployeeID
 END
 ELSE
 BEGIN
  SELECT
   [EmployeeID],
   [LastName],
   [FirstName],
   [Title],
   [TitleOfCourtesy],
   [BirthDate],
   [HireDate],
   [Address],
   [City],
   [Region],
   [PostalCode],
   [Country],
   [HomePhone],
   [Extension],
   [Photo],
   [Notes],
   [ReportsTo],
   [PhotoPath],
   [Modified]
  FROM
   [dbo].[Employees]
 END

GO

SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER OFF
GO
SET ANSI_NULLS ON
GO

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Date Created: Wednesday, September 28, 2005
-- Created By:   Generated by CodeSmith
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.InsertEmployees
 @LastName nvarchar(20),
 @FirstName nvarchar(10),
 @Title nvarchar(30),
 @TitleOfCourtesy nvarchar(25),
 @BirthDate datetime,
 @HireDate datetime,
 @Address nvarchar(60),
 @City nvarchar(15),
 @Region nvarchar(15),
 @PostalCode nvarchar(10),
 @Country nvarchar(15),
 @HomePhone nvarchar(24),
 @Extension nvarchar(4),
 @Photo image,
 @Notes ntext,
 @ReportsTo int,
 @PhotoPath nvarchar(255),
 @Modified datetime OUTPUT,
 @EmployeeID int OUTPUT
AS

SET @Modified=getdate()
INSERT INTO [dbo].[Employees] (
 [LastName],
 [FirstName],
 [Title],
 [TitleOfCourtesy],
 [BirthDate],
 [HireDate],
 [Address],
 [City],
 [Region],
 [PostalCode],
 [Country],
 [HomePhone],
 [Extension],
 [Photo],
 [Notes],
 [ReportsTo],
 [PhotoPath],
 [Modified]
) VALUES (
 @LastName,
 @FirstName,
 @Title,
 @TitleOfCourtesy,
 @BirthDate,
 @HireDate,
 @Address,
 @City,
 @Region,
 @PostalCode,
 @Country,
 @HomePhone,
 @Extension,
 @Photo,
 @Notes,
 @ReportsTo,
 @PhotoPath,
 @Modified
)
SET @EmployeeID = @@IDENTITY

GO

SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER OFF
GO
SET ANSI_NULLS ON
GO

SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON
GO
SET ANSI_NULLS OFF
GO
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Date Created: Wednesday, September 28, 2005
-- Created By:   Generated by CodeSmith
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.UpdateEmployees
  @EmployeeID int,
  @LastName nvarchar(20),
  @FirstName nvarchar(10),
  @Title nvarchar(30),
  @TitleOfCourtesy nvarchar(25),
  @BirthDate datetime,
  @HireDate datetime,
  @Address nvarchar(60),
  @City nvarchar(15),
  @Region nvarchar(15),
  @PostalCode nvarchar(10),
  @Country nvarchar(15),
  @HomePhone nvarchar(24),
  @Extension nvarchar(4),
  @Photo image,
  @Notes ntext,
  @ReportsTo int,
  @PhotoPath nvarchar(255),
  @Modified datetime OUTPUT
AS
DECLARE @CurrentModified DateTime
 SET @CurrentModified = getdate()
UPDATE [dbo].[Employees] SET
 [LastName] = @LastName,[FirstName] = @FirstName,[Title] = @Title,[TitleOfCourtesy] = @TitleOfCourtesy,[BirthDate] = @BirthDate,[HireDate] = @HireDate,[Address] = @Address,[City] = @City,[Region] = @Region,[PostalCode] = @PostalCode,[Country] = @Country,[HomePhone] = @HomePhone,[Extension] = @Extension,[Photo] = @Photo,[Notes] = @Notes,[ReportsTo] = @ReportsTo,[PhotoPath] = @PhotoPath,[Modified] = @CurrentModified
WHERE
 [EmployeeID] = @EmployeeID
 AND [Modified] = @Modified

SET @Modified = @CurrentModified
GO

SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER OFF
GO
SET ANSI_NULLS ON
GO

I gave a talk on ClickOnce in both St. Louis and Kansas City Monday and Tuesday evening this week and had a really good time. After the St. Louis talk I was able to go out for a beer with Bill Evjan, Scott Spradlin, and some of the other group members, which is always a great chance to network while I am there. KC was more of a quick strike since I had to fly out first thing in the morning to head to the MVP summit in Seattle.

The code samples and slides can be downloaded here.

Apparently Ten Thousand Fists released about a week ago. I happened upon it tonight as I was doing some coding to maximum volume Disturbed and it occurred to me they were due for a new album. Listening to it and burning from Rhapsody now.

This album F*&cking rocks. Period. First impressions: ((((The Sickness + Believe)++)++)++)++

Yes, my dirty little secret about music preferences is out. Yes, this is the same guy who blogged about Bond a while back. Look, my first album was Black Sabbath, my first concert was Kiss, Ted Nugent, and Montrose at Anaheim stadium at the tender young age of 11 in 1976. Lets just say my earliest music influences were HEAVY METAL. But I do have disparate tastes that span just about anything depending on mood other than country and opera.

But when I need to code or work out, rock is where I live.

Or, in the case of favorite bands like Distrubed, Limp Bizkit, Rage Against the Machine, Linkin Park, etc., it would be "Angry music" as my wife calls it. :)

I'll take the opportunity here for some shameless self-promotion...

If you are an intermediate to advanced developer who already has some .NET experience and are looking to take it to the next level, you might want to check out our Advanced .NET Master Class, which I will be teaching in Reston, VA from 17-21 Oct. This is a public offering of a high-demand course that we normally only offer onsite for larger development teams. You can find the full class description here. This will be a well-timed, comprehensive, in-depth coverage of developing enterprise applications in .NET 2.0. I cover a huge amount of material including advanced language features in C#, assemblies and versioning, serialization, multi-threading, transactions, security, Enterprise Services, and Remoting.

If you are interested, contact us through this link to obtain more information.

I had a great time speaking at the TampaBay .NET Users Group last night. We had a great turn out and it was a fun crowd. About 20 of us retired to a nearby bar afterwards for some suds and good conversation. Apparently they do that fairly regularly at their group. That is definitely the largest interactive mass of people I have encountered at a user group that goes out and really networks and has a good time together after the meeting on a regular basis.

Thanks for having me down guys and gals!!

The talk was on ASP.NET 2.0 Data Binding, and was a little rough since it was the first time I had given this talk. But hopefully people still got a lot out of it. I did all the demos on the fly, and as a result, a few of them didn't work out because I decided to take a few little side trips that I had not practiced, which is never a good idea on stage with new material.

If you are interested, here are the slides and outcome of the demos.

I just got back from Holland Thursday after speaking at SDC there, and now I am in Orlando to speak at TechEd. These things are nothing but fun, but man, the travel can get crazy.

I had a great time last night joining in with the crowd at the Party with Palermo, which evolved from a loosely organized geek dinner into a great gathering of speakers, RDs, MVPs, and attendees in the Peabody hotel restaurant and bar. Today there are a collection of overlapping events that I plan to try to attend portions of, including some MVP events, the INETA summit, and some of the pre-con sessions.

The rest of the week is already pretty packed. My breakout session is not until Friday, but I have a bunch of other things I am participating in / presenting as well:

Tuesday 7 Jun:

3:15-6:15 PM- proctoring Juval Lowy's Instructor Led Lab (ILL) on Generics (DEV20/DEV20R)

9:00 - 10:00 PM - Preparing for Indigo Birds of a Feather (BoF) given by Juval

Wednesday 8 June:

8:30 AM-11:30 AM- proctoring Michele Leroux Bustamante's ILL on Iterators (DEV23/DEV23R)

7:00-11:00 PM Influencer Party

9:00-10:00PM Leading BoF session on Smart Client Deployment (BOF051)

Thursday 9 June:

3:15 - 6:15 PM - Giving System.Transactions ILL (DEV 22/22R)

Friday 10 June:

10:15 AM -12:00 PM - Answering Q&A questions through LiveMeeting for Juval Lowy's Simulcast session Being More Productive with the .NET Framework (DEV325)

1:00 - 2:15 PM - Presenting CLI440 Smart Client Offline Data Caching and Synchronization

Those are just the items that warrant an unchallenged block on my calendar. There are a ton of other events mixed in there as well to keep the week packed. I also need to get some more work done on my book this week getting the second half of the book up to date with Beta 2 and ready for Tech review, and also want to try to blog a few technical posts about stuff I am working on. Hmm, when is thattime expansion device going to be on the market??

Yesterday I attended an all day event at the local Microsoft Office called the MVP Engagement Tour. This was put on by the team at Microsoft that manages the MVP program, and they are hitting about 20 major cities around the country and getting a chance to talk with the MVPs in that area (both developer, IT Pro, and End User app) about the program and what they are doing right or wrong.  It was a great event and a good chance to find learn more about the program and how to optimize my role in the community and with Microsoft as an MVP.

Besides learning a lot and getting to network with the other MVPs in the area, they gave us a nice little gift for participating - A Suunto SPOT Watch with 3 months free MSN Direct. NICE. I had pondered getting one of these little beasts before, but couldn't quite justify another $200 gadget. Now that I have it, maybe I will actually play around with creating some app for it.

Being an MVP and having early access to bits and great channels into the Microsoft product teams is reward enough for the time I spent speaking and writing, evangelizing Microsoft products and educating the community on them. But I'm always a sucker for cool toys too. Thanks MVP Team!!!

Another semi-major milestone in life complete - another graduate degree. As of today, I'm a graduate of University of Colorado Boulder with a Masters of Engineering in Computer Science. I should probably be a little more excited about this, but after 6 years of slugging through the course work in my precious-little spare time, I'm just glad to have the darn thing done.

This is my second master's degree, I already had a B.S. and M.S. in Aero Engineering (U.S. Naval Academy and Naval Postgraduate School Monterey).

So why did I bother with a second masters? Great question, but the truth is if I had it to do over again, I wouldn't bother. I decided to pursue it 6 years ago when I was transitioning out of the Navy into a full time job as a developer, and wanted to have a sheepskin to back up the knowledge that I thought I already had from self study over many years, and working on software development projects within the Navy. Within a year of starting it, I had already realized that knowledge and ability is what matters in this industry, not academics, and so I really didn't need the degree to get the kinds of jobs I wanted. And after six years of study, I found that I was pretty much right - I already knew most of the useful information that was contained in my course of study. Sure I learned a few things along the way and refined some knowledge I already had, but for the most part, it was just an awful lot of work. And I can say with convinction that if I had spent that same amount of time doing my normal course of self study, I would have acquired vastly more knowledge.

The other thing I found challenging (in a bad way) and frustrating about the degree was that it is really difficult to go from having an engineering degree and being a practicing engineer for many years to studying a science degree. Way too much time was spent covering things that may have been "academically interesting" but in reality have no practical value in industry.

Don't get me wrong, CU Boulder is a great school, and their distance learning program CAETE through which I did the degree is top notch. If you don't already have a masters and want or need one, this is a great place to look. But for me it was mostly just a large waste of time.

So that is at least one major distraction that won't be on my plate anymore! Good timing since I have a major and much more important distraction these days:

I gave a talk at Tulsa .NET Users Group on Monday 25 Apr on Windows Forms 2.0 Data Bining and had a great time. The group is large and growing, standing room only with over 40 folks. The group is well led by Caleb Jenkins, he is a great MC and keeps the group very dynamic and motivated.

Here are the slides and demos.

It took me a few days to get to it, but here are the slides and demos from Sunday's talks at Philly Code Camp:

Smart Client Offline Data Caching and Synchronization: Slides   Demos

Secure Smart Client Deployment with ClickOnce:  Slides   Demos

I'm speaking at the Philly Code Camp this weekend, and gave three talks today, and two tomorrow.

As promised to the attendees, here are the slides and demos from today for:

DataGridView Control: Slides   Demos

Complex Data Binding in Windows Forms 2.0: Slides    Demos

Extending ASP.NET with Custom Handlers and Modules: Slides   Demos

Good god. I started the download for beta 2 mid-day yesterday. Its still freaking going, trickling down at 15 KB/s. That is just wrong. Are they throttling that thing, or what?

I had a great time speaking at the Austin .NET Users Group and Texas A&M .NET User Group last night and today, giving my talk on Extending ASP.NET with Custom Handlers and Modules

For those that attended, or others that are interested, here are the slides and demos that I gave. If you have grabbed earlier versions of these from when I have given the talk in the past, you may want to grab the demos again since I added a custom handler demo that does watermarking of images that I wrote on the plane ride to Texas monday.