March 2007 - Posts
Have you ever wanted a list of Features packaged in a solution that you could just click a button to install? Well the good news is that I have too.
To solve this problem I extended a great tool called the Power Toys Pack Installer from CodePlex.
If you want to check out the Solution Installer that I created from it, simply download the Exe below and run the application.
If the application can connect to the Internet it will download a list of Solutions that can be installed. As seen in the image below. This is not a complete list yet, just a start of some features listed on CodePlex by Scot Hillier.
If you have a feature that is packaged in a solution send me an email or wait a little longer for a web page to submit the information about it to me.
Here is a sample screen shot of what the UI will look like. Notice you can install and remove these solutions from the tool and it shows which ones are installed.
If you have a local solution you should check out the following free tool to install it.
http://blog.mondosoft.com/ontolica/archive/2007/03/14/Generic-SharePoint-2007-Solution-Installer.aspx
Most of this I can't disclose, other than to say that I've got a new Business Intelligence talk to work on based on some of what I've seen. Really neat stuff.
Bill Gates gave the keynote. He actually talkked for an hour or so about his vision of technology today and in the future before siting down to answer questions from the audience for about half an hour. Questions ranged over a variety of topics including computer science education, philanthropy, and technical mineuta such as multilingual speech synthesis in Vista. Bill was a great sport and answered every question he received, even when the question was unintelligible or an attack from a Mac fanboy. The rest of the day was filled with some overview and roadmap type of presentations. The content is actually under NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) so I won't be revealing any dates or upcoming technical details in this or any other post about the event. Sorry. I don't want to get in trouble.
After the training sessions Microsoft offered a pair of parties. The exclusive party at the top of the Seattle Hilton was the Regional Director party. Brendon and I crashed for a few minutes, mostly to have a conversation with one of the attendees. While at the top of the 29 story building, I took this snapshot of the Seattle Space Needle (it's the tiny disk in the distance). Since we weren't invited, and frankly the RDs didn't seem to be drunk enough to keep us entertained, Brendon and I left and headed to the Attendee Party at the Museum of Flight to the south of the city. Below are a few photos of the event:
- SR-71 Black Bird hanging above a crowd of people. Shawn Wildermuth shared with us that this is one of his favorite planes b/c it has been so well designed to operate at low pressure altitudes that it leaks fuel on the tarmac.
- Brendon and I about to take off in the flight simulator. This was awesome, like a roller coaster. For two minutes we got to control what direction we were facing so we naturally did a ton of barrel rolls and loops. The seats we're strapped into are on a large machine which literally spins us any way we want to go and does it quite quickly. Brendon and I each got to control the stick for a minute, so we dedicated ourselves to seeing who could make the other sicker. I think I won, but it is one of those things where whomever wins really loses.
*** SUNDAY ***
I arrived in Seattle at about 9pm Sunday evening for the MVP Summit, which officially started Monday. Seattle did not disappoint - the weather was cold and raining. A $35 cab ride brought me to the Seattle Hilton where I simply checked in and passed out.
By arriving late on Sunday, I missed the Party with Palermo. Jeffery (not Jeff) Palermo hosted an excellent party complete with food and beverage tabs. The $1200 beer tab reportedly ran out at 9:30 but the party went on in some pockets until 4am. I know that Brendon and Heidi left around 12 and Jim Wooley left around 11. Sorry I missed it but I was way too tired from the rest of my trip to even attempt finding the restaurant. BTW - Jeffery reports that the attendance count was 240 people. That's what we had at the last Atlanta Code Camp! Amazing numbers! Free beer really helps.
*** MONDAY ***
The first day of the Summit was really all about networking. I've seen a lot of familiar faces and met some truly nice new people. Atlanta is well represented with Shawn W, Jim W, Brendon S, Eric V, Geoff H, Teo L, and myself.
Before registration actually began, I left my hotel to wander around downtown Seattle. I stopped in the first Starbucks I saw and who did I run into but Chris Williams from Greenville SC. Chris is now employed by Magenic and working on a CSLA project in Dallas. At this same Starbucks, I met George (sorry, I forgot the last name) and Curtis Spangurgh, a CRM MVP from SCG. The four of us wandered around together for a bit and found ourselves at Pike's Market where people were throwing fish around. Lots of fun. Curtis and I had a long conversation about a million topics, especially music. Curtis is the first of many great contacts I've already made at the Summit as I'm currently involved (peripherally) in a CRM project and now I have someone to go to with questions.
After registration, some of the Microsoft groups hosted booths at an expo where you could learn about certifications, licensing, CodePlex, and more. Food and beverages were all over the place.
After the expo, a group of us went with Joe Healy and the contigent of Florida MVPs to a bar on the way to dinner. Here I connected with more people than I can remember the names for. Well, here are a few names - Stan S (I can't remember the rest) and Tom Fuller. Anyway - some good conversations.
Dinner was a gigantic affair sorted by geographic region to help with language barriers. North and Latin America was a huge room, probably 800 or so people. A comedian tried to entertain the room, but people were in general more interested in talking to each other. That and the comedian wasn't very good. There were other rooms set up with entertainment such as linked Xboxes (playing Gears of War - which I dominated EVERY match I participated in), darts (I beat Jim W), and fooseball (Geoff H and I lost to Brendon and Eric V).
After dinner I went to a party at an arcade hosted by SupportSpace. SupportSpace is an Israeli based company which essentially provides web-based helpdesk outsourcing. The games at the arcade (Gameworks) were a lot of fun. Highlights included an Indy 500 racing game where I was in 2nd place (in the running for an Xbox or Zune) until Jim and another guy passed me at the last second, pushing me down to 4th place. I also played Jim and Brendon at a vertical balloon fighting game. You sit in a harness that raises and lowers you up to 20 feet in the air as you try to pop your opponents balloon. Jim won this game too, but only by 1 point. We both creamed Brendon!
It was midnight by the time I got back to my room.
Today is my last day of the west coast vacation. Kim's already on a plane heading home and I head to Seattle in a few hours. Right now I'm sitting at my parent's dining room table working on some of the final edits for the book chapter (Chapter 5). I'm also sitting here looking out the window at cloud covered mountains and impressive quantities of trees.
I've had a great time here in Spokane visiting my folks. I've eaten myself silly, starting with a massive Italian meal as soon as I landed. Since then Kim and I have been treated to home cooked meals, fancy seafood restaurants overlooking a waterfall, movies, and even a highly enjoyable two person play. The house is gigantic, perhaps a thousand square feet larger than the one Kim and I just bought. Lots of nice touches too, like alder wood cabinets and brushed nickel door and cabinet hardware.
Next week should be a great learning experience and a great deal of fun, but I'm already looking forward to going home and eating small and simple meals. I have been eating like it's going out of style recently! Time to scale back somewhat...
Next time you hear from me, I'll be in Seattle at the MVP Summit.
Pan's Labyrinth was a bizarre combination of movies. One part is set during the facist Franco government in Spain where the Army is hunting down and torturing the resistance fighters. The other part is a fairy tale featuring buzzing fairies, giant toads, and mosnsters with eyeballs in the palms of their hands.
This is not a kid's fairy tale movie. Loads of violence and guts, and not just in the military Spain setting. At one point, a pair of fairies get their heads chewed off! However, if you can handle the gore and the subtitles, this was an excellent movie. I do have to warn you that the beginning started a little slowly - my mother fell asleep next to me for a bit and was then confused for the rest of the movie.
Mark this in your calendars. March 7th was the perfect day for Disneyland. The weather was awesome - not too hot. The crowds were minimal, never more than a 10 minute wait to get on a ride. Ticket prices are pretty high - $63 for a single park ticket, but with such small crowds, Kim and I were able to get our cost per ride down to nearly $5. Space Mountain now rocks with a cool Red Hot Chili Peppers soundtrack. Pirates of the Carribean has been renovated to include Captain Jack Sparrow. Opening later this year, the 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea ride is being replaced with a Nemo undersea adventure. Food prices are, of course, outrageous. $25 to buy a chicken sandwich and a cheeseburger.
Despite possibly 40 trips to DisneyWorld and DisneyLand Hong Kong in the past 5 or so years, this has been the only vacation to Disneyland in quite a while. It was fun going as a guest and not walking through the underground tunnels. Disneyland might be a lot smaller than the parks in Orlando, but the difference in weather more than makes up for it.
I'm out on the west coast this week visiting friends and family before flying off to the MVP Summit in Seattle next week. This week I'm visiting with members of Kim's family in California. We're actually in Orange County; a beautiful bit of countryside complete with mountains on one horizon and the Pacific Ocean on the other. The weather has been blissful, if a bit dry for this Georgia native. What can I say - 99% humidity has become normal for me.
I've been having a wonderful time out here. My most strenuous mental activity so far has been deciding what to eat for each meal. I've run the gamut in terms of cuisine, from Del Taco to 5' in Laguna Beach. I'm actually writing this blog entry about that restaurant experience. 5' (Five Feet) has been among the best dining experiences I've ever had. The ambiance is great, the food was excellent and the wine pairings allowed me to taste bottles I would never have known about otherwise.
Today I'm going to DisneyLand and tomorrow I fly out of sunny CA up to frigid Spokane Washington to visit my family. I've got several days out there and then I fly to Seattle for the Summit. I'm in the SQL Server group so all of my sessions are SQL focused. I'm planning on coming back with a ton of knowledge about the next generation of SQL Server, code name Katmai.
Last Thursday I went to go see Billy Joel in concert. The ride down to Philips Arena sucked pretty badly with all of the rain, but not as much as walking the several blocks from the car to the arena. By the time the four of us managed to get inside, we were completely soaked. Once we made it inside the evening began to look up. I was actually standing in line picking up some beverages when he and the band came out on stage and started up.
The concert was excellent, ranging from songs I knew by heart (I still know all the words to "We Didn't Start the Fire") to songs from albums I didn't know existed (mostly this meant stuff from the mid to early 70s). At one point he even brought out one of his roadies to sing AC/DC's Highway to Hell, which was both really funny and really engaging for the audience.
I had a great time and this was completely worth the price of the tickets. Oh - did I mention that the tickets were free? One of Kim's oldest friends in Atlanta happens to be married to the nephew of Billy Joel's tour manager. Whenever Billy Joel comes through Atlanta, they always have some extra free tickets. While the nephew and his wife sat in box seats, the rest of us had to make due with sitting about 100 ft. away from the stage.
Great show and great time, terrible weather not withstanding.
The client location I'm at now uses a ClickOnce deployed Windows application to perform some highly critical business functions. Some time in the last two or three weeks, the application's certificate expired. We tried to deploy an update and everything BLEW UP!
Apparently, when you sign code from Visual Studio, you generate a certificate which is only good for a single year. When the certificate expires, you can't update your app anymore. The method to fix this is to publish the app with a new certificate to the web server. Then, on the individual desktop machines you have to manually uninstall the application then reinstall from the ClickOnce website.
What the hell? You have to touch EVERY machine? That SUCKS! I have 100 users and they're all over the country! Not a single one of them knows what I mean when I say "uninstall".
There is a published Microsoft KB article which describes a pair of workarounds to the issue. The first workaround is the uninstall/reinstall mechanism that I described above. The second method is to create a C++ application which will create a new certificate with an extended expiration date. In the KB article, Microsoft provides some SAMPLE code which should fix the problem. Per this forums thread, if you call Microsoft Support, they will give you a tool which will fix the issue.
They better fix this in the future - why would I care if my internally deployed application has been signed? If it HAS to be signed, why is the certificate good only for such a short period of time? I should be able to sign it once and move on.
If anyone points at security concerns, I'll deliberately ignore them. This is an internal app, not exposed to the web and not public. I know I'm supposed to use the STRIDE model and do the safe thing, but when the client wants results the only security I worry about is job security!
EDIT
This guy has allegedly posted working source code delivered by Microsoft Support. Someone needs to turn this into a working tool.