ADO Guy_s Rants and Raves

I may be late to the game here, but I just loved this one:

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We now have an official place for this week"s Geek Dinner.  We will be meeting in Dunwoody at:

Max & Erma"s Restaurant - Dunwoody
1155 Mount Vernon Highway
Atlanta, GA   30338
770-551-0055

Its right off 400, close to the King and Queen buildings as well as fairly close to I-285.  For directions click here. 

Again, if you haven"t RSVP"d, please click here (so I can get an accurate count).

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We now have an official place for this week"s Geek Dinner.  We will be meeting in Dunwoody at 6pm on Thursday, May 10th (2007):

Max & Erma"s Restaurant - Dunwoody
1155 Mount Vernon Highway
Atlanta, GA   30338
770-551-0055

Its right off 400, close to the King and Queen buildings as well as fairly close to I-285.  For directions click here. 

Again, if you haven"t RSVP"d, please click here (so I can get an accurate count).

UPDATE: Thanks to all that mentioned that I forgot to include a date/time (It was in the old announcement. (Again, its May 10th, 2007 - 6pm - Max and Erma"s)

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I am looking through the breaking changes for Silverlight and I saw this and just about kvetched.  Glad to see that some people at Microsoft are just as confused about versioning schemes as the rest of us. This is the Version Detection section from the Silverlight changes document verbatim:

Version Detection

Silverlight 1.0 Beta and 1.1 Alpha will follow this versioning scheme:

• Silverlight 1.0 Beta version is "0.90.build"
• Silverlight 1.1 Alpha version is "0.95.build"

Silverlight.js contains a "version" property that checks for the proper version and directs users to the install location if the proper version is not installed.

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In case you are converting older WPF/E code to Silverlight, here is an eminently useful link to the breaking changes since the February CTP to Beta 1.0

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I wasn"t surprised to see thsi story on CNet as I wondered whether this would be the case as far back as 2003:

http://adoguy.com/2003/10/29/Been_a_busy_couple_of_days.aspx

and again in 2006:

http://adoguy.com/2006/06/05/Vista_Beta_and_Battery_Life.aspx

I hate to say I told you so...but...

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Its been a busy weekend for Microsoft.  First the announcement that EDM is being delayed six months to be after Orcas...now two new dynamic data access layers for web-based apps:

• Astoria: Expose your data as web services for AJAX
• Jasper: Another RAD solution to Data Access

I haven"t looked at either of these *yet*, but I thought it was already confusing...now look a the data access toolbox from MS:

DataSets...LINQ for SQL (Server)...EDM...Astoria...Jasper

I can"t imagine that the Data team is going to be able to give good enough advice as to where to use what.  Hopefully after I dig in deeper, it"ll make more sense.

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Here is a quick little Silverlight animation I put together with the new version of Blend (that supports Silverlight).  Its a lot easier now to edit your Silverlight assets...its completely (as far as I"ve been able to tell so far) with Silverlight 1.0 Beta (haven"t tried 1.1 yet). 

Remember, I am no artist...but I thought this was fun:

Remember, you"ll need the Silverlight 1.0 Beta Runtime to make this work...

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A myriad of new Silverlight content is now available including a Beta of the Javascript-based Silverlight development and an Alpha of the CLR-Based Silverlight development.  As of this moment the SDK"s aren"t downloading but everything else is...expect it to work in the next hour or so as the MIX keynote isn"t complete yet.

Just to be clear...yes, this means you will be able to create Managed Silverlight apps that run crossplatform...though this is an Alpha so don"t expect to ship the code any time soon.

All the downloads are available here:

http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/

It includes:

• Silverlight 1.0 Beta (The Javascript Model Support) Runtime
• Silverlight 1.1 Alpha (The CLR Support) Runtime
• Expression Blend 2 Beta (with Silverlight support)
• Expression Media Encoder Preview (with Silverlight Support)
• Sliverlight 1.0 Beta SDK (for use with VS 2005)
• Silverlight 1.1 Alpha SDK (for use with Orcas Beta 1)
• ASP.NET Futures - Silverlight Server Controls

Enjoy!

UPDATE: The 1.1 Alpha SDK seems to be working, but the 1.0 Beta SDK is still down...hopefully soon!

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I get this error from time to time when I uninstall some MS software that isn"t behaving very well (I"ve gotten it from uninstalling Orcas, SQL Server early drops and other products).  I wanted to highlight the two big fixes to this (without resorting to the painful re-installation of VS):

First, tell VS to heal itself (this fixes it about 80% of the time):

devenv /setup

If that doesn"t work, make sure that the projectaggregator.dll didn"t get unregistered accidently:

regsvr32 <YOURVS2005DIRECTORY>/Common7/IDE/ProjectAggregator.dll

or usually:

regsvr32 
  "c:\program files\microsoft visual studio 8\common7\IDE\projectaggregator.dll"

Good luck!

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