If you are having a hard time breaking the habit of querying sysusers then maybe this download from Microsoft will help. It is a PDF with the system views in SQL Server 2005 along with the relationships between them. Now if I can just get access to that plotter to print out a poster size version that I can put up on my cubicle wall.

I realize that Christmas is over but I wanted to let everyone know that I wish them a Merry Christmas. I love this time of year, especially the way that people seem to take the time to think of others. As I was reading the news this morning and looking at the stories of the memorials on the one year anniversary of the tsunami in Asia I remember what a sick feeling I had that morning and then later the feeling of pride as I saw the world pull together to help those affected. This year has seen hurricanes and earthquakes that have tested the faith, charity, and resources of a lot of individuals and countries. I hope that we will always band together to help anyone who is suffering.

I checked my e-mail this morning and there was an invitation to the Utah Geek Dinner tomorrow night. Now, I know it is not much notice but it is more than the last one. The dinner will be held at the Mayan resturant. You can get more information and sign up for the event at http://www.devutah.com/geekdinners.htm. I am not sure what the topic will be but I look forward to seeing you all there.

Yesterday I spent all day at a MSDN and TechNet events showing the "best of launch" in the 2005 products. It was great to meet up with some people that I have not seen for a long time. There was an excellent turn out. Between the morning and afternoon sessions there were just under 1000 people attendees. A lot of them were there for both the morning and afternoon sessions.

The training I will be teaching on the 13th and 14th was also announced. I heard that the class already has 35 people signed up. It sounds like there is a lot of interest in the new development products. 

[Note: I must have missed the memo but the dates are different than I originally posted. The correct dates are Tuesday the 13th and Wednesday the 14th. I have also updated the information below with the correct dates. The registration web site has the correct dates.]

I will be teaching a 2 day class on Visual Studio 2005 in the Microsoft Offices on December 13th and 14th. It will be a lecture format with some demonstrations of each of the concepts. The class is intended for developers that have at least 1 year experience with Visual Studio 2005. I have included more information below.

What's New in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 for existing Visual Studio .NET Developers

This two-day instructor-led lecture seminar will provide the student with a focused environment to experience the new features and functionality of the Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 product.

Audience

This workshop is intended for experienced, professional software developers who are already skilled in building software using Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET or Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003, including those employed by independent software vendors or those who work on corporate enterprise development teams.

At Seminar Completion

After completing this seminar, students will be able to:

§       Apply knowledge of new productivity features and functionality in Visual Studio 2005 Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to develop software more efficiently

§       Write applications that use the Microsoft Visual Basic® and Microsoft Visual C#® programming language enhancements

§       Build managed code to run inside SQL Server 2005 (codename "Yukon")

§       Write data access code using the improved functionality in ADO.NET

§       Build Microsoft Windows® Forms applications using new controls and new functionality in the Visual Studio 2005 IDE designers

§       Deploy rich client applications using the new ClickOnce application deployment functionality

§       Build ASP.NET Web applications using new controls and new functionality in the Visual Studio 2005 IDE designers

§       Use the improved enterprise development tools to aid in the design, build and deployment of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications

Prerequisites

Before attending this seminar, students must have:

§       Experience (at least 1 year) as a full-time developer using Visual Studio .NET or Visual Studio .NET 2003

§       Experience in developing applications in one or more of the following fields:

Web Application (ASP 2.0), Windows Forms Application (Smart Clients with ClickOnce deployment), Server Component , XML Web Services

Student Materials

The student kit includes a comprehensive workbook. This event is a lecture only presentation with demos.  The student materials used are from a 3 day training course; the instructor will be making adjustments to the course to cover all materials in a 2 day class format.

Lunch

In appreciation for your attendance to this seminar, Microsoft will be providing lunch for the duration of the event.

Seminar Dates and Location:

December 13^th and 14^h, 9:00 am - 5:00 pm

Microsoft Corporation

123 Wright Brothers Drive, Suite 100

Salt Lake City, UT 84116

801-257-6400

http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/info/usaoffices/rockymtn/saltlakecity.mspx

Register today at: http://www.microsofttraining.com/devonsites

Class/Invitation ID 304327 

 

In a blog post at http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/10/sony-rootkits-and-digital-rights.html Mark Russinovich reveals that a CD he bought from Sony installed a rootkit as part of its DRM (Digital Rights Management) software. I don't oppose the right of Sony or anyone else to protect their software/music/intellectual property but when they resort to installing rootkits that could be used to hide other malware then they have gone too far. I haven't purchased a copy protected CD and after the problems that some Mac users had years ago where they couldn't eject the copy protected CDs I was a little skeptcal of their value. Now I am really beginning to wonder if the marketplace shouldn't speak up loud and clear that this is totally unacceptable behavior.

Lately it seems that there has been a lot of discussion about the Google Library project that aims to digitize and index a lot of books. Yesterday there were two well written articles in the opinion section of the newspaper. The first article expounds on the virtues of the project and how it will bring the great literature of the world to a larger audience. The second article is from the point of view of an author who is saying that the whole idea would cut authors out of the royalties that they deserve.

I have to admit that I am torn about this whole idea. For novels and other articles I can see the Google argument that they would protect fair use by only allowing downloads of a few pages at a time so it would be impracticle for anyone to read a novel start to finish without being very good at guessing which search terms would bring up the next set of pages. For technical articles, however, I think that the damage would be huge. I read a lot of articles start to finish but I also spend a lot of time looking for specific answers. If the Google Library would allow me to read a paragraph or two that would answer my question then I don't need to buy an entire book. I think it would lead me to decide that I didn't need to buy the book because I could get the information on-line.

I have heard the argument that I could do the same thing at a book store or at the library but I don't think those arguments are valid for two reasons. The first reason is that unlike Google that gets revenue from advertising, neither the library nor book store make any money off of me because I entered their store. There is no company that is offering them money for "impressions" on the advertising that exist in the store windows. So even if I don't find what I am looking for Google can gain money off of the fact that I was even looking. The second reason is convenience. While there is a library just a few blocks from where I work it still represents several orders of magnitude more effort for me to physically go down to the library, look in the card catalog, find the book on the shelf, and puruse in it to find the information I am looking for, and to copy the information so I can take it back to work and use it there than it is to just use Google from the office. I am not a legal expert but I think this is equivalent to the protection given to people taping shows off of broadcast TV vs. the people downloading MP3s from illegal file sharing services. One is fair use and the other is not.

I have never been paid royalties for anything that I have written but I do sympathize with the authors. For most of the writing that I have done the hourly rate comes out to something well below minimum wage. I do it because I am interested in the topic and think I have something to say not for the money. One of these days I might decide to write a book or more likely an e-book that I self publish. If I do write a book I would hope that there would be a market beyond Google for it.

I think the easy way to solve the controversy is to either only index books that have no copyright protection on them or to secure the permission of the copyright holder first. If you only index old books it might reduce the relevancy of the searches for technical and timely ideas but would still preserve the great works of the past. By securing the copyright holder's permission Google could figure out a way to pay the holder of the copyright. Napster and iTunes are able to figure out a way to pay for music downloads so there should be a way for Google to pay for book downloads.

The finalists for the Connected Systems Developer Competition have been announced. You can see them at http://csdevcompetition.com. Congratulations to all of the finalists. I know that I reviewed a lot of really good ideas. While I didn't reveiw all of the finalist entries I was fortunate enought to review the SQLCLR Z-Machine entry. I really liked it because it brought back memories of a project we did in college. The assignment was to get in a group and write a word processor to show not only text input, spell checking, formatting, etc. but that we could work together as a team and do project management. As a team we decided that a word processor was boring and proposed to create a text based game that had all the same functionality. The game we produced wasn't as polished as the SQLCLR Z-Machine but it was a lot of fun to make and I learned a lot about working in groups and some of the problems and advantages that groups can give a project.

I got in to work Monday and had an e-mail that said it was from our corporate IT and that my password had been changed as part of the weekend maintenance. I don't know what made me do it but I opened the attached .zip file to see what I needed to do to get into the affected systems. When WinZip opened it showed an empty file. I thought that was strange and just closed WinZip and went on with putting a CD into the drive to install some software that I needed. A few seconds later the "run as" dialog popped up telling me that I didn't have administrator rights and asking what user to install the software as. I assumed this was from the CD I had inserted and closed that dialog as I was already running "MakeMeAdmin" to install the sofware in my user account. It wasn't until I read the next e-mail that things started to fall into place. The e-mail was also from our corporate IT department and said that the previous e-mail and another one with a different subject and text were spoffed to come from them but really were a result of the MyTob virus. I checked and the CD did not have an autorun that tried to install software so the dialog box was caused by the virus trying to install. So the lessons that I should have learned over 15 years ago when I picked up my first computer virus are:

1. Don't run as administrator. I am currently doing this and it has helped me to avoid this virus by asking me who to install as. If I had not just put a CD in the drive it would have been very obvious that something was wrong when the message popped up.
2. Keep up to date on patches. According to the virus detection/removal tool that I ran I need 2 patches from Microsoft to avoid being infected by MyTob. I had both installed thanks to Windows Update.
3. Never trust e-mail. Back in college I had a project to write an e-mail client. As part of that I learned the SMTP protocol and would regularly send e-mails with a return address of the.monster@under.your.bed (sorry if you got one of those). I should have thought that the e-mail telling me that my password has been changed was in a system that I used the supposedly changed password to access and therefore spoofed but I didn't.
4. Don't ever open e-mail attachments. Well never can be a problem if you are expecting a word document but you should at least attempt to verify attachments. I was reading the e-mail through the web mail interface. Outlook would have flagged the attachment as having some other extension (probably .exe, .scr, or .cmd) past the .zip and would have warned me.

As I said at the begining of this post, this all happened on Monday. I intended to blog about it Monday night but got busy with some last minute details for the Connected Systems Developer Competition and getting ready for a customer meeting on Tuesday I didn't get around to blogging it but thought I would do it first thing Tuesday morning. Very early Tuesday morning I woke up with the flu. Somewhere in the wee hours of the morning in the delerium caused by the fever I found myself thinking it would be nice if I could run my body in non-administrator mode. That way when I got a virus from somewhere else I could just click on the cancel button and not have it infect me. Of course that is not possible, but it would have saved me two days of laying in bed feeling miserable.