I just read an editorial at http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=13568 entitled UNIX Security: Don't Believe the Truth. Aside from the authors assertion that UNIX is more secure than Windows and his refusal to entertain any other opinion (for the record I think it is somewhat akin to saying Orem, UT is safer than New York, NY because there are fewer crimes) I thought it was a good piece. The main point is that even though most users do not run with sufficent privileges to allow the OS to be damaged by a virus, the stuff the user cares about can be damaged. The exact same thing is possible when running Windows as a non-administrative user. I had an experience where not being an administrator saved me from a virus infection.

One other interesting tidbit was the advertisement that was playing along with the article. I normally ignore the ads but this one was for the Microsoft sponsored "Get the Facts" campaign on whether Linux or Windows Server 2003 is a better purchase for enterprises. It seemed ironic to me.

I will be teaching a class on ASP .NET 2.0 in the Microsoft offices in Salt Lake on February 14 & 15. I promise that we will be done early enough on the 14th to let you get home to your sweetheart. Here are the details from Microsoft.

You are invited to attend a ASP 2.0 Web Applications training class.  Microsoft is pleased to offer this training at no charge

Developing Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Web Applications

 

REGISTRATION ENDS February 10, 2006 by 12 noon

Elements of this syllabus are subject to change.

This two-day course provides students with the knowledge and skills to create ASP.NET 2.0 applications. It will show the advancements from ASP.NET 1.x to

ASP.NET 2.0 in creating applications. The course focuses on the new features and functionality of ASP.NET. The course includes sample code in both Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET and Microsoft Visual C#®.

Audience

This course is intended for experienced, professional Web application developers, including those employed by software companies or working on corporate development teams.

At Seminar Completion

After completing this seminar, students will be able to:

§       Describe advancements from ASP.NET 1.x to ASP.NET 2.0 in creating applications.

§       Develop new Web solutions using ASP.NET 2.0 features and functionality.

§       Creating ASP 2.0 Applications

§       Using Master Pages

§       Working with Data and the new source model

§       Handling State Management

§       Working with Web Parts

§       Personalizing web pages using Profiles and Themes

§       Implementing ASP 2.0 Security

 

Prerequisites

Before attending this course, students must have:

§         Experience developing .NET Web applications using ASP.NET 1.0/1.1

§         HTML

§         XML

§         ADO.NET (1.0/1.1)

 

Lunch

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

 

Seminar Dates and Location:

February 14^th and 15^th, 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 304420 or click here

 

Here is the blurb from an MSDN flash on how you can get your very own Source Force Action Figures.

You might also want to sign up for some MSDN webcasts or virtual labs. Here's the deal: if you don't sign up for MSDN webcasts and virtual labs this very minute, the world stands a very real (or, at least, not insignificant) chance of coming to an end. Or, at least, it's not completely impossible. Okay. Maybe it won't "end," per se. But it will get a whole lot more embarrassing. And sometimes that's even worse than the end of the world. Remember middle school?

Thing is, if you don't attend at least four live MSDN webcasts or virtual labs per month, from January through April, you won't get to collect the Source Fource action figures. And then where will you be? While everyone else in your office is playing with their Source Fource action figures at lunch, you'll have to paint a potato red and blue and squint your eyes. Oh, sure ... everyone will pretend to play along as you run through the room, holding your potato over your head and making "whoosh" noises ...

Scared? Good. Here's the skinny: From January through April 2006, we'll unveil a new super dude or dudette and send them to developers who get their act together and attend at least four live MSDN webcasts or four MSDN virtual labs in a given month. Hey, not so fast! In order to confirm your shipping address and receive credit for attendance, you must complete an evaluation at the end of each webcast or virtual lab.

So now is the time to leap over tall developers in a single bound. Remember - you need to fill out the evaluation for four live webcasts (on-demand or dead webcasts don't count), or four MSDN virtual labs in a given month to qualify.
- Brad McCabe

So, with January gone you will have to sign up and attend more webcasts in February to make sure you get you Source Force Action figure. Even if you don't get the action figure attending webcasts is a good way to learn without spending a lot of money on training.

Just in case you have missed the announcement, Microsoft has said that support for Windows 98 and Windows ME will end on June 30, 2006. This means that there will be no new patches or support articles written. The current documentation and patches will still be availaible. Realistically, if you are running a Windows 98 or ME machine connected to the Internet you should really look at upgrading to Windows XP SP2 or if you are daring you can wait until later this year and upgrade to Vista.

   I was pointed to this blog post by Rich Strahl who says he is a Microsoft MVP. In the article he explains why your WinForms application appears to take a lot of memory when it starts up and then drops down significantly if the window is minimized. He then provides a hack to help you reduce the working set. I was intrigued by the idea but I am not sure how useful it is. If the problem is really startup code then the memory manager should be swapping out the unused code for more relevant code as the application executes. I haven't done any profiling to verify it but I would think that running an application over time would end up with the same working set size whether you left all the startup code loaded after the form loads or if you used this method to shrink the working set right after loading and then let it grow.

Today, Microsoft announced the CTP release of Expression Interactive Designer (formerly code named Sparkle) and the fourth CTP release of Expression Graphic Designer (formerly code named Acrylic). Both of these tools along with the Expression Web Designer (formerly code named Cider) make up the Expression Studio family of products. The most important thing for me is that they will support exporting designs to XAML which will then be importable into Visual Studio "Orcas". I hope that will make it a lot easier for me to create applications that don't have the "battleship gray" color coding of the default Windows forms.

I was quoted in two articles about the releases. One article is from ComputerWorld at http://www.computerworld.com/developmenttopics/development/story/0,10801,108009,00.html and the other one is in eWeek at http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1914903,00.asp.

[January 31, 2006]

I missed a news article when I posted this. I was also quoted in the Computer Reseller News article available at http://www.crn.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=CHDSWTZXDDKE0QSNDBOCKH0CJUMEKJVN?articleID=177103281.

This week has seen 2 new releases from Microsoft. The first one is a beta of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) with a go-live license. You can get the software and sign up for the go-live license from a page on the WinFX delveloper center. There is also an interview with Ari Bixhorn on the Microsoft Press Pass site that explains a little about what WinFX means.

If you are planning on doing any defelopment for the Microsoft platform in the long term future then it would be good to start getting familiar with the WinFX development platform. You don't need to sign the go-live license and start deploying your applications today but at some time in the future you will probably have to make the move to WinFX so it would be best to learn a little today so you can "future proof" your applications and avoid major rewrites somewhere down the line.

The second release was Enterprise Library 2.0. You can download it from MSDN at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/?url=/library/en-us/dnpag2/html/EntLib2.asp. A lot of work has gone into the Enterprise Library to make it useful and easy to use. Just remember that once you start using it, it is your code and you will have to be responsible for making sure that any bugs are fixed in your applications. I have used the application blocks in some projects and they have saved a lot of time but I have also had one bug in the configuration management application management block from several years ago that made me have to turn off caching of the configuration information in December or get errors about invalid dates. I found a fix for the problem out on the Internet and patched all my code but just this last December I found where someone else on the team didn't get the patched code and we had some problems in the first days of the month until the problem was caught and fixed. In any case the blocks have saved me a lot of time so I will definetly be looking into using them.

While looking at an exception that is being thrown in Visual Studio 2005's popup window for exceptions I got the following error:

ContextSwitchDeadlock was detected
Message: The CLR has been unable to transition from COM context 0x1a09c0 to COM context 0x1a0b30 for 60 seconds. The thread that owns the destination context/apartment is most likely either doing a non pumping wait or processing a very long running operation without pumping Windows messages. This situation generally has a negative performance impact and may even lead to the application becoming non responsive or memory usage accumulating continually over time. To avoid this problem, all single threaded apartment (STA) threads should use pumping wait primitives (such as CoWaitForMultipleHandles) and routinely pump messages during long running operations.

The link for more help took me into the topic on Diagnosing Errors with Managed Debug Assistants. The link is ms-help://MS.VSCC.v80/MS.MSDN.v80/MS.VisualStudio.v80.en/dv_fxdebug/html/76994ee6-9fa9-4059-b813-26578d24427c.htm in my help file. I didn't even know that these things exist. That is one of the cool things about the .NET Framework, there are so many things provided for you that are so useful that each day is an adventure.