Today marks the availability of beta versions of Office 2007 and Windows Vista. I plan on downloading them and starting to play with them in the next couple of days.

Today also marks the updates to several web sites. The asp.net site has a new look to it. I am also told that weblogs.asp.net was updated but I haven't visited the main site in a long time so I can't tell you if there is a new UI or just upgrades behind the scenes. There is a new web site at iis.net that will serve as a community center for development on IIS 7. It looks like you can download the beta and get more information there.

The Salt Lake City and Utah County SQL Server User groups are official PASS (Professional Association for SQL Server) chapters and are hosting a SQL Camp on May 31. You can come to hear a lot of short presentations on SQL Server. It will be held in the Salt Lake City Microsoft offices so the number of participants will be limited. Also if you want to speak I am sure there will be plenty of opportunities. You can get more information at the official web site at http://utpasscodecamp.mollyguard.com.

[23-May-2006 Update]

I got an e-mail saying that this event has been postponed until September due to low enrollment. I guess with the Memorial Day weekend and the start of summer it is difficult for a lot of people to get away from work. When I have more information I will post it here.

I just watched a short video at http://www.rockyh.net/AssemblyHijacking/AssemblyHijacking.html that shows how someone can exploit some bad security (SQL Injection attack, accessing your database as a sys administrator, not applying a strong name to your assemblies, putting too much data into a log file) to get at information they shouldn't see. The best thing about this video is that I am sure that just about any developer would recognize some common mistakes that we all make when assuming how vulnerable our code is. It is also short enough to spend some time with a client or manager showing them this without loosing their interest and it shows just how easy it could be for a determined bad guy to get into your systems.

I just got a new tablet PC at work. It came pre-configured with Windows XP Tablet PC edition with service pack 2. The first time I connected to Windows Update there was only 1 patch. I was impressed at how up to date the image on the hard drive was. Then after a reboot I connected again. This time there was 1 patch (to install the Windows Genuine Advantage program). I realize I don't need WGA to download security patches but I know it is a valid copy so I installed that. After it installed I checked and there were now 38 patches to download and install. After a reboot I checked windows update and there were no more high priority updates. There were 7 optional updates left. So after only 47 patches I am now up to date on the software. I guess the image wasn't as recent as I thought. I am sure there will be other updates as I install Office, Visual Studio, SQL Server and all the other tools I need to work effectively.

There is an opinion piece at http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=2987&tag=nl.e622 that suggests with the DRM and patents that Apple controls it may some day become a monoply that controls digital media and phones. I am not an expert in this area and since I have (thus far) resisted the urge to buy an iPod I am not sure how much this will affect me but it is an interesting scenario.

I can certainly see some competition for Apple. If another on-line music site (say MSN music or Wal-Mart or whomever) were to gain popularity it could certainly put a damper on the "planned" take over. Also if the RIAA decided that they would like to do the bullying rather than be bullied they could look for an alternative DRM provider. It would cut sales immediately but could force Apple to adopt that DRM technology for the iPod to continue selling.

In any case I think the competition leading up to whatever happens will be interesting and could be very good for us all.

I don't know how I missed this when it released on April 19 but I just ran across a download at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=E719ECF7-9F46-4312-AF89-6AD8702E4E6E&displaylang=en that has over 100 samples and 3 sample databases. That should be enough to take up any free time I might have thought about having.

A couple of weeks ago my laptop was renamed as part of an Active Directory change. Since then I have been debugging problems related to services not starting or database connection strings that had the old machine name in them. This weekend I ran into another problem that I think was caused by the machine rename although I don't have any direct proof of that. When I would create a project in Visual Studio 2005 and attempt to debug it I would get the error that the binding handle is invalid. I was able to compile and run the application but not debug. Even something as simple as a default windows application with jsut Form1 in it wouldn't debug. I spent several hours on the option to fix Visual Studio 2005 but even after that I still got the error message.

I ended up looking on the Internet and found this is a known bug. The bug report shows it as a bug in the CTP that is closed but it had a workaround that fixed the problem for me. The solution is to not use the VShost for debugging. You do this by going into the project properties on the debug tab and unchecking the option to Enable the Visual Studio hosting process.

Just in case you are wondering what the Visual Studio hosting process is (I know I was) it is explained at http://www.dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/mihirsolanki/archive/2005/11/06/133588.aspx as a process that enables faster debugging and also debugging in partial trust environments. For the most part I am all for that especially since I normally don't run as administrator on my machine but in this case I guess I will have to settle for slower and untrusted debugging that works until I have the time to repave my machine.

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The other day I got an award from my employer.  It was given to me "for exemplary perfomrance in Achievement Through Teamwork". This is the first such award I have gotten in over 13 years of working under basically the same management. I am somewhat surprised that I got the award since I didn't do anything that much beyond what I have been doing since I started working.

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So the whole award thing got me thinking about how to recognize employees. I have this pipe dream of one day leaving the corporate world and becoming an independent consultant and eventually building up a company that would employ no more than 20 highly focused and extremely talented individuals. I say pipe dream because I am addicted to a steady paycheck but that doesn't stop me from thinking about how to recognize people.

I have seen many different ways of showing your appreciation for people who have done a good job. The most obvious is the "employee of the week/month/year" type award. I have long been opposed to those because there are usually way more deserving people than time periods to recognize them. If you make the period too short, the award seems trivial i.e. Today's employee of the day is Bob because he made it to work 2.8 seconds before anyone else. If the time period is too long you end up with something like: I know all 10 of you worked yourself to death to complete the project but only one of you can be employee of the decade so Susan will get the reserved parking spot and exlusive use of the company car until 2016. Keep up the good work and maybe your turn will come around.

I have also seen monetary rewards. These seem to be recieved the best when presented correctly. Most of the time I have been given a gift certificate to a local resturant so I could take my wife out. The certificate rarely covered the meal but it let us go someplace nice for very little money. I did get one one time where my manager said something like "I know you have worked 100 hours of overtime in the last 2 weeks. Here is a $25 gift certificate. I hope this makes up for it." I was obviously less than pleased about the implication that my personal time was worth so little to the company especially considering the fact that they billed the client for all of my overtime hours. So maybe money is not the best idea.

For some people extra perks are a good motivator. I would love to see a program at Keane or any company that I worked for where you were rewarded with training or going to a conference. Maybe I am just too much of a geek but I love learning new things and the best thing is that I can use the knowledge I get at a conference to further my career. The only problem I have come up with when thinking about rewards like that is how to quantify what kind of contribution would qualify for a large conference like TechEd or PDC. Oh well, I guess I have a lot of time to think about it before I make the plunge into the world of running my own business.