Yesterday the CTP 6 version of Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals CTP 6 was posted for download. I have been using and loving the tool. You can go to http://blogs.msdn.com/camerons/archive/2006/10/18/ctp6-is-live.aspx for more information about the release.

I will be trying to get everything updated for my talk on this at the CodeCamp this weekend.

It looks like we have found a new home. NuSkin has offered to host our meetings. Along with the new meeting location we will also have a new meeting time. We will be meeting at the NuSkin Network Operations Center (NOC) located at

1175 South 350 East
Provo, UT 84606

Note that this is not the large building in downtown Provo but is rather in EastBay. You can get to it by going to the south most University Avenue exit in Provo. We will also be moving our meetings to the 3rd Wednesday of the month and start at 6:00. Since today is the 3rd Wednesday we will be holding the October meeting next Wednesday.

Our featured speaker will be Aaron Zupancic who will be talking to us about refactoring. Aaron is a very dynamic speaker and a Microsoft MVP. He will be helping us to understand refactoring and how it can help us develop better code.

NuSkin will be sponsoring our meeting with pizza and drinks.

Also don't forget the Utah Code Camp happening this Saturday at Neumont University. You can find more details and register at msutahevents.com.

If you are into video sharing and for some reason don't want to use you-tube you can now get in on the beta of MSN Soapbox. Details are at http://www.on10.net/Blogs/laura/soapbox/.

This just showed up in my inbox this morning and the registration deadline is today but it looks like you have a chance to get some free training on VSTS next week.

I just finished speaking at a code camp in Colorado Springs last weekend. It as a lot of fun and I would do it again in a heartbeat. The best part is that I get the chance to interact with a bunch of other smart people.

Utah is holding a code camp on the 21st. I would encourage you to come out for at least part of the day if you can't be there the whole time. The details are below:

Join us on Saturday, October 21st for Utah Code Camp!

The local .NET Users Group and SQL Server Users Group is conducting a "Code Camp" for local software programmers next month at Neumont University.  The code camp follows the Code Camp manifesto that it is for the community by the community and always free.  We are looking forward to excellent sessions on lots of different topics.

The event is scheduled from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM. The conference is free, however we request that you please register at www.msutahevents.com and enroll for the event so that we can get as accurate a head count as possible.

We will have sessions for both Developers and DBA's. We will also have a Sponsors area with lots of giveaways!

If you would like to speak or are interested in speaking, please email Pat Wright at pat_wright@sqlpass.org - visit www.msutahevents.com for more information.

I got a call this morning early from my wife. I knew it was bad news because it was about 6:30 A.M. where she was calling from. She was crying and I found out that my dog Max was seriously ill. Max was over 12 years old and he had gotten to the point where he could barely walk so it wasn't totally unexpected but it still hurts none the less. I have played with Max, watched over him, stayed up all night with him when he swallowed a fish hook, and have greatly enjoyed his company. If you have had a pet yourself then you know what I mean. I will miss him very much.

In the wake of the disclosure that there were some shady things happening at HP while they were trying to find out who was leaking information to the press there is an article at http://redmondmag.com/features/article.asp?editorialsid=639 that talks about others who were doing things that were less than ethical. I remember taking a college class on ethics where we talked about issues such as finding out privileged information and what you should do.

I have been fortunate in that I have not had to be directly involved with any cases of spying or illegal activity at work. The closest I got was when I was the "webmaster" for a company and we were monitoring the logs on our proxy server. We had published a policy letting everyone know that they were being monitored but we still had an employee who decided to download pornography. I went in to the boss with the log files and left it up to them. The employee wasn't fired and I didn't see anything else going on that violated the company policy so I feel like it was handled correctly but like I said I was fortunate to not have to get in the middle of it.

It is a shame when people who have a good job that pays better than most feel they have to spy or cheat. I suppose we could blame it on a lot of things but it comes down to personal integrity and doing what you know is right.

I saw this article at http://www.spidynamics.com/spilabs/education/articles/JS-search.html that says they can use CSS and JavaScript to determine what you have searched for. It is a pretty ingenious idea and I guess if used widely it could come up with some information but from the way I read it the bad guys would have to have a lot of different sites checking different key words or just be very lucky to get more than basic information. I will take the example of developer web sites. They might be able to determine very quickly that I do visit MSDN but not OTN. Beyond that there are so many different things I might search for that they would have to try a lot of different combinations to know if I searched for how to manually set up SSL encryption between 2 SQL Server 2000 servers or not. I don't see this as being something that they could use to figure out word by word what I search for but instead it could be used to see if I visit certain sites.

The September meeting of the Utah County .NET User Group (UCNUG) scheduled for tomorrow is cancelled. We couldn't work out a room with UVSC so we had no place to meet. Our speaker has agreed to come back next month and we will hopefully have a meeting space worked out by then.

Check the UCNUG web site at http://www.ucnug.net for information on our October meeting.

I just got this message in my in-box. It looks like the bad weather has forced the postponement of the Geek Dinner tonight.

Well Everyone,

We’re going to cancel the dinner tonight on account of Rain both now and a good chance of it tonight in the forecast.

We’re currently putting together a plan to do it in 2 weeks – Oct 4th.  I’ll be sending out announcements for that today.

Thanks to all who were planning on coming, hopefully we’ll see even more of you in two weeks!

Phil Burns

I just saw an article that says Toshiba will recall 340,000 laptop batteries made by Sony. It has been a really bad couple of months/years for Sony. They have seen competition that has taken away their market share for the Walkman and PlayStation, there was the whole rootkit debacle, then the exploding laptop batteries, and then today the news that some of their batteries loose power too quickly. The latest recall affects some Dynabook and Satellite models.

The problems with the laptop batteries reminds me of a quote I heard on .NET Rocks! in one of the early shows. I don't remember who the guest was but he said something like "In the future there will be 2 kinds of people. Those who use batteries and those who understand them." I wonder if we are not getting closer to that day...

This morning I got this error trying to open my default home page at http://www.msn.com.

It was a transient error because I was able to get to the home page by clicking refresh after capturing this image. I was at first surprised that there was not a custom error page defined that would give me some marketing pitch like the one that a client of mine used to use. Whenever their site would go down we would redirect to a static page that said something like we were upgrading the site and thanking them for their patience.

What I really like about this error message is that it tells me nothing about what went wrong. I occasionally find error messages with database connection strings or other sensitive informtion being displayed. When I see things like that I just cringe because I know that sooner or later the wrong people will get that information and then the company will have bigger problems.