Join us for the Utah County .NET User Group on Wednesday, March 21. We will meet at our usual location in Provo. The topic this month is security in Windows Vista. We will specifically focus on UAC and CardSpace to show how they work and how they can help to protect your computer and applications.

We will be giving away prizes including a copy of Windows Vista and Office so please be sure to come.

Utah Spring Code Camp
Saturday April 14th 2007
Neumont University
Salt Lake City, Ut
Call for Speakers
Closes March 30th 2007

Code Camp is a one day free training for all developers of any technologies to attend and learn from there peers and local speakers.  We are looking for Speakers to present at this event.  All topics are open for discussion and all formats.  The sessions would be 1 hour long with a 10-15 minute QA time at the end of the session.  This will be an all day event we plan to go from 9:00-5:00.  You don’t need to be present the whole day but we would love to have you for an ask the experts panel at the end of the day. 

We are looking for 100-150 people to attend the code camp.  I hope to have enough speakers to break this into several tracks that run at the same time.  Right now a SQL track and a DEV track are planned. 

You must bring your own notebook for your presentation. You’ll have a chance to test the video connections during the speaker prep meeting. There will be a room on site for speaker prep during the day of the Code Camp.

Any code samples you show should be made available for download from Code Camp web site. 

We are not covering travel and expenses for speakers, but you will receive recognition and a great big THANK YOU from yours truly.  A Cool Polo Shirt also!

If you’re interested please submit a session title, abstract, and bio Email to Pat_wright@sqlpass.org Please put Code Camp Speaker In the subject. 

This is a great opportunity to give back to the community and present on a topic that you like. You don't need to worry about being the best presenter in the world, just get out there and tell people about what you know or what you have been thinking about. Also this is not just about Microsoft technologies. I talked with Pat and he said he has invited other user groups (I think he specifically mentioned Linux and Java) to present as well. I think it would be great to be able to sit in on a session on Ruby on Rails or Continuous Integration with CVS or something else that I would not normally hear at a Microsoft sponsored event.

This morning at the first session at the MVP summit Scott Guthrie is addressing us. I asked him if there would be additional content beyond what they are telling us here. He promised that there would be many new announcements at MIX and that it would be worth our time to go.

The early bird discount for MIX ends at midnight tonight so you need to sign up early. Or.... if you are a good designer (not the gray background and square buttons type of design that I do) you could enter the REMIX contest and design your way to MIX.

At the conference you can get information about Expressions, "WPF/E", and other design tools. If that is enough you can sign up to get into the MEDC (Mobile and Embedded DevCon) at the same time.

All attendees to MIX will get a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate and the right to purchase two additional copies of Vista Home Premium through the Windows Vista Family Discount so not only do you get a lot of good information but you also get some cool software.

So don't delay. Go register at visitmix.com. I will be there and joining in the conversation. After what I am seeing here I am excited for the announcements that will come out at MIX.

I was just finishing up some things on a remote server and noticed that it made the switch to DST while I was using it. I didn't notice the clock change (and I am not going to stay up the extra hours here to watch my computers switch over) but it seemed to go well. It didn't crash and the time was correct so I guess the patch worked. The only weird thing I saw was getting on to my e-mail to send the report I was working on. It was past 2:00 a.m. on the east coast where the server is located. I logged into the portal as usual and then tried to get to Outlook Web Access. I was prompted for my credentials again. That doesn't normally happen and I am not 100% sure it wasn't some other problem but I can see it being related to the DST change. If the two systems use Kerberos to exchange my credentials then a difference of an hour in the clocks could be enough to invalidate any security token that was passed with the request. I will have to see if the problem exists later on and report back what I find out. For now I am headed off to bed. After all I will already loose an additional hour of sleep tonight and that can't be good for anything other than my sleep deficit <grin />

I am doing a pilot to see if it makes sense to migrate off of our Source Off Site system over to Team Foundation Server. I set up the TFS server without any problems and then attempted to migrate over the VSS that was backing Source Off Site. That was when I found out that nobody knows what the admin password for VSS is. We have the admin password for Source Off Site but it is apparently not the same as VSS. I tried all the "usual suspects" but none of the standard passwords worked. I did a live search and came up with an article at http://www.interdimension.org/en/it/vss_lost_admin_password.htm that explains how to use a hex editor to modify the um.dat file to reset the password. I went out to downloads.com and grabbed a free hex editor and entered the codes. The first time I fired up VSS Administration tool I got an error that um.dat was corrupted. I looked again and I had mis-typed one character. After that I was able to start the import. The next problem I ran into was an error from Team Foundation Server. The message was "TF60022: Unable to connect to Microsoft SQL Server". Again Live Search came to my rescue. I found an article at http://blogs.msdn.com/ankur/archive/2005/09/27/474318.aspx from the guy who wrote the tool. I added in the <SQL Server ... /> element to my configuration file and the import started up.

On the 17th I bought a new HP computer with monitor and printer at the local Circuit City. I should have known I was in trouble when I saw the computer on display. It is running an AMD processor but was sitting in front of a poster that talked about all of the virtues of the Intel Viiv technology. Instead of running away I decided to go ahead and purchase the computer since it was at a good price and as a bundle I figured I would have no compatibility problems. I was wrong.

We got the computer home and even though I have been setting up computers for many years I still read through the manual. I got the computer set up and went through the install provided by HP. I answered their questions about who the machine was registered to, when and how I would be using it, and also set up accounts for each member of my family. That part went about as expected. Then I went in to their "Help Center" to see what else I might need to do. It had some helpful suggestions like that I should get anti-virus software and I should also create recovery disks. I installed the 60 day trial for anti-virus software that came with the computer. So far so good. I then created backup disks. Normally I wouldn't do it but I had read on the web about someone else's bad experience and lack of disks to get back to the factory installed state. The utility told me to make sure I had everything ready because it would only run once. ONLY RUN ONCE????! Why? There is nothing stopping me from copying the disks once I make them so why not let me run the utility more than once?

Next I decided to set up the printer. I had read the manual that said do not plug the printer in until the software tells you to. I put the driver CD in the DVD drive and started the install. I get to step 1 of 4 and it tells me that it failed. WHAT???? Why can't it install the printer? The dialog had two options one was to try again with "correct settings" or something like that and the other was to say that it had installed correctly. I don't remember the exact text on the dialog box but I do remember that it made it sound like it could fix the problem. I tried the "correct settings" option and got a message that the drivers could not be installed using the "run as" command. Well isn't that special. Even though I am logged in as the administrator I don't run as administrator unless I need to elevate my permissions. This is basic UAC in Windows Vista and a good idea in my mind. Elevating permissions appears to use "run as" and so I couldn't install the printer. In frustration I just plugged it in. The dialogs for new USB devices came up and then I was prompted to look for drivers on the web. It found a driver and I was in business....NOT. The printer had a problem with the color cartridge. We cleaned it, we reseated it, we tried a couple of other fixes off of the web and nothing worked.
We replaced it back in the box and took it back to Circuit City. They exchanged it without too much trouble and the new one that I brought home didn't seem to have the same problem. For some sick reason I tried the install disk again. Again it wouldn't run. I plugged it in thinking since it was the same model it would just run. It didn't but instead takes me to a page on the HP site where I can download the appropriate driver. I did and installed it. This time the printer works without a problem. As an aside on that page there was a place to leave comments. I left a scathing comment about how HP had plenty of time during the beta/CTP cycle or even after the business release to get their Vista drivers created and tested and I didn't think they had any excuse for the poor performance. I wasn't too kind and said things like if they had spent more money on developers and less on figuring out who is leaking their information they wouldn't have these problems. At the least they could put a single piece of paper in the printer box that says something along the lines of "ignore this book and instead go to this web site with Vista specific instructions".

A week later I think I have everything working. I decided not to blog about this when it happened because 1) I promised to never blog mad and 2) I kept hoping that the light bulb would come on in my head and I would see where I had made a mistake and realize that the system is more user friendly than I thought. Well, I have calmed down but I haven't been able to figure out where I messed up and made the install more difficult than it should have been. I still have an icon in the HP help center for system health monitoring. When I click on it I get a web page that says HP will have it out soon. It is almost 2 months since the business release of Vista and they still don't have it in place? At this point I am recommending to my technical friends that they upgrade to Vista because they can deal with the problems. For my non-technical friends I am recommending that they get the disks from Microsoft and install from them. I have never had this many problems with Vista including back in the beta 1 days on a VPC. I really love Vista and I hope what I am seeing is not HP trying to make Microsoft look bad because Microsoft didn't have Vista available for the big Christmas selling season. In any case I have had enough experience with Vista that I am putting the blame on HP.

This is just a reminder that we will be having our UCNUG meeting tonight at 6:00. You can get more details at http://www.ucnug.net. We will be talking about Vista and Office 2007. We will be giving away some prizes including a copy of Office 2007 professional.

There is an article on Application Developer Trends at http://www.adtmag.com/article.aspx?id=20227 on the deal between Microsoft and Novell to cross license their technology and to indemnify each other from patent lawsuits. It sounds like they are on track to have something here in the next few months and that in the long term it will work out. I have to admit that I was a little dubious of the whole deal and I still think that Microsoft got the better end of the deal because they get to "play nice" with Linux while at the same time causing some problems for the #1 Linux distro. I thought that the Linux community would figure some way to squash the deal and it may still happen but I would like to see it go forward so I can run Linux on a Longhorn client.

I saw a link on the MSN home page today that I just had to check out. It looks like if you are using Live Search (and who isn't?) that you can instead go to the page at http://click4thecause.live.com/Search/Charity/Default.aspx?locale=en-us&source=msnhp you can search from there and Microsoft will donate to ninemillion.org and help out with the nine million refugees around the world. Pretty cool especially if you are already using Live Search.

The company that I work for (Keane, Inc.) announced today that they will be sold to Caritor. It made the front page of the Caritor web site at http://www.caritor.com/ with a nice animated gif with fireworks and everything. Of course it will take a while to see what happens but right now all of the executives are saying that day to day operations will not change and that we will see no change in benefits, etc. I sure hope they are correct. In any case it looks like we will be in for a couple of interesting months while things settle down and get straightened out.

For those of you who want to read more the press release is at http://www.caritor.com/news-events/news-new.html.