Many of us has heard rumors about such a tool. Reading their business card on the SQL Reporting Services partners page, you'd think that their RDL Generator would be a hit; but, according to company representatives, they will only offer this as a service -- something about licensing issues with Business Objects. Hopefully, we'll see one pop up as open source or shareware.

Inacom in Madison, Wisconsin was just selected Microsoft's Certified Partner for Learning Solutions (CPLS) Partner of the year!

Congratulations to my friends Charley Eaton, Bryan Bechtoldt, John Cook, Dani Poppe, Bill Roddewald, Lauri Meixelsperger, Andi Rainey, and Sharon Rugge and everyone else at Team Inacom.

Sorry all. I took a week off and didn't think about technology ... only shelves. My garage is now defragged and all vehicles fit inside it!

Here's something light to get your started this week. Most of the articles found on this site are actual, only one or two paradies.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, IE and IIS together are too vulnerable to use. Read the story at Yahoo.

As of today, we are allowed to finally talk about the Visual Studio Express Editions.

These are lightweight, easy-to-use and learn tools for hobbyists, enthusiasts, and novices.

• Visual Basic 2005 Express
• Visual C# 2005 Express
• Visual C++ 2005 Express
• Visual J# 2005 Express
• Visual Web Developer Express
• SQL Server 2005 Express

I had the privilege of visiting the Delphi user group of Minneapolis, hosted by Lemanix. The group is skippered by Nick Hodges and Mark Theiste -- both well-known Delphi pros.

This is a small, but serious group. Everyone seems to be a Delphi coder, which is refreshing. The evening progressed as we watched demonstrations by a couple of the members showing off their coding techniques and styles, using Delphi 8.

We then had a discussion of Delphi 8 and it's support for .NET -- which grabbed my attention. Somehow we digressed completely into .NET and I ended up showing a short demonstration of Yukon's deep support of the CLR.

The group's site is currently down, but keep an eye on it for the future.

My first Web Service published on XMethods.com.

It's a screen-scraper application, but isn't as elegant as RegEx or HTML DOM but it works. Let me know if you want the source.

SP1 includes a variety of improvements to the inital release!

For a list of what's fixed and instructions read KB 839796, KB 842857, and KB 843369. To download SP1, visit this page.

Red Gate just announced their SQL Packager product, which makes packing up and deploying databases a snap. You can package structure, data, or both. It creates a .NET executable which you can walk over to your target machine and double-click. Wizards and templates ensure it appeals to the broad range of SQL professionals.

... just another wonderful product from the company that brought us SQL Compare and ANTS.

If you are doing any serious Web Service development, you'll need a good tracing tool -- something that watches HTTP traffic and logs the requests and resonses, so you can see what SOAP headers and elements are being transfered. Most of these tracing tools work by interception. The tool registers as a port 8080 (for example) listener, collects all inbound and outbound traffic, and then forwards the requests on to port 80 (for example). It can cause a few problems, but they work well for the most part.

• MsSoapT3.exe (part of Soap Toolkit 3.0) ... or you can download it directly here.

Here are a couple of others:

• Simon Fell's Win32 TCP-Trace utility
• Simon Fell's Proxy Trace tool

Steve McConnell's must-own book gets a service pack and hits the street this month.

Read more about it at the official Website, Microsoft Press, and Amazon.com.

I get asked this so often that I'm just going to blog about it. It's not a new trick, but it's not very obvious either. Unfortunately, you have to use the registry to pull this off.

Microsoft has an article (KB 306149) that steps you through it.

Was thinking today of all of the portal options avaiable and decided that there were too many to remember (rule of 7), so I thought I'd enumerate them, with hyperlinks, for future recall.

• Rainbow
• DotNetNuke
• Hurricane
• IBuySpy
• Portal Starter Kit
• Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS)
• Sharepoint Portal Server
• ASP.NET 2.0
• SQL Reporting Services (kinda)
• Microsoft Solution for Internet Business 2.5 (Thanks to Mark Harrison)

Did I miss any?

I had a student ask how to do this, because they have problems with their users dabbling with Control Panel's ARP applet. I suggested a tighter group policy, but went on to research the MSI documentation anyway.

Turns out that there are a number of properties you can set as command line switches during installation. The simplest one that caught my attention was setting ARPSYSTEMCOMPONENT = "1", which treats the install as a system component, rather than a standard desktop application.

Using Visual Studio .NET, I built a standard Windows setup project and when I executed it, I passed it the switch. It worked great.

   setup.exe ARPSYSTEMCOMPONENT =  "1"

So why can't I burn this value into the .MSI from Visual Studio? The project properties window and dialog only offer about 1/10th of the settings you can implement in an .MSI. According to the SDK documentation, I can add many different settings which were related to what I was trying to do: ARPNOREMOVE and ARPNOMODIFY for example.

When I tried to hack the .vdproj file directly and add the setting, I couldn't make it work, even though some of the ARPxxx settings are already in there. Any suggestions? Here's a snippet of my .vdproj file:

"Product"
{
"Name" = "8:Microsoft Visual Studio"
"ProductName" = "8:MoviesSetup"
"RestartWWWService" = "11:FALSE"
"RemovePreviousVersions" = "11:TRUE"
"DetectNewerInstalledVersion" = "11:TRUE"
"ProductVersion" = "8:1.0.0"
"Manufacturer" = "8:CET"
"ARPSYSTEMCOMPONENT" = "8:1"
"ARPHELPTELEPHONE" = "8:"
"ARPHELPLINK" = "8:"
"Title" = "8:MoviesSetup"
"Subject" = "8:"
"ARPCONTACT" = "8:CET"
"Keywords" = "8:"
"ARPCOMMENTS" = "8:"
"ARPURLINFOABOUT" = "8:"
"ARPPRODUCTICON" = "8:"
"ARPIconIndex" = "3:0"
"SearchPath" = "8:"

Looks like Yahoo is supersizing their free email capabilities to 100mb and freeing up many previously inactive addresses in a preemptive strike.

Ain't competition great?

BTW - It looks like 100s, if not 1000s of GMail invites are available on Ebay for upwards of $60 or more. And I've been giving mine away to friends!

Had a student ask me about this one today, so I investigated further. It seems that this is the design pattern which keeps a list of objects (or records) affected by a business transaction and coordinates the writing of the changes and the reporting of concurrency problems.

Sounds like a DataSet to me. Here's Fowler's article.

Wanted to list a few good resources here for this technology:

Chris Sells' article on command line arguments
Launching No-Touch Deployment Applications with Command Line Arguments

Chris Sell's original article is still the best
Security and Versioning Models in the Windows Forms Engine Help You Create and Deploy Smart Clients

Not exactly No-Touch in definition, but in spirit
Updater Application Block for .NET

I've known that this process exists, and why to use it, but this article by Craig Wills walks you through it in a very straightforward manor.

So as some of you know, I'm traveling overseas -- in Serbia right now, teaching a .NET architecture class for Microsoft.

So I wanted to call home, and didn't want to pay the 403 Yugoslavia Dinars/1st minute and 553 Dinars/extra minutes because this works out to be $7 and $9.5/minute respectively. I remembered using Dialpad.com (which was free at the time) when I lived in Germany. The quality was so-so, but it was nice to be able to call home for free. Now they are charging for the usage - $ 0.039/minute to call the states, which I'm more than happy to pay and the quality is excellent. Don't believe me? Let me give you call sometime - just email me.

Here's their interface:

Once the most secret place in Britain, Bletchley Park is now giving the public a first look into the hut where math genius Alan Turing worked on cracking the Nazi's Enigma codes. I would love to visit this, and it turns out that my friend Peter Blackburn lives only about 40 miles from there. Looks like I'll be heading over for a visit soon!

I read in another article that Colossus and its upgrade (Colossus MK2) are also on display.