Here's a good introductory article on SPOT, written by the product team.

As a reminder, Smart Personal Objects are everyday objects, such as clocks, pens, key-chains, billfolds, and wristwatches that are made smarter, more personalized and more useful through the use of special software.

I'm glad that some of my Regional Director brethren have hung in there and seen the Visual Studio Team System installation through to fruition. Here's a good blog that lists some steps and resources for pulling it off using Virtual PC

http://weblogs.asp.net/cmenegay

Microsoft is currently investigating a reported vulnerability in Microsoft ASP.NET. An attacker can send specially crafted requests to the server and view secured content without providing the proper credentials. This reported vulnerability exists in ASP.NET and does not affect ASP.

Read about the vulernability here and about the underlying issue here (KB 887459).

Follow-Up: The ASP.NET Team has confirmed that all versions of ASP.NET on all operating systems may be susceptible to this potential exploit. They strongly recommend you apply the following code to the Global.asax for each of your applications.

Global.asax code sample (Visual Basic .NET)

Sub Application_BeginRequest(Sender as Object, E as EventArgs)
  If (Request.Path.IndexOf(chr(92)) >= 0 OR _
    System.IO.Path.GetFullPath(Request.PhysicalPath) <> Request.PhysicalPath) Then
    Throw New HttpException(404, "Not Found")
  End If
End Sub

Global.asax code sample (C#)

void Application_BeginRequest(object source, EventArgs e) {
  if (Request.Path.IndexOf('\\') >= 0 ||
    System.IO.Path.GetFullPath(Request.PhysicalPath) != Request.PhysicalPath) {
    throw new HttpException(404, "not found");
  }
}

Thanks to Jim Blizzard (Sr. .NET Developer Evangelist) for this!

Otherwise known as the next version of Delphi. It'll do Delphi Win32, Delphi .NET, and C# projects all under one IDE. There's support for refactoring and ASP.NET as well. Here's a quick screenshot:

One industry that stays cutting-edge on technology is the Real Estate industry. They were one of the first to introduce networked computing and then Web based solutions to allow realtors to submit and search for properties. The Multiple Listing Service (MLS) is essentially a giant pay-to-play database of all the properties for sale in the US. MLS then took it to the next level by offering their search via a Web service, so that other companies could provide the search and display functionality.

Well, it was only a matter of time, before these records were joined with satellite data. My friend Jon Beck, while researching property up in Washington, happened across just such a service -- and he looked up my new house.

As a software developer, I've often wrestled with the decision of how much to price my creation. I remember watching my grandfather create a large, beautiful watercolor painting and then stick a price tag of $10,000 on it. When asked how he could justify $10k in 3 hours his answer was it took him 40 years + 3 hours. That makes sense.

It would be nice if this would apply to software development, because I'd be at 20 years mark!. Since it doesn't work that way, try reading this article on how to compute a price, all the time keeping your revenue in mind.

The Intermountain Venture Forum will be held on October 6th & 7th in Boise Idaho. Fifteen companies will present in front of the top institutional investors in the West. In addition, there will be several panels from leading experts in venture funding, angel investment, and how to sell to the government.

Here is the Web site and agenda.

Been doing some coding this weekend and, in keeping with good TDD practice, I've been writing my tests, albeit paper-based exercises for the users, as I'm writing the code.

I found this good resource: www.testdriven.com -- check out their list of TDD Tools

It seems that Google is breaking one of Philisophical tenants. It seems that Google/China is omitting sites from the Chinese government banned sites. This article exposes the tests and possible reasons.

Had a student point this out last week. Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News aggregator. Personally, I think it's a bit busy but interesting.

Ok, I'm a couple of days late on this one, but since I recommend it to all of my friends, clients, and students, I thought I should post this advisory and patch.

Just wanted to list a few resources here:

• Compaq R3000Z (64bit laptop) - Only $824 for a base unit!
• www.route64.net - even though it's over, looks like a good site

As you may know, .NET Framework 1.1 has a service pack out now.

I've been reading a few notes about installing it.

• I've heard that it breaks SourceGear Vault
• But then I've heard that it doesn't

Also, there appears to be a problem w/ the client-side JAVASCRIPT file. If you've upgraded to .NET FW 1.1 SP1, you'll need to copy the old "WebUIValidation.js" into your IIS \aspnet_client\system_web\1_1_4322 folder. This is the old file before the SP1 update and your web app should work as usual now. Here is the thread that mentioned about the workaround.

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=21650

Microsoft and Netdesk have partnered to run several ISV tours throughout the US over the next couple of months.

• Building Connected Systems Today
• Enhancing your Applications with Windows Server 2003

I'll be personally delivering the W2003 tour. Hope to see you on the trail!

Wow, you really can do everything with Google. Here's a blog entry from a guy who wrote an API in Linux to turn your Google GMail account into a mountable file system.

Wish me luck -- I'm off to install the Client/App/Data components to VSTS TFS in *one* VHD image.

My first snag, was seeing a weird !"ValueType mismatch" error that I couldn't explain, so I did some research. Well, now that IIS 6.0 now has 1.1 and 2.0 versions of the framework, and Sharepoint doesn't work, until you set both of the sites back to version 1.1. Do a restart of the server too, for good measure.

The next speed bump occurred when I was actually installing the software, and specified my local machine as being the database server, at which point I was presented with a dialog reading “Cannot install database server on the local machine. Please enter a remote machine name instead“:

The workaround was to specify 127.0.0.1 as the name of the server, rather than RESEARCH (my local machine name)

I was commenting the other day that many TLAs at Microsoft are getting way too many meanings. Case in point, WSS, which can mean one of many things in this world, even with Microsoft technologies.

At least they honestly acknowledge this.

I love everything about Office 2003, except for the fact that Photo Editor is gone and the (ahem) replacement, is far from what I need. The good news is that you can just re-install the old editor from your Office XP media.

Microsoft's official explanation is here and there's an independent analysis here.

If you want to download the latest .NET Framework 2.0 Beta 1, then click here:

Beware of other versions of the .NET Framework 2.0 Beta 1's out there. The one above is dated late July, not June.

A student of mine pointed this out today. Leave it to a C++ programmer to know all the platform tips and tricks.

PINVOKE.NET addresses the difficulty of calling Win32 or other unmanaged APIs in managed code (languages such as C# and VB .NET). It even includes the complex structure definitions, where applicable.

www.pinvoke.net

Thanks to Bob Beauchemin for pointing out this great paper on Batch Compilation, Recompilation, and Plan Caching Issues in SQL Server 2005.

It's available from MSDN subscription downloads

You may know my feeling on SqlCommandBuilder, but on those days you're feeling lazy ...

  Dim cmdNW As New SqlCommand
  cmdNW.Connection = conNW
  cmdNW.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure
  cmdNW.CommandText = "Employee Sales by Country"
  SqlCommandBuilder.DeriveParameters(cmdNW)