08 June 2004

Named and shamed on .NET Rocks! Named and shamed on .NET Rocks! So, I'm sitting here eating my lunch and checking out this weeks .NET Rocks. I'm happily munching away when Carl mentions my name ("Peter Wright....Remember him...."). Turns out I got it all wrong and misheard just who peed in a sick bag. It wasn't Dan and apparently was just Carl making a flippant comment/joke. So, Sorry Dan. Didn't mean it. Please don't stop publishing my books. www.franklins.net/dotnetrocks     2:28:43 PM    comment [] A great case study for .NET A great case study for .NET I've been accepted onto the Alpha test program for a new piece of Tablet PC software (no, I'm not going to say what it is), and being an Alpha test I'm really not happy about having to rely on it day to day on my Edenbrook tablet. So, with a hint of reluctance and more than a smidge of excitement I found myself having to buy yet another notebook. In this case, a brand new Acer Tablet PC. The buying process though got me to thinking about a great case study for .NET technology. I have to do a series of evangelism demos to the Oracle team at Edenbrook soon to show them what .NET and the Microsoft toolset is all about, and I've been pondering for some time how I get across a demo of Visual Studio.NET, web services, ASP.NET, winforms, Biztalk 2004 and possibly Sharepoint. To buy the notebook I had to reluctantly take out a short term finance agreement. So, the process involved going to Acer's website, finding the model I was interested in, then finding an online retailer in the UK with stock. I chose the vendor in question based on a price comparison with other vendors and then clicked through to their site. I added the notebook to my shopping basket, then navigated through to the accessories section and chose an extra battery (with only a 9 month life-span, and a notoriously bad 3 hour drain period, its somewhat accepted that Acer owners have to buy a second  battery). With that done I checked my basket, clicked Checkout and then chose to finance the purchase. This took me through to the finance companies website where I filled in information about myself, where I live and all the usual tedious crap that goes with such applications. In the process of filling out the application, the website minimized my typing by just asking for postcodes and then displaying a list of matching addresses for the postcodes for me to choose from. With the application complete there was nothing left to do but wait for approval. The approval response came by email a few minutes later, presumably after some underwriter at the finance company checked the information I had entered with their in-house rich WinForms application processing app. The emails lead me back to the site and secure link to download the credit agreement which I have to print and sign, then post back (there's a flaw there -really it would have been great to be able to load the docs up in Word and sign them with my Tablet Pen). When the forms get back to the credit company, they check them, approve the finance and then contact the vendor who then picks the items from their warehouse, packs them and ships them, presumably adding me to a myriad of marketing databases along the way. The vendor will then, I guess, contact the finance company to say "the products shipped and you can start billing the guy now". That particular process could make an awesome case study and demo for .NET. By my reckoning there were xx systems involved The computer manufacturers website Various resellers systems showing the price they sell a selected item for, this would be best implemented as web services The vendors e-commerce website The finance company's website The finance company's underwriting and application approval app The vendor's pick and pack app A webservice exposing the vendor's direct marketing system, or CRM system, for follow up later A web service at the finance company to allow notifications from vendors that something shipped. In addition to all that, there's scope for a long running transaction. The finance company could have said no, which would back out the transaction started at the vendor. The customer (me) could refuse the sign the forms which again would back things out. There's an acceptance period of seven days after I receive the notebook during which I can return it and opt out of the agreement, which again should roll back the transaction. There's also scope in there to build in some Infopath documents, such as the pick and pack document, and the finance approval internal business process. I'll have to start work on this when I've reduced my current workload a little - it's going to make a great demonstration. 9:23:29 AM    comment [] Getting Whidbey online help to work Getting Whidbey online help to work On all the computer's that I've installed the community preview of Whidbey on, none of them seemed to like Help. It didn't matter whether you ran help on it's own, or called it up from Whidbey itself, it just seemed to hang trying to display any help topic, with a "downloading..." message at the bottom of the window. I tried turning off the Online Content option but that did nothing other than go "BING" and tell me something nasty had happened. I also copied the Help URL of a page from the MSDN help browser into IE and that worked just fine, so I knew Whidbey had installed the help in the right place. Then I stumbled across a strange finding. If you go into the IDE, choose Tools, Options from the menu and select the Help options page, you'll find a combo box at the top that says where you want help displayed; inside the IDE or in an external viewer. Set this option to display help inside the IDE, click OK then close and re-start Whidbey and help will work. Weird one that - good luck to the poor chap(ess) at Microsoft that gets assigned that one to fix.   8:46:53 AM    comment [] I take it all back - it doesn't work I take it all back - it doesn't work I was wrong. In installing Whidby I seem to have borxed up Longhorn's explorer. Not Internet Explorer, but the desktop shell explorer, which means no taskbar, no app bar, no My Computer, no control panels - nothing. That'll teach me I guess. Time to re-install. Moral of the story : Whidbey really really doesn't work on Longhorn, so don't go there.   8:46:50 AM    comment [] Installing Whidbey on Longhorn Installing Whidbey on Longhorn I installed the latest community preview of Longhorn on my desktop PC this past weekend, and the community preview of Whidbey on my desktop and notebook within XP. I didn't think Whidbey would install on Longhorn and really didn't fancy pushing my luck with a pre-beta development environment inside a pre-beta operating system. This morning though curiosity got the better of me. A quick google showed me that as far as a lot of people are concerned the only version of Whidbey that will install on Longhorn is the PDC preview, and even then it has to be installed on the PDC preview of Longhorn. I have both here, but didn't relish the thought of re-installing, nor on missing out on all the cool new features and fixes that have made their way into build 4074 of Longhorn. So, ignoring them I started installing Whidbey. For some reason Longhorn wanted to reboot after installing the .NET Framework 2.0, but other than that everything went just fine. I now have Whidbey running in Longhorn, with no drama at all, and I've even installed the Longhorn SDK to give me the cool Indigo application templates within Whidby. I don't have any templates for Avalon though and I'm sure I read somewhere that the SDK does give you those. I probably misread it though since Avalon apps tend to rely on a user interface developed with XAML, and I know that in the current build Whidbey doesn't support that. Anyway, I'll let you know how I get on. I have an idea in my head for a suitably taxing Longhorn "Hello World" that I intend to get cracking on later on.   8:46:44 AM    comment []

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