John Pattison

I just read an article over at CNET that confirms my suspicions — the patch released for Internet Explorer last week can cause Internet Explorer to crash on sites that use HTTP 1.1 and compression.  I have been receiving increased complaints from several clients of Internet Explorer mysteriously crashing all of the sudden while using web applications that they use on a regular basis.

One workaround that Microsoft suggests is disabling HTTP 1.1 support in the Advanced settings in Internet Explorer.  I’m going to hold off on that as long as I can.

Relief is on the way.  Microsoft states that they will re-release More >

I finally got my e-mail-to-blog interface working! I definitely have some blog catching up to do. I’m at my first session this morning — IIS7 overview. I’m excited to learn= more about what is new in v7. I’ve heard a lot of buzz around the new plug= gable architecture. It’s starting, and being webcast live too!

This was a great session that went over a lot of the highlights of IIS7.  The speaker has some technical issues with keyboards gone wild, but it was beyond his control and provided some good humor first thing in the morning.

What I’m particularly excited about More >

My notes from attending this Microsoft Tech Ed 2006 session…

• WF is a framework for building workflow into applications.
• It is part of the .NET Framwork 3.0.
• Workflow: a program defined as a set of activities, control flow, run durably and transparently
• You still have to provide a host for the workflow (i.e. instantiate the workflow objects)
• Activity Framework
  • Specialized activities: Class with an execute method, returns ActivityExecutionStatus
  • Composite activities: Structure, State Machine, Rules-based
  • Flexible: You can change rules and add steps while WF is running
  • You can develop workflow in Visual Studio 2005 or Office Sharepoint Designer
• Runtime: Hosted very easily. More >

This was a great first TechEd session for me.  It went into some detail on the application blocks available as part of the Enterprise Library:

• Caching
• Configuration
• Cryptography
• Data Access
• Exception Handling
• Logging & Instrumentation
• Security

One thing that I really like is that the Enterprise Library comes with a configuration tool that will open the web.config file and make all of the appropriate entries.

DATA APPLICATION BLOCK

Uses the connection strings defined in the web.config file (nice to see).General model is to create the database with a factory, create the command object (DbCommand), add parameters, and then execute / fill the dataset.Provides a More >

Great keynote!  It’s available online as a webcast, and was broadcast live.  They had that girl from 24 there, which was pretty cool, and a cool spoof on the show 24.  It was tacky, but funny.

When you were entering the keynote, they had signs up warning about pyrotechnics, bright lights, noises, etc.  That got my expectations up a little too much, I think.  It was really cool, but no pyrotechnics.