You heard it here first:  the next Microsoft Professional Developers Conference will be October 2 - 5, 2007 in Los Angeles, California.  The Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) is the definitive developer event focused on the future of the Microsoft platform.

Registration is NOT open at this point.  The dates have simply been announced.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/events/pdc/

It was PDC 03 that tipped me off to the coming web-desktop convergence.  It was PDC 05 where I saw what a real Avalon (humph, WPF) designer could look like with timelines, transitions, reflection, etc.

Start saving your pennies or start dropping hints to your boss!

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Here are slides for 5 of the 7 Dev East presentations.  Some have code included.  If you are looking for something that's not here, ping me at derek@ardentdev.com and I'll track it down for you.

Mike Mullen - Next Generation Web Applications

Frazer Smith - Dynamic App Config with VB.NET

Tyler Davey - Virtual Earth: Adding the 3rd Dimension

Sean Smith - Halifax on Rails: An Intro to Ruby on Rails

Derek Hatchard - The Ajax Revolution

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Finally got podcast episode #3 and show notes posted at http://devcasting.com/index.php/2006/12/06/devcasting-3-give-me-20-cents/.

The show has a name now:  Devcasting.  And we're in iTunes.  Just search the iTunes store for devcasting or browse through the Technology category of the iTunes podcast directory.

We're looking for your favourite Firefox extensions for an upcoming show.  Email them to me at derek@ardentdev.com.

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The Panel is the place to collect showcases of the new user experiences [in Vista and WPF] and provide insights on how they were implemented.

http://www.microsoft.com/emea/msdn/thepanel/

Definitely check out UniveRSS, a 3D Vista RSS reader.  I can't really see myself using this but it's neat to see.  (And it did run like crap on my tablet because the NVIDIA WDDM drivers aren't final and things crash when I try the pre-release.  Of course the XP driver causes problems too - could be a hardware issue I suppose.  Or just crappy drivers.  Who knows.)

UniveRSS: http://www.microsoft.com/emea/msdn/thepanel/featured/universs.aspx 

(CBC Radio 3 is in the screenshot - woohoo).

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This is pretty cool:

a VPC virtual machine image containing a pre-activated Windows XP SP2, IE6 and the IE7 Readiness Toolkit to help facilitate your testing and development. The image is time bombed and will no longer function after April 1, 2007

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/11/30/ie6-and-ie7-running-on-a-single-machine.aspx

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If this looks familiar to you:

public class Catchall : ISMTPOnArrival
{

void ISMTPOnArrival.OnArrival(CDO.Message msg, ref CDO.CdoEventStatus EventStatus)

then you know that debugging SMTP filters sucks.

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http://www.derekhat.com/index.php/2006/11/28/dev-east-was-great/

The room was packed and the content was great. Definitely a success.

Thanks to everyone who helped with Dev East. Special thanks to Mike Hatfield and Darryl Skeard who showed up early to help with registrations and setup. Thanks to Chris Maxwell at the Dalhousie Faculty of Computer Science for much needed tech support. And thanks to Dr. Morven Gentleman for the great venue.

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Attention software developers in eastern Canada

Dev East 2006 is just one week away! Come join your fellow developers for a day of insightful presentations, thousands of dollars in prizes, and a chance to interact with your peers. It all happens in Halifax on Friday, November 24, 2006 from 8:30am to 5:00pm.

Go to www.DevEast.com to register and get all the details including a student special just announced last night! Registration is only $10 thanks to the generous support of our sponsors:

Release Sponsor

Beta Sponsors

    

Want to be a sponsor? Email derek@ardentdev.com

Alpha Sponsors	In-Kind Sponsors

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Sigh...  I'm at the office this evening trying this:

DBCC CHECKDB ('sgvault', REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS)

Fingers crossed.

First the mail server went down on the weekend while out of town.  Got it back up yesterday afternoon over remote desktop with only a few problems.  Then today discovered that there was a problem with the Vault database (source code control).  Looks like the corruption happened prior to last night's backup so the nightly backup is of a corrupted database.  So trying a repair before restoring the previous backup.

Update: Ugh, not a good sign:  There are 28948 rows in 129 pages for object 'tblfolderentrypins'.

Update 2: I/O error (bad page ID) detected during read at offset 0x0000004d526000 in file 'E:\Databases\sgvault.mdf'. Connection Broken.  Grrrrrr.

Update 3: Ran repair a few more times.  Now says: CHECKDB found 0 allocation errors and 0 consistency errors in database 'sgvault'.  And I can now select from tblfolderentrypins, which I couldn't do before.  Fingers still crossed.

Update 4: Can now access repository properties with Vault Admin tool.  That's an improvement.

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http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/09/1534204

Last night we crossed over 16,777,216 comments in the database. The wise amongst you might note that this number is 2^24, or in MySQLese an unsigned mediumint. Unfortunately, like 5 years ago we changed our primary keys in the comment table to unsigned int (32 bits, or 4.1 billion) but neglected to change the index that handles parents. We're awesome! Fixing is a simple ALTER TABLE statement... but on a table that is 16 million rows long, our system will take 3+ hours to do it, during which time there can be no posting. So today, we're disabling threading and will enable it again later tonight. Sorry for the inconvenience. We shall flog ourselves appropriately.

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The Dev East 2006 one day developer conference will happen November 24, 2006 in Halifax, NS.  Cost is only $10 thanks to the generous support of sponsors.

Visit www.DevEast.com for details and to register.

Hope to see you there!

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