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Our home grown work tracking system has been through many versions over the years. The current incarnation was using a pre-release version of the Microsoft AJAX extensions. Now this caused a problem when we moved the ASP.NET application to a newly rebuilt IIS server with the 1.0 release version of AJAX. We were getting errors that the correct System.Web.Extensions DLL could not be found, as you would expect. I rebuilt the application using Visual Studio 2005 with the AJAX 1.0 Release installed, and published this build. I tried to load the application and the browser went into a tight loop, not what I expected. I checked the server event log and found the issue was that in the published web.config file there was a reference to a Crystal Reports DLL (which we have not used for years). Once I removed this reference from the web.confg the site worked perfectly. ...

… you end up presenting at TechEd. Yesterday was fun (of a sort) I ended up doing the demo section of the ESB Guidance session at TechEd. This session was scheduled to be done by Robert Hogg (Black Marble) and Ewan Fairweather (Microsoft) but Ewan had to fly home early unexpectedly on Friday morning, so leaving somewhat of a gap. So you say, ’that is not too bad you just step in and do the prepared and scripted demo’. Well in a perfect world you would, but about 6 hours before our session was on the formal release of ESB 1.0 was posted to the MSDN site. As our demo was based on a CTP build, and as we knew the final release was somewhat different, we thought it only right to at least show the new documentation and file structures. So a hectic few hours were had by all. ...

I have not been blogging much from here have I, it is not that the sessions are not that interesting, but no single item has been giving me an huge urge to write. As I said in my last post I think this is a conference of best practice ideas and as such you tend to pick up a useful nugget here and there which you store away for future use. This is particularity relevant as at present I am reviewing our engineering process to improve our software development life cycle. ...

The keynote at TechEd was as expected, we all knew about the impending release of VS2008, and still no fixed date yet (so no sausage there) and not really anything announced product wise that was not already in the blog sphere (so no real sizzle). I think this is going to be conference on delivering on last years promises; how to get the best from the tools and technology announced last year, now that they are now really production ready and the early adopters have had a year to play with them. ...

Just come out of an interesting set of round table events for ‘community influencers’ at TechEd. These are people who are active in both the online and face-to-face communities from all round Europe (and Australia - the reach of TechEd Europe!) attended. In the sessions I went to the general discussion was on the point I posted about a few weeks ago and that had been a running conversions on a number of UK blogs. I was refeshing (or sad?) to find the problems we have seen at home over attendance are the same around Europe: ...

I am now sitting in the keynote waiting for the session to start - they have graffiti artists on the stage - I wonder if it is a homarge to that great Palm Pilot handwriting text entry language? Or is my my chance to say that that ’this keynote I could actually watch paint dry'? Oh… the paint fumes are starting to get to me……………………….

What an awful journey I have had since my last post, the trip back from the USA was fine; the problems started getting from the UK to Spain. Basically fog at Liverpool stopped all flights so we had to change airline and airport to get here in time for the TechEd conference. Should have been here by noon on Sunday and actually got here nearer 9pm, so no sigh seeing for me. ...

Seems quiet here today at the SOA conference, less people about. I wonder how many have sneaked off early for flights? It does seem to be mostly Europeans left, judging by the languages I have heard. This does not mean parking was easy this morning, as in the same conference center Bill Gates and Bill Clinton are speaking at an MSPAC event. Now a bit of google’ing shows MSPAC is either: ...

When at Mix07 I posted about Robby Ingebretsen’s excellent session on the relationship between developers and designers in the WPF/Silverlight world. Channel9 has just posted an interview with him on the same subject, well worth looking at if this is the type of project you are involved in.

There is more to Seattle than the Space Needle and flying fish at Pike Place Market. At the end of the SOA conference today I persuaded Robert to embark on a tourist adventure, to brave the Seattle traffic and go to Archie McPhee “Outfitters of Popular Culture” . It should have been a 20 minute drive… hour and half later of nose to tail traffic we arrived. Now I had come across Archie McPhee years ago when my ex wife had been on the Clarion West SF writers camp, and she came back with the strangest plastic frog in fur white rabbit suit; I always wonder what the person who made it in China think of the west? ...