Lycangeek

Lang.NET 2006, Day 1

Wow - what a day. It started with discovering that the turnout was well past my expectations. Mike Lehman (the technical evangelist for compilers at Microsoft, and the event coordinator) told me that we hit the limit and had to turn people away. I'm glad I arrived early go get some good parking and a good seat.

The material I'm posting now is probably of limited interest to a LabVIEW developer, but I find it very interesting computer science information. Feel free to browse and comment.

Seattle, Day 2

Well, I've discovered an important lesson on visiting customers in Seattle: don't do it in summer - especially around August. Apparently this is prime vacation time. It reminds me of my summers in Italy as a child (I'm 1/2 Italian if I haven't mentioned before), where Milan was a ghost-town in August.

The result is the turnout to my visits was less than expected. Apparently there was a lot of interest in the topic, but most people weren't around (picking a Friday probably wasn't a great idea either *laugh*).

However, the sessions went well and we did manage to cover a lot of material - again with a lot of good questions. Vista is definately a big deal - no big surprise.

So now it's a bit-o-weekend for me before we begin the Lang.NET symposium next week. That's perfect - a weekend followed by "work", meaning three days of geeking out about languages!

Upgrading to Vista

So, nothing is ever as simple as you'd think. Upgrading to Vista isn't as easy as I'd thought as they appear to have some rules about what version can upgrade to what other version.

For the most part, if you're running XP Home or Professional, the upgrade option is straight-forward. If you're running Win2k or XP 64-bit, read the fine print. You might be able to purchase Vista at an upgrade price, but it'll need a clean install. You've been warned...

Seattle, Day One

I love trips that start with me getting up at 4am. No really, I do...

Not convincing you, eh?

Well, past that the trip itself was fine. Managed to get up to Seattle without much of a hitch and even made it to the seminar on time - barely, but I did walk in the door at 12:55pm.

The session seemed to go well - we had a lively group who asked a lot of questions. I just love that as a presenter. It really allows you to customize your presentation to what they want to know.

So tomorrow I'm off to a few customers to give a shortened version of the presentation again. The good news is that this presentation is mostly my NIWeek presentation this year, so I'm getting a lot of practice in *grin*

NIWeek Blogs

While I'm hoping to provide some material on this blog about NIWeek, you just can't beat a whole bunch of LV users writing up their experienced. The LAVA group has started up a community blog for NIWeek 2006.

Good .NET 3.0 Deployment Guide

Kinda dropping this link on the new .NET 3.0 Framework for my own future reference, but it's a handy little paper. Much more information than most need to worry about (especially since 3.0 ships as part of Vista), so don't panic if it seems like a lot. For most people, you only need to download and run the .NET 3.0 framework, just like previous versions.

Going to Seattle

For those that live in the Seattle area, I'll be giving a seminar on Windows Vista, .NET and LabVIEW this Thursday (7/27). Even though it says "for test', it's really pretty open to anyone running LabVIEW on Windows. If you do make it, make sure to stop by and say hi.

Here is the info

Explore the Application of New Microsoft Technologies in Test Applications
This seminar explores the convergence of National Instruments LabVIEW software and two exciting Microsoft technologies -- .NET and Vista. Brian Tyler, a senior LabVIEW developer at National Instruments, discusses the benefits of .NET in a test application and demonstrates how to use the power of .NET from LabVIEW. Brian has been one of the lead developers at NI preparing for the Vista launch, and he is sharing what he has seen in Microsoft's newest operating system along with how it can impact you as a test engineer. Take advantage of this unique opportunity to gain perspective on this important industry shift.

This seminar includes the following topics:

• Introduction and overview of the .NET framework
• Integration of LabVIEW and .NET technologies
• Preview of the Vista operating system
• Discussion of the impact of Vista on test engineering

How the world turns

An interesting announcement by Microsoft regarding Windows and what they now allow PC manufacturers to do. Having been working with Windows from the early 16-bit days, these are some major changes to their business practices, although the change has been going on for many years now.

Microsoft buys Winternals

The amazing duo of Winternals (who also provide the incredible tools at www.sysinternals.com which I always recommend) have joined with Microsoft. Read more about it here.

ASP.NET and ActiveX - Identity

Okay, so it's been a lot longer between the last post and this one than I had planned. Life does that to you sometimes. I'm afraid that I'll also be even more sporatic over the next several weeks as I have (a) vacation, (b) business trip and (c) NIWeek 2006...

But, let's talk now about the issue of security when using ASP.NET and LabVIEW via the ActiveX interface.