Stephen Put on Some Pants, Andrew Brush Your Teeth 

Linda was on a mission yesterday morning to get us up and motivated to watch the NYC Marathon up at Banshee on 1^st and 74^th as she ordered Andrew and I around before breakfast. The runners had awesome weather (sunny and in the low 70s) while we drank some beer and cheered them on. A band was playing in the street and some random runners even kissed random people in the crowd.

While Linda and I are running a marathon on February 26, 2005 in Antarctica, I could not get her to commit to running the NYC marathon with me next year. Kathleen did agree. Training starts this winter.

Its gotta be the shoes (aka a Night of Sin exposed)

The madness known as the Halloween Night Party started around 4pm on Halloween at East Side Nails on Lexington Avenue when the manicurist questioned my decision to paint my nails alternating blue and purple. I spent about 10 minutes picking out the correct colors to match my costume. I should have known, this set the tone for the entire evening.

Linda (a sailor), John (a Scottish man in a kilt) and I (masquerade masked man) picked up Kara (hot chick in red fishnet) in the cab and headed down to the Annual Halloween Festival and Costume Ball in the East Village. Andrew, with his new shows, playing the role of a gay British guy met us there and we got going. The night started off well when we found out that beers only cost $2, so we drank a lot (Please don’t tell Scott Hanselman). After Kara, Andrew and I got our Tarot cards read (it was soooooo scary how accurate it was), we got a little freaked out and had to drink and dance more. Andrew and I took over the stage on one of the dance floors and grooved until it was time to go. I was told that I was very drunk, but I don’t believe them.

As we walked to a bar called the Opium Den, we passed on the Bowery between 2^nd and 3^rd a bunch of homegirls grooving outside of their car. Andrew and I started dancing with them in the street. They got into it and started to smack our butts and one girl really got down with Andrew.

After dancing to some retro 80s tunes at the Opium Den, we decided to head home around 3:30, surprisingly we got the 5 train without any problems. After the 4am McDonalds Big Mac call (where that mean lady who cut us on line called Andrew and I gay), we ran into a bunch of dominatrix chicks across the street from home who whipped us pretty good.

After some beer and watching Governor Arnold in True Lies we finally got to bed around 5am. It was slow going at 2pm when we got up when John and Stephen went to the store and cooked breakfast. As I type this we are sitting down to eat breakfast at 2:45 pm. What a cool night..

Everyday is Halloween

Today for Halloween I am going to dress up as a coder from the future. A future where Longhorn is on my desktop (with the eye candy Avalon graphics), I am coding with Whidbey (refactoring away) against a Yukon database (sorry Clemens). Now that I attended the PDC, I am counting down the days. I am going to start my count, today is day 1.

Great Panels @ PDC Today

The RDs are covering some panels at the PDC today, check out www.pdcbloggers.net for their reviews.

Title	Speaker(s)	RD
Making it Sizzle: Enabling and Building Next-Generation User Experiences on Windows “Longhorn”	David Massy; Pablo Fernicola; Tjeerd Hoek; Chris Anderson; Michael Wallent	Thomas Lee
Designing the CLR	Brad Abrams; Anders Hejlsberg; Christopher Brumme; Patrick Dussud; James Miller; Jonathan Hawkins; Sean Trowbridge; George Bosworth	Paul Sheriff
Choosing The Right Business Integration Technologies	Donald Farmer; Scott Woodgate; Alex Weinert; Joe Sharp	Andrés Fontán García , Mike Snell
Real World Innovation:  From Idea to Product	Phil Fawcett; John Lefor; Lili Cheng; John Breese; Jeff Erwin; Katie Drucker; Renee Labran	Joel Semeniuk
Connected at the Edge: Building Compelling Peer-to-Peer Applications	Robert Hess; Amar Gandhi; Oliver Sharp; Kim Cameron; Shaun Pierce; Gursharan Sidhu
Client Architecture: The Zen of Data-Driven Applications	Michael  Pizzo; Alex Hopmann; Jeremy Mazner; Mike Deem; Quentin Clark; William Kennedy	Edgar Sánchez, Terry Weiss
Mobile Application Development and Distribution:  Innovation and Opportunity	Irwin Rodrigues; Chee Chew; David Jones; Bruce E. Johnson; Laura Rippy	Jon Box, Chris Kinsman
Put The Power Inside: Hosting the CLR in Your Application	Balaji Rathakrishnan; Mahesh Prakriya; Christopher Brumme; Christopher Brown; Dmitry Robsman; Ramachandran Venkatesh; Mark Alcazar	Abdelmalek Kemmou
High Performance Computing on Windows: Taking Care of Business	David Lifka; Kang Su Gatlin; George Spix; Andrew Lumsdaine; Max Giolitti
“Indigo:” What’s Next for Connected Apps and Web Services	Don  Box; Oliver Sharp; Omri Gazitt; Joe Long; John Shewchuk; Eric Zinda	Ingo Rammer
Computing on the Beach: Visions of Mobility	Donald Thompson; Tara Prakriya; Bert Keely; David Groom; Otto Berkes; Arif Maskatia	Abdelmalek Kemmou
Rocking the Web with ASP.NET “Whidbey”	Scott Guthrie; Rob Howard; Jon Box; Shanku Niyogi; Thomas Lewis; Nikhil Kothari; Dmitry Robsman	Jon Box (panelist), Carlos R. Guevara
The Future of .NET Languages	Paul Vick; Rob Relyea; Anders Hejlsberg; Brandon Bray; Erik Meijer; Daniel Thorpe; Raphael Simon; Basim Khadim	Jackie Goldstein
Architecture Panel:  What is Service-Oriented Analysis and Design	Michael Burner; Brent Carlson; Mark Driver; Martin Fowler	Scott Hanselman, Michele Leroux Bustamante
Security Panel: What’s Next? Directions in Security	Jason Garms; James  Hamilton; Carl Ellison; Howard Schmidt	Thomas Lee, Patrick Hynds

Melody has a Fan

-----Original Message-----
From: Andy Catlin 
Sent: Wednesday, October 29, 2003 4:51 PM
To: Coach T (work); Adam Heiser; Linda Varoli; Fortissimo; Jack Prilook; Stephen Forte
Subject: Belle of the Ball

So I'm pushing my way through the flood-tide of male

ubergeeks at the Microsoft conference this morning, and

notice that the crowd is rubbernecking as it makes a wide

berth around this drop-dead beautiful blonde.  As I get

closer, I hear this most decidedly animated dialogue coming

from her side, and there, of course, is our man in LA,

Stephen.

"Andy, meet my editor, Melody."

Of course she is.

Yukon XML Features

Don’t get me wrong, I like XML. Yukon has so many awesome XML features I can’t even absorb it all. I have been focusing on XQuery since beta 1, but there are many more things to work with.

For starters there is a native XML data type. You can also use Full Text Indexing on top of the XML datatype and use the full text query as a filter or a XQuery statement.

The coolest thing that I saw was the XML Schema validation of the XML Datatype, so if you try to insert data into the XML field and it violates the XSD, it will bomb.

Good stuff, stay tuned for more as we write the book….

Rows and Columns Revisited-on the Radio

Today on my Sys-Con Radio Interview at 11:15am PST, I'll revisit the Rows and Column issue as well as Clemens' Elements and Attributes argument-where at the bar last night he said in a lame attempt to win the argument that Oracle is more scalable than SQL Server. :)

I think that I will have to write das Blog and base it all on SQL Server Yukon storage and call it der Blog. Anyone want to help?

Refactoring C# Code in Whidbey

Want to refactor some code? How do we do it today, maybe use global find and replace? Ugly.

Whidbey has several great new tools to select a block of code, right click and select one of about 8 ways to refactor your code. My personal favorite is “Extract Method” where Whidbey takes selected code and makes it a new method (complete with parameters). Whidbey then writes a line of code where the code use to exist calling your new method.

Some other refactoring tools allow you to promote a variable to a parameter, switch the order, etc of parameters and also “surround with” which allows you to surround your code in an If statement, Try block, etc.

Happy Refactoring.

(From TLS321: Visual C# "Whidbey" IDE Enhancements)

So Clemens is here at the PDC. And as usual we got drunk together and argued Relational Databases vs XML. Clemens, while such a smart dude, is still wrong on this issue. He thinks that everything should be in XML. My crazy Dutch friend, Remi and Kevin Collins and I all tried to talk sense into Clemens (apparently the Germans don’t like Dr. Codd.) At the end of the day you need to store data in a database, not XML, XML is good for transport of data (like in a web service) or is good for something like a config file.

The Relational Database is not dead. XML is not the cure for everything in the world. I think that the world is really defined in Rows and Columns, not Elements and Attributes.

Attention passengers, this is the captain speaking: the smoke you smell is not from our plane

The most amazing thing (and the most horrific) I have ever saw from an airplane window was the view of the Los Angles fires from about 12,000' on the descent into LAX. I have never seen anything like it. I have flown over very large forest fires (which are more black in color) in the past and was not prepared for what I saw today flying into LA. When descending into LAX you get a good view of the San Bernardino Valley. You usually see nice homes and cars and such. Today not so much. Nothing but fire and white smoke. You could SMELL the smoke from the plane. That is a first for me. It looks like a nuclear bomb hit LA. Maybe I was getting a little emotional from the white cloud of smoke over the world trade center after 9/11, but that is what it looked like.

Well, although late, the PDC is now underway. Tomorrow I plan on taking in some WinFS and Yukon DTS sessions. It took me about 14 hours, but I got here in time for a dinner with RDs from around the world.

Two Chix and a Skillet

This weekend my good friends, Ned and Laura Gardner made it to the top of Katterskill High Peak (along with 5 of their closest friends). This was their 35^th peak and 39^th climb to gain entry to the Catskill 3500 Club. I did the honors and opened the Champagne at 3600’ and we had celebrated in the ice and snow. I personally have 12 more climbs before I can gain entry into the club, so we did two more peaks on Sunday, only after we had “Breakfast Grub” at Two Chix and a Skillet.

WinFS at PDC

The PDC will be all about Longhorn, Yukon and Whidbey (and maybe some Web Services crap too.) Since I am writing the Yukon book for MS Press and have been playing with it almost all year and Whidbey is now in alpha, Longhorn is what I want to see the most of. As a developer, WinFS seems the most important.

So the future of the file system in Windows is WinFS. The hints are that WinFS will "leverage database technolgies." What exactly does that mean? Hummmmmmm. SQL Server?

Here are the sessions to look at:

WinFS: File System and Storage Advances in Windows "Longhorn": Overview

Track: Client   Code: CLI201
Room: Room 150/151/152/153   Time Slot: Tue, October 28 2:00 PM-3:15 PM
Room: Room501ABC   Time Slot: Wed, October 29 2:00 PM-3:15 PM
Learn about the next generation storage platform for Windows! In "Longhorn" we're advancing the File System into a Storage Platform for storing structured, file and XML data. Leveraging database technologies, the "Longhorn" storage platform manages data for organizing, searching and sharing. The storage platform also allows for data synchronization across other "Longhorn" and foreign data sources. The new storage platform supports rich managed "Longhorn" APIs as well as Win32 APIs.

WinFS: File System Integration

Track: Client   Code: CLI326
Room: Room 152/153   Time Slot: Wed, October 29 11:30 AM-12:45 PM
Speakers: Sanjay Anand
This session provides an overview of the File System and Security features of WinFS, including but not limited to a drilldown into the WinFS namespace, file system integration and Win32 support. We also cover the WinFS security model including authentication, authorization and encryption features that help you secure your data as well as build security into your applications. Learn how you can integrate your file-based content into WinFS using WinFS property promotion infrastructure or build support for integrating with WinFS search capabilities.

WinFS: Schemas and Extensibility

Track: Client   Code: CLI322
Room: Room 409AB   Time Slot: Wed, October 29 10:00 AM-11:15 AM
Speakers: J. Patrick Thompson, Toby Whitney
The WinFS schemas are the data and API definition that ship with Windows. The Windows Schemas define documents, contacts, system and person tasks, and much more. Learn about the thinking behind the designs of the Windows Schemas and how you can extend the schemas that ship with Windows, create your own schemas, and extend WinFS.

WinFS: Schemas, Extensibility and the Storage User Experience

Track: Client   Code: CLI323
Room: Room 409AB   Time Slot: Wed, October 29 2:00 PM-3:15 PM
Speakers: Nat Ballou
Windows "Longhorn" introduces an entirely new user storage experience and model around the storage of user's data. Get an introduction to new concepts such as: dynamic sets, static sets, and views, with a quick overview of the "Longhorn" storage user experience. Focus on how you can present application-specific data in Windows as well as re-use "Longhorn" components to build rich "Longhorn" applications.

WinFS: Using Windows "Longhorn" Storage ("WinFS") in Your Application (Part 1)

Track: Client   Code: CLI320
Room: Room 409AB   Time Slot: Tue, October 28 3:45 PM-5:00 PM
Speakers: John Ludeman
The preferred method of access to the advanced features of the new Windows Future Storage (WinFS) is through the WinFS API. This session starts by covering the broad set of concepts that form the foundation of the WinFS API design, and then delve into specific code examples. You will be able to write a simple application against WinFS by the time this session is complete. The walk-through includes connecting to the store, basic enumeration and queries, saving changes back to the store and the associated transactional semantics. Folder and Filestream access are also discussed. Basic data change notification scenarios round out the core examples.

WinFS: Using Windows "Longhorn" Storage ("WinFS") in Your Application (Part 2)

Track: Client   Code: CLI321
Room: Room 409AB   Time Slot: Tue, October 28 5:15 PM-6:30 PM
Speakers: Mike Deem
In part 2 of the WinFS API session, we jump right into the deep end and cover the advanced features of the WinFS API, including rich view support, support for XML types, asynchrony, using the "Avalon" data binding support, using the interfaces from COM, how to build your own schemas and extensions on WinFS, the different relationship lifetimes and the associated semantics. A key component of the WinFS architecture will allow for ISVs to extend the same base schemas to maximize information sharing or even create their own schemas. How and where to extend WinFS is discussed, along with the schema and API creation process. Part 1 should be considered a prerequisite for taking this session.

Architecting Smart Client Applications (It's a PDC Thang)

Allen Cooper thinks that IT people are in love with Web apps since they are too lazy to deal with deployment issues, so we as IT people force less rich and robust UIs on people (via HTML) so they don’t have to deal with the deployment. This is changing with .NET and zero touch deployment and all the tools Microsoft has given us to deploy apps on the client. This only makes sense since the client nowadays also has about as much processing power as a small city had just about 5 years ago.

If you want to talk more on this topic, come see a super duper BOF session at the PDC on Tuesday. You can come to the Architecting Smart Client Applications session on Tuesday night. Several RD's will be hosting this event with uber RD Tim Huckaby including: myself; Joel Semeniuk; Ingo Rammer; Tim Landgrave; Joe Homnick; Greg Frankenfield; Edgar Sánchez; Scott Stanfield; Billy Hollis; Peter Himschoot; and Patrick Hynds.

We want to cover a number of themes:

•           What the hell is a smart client?

•           The Smart Client application development offerings from Microsoft

•           Web vs. Windows

•           .NET fixes the historical problems of deployment

•           Web applications may be headed for extinction (at least on the windows platform)

Hope to see you there, here is the write up:

Architecting Smart Client Applications (the future of application development)

Track: Birds of a Feather   Code: BoF05

Room: Room 404AB   Time Slot: Tue, October 28 9:00 PM-9:55 PM

This BOF fosters discussion on what a smart client is and delves into the implications and opportunities for smart client application development now and into the future. The topics discussed focus on smart client technologies like InfoPath, VS .NET tools for Office 2003, Framework, and Managed Code Extensions for Office 2003, and Windows Forms, with industry experts who facilitate examples and solicit comments and discussion on the best techniques to getting started on smart client apps today. Browser-based application development will be contrasted to smart client application development and we take an amusing look at the history of software design, development, and deployment and make some bold speculations, discussions and arguments on the future. Host: Tim Huckaby.