Forays in Finance

So I attended the Launch event today at Chinook Center. It was good to see a lot of familiar faces and get a chance to hang out with fellow geeks :o). It’s amazing that I have been in Calgary for only about six months and have already made some strong friendships.
The Launch event itself was a 6 out of 10. I attended the developer track and had a chance to see John Bristowe and Joel Semeniuk in action. They are both excellent speakers and provided a good overview of WCF, WPF, WF, Office 2007, Vista gadgets, and SharePoint 2007 webparts. My favorites by far are the Vista Gadgets and Office 2007 Open XML file format.

Yes, for the time being we must make do with the lousy HTML/Javascript combo for gadget creation, I still think that we will see some ingenious apps come out as Vista gadgets. For a current list of Gadgets available visit Gadgets. There’s a couple of other cool gadgets that they previewed including one from The Weather Network which could be out early next year, and another one from Workopolis that displays new job postings.

The second favorite is the open xml file format that office 2007 uses. Thank good for MS finally moving away from proprietary file formats. I still have nightmares about  a previous project in which I had to extract information out of Word documents and man was it ugly. The new file formats make it really easy to programmatically create office documents as well as extract information out. If you are interested in delving deeper into how the new .docx file works, rename it to .zip and then open it. You will see all the individual files inside including the xml file containing document content.

Words every developer dreams of uttering as often as possible.
So I'll kick off my first ever blog entry with the perils of getting dasBlog to run at GoDaddy.com. Here's the short of it:

'Everyday I feel as if something is missing in my life; love? money? a fast car? nope..none of that. I come to the realization that my inner soul can no longer take the absence of my very own BLOG. I must have it...NOW!
Perfect timing for my Calgary .Net User Group president Daniel to detail me his love affair with dasBlog and what a cake walk it is to set it up at the 'best' hosting service of them all...yes...the infamous 'Go Daddy'.

DAY 1
20:30 PM - Call made..deals done...$75/year...ASP.NET 2.0, SQL Server, tons of space and I'm the proud owner of sharymudassir.com.
21:00 PM - Download dasBlog 1.9, fire up a new VM using VMWare Workstation running Windows Server 2003 SP1, and the configuration begins.
22:00 PM - Girlfriend's starting to give the evil eye...will I spend the entire evening at the computer once again?
22:30 PM - Honey, 15 more minutes plz....
22:42 PM - Success, configured to my initial liking, let's upload! Fire up FileZilla.
22:55 PM - The famous words are uttered: "This should work" but maybe I missed something.
23:15 PM - Another version of the above quoted phrase is uttered which shall remain out of this blog.
23:45 PM - Half an hour with GoDaddy multi-tier support ranging from SuperIdiot to The Incredible Moron, and I'm no where better. By this time GF is thoroughly unimpressed.
00:00 AM - I find out that dasBlog requires FullTrust and GoDaddy doesn't buy my request for granting escalated privileges for a measly blog.

Now it is at times like these that a developer must look deep within and ask himself the most important question of all, "Do I have the courage to continue or should I abandon the task at hand and blame it on the first reason that comes to mind". And before I can figure out an answer I must go to bed and make up with a very annoyed GF.

DAY 2
Read some more posts and realize that dasBlog may have issues with ASP.NET 2.0 even if properly configured. Decide to give it a try and also drop the entire directory structure under a BLOG virtual directory instead of the root. PRESTO...it works. Persistence pays off.