For those of you out there that are smarter than me ... and after yesterday's post, I'm thinking that there are a *lot* of you ... You probably noticed that I was a little confused between the effects of IE7 protected mode (Low Rights IE or LoRIE), the VS 2005 SP1 release and the debugging problems that I was experiencing on Vista.

I've known about IE7 protected mode, sandboxing and virtualization for many months now and was even cognizant of that when I was having my debugging problems. I even glanded down at the bottom bit of the IE chrome and noticed "Protected Mode: On", but for some reason I thought http://localhost would *not* be affected by the protected mode. I was dead wrong. Arghh.

So, the answer to the basic debugging problems that I was having w/IE7 on Vista are entirely solved by adding http://localhost as a trusted site in IE7. Remember to uncheck the "https://" checkbox when adding the site, or else you won't be able to add http://localhost.

There are a bunch of other blog posts on the subject if you are interested.

I decided to re-build dasblog (the blog software that I use) on Whidbey (VS 2005) over the holidays. It is something that I had always wanted to do and it seems like the dasblog folks have not yet publicly taken that on. Before anyone gets any strange ideas, I have no desire for a thinkjot-like schism, but wanted to move the codebase to Whidbey and work on getting the software to run under partial-trust. If this all works out, and the dasblog team wants to adopt my changes, cool, otherwise, I'm going to just use it myself.

Anyway, I decided to tackle this task over the holidays. Believe it or not, I almost exclusively use the free VS Express SKUs for my coding work. The "free" part isn't a big deal for me as I have a full copy of VS team suite a couple meters away from me, and I can download and install any program (including "Microsoft Bob") from the MS network that I want. Still, the Express SKUs are super convenient since I can download and install them in about 10mins and they satisfy most of my needs. Anyway, I downloaded the dasblog source and started playing with it. It became clear that I needed to use both VS express C# and VS express Web to get this done since the Web product didn't appear to support multiple projects in a single solution; in fact, it didn't appear to support the solution concept at all. And I then realized that since VS C# doesn't support JIT attach debugging (due to licensing issues), that the whole thing wasn't going to work at all. That's when I reached over for the quite large (requires two hands) VS team suite box to do some "real developlment" ;)

After a fairly lengthy install (and I didn't even install MSDN since I use the web mostly), I started back at it. I was able to get the web and class library projects into one solution in VS. Cool! I then hit F5 and it was immediately clear that something was terribly broken. The web project launched as expected, but was immediately detached from the debugger. Huh? I tried a couple more times, and I had the same experience. I was able to attach VS to WebDev.WebServer.Exe and then refresh the page, and then my breakpoints were hit. This approach though is anything but a good experience.

I had heard that there were some incompatibilities with VS on Vista, but I was under the impression that it was more niche issues, of which this is not. It is also very strange that I didn't have these same problems with the Express products, which I've been using on Vista for months. I wonder why the full product has some additional problems. I'm sure someone in building 41 knows.

Time to install VS 2005 SP1. I went to the following page. I downloaded the Vista-specific update. That didn't work, claiming that I was missing a file or two. I then downloaded and installed the non-Vista-specific SP1 package, which is just shy of 1/2 GB. Ouch! That worked. Upon launching VS, it claimed that I needed the Vista-specific update. Oh, I see, you need to install the generic VS 2005 service pack, and then the Vista-specific update. That was not at all clear to me from the VS 2005 SP1 page. Grrrr. Anyhow, now you can avoid the trouble that I had.

I then launch VS, but it claims that I need to launch the app elevated. I was actually expecting that, but thought that they would have manifested the application to force the elevation dialog. I guess not, or maybe that's still coming. Developers are going to go nuts if they have to remember to right click on the VS 2005 icon and hit "Run as administrator" every time, or just turn off UAC on their dev-boxes, which is a bad idea.

OK, launch VS again, but elevated, and voila, everything is working correctly again. Peace and harmony have now returned to my development experience.

I'm very thanksful that the VS team has pulled off this pretty significant service pack ... *before* Vista is generally available. I'm glad to be back and productive again. The directions on MSDN could use some improvement.

I did an interview with my buddy John Bristowe a while back. You can hear me largely talking non-sensically about the CLR and at Developer Night in Canada. If you read Joel Pobar's blog too, then you hear me taking that guy down. Sorry Joel.

I really like the program that John's got going there. I couldn't believe how fancy the intro sounded. I'm now trying to get other Canadians at Microsoft to do interviews with John. Let's see where that leads. I hope that we'll have something in the later summer, as John made it sound like he'd be taking the summer off.

I'm hanging out at Microsoft Calgary at this point. I'm still recovering from the Calgary launch yesterday, which involved standing for several hours answering lots and lots of questions. Actually, the standing wasn't that bad. My favourite part though was the Q&A at the end of the day. I'd say that Calgary was probably our best stop on the tour for Q&A, with the caveat that I did not attend the Toronto Q&A (even though I was in the building). The Calgary folks provided us with a constant stream of high-quality questions, including a string of them on Windows OneCare, which we really were not able to answer.

The only bad thing is that my notebook hard-drive failed yesterday at the launch. I knew something was bad when the BSOD popped up on my XP machine. Gotta say that that never happens on XP, contrary to the belief of the Slashdot crowd. They'll likely need to put on their tin-foil hats to read/hear that. My buddy Marc -- whom I'm staying with in Calgary -- graciously leant me his PIII Thinkpad for the day. It is slower than my regular machines (particularly compared to my X64 machines with 4 times more RAM back at the office), but it sure works better than my cooked laptop.

Well, I'm at the end of my tour-of-duty on the VS 2005 Launch: Canadian Edition. I really enjoyed myself hanging out with the MS Canada folks, in Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver and Calgary. In particular, there was a set of us that spent a lot of time in the experts area (while not presenting), answering and routing customer questions among each other. It was tough to beat the expertise held by the Count and the Saint. They could pretty much answer anything from Com+ to Windows Forms, with a whole lot in between. I noticed a bunch of interesting diagrams that the both of them constructed on the paper boards (cannot think of a better term). Can you say WCF? And Zed was our man when it came to VSTS, particularly licensing and the apparent mystery of VS SKUs. We were constantly calling him over, as there were *a lot* of questions relating to VSTS.

I also enjoyed "experting" with the bunch of the folks that joined us in one or more of the other cities. We had a lot of fun together, on and off the field.

That's all not to mention all of the developer/IT Pro folks that we met in each city. I had a lot of interesting conversations with our customers all over Canada. You are the ones that make our platform so successful. You are also the reason why I put so much effort into the CLR, back in Redmond. It sounds like a marketing-line, but it is true. We spend a lot of time in conference rooms, hallways and each other's offices (not to mention mail) talking about how customers are going to use our product. Invariably, we broaden what seems like a simple scenario into something a fair bit more significant, but that will delight and empower a much larger (hopefully all of them) set of customers. That's what it's all about.

Thanks again to everyone I met on the launch tour. I hope that you got as much out of the experience as I did.

I'm now back to Team CLR, back in rainy Redmond.

Today marked the second of ten stops on the Canadian launch of VS 2005, in Ottawa. You can check out launch pics @ flickr. Looks like the pics are limited to Toronto at this point, but I expect that to change over the next few days.

The Ottawa launch was another success. It was definitely more cozy than Toronto, being in a hotel, rather than a convention center. This different actually had its benefits. Faces started looking familiar more quickly and people didn't get lost ;)

The ask the experts area was staffed by a bunch of the same experts as Toronto. By the second go, we definitely had our act together. For example, we did a better job of getting the best person to answer questions. I don't know a lot about databases or of our System.Data classes. Fortunately, Bruce Johnson did, another .Net expert from ObjectSharp.

I managed to break away from the experts area for a while to go see one of the talks. Gotta say that Jerome and Barry did a great job. John also did a great job during the keynotes. I didn't get to see him in action during the talks.

The Ottawa launch started with us arriving in town last night. Ottawa is one of my favourite cities in Canada, and certainly my favourite in Ontario. As a result, I was really looking forward to it. The trip started a little rough with a couple flights to Ottawa being cancelled and then me forgetting my jacket at gate 122 in Toronto airport. The dumb part is that they announced a lost jacket just before the plane left the gate (with everyone seated), but I was already deep into conversation with my two seat-mates. Anyway, a quick call to Toronto Airport from Ottawa solved the problem after I was patched back through to gate 122. The jacket was there and we were good to go. My Swanndri jacket is particularly important to me as I picked it up when Annie and I were married in New Zealand five years ago.

We drove from the airport to Microsoft Canada. We were late and were denied admittance at first by building security at Microsoft Ottawa. Note that the building has several tenants, so security was not MS-specific. Anyway, we explained the situation and got past that. Odd. We then spent the next hour with a bunch of local Ottawa .Net folks. We had some great conversations with the local developers over beer and cheese. I spent about 30mins talking with one guy in particular. We had a very interesting conversation about dynamic languages and some of the subtleties of anonymous delegates and methods in C#. I certainly knew about anonyomous delegates, but didn’t know about the subtleties that he mentioned. We talked more about the way that these work today at the launch and I now have a better idea. I’ll post more on this later.

After the beer and cheese, we headed to dinner with Barry Gervin of ObjectSharp. He's the left-most guy in this pic. Definitely a very smart guy. He's a regional director for a bunch of Microsoft technologies and also seems to like Italian food.

Wow! The Toronto launch was pretty amazing. There were apparently >3000 people there. The keynote presentation was pretty good. It was more marketing-oriented than anything technical, which is to be expected from a launch event.

I really enjoyed the ~5 3-5 minute videos that they played at the launch. For me, they are more interesting than slideware and also much more compelling. “Here are some real-life customers who might even be part of your industry who are using Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework v2.0.” About half the videos were of American or International companies. The other half was impressively Canadian. I was surprised and very happy that Microsoft Canada had taken the time to create videos of customers using VS and the .NET Framework from all over Canada. Being Canadian, that really helps make the whole thing more credible.

Also, all the speakers wore poppies. Nice touch guys. I’m sure that I wasn’t the only one who noticed that detail. This attention to detail was most impressive to me with Craig (Symonds), who like me is Canadian but came from out of town (Redmond). With all the last minute details related to the launch, I could easily see how he would have forgotten to wear a poppy. I’m sure that the launch team helped with that, but it was still a nice touch.

Anyway, on to the more interesting data. The whole event started off with a keynote. It was dark in the big room with lots of flashing lights and these huge clear balls with some kind of wide tinsel flying around side, bouncing from one side of the building to another. Wild. You can get an idea of the excitement in the room via the picture below, taken about 20mins before the event actually started and before everyone got into the room (hence the empty chairs at the back).

I didn’t go to any of the sessions. I had the pleasure of hanging out in the Cabana or “Ask the Experts” area. I was there for several hours straight – even during lunch – answering many many questions of the folks that came in. There were 20 or so “experts” in the room, but it seemed like folks were lined up most of the time, waiting to talk with us. It was actually pretty crazy. There were a bunch of questions that I couldn’t answer, being too far out of my area. As a result, I handed out about 30 or so business cards, asking people to contact me later with their questions, which I would then hand off to the actual experts.

Several folks commented that the major value for them was the experts area. They definitely got value out of the other aspects of the event, but were able to drill down pretty deeply into areas that mattered to them with the experts. Very cool. See a pic of the experts area below.

To end the day, we (all 3000+ of us) got a grab bag with VS 2005 and SQL Server 2005 (both standard non-trial versions). I imagine that a lot of folks were pretty excited by that. They already could download the Express SKUs from MSDN, but getting the real thing is a pretty cool deal.

I met with two companies today in Toronto, both banks. It is interesting to see what kind of projects that they are taking on and where they are and are not choosing to use the platform. In most cases, the “are not” scenarios are mostly for historical reasons and will change over time. It is most interesting to see where their pain points are. We’re about to start a new release and have the opportunity now to look at addressing significant problems. For the last year, we’ve been pretty locked down on Whidbey, not allowing us to implement significant solutions to issues that customers have encountered. It is a breath of fresh air to be in a different mode. I’m looking forward to meeting with customers, learning about what sort of improvements/features that they want and then brewing that all up in the feature mash to come up with something great for CLR v3.

I’m in the airport right now, waiting to head out to Ottawa in about 40mins. The flight is ~60mins. At 6 (or as soon as I can get there since I’m landing at 5:40), I’m going to attend another pre-launch event at Microsoft Ottawa. I’m guessing that this is going to be another “Beer and Cheese”. We shall see.

The MVP/Influencer type events are generally my favourite. The folks that attend them have generally invested a lot of time and passion into .NET development, so by definition have a lot of depth and opinion on the subject. As a result, you can have some pretty interesting conversations with these guys. They also don’t hesitate to push back on certain things. Constructive (and sometimes not that constructive) criticism is very helpful and does affect the designs that we decide on and implement.

And of course, I’m really looking forward to the launch event tomorrow! See you there.

I just got back from the pre-launch event. It was pretty much a "beer and cheese". Got to love those. We're doing them all the time in Redmond.

I got talking to a few guys for most of the time. It is amazing to hear folks from back home speaking so authoritatively about the platform that you work on! John, pictured below, had a lot of interesting things to say about ASP.Net. I definitely understood where he ws coming from and had had some of the same experiences. He also made some interesting comparisons with Ruby. It certainly does seem like dynamic/scripting languages are rising in popularity.

Here's a picture of the 3 guys I talked to most. Of the 4 guys pictured, I'm the one on the left with the brown shirt. The other guys from the left are Obi, Richard and John.

Time to go to bed. I'm still on Pacific time, but won't feel much like that when I need to get up on Eastern time for the launch!

I started my day at 6AM, which is earlier than normal. I haven’t set the alarm for work since my daughter was born, always waiting for her to wake us up, which is generally earlier than desired. The alarm and 6AM wake-up didn’t hurt much though.

The cab came by at 7:10AM, 20 mins late. That was OK though, as I booked it 10mins earlier than I needed. Also, my daughter didn’t wake up until 6:55, so I would have missed her by 5 mins if the taxi had arrived on time, which would have put a lot worse feeling on the day.

For some strange reason, I opted to fly to Vancouver and then to Toronto. We always fly direct on Air Canada from SEA (Seattle) to YYZ (Toronto). Actually, I didn’t choose to do it; it was a mixup on my part of understanding how to use our travel booking website. Better luck next time. It adds 3 hours (or so) to the trip to Toronto, but that’s OK. Vancouver airport is one of the nicest that I’ve ever had the pleasure of visiting. Seattle’s is pretty bad in comparison.

Now I’m on the flight from YVR (Vancouver) to YYZ. Interestingly enough, Air Canada decided to cut free in-flight meals last week. I applaud the change, actually. I care a lot about the food I eat, both from the standpoint of nutrition and taste. Airplane meals, as you know, generally lack in both categories. It would be great if appropriate price cuts accompany the reduction of service.

The guy just came by asking “anything from the restaurant”. Last time I checked, a rolling cart with a bunch of pre-packaged food on top didn’t count as a restaurant!

I opted for lunch at Whitespot, a household name in Vancouver. They even have Whitespot available on the BC fairies. I opted for a veggie burger and a salad. I’m feeling pretty good about that after seeing what folks are ordering on the flight. Maybe next time, I’ll bring a steaming Indian curry on to the plane. Either that or a Coleman stove and a filet of salmon to bake.

Enough of the logistics … I’m really looking forward to the launch. I’m heading to a pre-launch event at a restaurant on Dixon (Lonestar Texas Grill) as soon as I land. I believe that I land at something like 7:24PM and the event starts at 7:30PM. Watch in-flight feature film “Must love dogs” à Land à Deplane à Get baggage (1 item) à Get Taxi à Enter restaurant à Order supper à Watch meal get cold as I talk Whidbey with .NET MVPs.

Craig Symonds is doing the keynote tomorrow in Toronto. Craig is the General Manager of the Visual Studio division. Surprisingly enough, they produce this thing called Visual Studio. I’m in its sister/brother division called NDP or .Net Developer Platform, which produces the .NET Framework. I don’t exactly work with Craig, as he’s an executive and I’m an “individual contributor”. That being said, I work with folks from his division all the time, generally working on two things: designing/implementing VS/.NET Framework integration and determining which product a given bug resides it (it often isn’t clear on first look). Actually, the last part is the most interesting to me. More on that another time.

Last I heard, there are four or five thousand people registered for the Launch event in Toronto. I also heard – and I think that this is amazing – that all attendees are being given a fully-fledged version of VS 2005 and SQL Server 2005. Wow! The VS version is apparently a “special edition”. I have no idea what that means, but the product is apparently not time-bombed or crippled in any way. It might just be a special box, which would actually be kinda cool. I have a special Windows XP box that I was given for working on that, and I still get a kick out of that.

Hope to see you there … or in Ottawa a couple days later.

I'm being sent to Toronto and Ottawa to participate in the VS 2005 launches there. I guess I was picked since I'm a native speaker ;)

If you are going to be there too, it would be great to meet up to talk about Whidbey. I believe that I'm going to spending most of my time at the "Ask the Experts" desk/area/table. Come by to chat, ask questions or bring your laptop stopped at your favourite breakpoint in the VS debugger.

I also have a bit of time on the 8th and 9th (in Toronto) and 10th and 11th in Ottawa if you'd like to meet to talk about .NET Framework development that you are (or are planning to be) doing. Please mail me @ rlander@microsoft.com if you'd like to meet (at the launch location, Starbucks or your location).

I'm also planning to attend the Vancouver and Calgary events. I'll post more on that after the Ottawa and Toronto events.