Lance's Whiteboard

A couple years ago I spent time developing BizTalk 2002 AIC components with C#/.NET Framework v1.1 and learned tons about COM+ interop.   I always planned to go blog about the basics and various tips and tricks for composing your COM interfaces, but after stumbling across this article, I'll happily point people to it on Peter van Ooijen's blog instead.

Over the past couple years, my friend Bob Tabor has put together an impressive collection of .NET tutorial Videos to help noobie .NET coders and experts alike learn how to develop with VisualStudio.NET via his awesome site LearnVisualStudio.NET.

I'm still researching my main PDC session picks, but here are my tenative pre-con selections...

I recently picked up a license for CodeSmith Professional and upgraded from version 2.6 to the brand new version 3.1.  As a long-time user of CodeSmith, I love the new enhancements to both the core engine and the Studio!   The built-in Statement Completion (e.g. intellisense-style lookup) feature is worth it alone!  Great work Eric!

I got a late approval today from management to go to PDC!  Woohoo!

Someone recently pointed me to this excellent article on EggheadCafe.   Much of what it contains is dead-on and amounts to what has taken me a good year and a half to learn through a combination of trial & error, the anorexic Reporting Services books online, and hundreds of posts to the Microsoft public Reporting Services newsgroup.

Here is a response I wrote for a problem posted on the Microsoft Reporting Services newsgroup:

I played around with Registration-Free COM for quite a while before I truly grokked it.  Today, I ran across these Walk Through style articles on MSDN by Steve White that do a good job of explaining the basics in a step-by-step manner: