Ever promised yourself that one "weekend" you'd go through all those MSDN Universal disks, install stuff on Virtual PC images and start learning some new technology?  Then Saturday rolls around and the idea of doing all that install work just to start digging into stuff becomes wildly unappealing?

If that describes you, you're a lazy, me-generation sloth!  But then again so am I.  Luckily Microsoft has a solution.  Check out this URL:
http://msdn.demoservers.com/login.aspx

This site provides hosted (Terminal Services-based) access to actual Hands On Labs for a number of MS technologies, including shipping technology like VB .NET, C#, ASP.NET, VS .NET 2003, Smart Client development, and Beta technology like Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 (just added).

Go to the site now, and you'll be up and running with a Lab manual and a functional VPC in 3 minutes or less.  The only drawback I can find is that the labs are time-limited, so make sure you can block out some uninterrupted time to avoid being kicked out and having to start from scratch.

Feedback on this content is welcome...I'll work to push it back to Redmond as appropriate.

More details to come (including code), but here's a first glimpse of what worked and what didn't when I combined Whidbey with Oracle:

        ·         Even though ODP.NET was installed on the same machine as VS 2005, none of the VS dialogs or wizards recognized it.

·         Using Microsoft’s Oracle provider in the Server Explorer window, I could enumerate, but not view the PL/SQL code for, stored procedures within Oracle packages.

·         Using Microsoft’s Oracle provider in the TableAdapter Configuration Wizard, stored procedures in packages were not enumerated and could not be selected.  Therefore, typed DataSets against Oracle package-based stored procs were no go.

·         I couldn’t use the ASP.NET SqlDataSource control with ODP.NET.  The latter isn’t available from any drop-downs, and manually typing “Oracle.DataAccess.Client” into the Provider property created errors when I tried to run the page.

·         The winning combination was the ObjectDataSource control combined with “hand-written” classes that use ODP.NET to implement CRUD operations on package-based stored procedures.

·         Most of my research was in ASP.NET 2.0, and not Windows Forms.  But similar results came up there as well.

The headlines tonight make it look almost certain that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s board will vote to approve the New York Jets’ bid to build a stadium over the LIRR rail yards in Manhattan’s West 30s.  I am extremely pleased with this probable outcome and I think the Bloomberg administration was right to push hard for it.  Many people I know, and with whom I often agree on matters of city politics and policy, do not share my view on this issue and have been (and will be) very surprised by it.  What follows is a first attempt at explaining why I think the stadium initiative is good for New York and for New Yorkers.

Most importantly, New York City needs a convention center that equals or exceeds in size that of other major cities.  From attending industry conferences around the U.S., many of which are very far from New York, I can tell you that Javits is a laughing stock in comparison to its counterparts in other cities.  Besides gnawing at my innate New York snobbery and assumption that New York should have the biggest and best everything, this disparity infuriates me in terms of the economic misfortune it brings to this city.  Javits’ inadequate size kills our prospects for most serious convention business.  Has Microsoft ever had a major conference in New York?  Even VSLive, for the first time in 10 years, won’t be coming here.  We’re too small at the high end and too expensive at the low end.  Something needs to change.

I want New York hotels to have the room nights, I want New York cab drivers to have the fares, I want New York restaurants to have the revenues, and I want New Yorkers to have the jobs that a constant flow of convention and conference business can bring.  I want people who wouldn’t ordinarily come to New York to come here because a conference is in town, and I want them to discover how much fun it is here, and then I want them to come back on vacation.

The Jets stadium gets us a bigger Javits Center.  It also gets the Jets back to New York.  I have never been a big sports fan, but I grew up here and I went with my dad to see the Jets play at Shea.  And when the Jets left Queens to play in New Jersey, it really kind of broke my heart.  In the 70s, New York had all the “ets” teams…The Mets for baseball, the Jets for football, and the Nets for basketball.  With two out of three going to NJ, it’s just felt unnatural.

And another thing.  The campaign by Cablevision to scuttle this deal is one of the most cynical, dishonest, and corrupt political ploys I’ve seen in a long time.  Anyone who thinks a company based in Bethpage, Long Island gives a damn about the quality of life of residents of Manhattan’s West Side is dreaming.  Although the TV spots they ran were meant to look like they were paid for by a consortium of Chelsea block associations, they were in fact a desperate attempt by a failing media and entertainment company that is not based in New York City to protect its Radio City Music Hall and Madison Square Garden franchise.  Period.

I’m as troubled as anyone by the hyper-gentrification of Manhattan, and I do acknowledge that the stadium project has the potential to make it worse.  But I also know that protectionist policy to keep the West 30s a relative wasteland is wrong-headed.  And I feel strongly that many people who oppose the stadium truly do not realize how much economic activity we are losing without such a project.  Further, I have a feeling that the number of home games played and nighttime events held at the stadium will make for traffic congestion that is far less than what many people fear.  When I was a kid, I marched against Westway.  That would have caused traffic nightmares all throughout the West Side.  I can’t imagine a Jets stadium doing any such thing.

And a final word with regard to New York’s bid for the 2012 Olympics (another underpinning of the case for the stadium).  I think the campaign is improbable, and maybe even Quixotic.  I think having the Olympics here will ultimately make no sense economically.  I also think chances are very good that the games will go to Paris.  But maybe we should still try.  It would be a royal pain to be the host city, but I have to admit it would be fun.  And with our stadium plan in place, and the specter of labor unrest in Paris during the games, you just never know…the IOC may just decide to give us a chance.

But a bigger Javits is my mantra, and this project looks to me, on balance, like the best way to build it.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here.  Part of the reason for this is I’ve been in hiding for the last 10 days learning the ins and outs of ASP.NET 2.0.  Moreover, I’ve been trying to make it all work with Oracle, and when I say “make it work with” I mean get all those fancy new data bound controls to bind to Oracle data, and to do so by calling stored procedures in packages.

The good news is I made it work.  The bad news is it’s much harder than it should be.  Microsoft’s Oracle provider doesn’t readily acknowledge stored procedures in packages, and Visual Studio 2005 doesn’t readily acknowledge Oracle’s own data provider for .NET.

In a few days, I’ll try and list all the issues, and explain how ASP.NET 2.0’s ObjectDataSource control lets you work around them and still take advantage of data binding.  I’m also going to try and get people at both companies to look this over and maybe rectify things before Whidbey ships.  Since there’s every indication that said ship date is still nine months away, this shouldn’t be too tough, but, even so, never underestimate the potential for competitors to fall short of effortless interoperability.

If you travel (or live) outside North America much you’ll be familiar with the ubiquity of BBC World and CNN International.  The latter, in James Earl Jones’ voice identifies itself simply as CNN, just as its North American counterpart, but is in fact a very different channel.  Just to the right of the omnipresent CNN logo is a small, slowly spinning globe.  And that globe means a lot: the anchor desk is based in London and the programming is much more news-heavy, infotainment-eschewing, and editorially pure than CNN in North America.  Much like BBC World, the channel follows a format of 30 minutes of pure international news at the top of the hour followed by a variety of shows on the half hour.  Many of these shows like “Diplomatic License,” “Inside Africa,” “World News Asia” and “International Correspondents” are also chock-full of interesting world news content.  Anyone who remembers and liked CNN in the 80s will feel right at home watching CNN International.

Whether you’re conservative, liberal or somewhere in between, if you crave a news channel that isn’t sensationalistic and ratings-hungry and focuses on serious analysis of the news, BBC World and CNN International are terrific news programming sources.  The problem is that until recently, neither of these channels was widely available in the United States (I believe BBC World is available 24-hours a day on some Canadian cable systems, however).  CNN International was available all weekend and from midnight until around 8am each weekday morning by watching CNN fn, which was off the air at that time, but not on a full-time basis.

But now there’s a better option.  Recently, CNN fn went dark (which is too bad, I actually liked watching it) and on many cable systems, including Time Warner Cable’s DTV digital cable service in New York, CNN International has replaced CNN fn and is now on 24 hours a day.  On Time Warner in New York, you can tune to channel 133 and watch CNN International whenever you want.  If you think of it, at the top of the hour, tune in and see what you think.  If you’re serious about your news, this could become habit forming for you.

If you can’t get CNN International, or even if you can, you have another option for hard world news.  Many of the news half-hours from BBC World are carried on BBC America (a digital cable/satellite channel) and many PBS stations.  If you’re a news junkie and you have a DVR, you can do what I do: tell your machine to record all airings of BBC World News on all channels, saving only the one most recent recording (you may want to give the recording a relatively low priority so that it doesn’t pre-empt other recordings you’ve programmed in).  This way, you’ll always have a recent half hour of world news near the top of your recorded shows menu, and you won’t use more than a half-hour’s worth of hard drive space on your DVR. This approach works quite well, especially in markets like New York, with a number of PBS stations (including new digital-only PBS channels).  Here in NY, if you have digital cable, BBC World News airs on a total of five different channels.

By the way, both channels have their own Web sites.  BBC World’s is www.bbcnews.com, which redirects to http://news.bbc.co.uk/.  Unless you’re in the U.K., you’ll probably want to select the World Edition.  And speaking of selecting the World Edition, you can configure CNN’s main home page, www.cnn.com, to display CNN International’s content by clicking the International Edition link on the upper-right of the home page or by pointing your browser directly to http://edition.cnn.com.  Oh, and check out BBC World's front page RSS feed here.  News junkies of the world, unite!