November 2006 - Posts
I hope the audio comes through OK - we had some trouble during the recording. Download
it here.
It is possible to query the event log in Windows Vista using the WEVUTIL command line tool, passing any arbitrarily complex query. Unfortunately, the syntax needed by the query command line paramter (/q) doesn't seem to be documented (I was searching for this syntax when I got my
own article back) Thanks to
Ted Barnes for the question.
I've found that the simpliest way to get the search query is to let Vista do the heavy lifting for you. First, create a filter, as shown below
Then, save the filter to a custom view
Bring up the properties of this custom view
And edit the filter
Apply whatever filter you need
And then copy the text of the Select element to as the /q paramter
In this case, the syntax would be:
wevtutil qe System /rd:true /f:text /q:*[System[(EventID=7036)]]
The Platform SDK Documentation search suggests something you wrote might be helpful with your query...
Length: 10.3km
Descent: 1418m
Google Earth Path of Trail
2 Mar - Arrive LA 10:00AM (crossing International Date Line - Leave work after work Friday).
Fly/ drive to Flagstaff. Drive to Grand Canyon. Night at Grand Canyon Lodge
3,4,5 Mar Grand Canyon Trekking
3 Mar - South Kaibab Trail to Bright Angel
4 Mar - Day trip to Ribbon Falls. Colorado River
5 Mar - Bright Angel Trial to
Nth Rim back to Sth Rim. Night at Grand Canyon
Lodge Village or Page
6-7 Mar Travel to Yosemite via Zion National Park, Page (Antelope Canyons)
6 Mar AM. Antelope Canyons
6 Mar PM. Zion National Park. Night at Springdale.
7 Mar AM. Zion National Park
7 Mar PM. Travel to Yosemite
8,9,10, 11 Mar Yosemite Trekking
12 Mar Travel to Seattle. Drop car SF
15, 16 Mar Olympic National Park
I can't believe
Frank missed this one - I guess in his defence the release happened during his recent hospitalisation. I'm a WMP fan, but would love to see better keyboard support. Lets see how WMP 11 shapes up.
Chuck has
reported that Coastsey is the Man for TechEd 2007, taking charge of the event's planning and execution. Chuck also mentions some of the ideas bought up in Dave Lempher's
earlier post on TechEd v. NEXT, particulaly around shorter sessions and getting speaker quality up. As I've done a couple of Australian TechEd's now, I though I'd have my say.
Chuck mentions getting better vendor involvement. Most vendor presentations I've seen at TechEd have been awful. They are pure, unadultered commercials. To give Readify their dues, the do the best job in this area by doing a soft sells of their skills. Other vendors tend to look shabby in comparison - I think a prime example was the Readify guys running the Dev'Garten thing, while a consultant from a compitor methodically moved between the CommNet PCs setting the homepage to his company's website. This was a company that had done a number of large .NET projects with varying degrees of success over the last couple of years - a session by one of their seniour consultants on lessons learnt moving to .NET rather than their commical marketting efforts would have had a lot more impact.
The balance between shorter cabanna sessions and longer real sessions seemed about right at TechEd this year. Dave's nominated 30 minutes is too short for a lot of sessions. At 30 mins, you've either got to cut the intro, which will leave those not familar with the topic lost and without context, or cut the guts, which leaves people who want deep-level knowledge unsatisfied.
The idea of more attendee involevment and input is great, but very hard to realise. From all the reports I've had about user group sessions where the attendees are suppossed to just show up and a evening of fun-filled spontanous coding will materialize, the things are disasters filled with dead air. Spontanous things need a lot of planning.
Speaker preparedness and quality seemed like a bigger issue this year than in previous years. Maybe because everything else like the wireless, venue, CommNet, etc. went so well, speaker issues became more apparent. In general defence of speakers, nearly all of us do TechEd on a volentary basis, and need to find time in our busy lives to prepare our sessions. I took the Monday and Tueday before TechEd off work to prepare, and that seemed to work pretty well.
Sessions always go smoother the second time around, so favoring speaker/ session combinations that have gone through a user group presentation or two before-hand would help quality.
Pairing speakers with a large geographical seperation generally gives lower presentation quality. By the time I was paired up with Jason McConnell for the native code cabana session, Jason had already left Redmond, and we didn't hook up till about a hour before our first session. Thankfully, we both where comfortable with the subject, and where prepared. We simply needed to combine our two slide decks, and allocate the time.
Early preperation for a speaker is important, and on the Developer Tools track for TechEd 2006, we had to get the presentations in a couple of weeks before the event.
A couple of weeks ago
I wrote about the frustrution of VSTO deployment, and the real hole that VSTO developers have been left in. One of the main problems is that there is no programatic way for managed developers to add an assembly to the GAC. Well - now there is. I've written a Managed C++ wrapper around the Fusion APIs that provides a really simple interface for adding an assembly to the GAC. The CodeGuru article that describes the managed wrapper
can be found here, and for those that just want the release version of the binary, grab it
here.