Patrick Steele's .NET Blog

I'll be presenting at the Greater Lansing User Group .NET on December 16th in Lansing, Michigan. I'll be giving a presentation on COM Interop -- specifically, creating .NET objects that will be exposed to existing, COM-based applications. If you're in the area, stop by!

If you're running a stored procedure via ExecuteReader and the stored procedure has some output parameters, you won't be able to access the values of the output parameters until you're done with the IDataReader. Thanks to Bill Vaughn for an MSDN article that cleared this up for me. See the section "Using a DataReader to Process the RETURN Value and OUTPUT Parameters". Note how he calls the DataReader's Close() method before accessing the output or return values.

If you missed the October ".NET To Go Mobility Roadshow" held at Microsoft's Detroit office in Southfield, MI don't worry. You've got another chance to attend the roadshow in Grand Rapids, MI on Dec. 2nd, 2004. You'll get the same great content as well as a chance to win a mobile device.

This month our local .NET User Group, GANG, has an INETA speaker -- Tom Barnaby. The topic is "Understanding Web Services" and should be a good one for those who haven't jumped into web services yet. If you're in the metro-Detroit area this Wednesday, stop by the Microsoft offices in Southfield for some free Pizza and good .NET stuff!

Man -- a whole month without posting. That was painful. I've been so busy at work and home that I haven't fired up RSSBandit for weeks. But I ran it tonight and let it fill up with tons of news that I'm slowly scanning.

I was working with an application that stored some permission information in an integer in the database. Each bit of the integer represented a particular permission. The meaning of each bit came from an enumeration defined in a VB6 DLL. I needed to dig into some of these existing permission values to find out which permissions were enabled based on which bits were set in the database.

Local Regional Directory Bill Wagner (co-founder of SRT Solutions) will be hosting a "webinar" on using Wise for Windows Installer for installing and configuring data-drive web applications. The webinar is free and takes place tomorrow morning at 8:30 AM EST. For registration information, go to http://www.wise.com/wfwi_webcasts.asp.

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