Adam Kinney on .NET

Visual Studio .NET Tips and Tricks Book

2004-11-09T15:27:00Z

Minh T. Nguyen has written a book entitled Visual Studio .NET Tips and Tricks and its really cool. The book covers a ton of useful features in VS.NET 2002, 2003 and 2005. The style of the book is very easy to read as its broken into many little chunks. The book works well as a quick time filler when you're waiting for your overused pc to respond.

Nice job, Minh!

C# in 2000

2004-11-09T15:26:00Z

I was looking at my conference Tee from a Wrox conference in 2000. I thought it was interesting the placement of C# and how its become such a big name now, definitely worth a top billing. Also you'll notice the original name for ASP.NET listed as "ASP+". I think I still may like that name better. Hopefully at the next PDC, they'll have Avalon and Indigo on the conference Tee so I can post that Tee in 2010 when the names have been changed by marketing to something functional like Windows Ultra-Graphic Rated-M Control System and Really Good Communication System.

Erik Porter speaking at NUFW Tuesday August 10

2004-08-06T18:46:00Z

Erik Porter will be speaking at the .NET Users of Fort Wayne group on Tuesday night on the new and upcoming ASP.NET 2.0. And to go along with the presentation, we'll be giving away two copies of ASP.NET v. 2.0 The Beta Version! Thanks Addison-Wesley.

More details on this Event...

(Make sure to take notice of our new location on the Event page)

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Best Blog programming

2004-07-22T02:48:00Z

Dunstan Orchard has released Version 2 of his blog and he's really pushed the envelope on blogging software. With a long list of features and a flowing interface, I believe he's set the bar on what a blog could/should do. The experience plays best in Mozilla FireFox.

I love the panoramas!

[via redemption in a blog]

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New Mozilla FireFox Features

2004-07-14T20:15:00Z

Neil Turner talks about some of the new features that have been added to the most recent FireFox build. The most popular features mentioned will probably be the Gmail Notifier and the LiveMarks.

Livemarks are a cross between aggregation channels and bookmarks - Live Bookmarks if you like. If a page has an RSS feed, a lightning icon appears in the fourth box on the status bar, and clicking on it lets you choose a Livemark to add to your bookmarks. The livemark then appears as a folder, with its items as bookmarks in the folder. It’s quite a basic but potentially useful function. Incidently, it also supports Atom feeds.

Can't wait for FireFox 1.0!

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Outlook "Import Contacts" Oddity

2004-07-06T16:32:00Z

Go into Outlook 2003, Export Contacts into an MS Access file.
Zip up file, send file to new computer to use for communication
Open up Outlook 2003 on new computer, click Import and select unzipped MS Access file
Wizard selections: Import from another program or file | Microsoft Access | Allow duplicates | choose folder
Click Finish, Import runs

All of your contacts' emails are missing. The default mapping of fields between the Access file and Outlook does not map the Email fields. Before clicking Finish in step 5, you need to go back to the end of step 4 and click Map Custom Fields and specify that you want the Email to be imported as well. I don't know about you, but that email address is the most important field to me when using my email program...

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Home PC Tune Up

2004-07-05T17:27:00Z

I just read a post on Ed Bott's blog about helping a non-programmer clean up their computer. Ironically, I did spend some time this weekend cleaning up my parents computer. It must have somethiing to do with the whole July 4th, Independance Day(US) idea. "Break free from spyware and viruses!"

Here's the expanding tune up checklist:

install anti-spyware software and configure it to run automatically on startup. I use SpyBot Search and Destroy. [I've been using Ad-Aware]
enable their existing Windows Xp firewall, just turn it on
give them anti-Virus software (or install the free version of AVG)
run diskcleanup and defrag
lower the size of the IE cache [crazy bugs happen when this gets full]
turn the security in IE up (for ActiveX controls) or install FireFox [I just installed FireFox]
Get the latest patches from Windows Update and turn on Automatic Updates.
Grab the utilities from Gibson Research Corporation that disable unnecessary Windows services (like Universal Plug 'n Play and Windows Messenger service).
go back to GRC and run a free Shields Up! scan to see how well protected the PC actually is.

Credit goes to Scott Hanselman, Ed Bott, and Marc Orchant

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Still need to track referrals?

2004-06-30T21:08:00Z

My blog engine does not track referrals yet, and I am contemplating how important they really are. With services like Feedster, Technorati and PubSub, you can easily track where links to your site exist. I will probably end up implementing referral tracking in the interest of capturing all data possible, but I wonder how much that data will get lost and if it will just take up hard drive space.

When I setup dasBlog as my engine last November, I checked all of the tracking textboxes thinking I would enjoy logging and even getting an email for every referral, trackback, pingback to my blog. When I went to move my blog last week, I found that the logs had grown to some 6MB of files.

I think I'll take a step towards not keeping unused information and write without referrals for awhile. Who knows, maybe someday I'll be such a free and casually writer that I won't even accept comments...:p

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Windows 2003, so secure it doesn't work

2004-06-28T16:18:00Z

At least in this instance, the default security was a bit handicapping...

Last night I was attempting to setup a site in a pretty new instance of Windows 2003, and I wanted to transfer the files to the server via FrontPage Extensions. So I remote desktopped in, and opened IIS and clicked the "Configure Extensions" menuitem on the respective website. A local webpage opened and asked me to define the administrator and folder path, which I did and then clicked the button. Waa-laa, up comes the fancy gear-shifting image!

Waiting...

Hmm, nothing changed. Close IE window. Click "Configure Extensions" link again in IIS. Click Button on web page again. Gear-shifting image appears.

Waiting...

Repeat a few times double checking connections and everything. No good.

Ok, fine, its late I'll just email myself the files using my fancy gMail account. After sending the zipped files I attempt to login to gMail, where I have to enable cookies and javascript even to get into it. I see one of the files has arrived, but then a lightbulb goes on. Bing! I flip back to IIS, click "Configure Extensions", click the button, gear-shifty things come up and Boom! The page uses the newly enabled Javascript to show me an error. Apparantly I had moved some files under the application root that had some past Front Page extension logs in them and I needed to delete them before I could enable Extensions for this website.

So there you have it, gMail is good for something beyond a status symbol.

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Adam gets a new blog!

2004-06-24T21:22:00Z

Ok, this is the last "Adam gets a new..."

I've got a new blog engine, as well as a new look. I can't take any credit for the new look as it's almost a complete copy of D. Keith Robinson's blog. I've always thought that he's had the best blog layout, so while creating the new engine I thought I'd just pay him tribute and create a near duplicate. The greatest value was the HTML structure of the site, what better way to learn then to emulate a site that passes XHTML, CSS and Section 508 validation tests successfully.

I'll change the skin soon, though, I don't want to cramp Keith's style for too long...

Now on to the new blog engine. I've been using dasBlog as my main blog and every blog community site that I am involved with uses DotText. I've liked and disliked parts of each, and I've always been a “write-it-yourself” guy, so I decided it was time to start fresh. I've just got the basics so far, but now I'll be able to experiment with a few ideas.

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