.NET Blog - Chris Frazier Style

Hit a new "milestone" in my current project today, at the same time really starting to understand where the term "over-engineering" is founded - of course, from engineers.

Background: I'm adding features that were requested by engineers onto the Risk Analysis project. Basically, there are 4 components that help clearly define what is known in the Oil&Gas Exploration industry as Recovery Factor - How much oil or gas do we think we're gonna get?

They're bullISH. From an end-user (who may be an engineer) perspective, tho - these things are important. So I get to learn VB.NET.

The original component used to make the calculations and the associated graphs was written about a year and a half ago in VB6. Since the move to .NET, we decided that it would be a good idea to upgrade the VB6 code to VB.NET. So far so good, but guess what? I'm a C# programmer :S

So I'm not finding VB.NET that difficult to work with, as a matter of fact, I'm kinda digging the compatibility namespace since it's letting me leave a goodly amount of the code alone. Actually, if I stick with the fx to do my bidding, the code is looking structurally identical to the code that I write in C# (not aesthetically or syntacticly) heh! go figure.

Luke Blogs of the dream of WORA.

Slightly more interesting to me at this point, tho, is his experiences with log4net, the popular .NET alternative to log4j...This is the kind of stuff I've been looking for, and would have if I had more than 2.5 readers. (That third one is on and off ;)

See, I have a current incarnation of an application that uses the Exception Management Application Block from M$, plus some custom schtuff I put in so I could have notification via email. I got very little feedback on which was the best to use, and the general concensus was that log4net has a broader range of purpose.

That's cool, but added to this, I doubt I would run into Luke's problem simply because I've yet to write a downloadable windows forms application, so my apps sit on a server which I have a lot of control over.

Eh.

Heh - I get more traffic here and there  from a post I made a while back that had the words "Object reference not set...." you know, you've seen it.

I guess this is a really common problem. There's got to be a way to give developers, novice and seasoned, more information about this exception than is currently given. I'm sure there's someone in M$Land who can shed some light on this.

Any takers?

Corporate Blogs Catching on 

It's like a plague. I have some unmanned Tripod sites that sent the "webmaster" (yours truly) an email detailing how someone should have a Blog for the summer.

Am I just late in seeing this stuff?

So, after my wah-wah yesterday about Visual Studio, I was looking thru my hotmail account and realized that they offer mobile services. Hey! I've got a cell phone now, let's try it out!

After the confirmation message, I got a horoscope:

Scorpio: Today someone is being unreasonable. That someone could be you.

As I'm reinstalling windows just because one or two programs aren't doing what they should be doing; as I am cursing Windows set up for not letting me delete C: as a partition; as I'm trying to figure out why everything is blowing up on me after so long having no problems.

Oh well, 29 minutes and a few key programs left.

Visual Studio .NET has not been my friend lately.

Last week, ASPNET was having issues - taking up to 4 minutes to compile a (relatively) small project. Now, I can't get to any SQL Server instance on my network - When I attempt to connect thru the server explorer, I get the nice friendly message "The specified procedure could not be found."

Thanks, Visual Studio.

I can't help but wonder if this may be intentional...VS.NET 2003 just came out, and now I'm having problems w/ 2002 after over a year of no problems...things that make you go hmm.

Thanks to a recent upgrade(?) to this here blog engine, I was able to recover a story I wrote a while back that I never set to "active". It's called Enter the QuickButton and it deals with adding DHTML rollover behaviors to the ImageButton control that ships with asp.net.

Enjoy!

Each Workspace has a maximum limit of 500 members. 

[gotdotnet workspaces]

Wha? I thought it was only 20. Very interesting....

I'm still kicking around some ideas for an online aggregator, so I can maybe look over some of the blogs I frequent over my loverly dial-up connextion at home. I wanted to use a tree structure like the left pane of SharpReader (and others, but sharpreader's what I use a lot:).

In my searching, I found a great xml tree component from youngpup. Well, I've had my hands on it for a while, but I'm just now getting to the meat of it. This component uses xslt to convert an xml file to html, then uses javascript to toggle expanded state. Good component, but there's a little snafu.

I want to take an opml file (generated from sharpreader) and use it to populate my tree. This means I can either a) apply xslt to the opml file so it will retain the structure needed for the javascript component or b) write a custom server control that will take opml and generate the necessary html for the javascript.

Not sure which way I'm gonna go at this point, but I'm leaning toward b as I have experience with server control authoring and zilch with xslt. Might be fun to learn xslt, but I think that I may leave that route to a later date and a more seasoned developer.

Earlier tonight, I showed my girlfriend Tina some of the work I've done, namely www.velocitydatabank.com and my most recent endeavor, Risk Analysis. Like whoa.

It's different showing this stuff to those who are not primarily technically oriented, to say the least. She was slightly impressed, but I think she just said that to make me feel good about myself. That was nice of her.

Has anyone else had experiences like this? I remember showing my mom my company's website when I first rolled it out, and she kind of got this glazed look over her eyes like, wha? Anyways, just thought I'd share.