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My favorite conference/summit is now open for registration. If you are a developer in GIS or even just getting into mapping and location, this is a must go. You’ll find how to use the ESRI Silverlight SDK, Flex, JavaScript and the new iPhone SDK. So many developers for the Apple iPhone with great knowledge of Objective-C and Cocoa are waiting for the ESRI iPhone SDK that will provide you with all the ArcGis online maps and functionality  to create your applications. Registration What's Included All scheduled sessions Presummit seminars ESRI Showcase GIS Solutions EXPO and Social DevSummit party Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday’s continental breakfast, lunch, and beverage breaks   When? March 22-25, 2010 From the official...

I have been receiving a few emails about my old post how to fix the javascript error Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManagerParserErrorException on ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX 1.0. Looks like google maybe is not looking in those old post anymore for people to find it, so I reposted for your convenience. Hope that helps now, or maybe is a problem with Graffiti CMS. I'm planning to move the blog to something better and more optimized by search engines. Original post from 2007 Most annoying issue with MS ASP.NET 2.0 Ajax 1.0 is the error Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManagerParserErrorException that will crash the web app. I found a great article from Eilon Liptonhttp://weblogs.asp.net/leftslipper/archive/2007/02/26/sys-webforms-pagerequestmanagerparsererrorexception...

Tonight at Hudson Software Craftsmanship , I paired with another group member and worked on the PotterKata for the first time.  I’d seen NotMyself write about it a few days ago, which prompted me to suggest it for the group to work on ( summary of the meeting here ). Briefly, this kata is a fairly real-world exercise in that it has to do with business rules for a shopping cart that are non-linear.  In this case, the rules are: One copy of any of the five books costs 8 EUR. If, however, you buy two different books from the series, you get a 5% discount on those two books. If you buy 3 different books, you get a 10% discount. With 4 different books, you get a 20% discount. If you go the whole hog, and buy all 5, you get a huge 25% discount...

The new VS 2010 has a new lineup of versions which you can find described on the Visual Studio 2010 Products page .  Some things to note: Ultimate is the new Suite The “Data Dude” SKU is now fully incorporated in the Premium and Ultimate versions Premium and Ultimate come with a production license for Expression Studio 3, as well as Visio and Project 2010. All versions now come with some Windows Azure pieces for dev/test use All versions ship with Team Foundation Server (which now supports running on the client as a lightweight alternative to a full server-side install ), providing version control, build automation, bug tracking, and continuous automation out of the box very quickly Read More...

I decided to reinstall Win7 on one of my laptops because it was acting up – turns out that’s not helping and I think at this point it’s a hardware problem (either memory or hard drive – I’m going to try memory next).  In the course of troubleshooting the problem, I decided to rule out a bad installer DVD for Windows 7 (the installer was failing, saying it couldn’t access certain required files).  So I created a USB installer for Windows 7 x64.  And since I’ve been meaning to install Win7 on my Dell mini10 for a while (which has no CD/DVD reader), I also created a separate USB installer for it for Win7 32-bit x86. I found this post to be helpful, but it has some problems in the original post that are corrected in the comments Read...

Last year I wrote about Avoiding Dependencies and described some Insidious Dependencies (with help from many commenters) that many developers might not immediately recognize as dependencies.  It occurred to me today that I should point out that dependencies themselves are not intrinsically bad design – all software has dependencies.  The important distinction here that I think is a best practice is that one should make efforts to avoid entrenched dependencies on things that are likely to change . As an example, I write most of my software using Microsoft .NET.  I’m inherently taking a dependency on the CLR.  If at some point the customer’s needs dictate that I need to move to Java or Ruby, that is most likely going to be...

Eight years ago this month I gave my first presentation at a conference.  It was DevConnections’ Fall 2001 show, and it was held in Scottsdale, Arizona at the Princess Resort.  The show was delayed a couple of weeks from its originally scheduled dates, and took place Sep 30 to Oct 3rd, as a result of the events of 11 September 2001.  I still vividly remember the alarm with which my seatmate on the flight over (an older lady) observed that they had given us all plastic knives with our meals.  I reassured her, “It’s OK, we all have them.” As a result of the times and the rescheduling, the resort was a ghost town and the conference attendance was, shall we say, light.  I think my 3 sessions pulled in attendance numbers...

This week I found myself wanting to search within files of a given extension for a particular substring.  I often find myself missing UNIX’s grep tool.  In any event, I tried using the default Windows Vista file search dialog, but found that if I wanted to search for “connection” or “database” within all files ending with “.cs” or “.config” I was unable to do so.  I’m guessing there actually *is* a way to do this from the GUI, but after spending a couple of minutes either searching all files for the text “.cs” or else searching for files named “connection” I opted to just do it from the command line using PowerShell. PowerShell is just freaking amazing.  Seriously.  Being able to easily store collections of objects in...

(this is a submission I made to the upcoming 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know book) Of all the principles of programming, Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) is perhaps one of the most fundamental. The principle was formulated by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas in The Pragmatic Programmer , and underlies many other well-known software development best practices and design patterns. The developer who learns to recognize duplication, and understands how to eliminate it through appropriate practice and proper abstraction, can produce much cleaner code than one who continuously infects the application with unnecessary repetition. Duplication is waste Every line of code that goes into an application must be maintained, and is a potential source of future...

I was lucky enough to travel to Bogota to teach a ESRI ArcGIS Silverlight API workshop for the LAUC. All ESRI distributors in South America came to the conference and some came to the workshop. Was great meeting all the people passionate about GIS. It’s always great to travel to different countries and learn new cultures. Kills me to be away from my wife and kids, yet the opportunity of seeing new countries and meeting new people is just great. Below a few snapshots of the week. Picture above the ESRI logo in Spanish The class learning the ESRI Silverlight API for ArcGIS Server. Picture above of the students attending the Silverlight workshop from different ESRI distributors at break time. Picture above a lunch with all the students, Silverlight...