March 2004 - Posts

• I'm on spring break

  my wife and I decided to take the last week of march off making it a spring break of sorts.  I recommend this to anyone out there who has the time...  Pretend you're in college again;  Take a week off in spring. Plant some trees! [Watching: Our favorite movie: Fools Rush In]   Posted Mar 27 2004, 07:38 PM by dbrowning with no comments

• .NET Resource Generator

  Lutz Roeder (author of Reflector for anyone out there living under a rock) has posted yet another kick-ass tool.  A ResGen replacement for creating .NET resources. BTW, Lutz has the worlds tersest weblog!  ;)  His average post is about 10 words!  He's the anti-Chris Brumme.   Posted Mar 20 2004, 02:51 PM by dbrowning with no comments

• Interesting perf nugget from Eric Gunnerson...

  It seems that anytime you hit F5 in the IDE, the JIT is running in non-optimized debug mode: You see, whenever you do an F5 from inside the IDE, the IDE figures that you want to be able to debug your code, and therefore the JIT is put into debug mode, and you don't get the fully optimized path. This happens even if you are building in a release comparison. IIRC, if you do a CTRL-F5, you don't get this behavior, but it's generally a better idea to do any timings outside the IDE, as the IDE may have other impact on your timings. So if you're going to do any timings (even ad-hoc ones) do it with a release build from outside the IDE. Eric's full post   Posted Mar 20 2004, 02:39 PM by dbrowning with no comments

• Fawcette and other TechPubs: The writing is on the wall

  Jason Mauss has some advice for Fawcette and other technical publications that are struggling in this era of blogging.  If you work for (or better yet are in charge of) a technical publication you should read through Jason's post and see some of the ideas he has that may help you get back on your feet. I'm with Jason; I like reading magazines.  I still have active subscriptions to Dr. Dobbs and Java Developers Journal.  Trust me, with a little creative thinking magazine companies could get back on their feet. Of course, one way they could help themselves would be to pay their authors!  This way people in the industry would write for them.  I have a dozen good ideas for articles, and would love to write another one (for either Fawcette or someone else), but I'm not going to do it for free!  By not paying their authors they are killing themselves.  The word is getting out.  Pretty soon they aren't going to be able to find anyone to write for them because everyone one will know it will take 2 years to get paid! This whole thing frustrates me!   Posted Mar 16 2004, 09:48 AM by dbrowning with 6 comment(s)

• The best VS.NET tip ever

  Thanks to a post by JoeN I now know how to turn off the dynamic help "feature" in VS.NET!   In VS 2002 and 2003, there is not way through the IDE to turn off Dynamic Help but where there is a registry there is a way! You can turn it off via the following registry key: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.1\Dynamic Help] "Never Show DH on F1"="YES"     Posted Mar 15 2004, 09:20 PM by dbrowning with 2 comment(s)

• Answer to Winform rant from Robert.

  Julian responds to Robert's rant about how WinForms are inferior to WebForms. 'couldn't have said it better myself Julian!       Posted Mar 15 2004, 09:07 PM by dbrowning with no comments

• Long-Range Technical Plan Feedback

  I'm currently working on our Long Range Technical Plan that maps out our group's long-term vision; out to 2008.  The audience is upper-management (so can't be super-technical), but it does need to provide a high-level roadmap of my groups technical vision. I contributed to this document last year, but this is my first take at creating one, so I thought I would look to the community to help with ideas.  Anyone out there working on a long range plan similar to mine?  Anything I should include?  Below is a quick list of things that I've got so far: 2004-2006 WS-I compliance Adherence of 4 (or 5) SOA tenets Repeatability of development process (CMM level 2-3) Department-wide data sharing strategy (web services, async messaging, replication) SOA-based "Systems Integration" layer (and development strategy) for legacy applications Async Service Communication Infrastructure (Federated Search, service discovery and selection, data transformation) Single Sign On and unified security realm Reusable client-side frameworks and glue Indigo migration strategy 2007-2008 Longhorn migration strategy This is where I need the most input! Thanks for any ideas!     Posted Mar 15 2004, 11:12 AM by dbrowning with 4 comment(s)

• VS 2003 Tip #3: View exception information with $exception

  No matter how long I use a tool there are always features I never know existed.  This is one of them...   Well, in Everett the debugger team put in a little feature called $exception. The next time you crash in C# or J# go ahead and dismiss the dialog. Open the locals window and take a peek at $exception there (chills are setting in right now). Expand it and you can see all the delightful things inside the Exception object - Messages, Stacktrace, Inner Exception etc - everything you would have gotten had you put a try catch around the code and caught the exception object. Is that cool or what? I mean, is this doc'ed anywhere! Check out more usefull tips at shaykatc's weblog [Listening to: John Mayer - Heavier Things]   Posted Mar 14 2004, 04:17 PM by dbrowning with 1 comment(s)

• New BlogJet Version Available

  BlogJet has released a new Beta (1.0.0.15).  Download it here.  Here's the release notes: FEATURES * FeedDemon's "Blog this" support. * Gutter for code editor. * Enabled FTP settings for dasBlog. BUG FIXES * Fixed bugs with custom images paths. * Normal/Code tabs blinking eliminated. * Unable to remove links fixed. * Fixed bug with voice upload. * Fixed shortcuts in code editor. * Other bug fixes. I'm hooked on BlogJet.  I use it for all my posting to .TEXT (both my work blog and this one).  Glad to see it now supports FeedDemon's "Blog this"! [Listening to: Helmet - In the Meantime]   Posted Mar 14 2004, 02:55 PM by dbrowning with no comments

• FireFox is flaking out!

  Ok, I am a diehard Firefox user, but the past few days it has been seriously flaking out.  Anytime after you download a file, it tries to copy it from your $TEMP directory to the place you want your downloads to go (the Desktop for me).  Well for some reason Firefox is now bombing when it attempts to copy the file from $TEMP to that destination directory. As a workaround, you can open the $TEMP folder and copy the file manually, but you have to do it before you hit "ok" on the error dialog.  If you don't then Firefox will delete the file. I've reinstalled and the problem is still here.  Guess I'll use IE until I figure out a better way. :(   Posted Mar 14 2004, 02:49 PM by dbrowning with 1 comment(s)