Erik Porter's Blog

Microsoft Phantom Car Patent

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000100055049/

I'd have to say this is one of the best and worst ideas I've ever seen.  I've been thinking of some ways to use projection.  I will say a car is one place I had been thinking about but more for virtually "seeing through buildings" to see where it is you really need to go.  This virtual car driving in front of you is pretty awesome, but I'll place a bet that pretty early on, someone would rear-end someone else and say they didn't see them and sue Microsoft, but whatever...

Dynamic Content on Safari

We have some crystal reports we call to generate invoices.  Basically just setting the content-type and content-disposition header, doing a BinaryWrite, passing it the byte array generated by the crystal report and calling Flash and Close on the Response.  Works just fine in every browser of every OS except for Safari on Mac.  Going through some Community Server code yesterday I noticed that after every Response.Redirect (at least in the code I was looking in) they called Response.End.  I figured maybe it was related, so I added a call to End() and all of a sudden our dynamic reports worked.  Hope this helps someone else.

Validation Groups in ASP.NET 1.1

So in ASP.NET 2.0 you can have validation groups so one set of fields can be validated when a certain button is clicked and another set of fields on the same page can be validated when another button is clicked.  I don't find myself needing this too often, but this is fantastic for when I do need it.  However, I've recently found a place in one of our applications where we needed it and we're using ASP.NET 1.1.  How to get around it?  This gem of an article describes a kind of cool rig for faking validation groups yourself.  It unfortunately will only work server-side and not client-side, but at least it's possible.

Try Catch When

This is a feature that's been in VB (.NET) since day one and is very cool.  If you've never used it before, what it does is add a condition to your catch statement so the catch is only executed the condition is met.  I've never really had much of a use for it, but it's good to know it's there.  A couple days ago though, I had a really good use for it though, even though a bit unconventional.  My scenario is basically that after a long process a webservice is called to update some things.  In the event of a failure, it saves what needs to go up to an xml document to try again later.  The "try again later" times are when the application loads or when they click on a certain button.  When the application loads, if there was a failed call from before, I want the app to try the call again, but don't do anything if it fails and just move on with loading.  When they click the button, I want it to also try the webservice call again, but this time display an exception or message or whatever with what went wrong.  Try Catch When is perfect for this.  Here's the code:

Public Shared Function SaveChangesToServer(ByVal ShouldThrowException As Boolean) As Boolean
     Dim Success As Boolean = False

     If GetHasChanges() Then
          Try
               'Execute WebService Call

               Success = True
          Catch Ex As Exception When ShouldThrowException
               'Clean-up
               Throw Ex
          Catch
               'Clean-up
          End Try
     End If

     Return Success
End Function

Well, I think it's handy anyway...go VB!  ;)

UPDATE: Thanks, Steve for pointing out my screw up.  Appreciate it!  :)  Who knows, maybe I have more.  Good to know I have readers checking this stuff out though!  ;)

Project FAZR Blogging

We've starting blogging.  Check out my first post.

Samsung Phone Again

The phone that I just blogged about is in a Channel 9 video.  Very awesome!

Make Your Own IFilter

I've been looking around (read: googling) for how to create your own IFilter in Windows Vista and haven't come up with anything good.  Figures I stumble across something on the Channel 9 Wiki.  I should've looked there earlier.  Check it out...good stuff...

Samsung i300

I've had a Windows Mobile SmartPhone (Samsung i600) for quite some time now.  I love it and can't ever go back to a "regular" phone.  My only complaint with Verizon is that they only offer a few smartphones.  I just saw this review for the Samsung i300 due out in October and I'm impressed!  Check it out!  Unless I find something better, this is what I'll be upgrading to.  Apparently, part of the Midwestern accent is to end sentences with prepositions.  At least I do!  :P

Project Fazr

With a creative intro, I have been welcomed into Project Fazr.  I'm pretty excited about this!  Let's see what we can make happen with this interesting idea.