Jason Alexander's Blog

Blogmailr on Digg!

2006-11-08T21:56:32Z

Wow, we made it on Digg. Check it out:

http://digg.com/tech_news/Free_Blog_by_email_Service_to_Simplify_Blog_Publishing

If you have a few seconds, run out and give us a Digg!

Published with BlogMailr

WTH IE Team?

2005-12-23T14:14:00Z

So, I normally post over at my personal site (http://JasonA.net), but I'll be honest - it doesn't get the exposure that this site does. ;) And, that's okay... but I wanted to make sure someone (*cough*the IE team*cough*) saw this.

My question is: What the heck happened with the latest Windows updates, IE Team?

Now, granted, maybe I'm a bad boy for having FireFox installed on my system *smirk*, but ever since the last windows updates were applied, I can no longer even use Internet Explorer. When I type in an address in IE and hit enter, it spawns FireFox and FireFox opens it.

I've tried uninstalling FireFox, re-installing IE, everything, to no avail.

Normally, I would call this an update anomaly and re-pave my machine, but it's now happened on two of my computers after applying the updates (one XP Pro box, and one Server 2003 box).

<sarcasm>
I didn't realize you guys would give up so easily to FireFox! If you want me to switch full-time, just say so!
</sarcasm>

:-)

My blog is moving to http://JasonA.net!

2004-09-24T17:01:00Z

As I hinted to in my last post, I'm moving my blog off of weblogs.asp.net to my own domain:

http://JasonA.net

Please update your readers to:

http://jasona.net/blog/rss.aspx

Thanks!

-Jason

More on the Telligent Positions at http://JasonA.net

2004-09-22T13:13:00Z

Heads up, I've explained a bit more about Telligent's positions and requirements from Rob's original post:

http://weblogs.asp.net/RHoward/archive/2004/09/21/232682.aspx

over at my new blog, http://JasonA.net. If you're interested, check it out:

http://jasona.net/blog/archive/2004/09/22/22.aspx

Setting up nGallery on Mono

2004-08-20T20:36:00Z

I met Joseph at our last PDNUG meeting. Great guy! One of the few out there that shares my love, and respect, for the Mono project.

I recently came across a post of his explaining how to setup nGallery to run on Mono. If you're interested, check it out:

http://www.monotropa.net/MonoTropa/nGalleryHowTo.html

Cool stuff. I knew we were Mono compatible (verified by the Mono team) but didn't have all the setup instructions (from a clean machine) myself. It's awesome to see Joseph document this!

Mistake identities

2004-08-10T13:44:00Z

Too funny, Rob posted about how he's constantly getting mistaken for “Ron Howard” of current directing fame, former Happy Days fame, and so on.

And, then he just has to go there... ;)

Yes, I constantly get the, “Hey, 'Jason Alexander' isn't that that guy...” “...from Seinfeld?”, I'll interrupt. It was really bad during the Seinfeld days where it was still in production. Over the past few years it's slowed down as Seinfeld has slipped in syndication, and as the overweight, bald actor slipped into obscurity.

But, then he had to go and sign up to do those KFC commercials! And, before I knew, it had all started again! Luckily, he shot off his mouth and quickly got “let go” from the KFC gig.

But, much to my chagrin, I saw a commercial the other day for a new show he's coming out with. I just groaned, as my wife giggled in the background. :)

Database Schema to Wiki Trick

2004-07-22T22:24:00Z

Ok, this is a really slick trick for generating wiki mark-up for the database schema in SQL Server. One of my buddies, Terry Denham from the Community Server :: Forums team (previously the ASP.NET Forums) and co-worker here at Telligent, came up with this nice little script:

select '!!!Database Schema', '1' as [dorder]
union all
select '!!!!' + o.name, '2.' + o.name + '.0' [dorder]
         from sysobjects o where o.type = 'U' and o.name like 'forums%'
union all
select         '||''''''Column Name''''''||''''''Data Type''''''||''''''Nullable''''''||''''''Key''''''||''''''Description''''''||', '2.' + o.name + '.1' [dorder]
         from sysobjects o where o.type = 'U' and o.name like 'forums%'
union all
select        '||[' + c.name + ']||' + type_name(c.xusertype) + '(' + convert(varchar(20), convert(int, c.length)) + ')' + '||' + case when c.isnullable = 0 then 'no' else 'yes' end + '||||||'
          , '2.' + o.name + '.2.' + convert(varchar(20), c.colid) [dorder]
         from sysobjects o inner join syscolumns c on o.id = c.id where o.type = 'U' and o.name like 'forums%'
order by 2, 1

Just paste the output into your favorite wiki (this has been tested with FlexWiki) and, voila, you have your schema in a nice readable wiki format!

Also, you can run the following SQL script to generate the corresponding data dictionary:

select '!!!Data Dictionary', '1' as [dorder]

union all

select distinct '[' + c.name + ']', '2.' + c.name from sysobjects o inner join syscolumns c on o.id = c.id where o.name like 'forums%' and o.type = 'U'

order by 2, 1

This works great when you have pascal cased columns because your columns will become wiki links, and you can then use the latter script to gen the corresponding data dictionary.

Very nice!

(NOTE: Apologies on the poor formatting. Somehow this editor has mangled my poor post!)

The New ASP.NET Site & a 2.0 Tip

2004-07-22T17:47:00Z

One of our great first projects here at Telligent Systems has been to take up the ASP.NET website and:

Update it to run on ASP.NET 2.0 B1
Give it a bit of a facelift.

There's many little things we've learned along the way in this project (and I hope to capture more of these later), but one of the most important ones I've found so far has been the ability to install the 2.0 framework without affecting any other vroots installed on the server. In our case, we needed to install the 2.0 framework on the current www.asp.net server farm without upgrading the 1.1 vroots (i.e., the current site).

Fortunately for us, there's a great set of command line switches to do just that:

dotnetfx.exe /q:a /C:"install.exe /q /msipassthru MSI_PROP_BEGIN""NOASPUPGRADE=1""MSI_PROP_END"

This is pure greatness.

And, if you're interested in seeing what we're doing exactly, you can hit:

http://beta.asp.net

We're doing a nice and quiet “soft roll-out” this week while tweaking and suring things up. And, as you can see, it's only the home page at this point. But, you'll get the full site soon enough, I promise. ;)

So tell me, what do you think?

More great news!

2004-07-16T13:32:00Z

As Scott announced yesterday, yesterday was his first day with us here at Telligent Systems! We're super excited to have him on board! We're quickly staffing up with all-stars, and really building a sound foundation. We have nothing but great things going here!

And, to follow that up, you see that Rob announced our product line yesterday, as well! Also, very exciting! It's great to have so many wonderful products under such a strong umbrella: ASP.NET Forums, .Text, and nGallery!

Of course, we can't say much about the long-term plans. But, I can say it's going to be pretty incredible. Keep your eyes peeled!

Has Moore's Law made us lazy developers?

2004-07-09T14:24:00Z

So, my shower thought this morning: Has Moore's Law made us lazy developers?

Jumping back a sec to explain a bit, I was reading Plip's blog about how your windows look and the side bar application caught my eye. Being one that's always interested in more eye candy and nifty toys, I ran out and installed it immediately. I've been playing with it, and tweaking it for the days when I realized that it's taking up around 50MBs of memory.

I was amazed. I tried removing a few panels and modules and tweaking it down a bit. But, to no real avail.

And, okay, 50MBs is nothing on my desktop that has 1GB of RAM. But, still, when did this become acceptable? I understand memory usage is relative. And, with our old TRS-80's from when I was a kid has little-to-no RAM, but I just found this interesting.

It makes me wonder if developers these days still worry about writing as efficient code as possible and conserving as much memory as they can, or do they chalk it up to Moore's Law and just say, “Add more memory!”

Of course, this isn't a new topic. I'm not being terribly insightful or thinking a new thought or raising a new question. I'm just curious and reiterating the same concerns, I suppose.

Anyways, I'm rambling now...

Telecommuting

2004-07-08T14:38:00Z

The Register has an interesting article on telecommuting stats.

With Telligent, I'm working from my home office currently. Initially, we're going to try to go with a true distributed model with most of our employees. I think this is great because it doesn't limit our hiring geographically, and I would contest that the technology is there to easily collaborate still.

We use things like SourceGear's Vault for our distributed source control. IMHO, that's still Vault's biggest advantage (among many others, of course) is the ability to easily create a source control solution that can be used world wide with little problems, and still amazingly fast speeds.

We use Countersoft's Gemini for issue tracking across all of our projects. Though, I have a serious eye on Sourcegear's Dragnet product that's in the works. I'm hoping Eric can hook me up with a beta! :-)

And, of course, IM is priceless. E-mail is good, but IM is better. Nothing beats immediate gratification.

But, given that there are so many enablers out there now for online collaboration, such as forums, wikis, blogs, issue trackers, free VoIP solutions, why shouldn't this be able to work?

I'm curious to see what everyone else thinks about online collaboration. Are we there yet? Can we piece it together with various products, or do we need products like Groove to help us out?

Thoughts?

Wow, what a year so far!

2004-07-01T22:07:00Z

I just got the e-mail today confirming my recognition as a ASP.NET MVP! How exciting! That's very cool... it didn't seem that long ago that I was hunkering down, determined to learn all I could about .NET, and then later attempting to get as involved in the .NET community as much as possible! It's truly an honor!

That follows my nomination and acceptance as an ASPInsider just a few months prior! I'm now associated with two very awesome groups and groups of people. What an awesome compliment! Though, very much undeserved. I only hope I can continue to bring my experience to the .NET community and continue to build upon nGallery and continue to bring more great open source .NET projects to the community!

So, of course I'm still reeling... MVP, ASPInsiders, working with Rob Howard at Telligent Systems... whew. What a roller coaster so far!

Anyways, thank you to everyone. I really appreciate the recognition and awards. It's truly a pleasure to be involved with such a great community of people and technology. :)

Blog Roller?

2004-06-18T03:31:00Z

Ok, I'm looking for a fairly simple app that I”m sure someone must have written already: a web-based blog roller.

Basically, I want to input a list of multiple RSS feeds and have a aggregrated list of posts from those blogs in a fashion much like that of the http://weblogs.asp.net page.

I thought I remembered seeing someone building one previously. But, I can't find it now.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks! :)

Update: Thanks for the comments guy. Unfortunately, I didn't mean a true blog aggregator/reader like SharpReader, Bloglines, etc... This would be a web-based interface that you input in a list of RSS feeds and it then generates a “front page” listing of the latest posts from the entered blogs. Ideally, it would be something I could re-skin and use for a corporate blogging solution where I don't necessarily want to host everyone's blogs, but I just want to pull in their existing blogs from other locations.

Does that make any sense?

To up the anty a bit, I've also got a Gmail account for the person who successfully points me to some software I can use. :)

Plans Unveiled!

2004-06-14T21:34:00Z

A few weeks ago I posted about the fact that I was leaving Match.com. At the time, unfortunately, I couldn't say much about where I was going or what I was doing. I apologize for baiting you. ;)

But, now that Rob has finally announced his plans publicly, I can also announce mine!

Rob first pulled me to the side back at DevDays, telling me about his plans to leave Microsoft and start his own company. He asked if I would be interested at all. Of course, I can't lie - I was ecstatic! Of course, I was interested!

After a few months of chatting about it over lunch, and a night out with our spouses to let them meet and chat, it was decided - I had to sign on!

And, with that I accepted a position with Telligent Systems as Chief Solutions Architect, leading up the solutions arm of the company. It's an extremely exciting opportunity to not only work with and for Rob, but to also help build something from the ground up. Many of us deal with frustrating environments, processes, management in our current jobs... this is a chance to do it right! With Rob's direction and much of the culture and experience he's bringing with him from Microsoft, and my experiences and best practices, it's sure to be a true success!

It's now been one week since signing on full-time, too. And, wow... talk about jumping in head first! We're already slammed with business and managing deadlines! What a great problem to have! And, like I mentioned before, the momentum just continues to build... it's insane!

So, keep an eye on the website - we'll be doing a public launch very soon!

A day of mixed emotions!

2004-05-14T20:45:00Z

First of all, I'm sad today that with great remorse I gave my two week notice here at Match.com. I'll be leaving behind a very talented group of developers, as well as a great group of friends. The camaraderie we shared was nothing I had experienced anywhere else before. It's going to be greatly missed!

But ultimately, I’m INCREDIBLY EXCITED to be moving on to new endeavors. Unfortunately, I can’t talk about where or what it is exactly just yet. But, it’s big and it’s coming with the momentum of a freight train! Now I just have to hang on for the ride of my life! :)