July 2003 - Posts
So everyone's talking about Edit & Continue. I missed it at first but got used to not having it. I had always found it great for fixing a quick typo here and there and just moving on. Much preferable to stopping the app, fixing the problem, starting the app and getting all the way back to where you were at the time of the issue. But now a much better choice is unit testing (which was available then as well). You don't have the overhead of the entire application to deal with when working with unit testing.
But for me, this begs a different question. In VB6 IDE you could actually do this from the immediate window. Start up a module, instantiate a class and test one of it's methods. Or even experiment with VB functions that you had just discovered. Although nUnit, etc are great, there are times that I would love to still be able to do this in the VS.NET IDE but you can't because you need the CLR running. There must be a tool the enables this. Mostly I would like it to test functions and methods from the framework as I discover them.
This is awesome. Microsoft is putting on a free day of XML & Web Services training (aka Microsoft Technical Briefing Day) in Boston during the XML Web Services One show. This seems to be the doings of the gal of the hour, Rebecca (oh, it's hard now to call her Becky) Dias. Thanks Becky!! Free training with the likes of (among others) Yasser Shohoud, Scott Shortt, and Don Box. Plus Don Box will be doing a presentation at the Boston .NET user group meeting (www.bostondotnet.org). I think I just MIGHT be convinced to drive the 4 hours for this one!
NO! Nobody broke NDA. It's Ari Bixhorn's demo from VSLive that Fawcette has put on line!!
check it out
For those of you who use C# - you probably don't want to see this anyway.
Marcie points out a big pet-peeve of mine in our industry. I am SO happy that she is going to be speaking at Tech Ed. It makes one more woman speaker for the ranks for future conferences. If you look at conferences like VSLive, TechEd and Connections - you will notice very few speakers are women. At Connections Orlando, Marie Huwe from MS is a keynote speaker. This is amazing and wonderful. Besides Kimberly Tripp, one of the top SQL Server gurus, it is a rare day to see a keynote by a woman. Besides Marie, Asli Bilgin is the only other gal giving talks there. Kimberly is doint a pre-con session.
So it is totally awesome that Marcie is doing TechEd. She has been speaking at a lot of user groups. It's hard to break through to the conferences. You have to have a track record. Sometimes it is a “which comes first, the chicken or the egg” problem.
Marcie and Marie and Asli and others, such as Kate Gregory and Michele Leroux Bustamente, are great role models and because of them (and others) this WILL change. There are a lot of qualified women out there. They will get encouragement to speak up. In print we see Kathleen Dollard and Dianne Siebold a lot and Deborah Kurata (who speaks as well). But not too many more. We are creating an initiative that will be trying to push this so you better watch out for us!
it started last night with a notice from norton antivirus that W32.HLLW.Graps was detected and the file infected file could not be repaired. I made sure my definitions were updated and did a full system (all files) scan and it said everything was okay.
Then due to a big thunder & lightening storm last night, I powered down and unplugged everything in the office. THis morning when I started up my computer I got one message after the other - many .bat and .exe files with 2 viruses detected and could not be repaired. I had “bat.mumu.a.worm” and “w32.valla.3048”.
I downloaded the muma fix from symantec and ran it twice. Both times it said that I was not infected with the mumu virus. That's disturbing.
I am not sure where I got it. I was trying to look up someone's website when the first piece started last night. Even though their company name is Crossroads, crossroads.com and crossroads.net were not their site. But I was on one of those sites when I first saw the notification. I have satellite which protects me from a lot of incoming stuff. But geeze that was scary. I am pretty smart about emails with viruses and outlook protects me from some as well.
Well, those long process scans did give me some time to pack up a lot of the office at least!
Be careful out there.
I received a reply from my friend who teaches VB and Java classes at Champlain College. Even though they are gearing up for .NET (happy happy) they still teach VB6, C++, Java etc. and she is very happy to be the recipient of my Java 1.0 and VB5 books. Yes I did indeed spend three months when I left FoxPro, playing with Sun's Java workshop but there were just no data tools yet so that's when I made my fateful leap to VB4.
Maybe it's not too late for Matt Williams to get his books out of the dumpster and find a local college to share them with. I bet he's got some darned good notes in his!
I was asked to add a quick report to an ancient legacy app (still proudly in use by my client) in FoxPro 2.6.
I was having trouble with a query and thought about creating two queries and linking them for the report just to get on with my life.
Then suddenly it hit me: ado.net's dataRelation object is a very similar concept to FoxPro's relation “object”. If you wanted to join two resultsets you could “set relation to [fieldname] into [childtable]”. Then as you moved through one table, I had completely forgotten about that over the years and did have to make the leap of understanding the function of a dataRelation when ADO.Net came out.
I wonder... and I know just who to ask!
Someone “teased” me recently for being a name dropper. I have thought about this - in regards to the name(s) dropped and I think I beg to differ. The particular focus was some of the folks at Microsoft. Microsoft has made a big point (and now official policy) of ensuring that their staff engage with the developer community. And many of them have done so quite successfully.
I remember how difficult it was for many years to get tech support. Now the situation is so different that you can post a question or comment to the WSE newsgroup and have someone along the lines of Keith Ballinger respond to the post. Microsoft has ensured that if a developer wants to learn more about their tools that not much stands in their way.
Many people in our community have been given “star“ status and certainly deserve it for the ways in which they outshine so many of us. But this does not, and I think should not define an “us and them“ culture. Everyone is so accessible and available.
Though I absolutely admire so many of these people, I still regard them as my peers in many ways. We are all part of the same team. We are all part of the same community. We have a lot of the same experiences and dreams. And c'mon - we're all just a bunch of geeks when it comes down to it.
I just had to use Scoble's quote, nay - HEADLINE on this one! Great work, Scott. (Which I suppose lately has really been, Great Scott, Work!)
Besides the Jan 99 - Dec 01 VBPJ and VS Magazines, I also finally threw out a gazillion 3.5" floppy installs. It was painful but a LOT of fun. It was mostly fun to look through them because it was like a little journey through my past as well as a little software history. Just for fun and posterity's sake - here is the list. All of the books that I don't want I am offering to Champlain College which has a lot of software courses - Java and Microsoft and more. They also host our monthly meetings for www.vtdotnet.org during the summertime.
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