Jason Nadal

I've decided to delve more into fully unit-tested code and write an application from scratch using TDD methodologies after being re-invigorated by Robert C. Martin's fantastic Craftsman article series ( http://www.objectmentor.com/resources/publishedArticles.html -- click on the "Test Driven Development" category).

I had found out about SSW's Code Auditor product through one of those ubiquitous Top 10 .NET Developer Tool lists recently, and as I'm at the start of a new project, felt that I should run it through an auditor to nip common code errors in the bud as early as possible. This tool retails for about $305US, and can embed itself right into Visual Studio. Here's my thoughts on it. 

It'll be a short posting day for me today as I get ready to head down to sunny Miami for a few days. Learn2Asp is providing free training webcasts for ASP.NET as well as the opportunity for free Visual Studio standard, a price reduction on MSDN Pro, and some other goodies. You can get to the webcasts here. They seem to be targetting crossover developers, as the material is tailored to 3 distinct areas: JSP devs, PHP devs, and ColdFusion developers.

Found a post on how to install IIS7 on the latest build of Vista (5308), and wanted to do some staging for my stagnant personal site on my laptop (that has Vista installed), and decided to give it a whirl. Thanks, Dan Bartels for doing the writeup. That's some great site design on his page!

If you're trying to create a gridview, automatically bound to either a SqlDataSource or an ObjectDataSource (the better of the two options), and want edit and delete functionality, do not forget to set the DataKeyNames property to the primary key of the table or object you are trying to delete. Otherwise Edit/Update seems to work, but Delete will complain that it cannot find the parameter, even if you are defining DeleteParameters in the DataSource itself.

...then you might be running into this issue with the installers, as reported by Jason Sacks. Keep your eye on his blog for a resolution to this. Here's the telltale sign in the install logs that you'd see:

Here's an easy way to check if a temp table exists, before trying to create it (ie. for reusable scripts) from Simon Sabin's post :

I had ordered some 3D glasses for a very old TV show, based on the Pulfrich effect, in fact the show mentioned on that site, Doctor Who. I found a place online selling them for only 99 cents each, called Science Stuff. The cool thing is that they are great for sports with a lot of motion (like skiing, or what happens to be on the Olympic coverage now, replay of Figure Skating. The principle is that by tinting one side, you're slightly slowing the light hitting your eye, causing your brain to percieve 3D. There's the normal sensation with 3D glasses after you take them off, where your eyes feel wierd seeing the same amount of light in both eyes again!