Jason Tucker's Blog

Anacubis is live..

Just got an email saying that anacubis has gone live. Here is a little blurb from said email:

Thank you for registering your interest in the anacubis Google enabled viewer. We are pleased to inform you that this is now available on www.anacubis.com. The viewer will enable you to visually explore linkage between similar or linked websites.

Also the stated that you can download the View manager that will let you change, print, save views from the web.. ubercool!

Anyone attend the CAPAREA.Net UG Meeting Last Night?

Anyone attend? I missed it and I really wanted to check out the talk on InfoPath. So if you have any notes you can share ;)

Also Robert pointed me in the right direction to the Research Task Pane SDK. Can anyone tell me where in the world is the Office add-in for the Visual Studio?

Quick update [ Linkin Park Style ]

Tim writes:

The opening of Faint, track 7 off Linkin Park's Meteora, absolutely rocks.
Just wanted to share that with everyone :)

http://dotnetweblogs.com/TMarman/posts/4282.aspx

Yes sir it does, but by far "No one is listening" has to be the best track on the album.

Jumping into the Web Services world this week and next, expecting to play with DIME, WS-Security and the Office 2k3 Research Pane. Anyone else out there find the SDK's on the Beta Eval cd's yet? I sure can't..

Code line counting..

Duncan writes:

From time to time, when I've shown someone a system I built, I've been asked "How many lines of code is that?"... and my answer has always been the same... "I have no idea".

I've never even tried to count the lines of code in a project, and I have no idea why I would. Jason mentions in his post that some people have to account for their lines of code produced in a day and I think that is absolutely crazy. So if you write more lines of code, you are a more productive employee? I hate to point out such an obvious point, but I'd like to think that the important point is how many bugs you fixed or how many features you completed.... regardless of how much typing it required.

I hate the fact that I have to produce a report of lines of code. I totally agree that I should be judged on the quality of code that is produced and not how many lines it took. In fact I've gone as far as intentionally written more lines to solve a problem when I knew it would take less. My boss tells me that it was the best code I've ever written??!? Because it was 200 lines as opposed to 20. WTF?!

I think there is a mentality out there that more is better. Any developer would tell you that's not true ( unless it's money, sex or Mt. Dew ). But until we get more dev's into management *shutter*, I don't know when it will stop. Now of course this is all my opinion and does not represent the views of my employeer ;)

Oh and Duncan, you saved my ass with your DirectoryServices article. Thanks alot!

** Update **
Darren likes PLC...

PLC, WebServices and other things..

So it's been sometime now that I've finally have some free time to blog. Most of the past week has been getting all the paperwork done for my new house. If someone would have told me the amount of hair I would be pulling out before all this I don't think I would go through with it. And to top it all off, the delivery date for the house ( well condo really ) isn't till November.

For those of you that have to account for your time in the lines of code you write, or like me I have to give a status report every two weeks on the amount; check this out.  It's called Project Line Counter and it's an add-in for VS6 and VS.Net. It can take your entire solution and tell you the lines of code for the whole thing or on a per project basis. Here is a snip from the home page:

Key Features

• Now supports Visual Studio .NET - The world's first dual VC6/VC7 addin!    NEW!
• Automatically scans your workspace and project files.
• Varied statistical data about your source code, including: lines of code and comment lines.
• Includes parsers for: C/C++, VB, INI and other file types.    NEW!
• Can filter statistics based on workspace or project files and/or custom wildcards.  IMPROVED!
• Reporting & Exporting: 
  • Export as CSV file for processing by Microsoft Excel (includes sample worksheet with statistical analysis).
  • Export as XML for use with the report stylesheets.
• Online help.
• Full source code.

That's right! Full Source included! The only thing that I would like to have would be a line counter for the .aspx files and not just the .aspx.vb/.cs code behinds. I now export to XML and pretty it up in Word2003 for my manager to look at.

For a good laugh check this out. Funny stuff and this came by way of Jon Udell's blog.

I'm currently evaluating the VB Comments stuff from Fesersoft. A quick synopsis is that us VB.Net guys don't have the whizbang XML comments feature that C# does. This little app adds that functionality. I've been playing around with it and so far I am quite pleased with it. For example:

[c#]

1:             /// <summary>

2:             /// Required designer variable.

3:             /// </summary>

4:             private System.ComponentModel.Container components = null;

Now that's how it looks in C#. Here is the same code with the VB Comments assembly:

[vb.net]

<VBXC_Summary("Required designer variable")>

Private components As System.ComponentModel.IContainer

So instead of 4 lines of code it's only 2 for the VB.Net one. Not to shabby. Now once you start adding more summarys, comments, arguments and stuff it can get a little weird looking. I like the look of the XML Comments in C#, but it's great to have the functionality in VB.Net now.

Whew.. that's alot.. back to work I go. I'm going to start playing with the Speech SDK in the next few days along with Office 2003 and InfoPath..

Sweet! Sharpoint 2 Beta.

Free Text Box Web Control.

Anyone seen this: FreeTextBox. And as the name suggests it's free.

From the site:

 A free ASP.NET control written in C# implimenting MSHTML in Internet Explorer. It can be validated using standard ASP.NET validators and has many options for customization. This control is offered as is with no support, so please purchase one of the following fine products if you will need support (RichTextBox, soEditor, HTML TextBox, ActivEdit, Rich Content Editor.

FreeTextBox 1.5 BETA Coming soon: Office 11 Styles Active Buttons and Toolbars that reflect current text style (instead of always being inactive) Auto Curly quotes Tab color customization features Better JavaScript output through Peter Blum's RegisterScripts MS Word specific code sweeper

How would you like a 2 trillion dollar power bill?

This guy got one. By way of Yorkshire Post. FWIW, they run ASP.Net on thier site.

New Longhorn Build Leaked...