Mitch Rupp's .NET Blog

Real coders, real code.

HomeSkillet — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 14:35:00 GMT

They are awake, bleary, weary and barely lucid, secretly feeding their addiction. Yes, it is sad and depraved, and utterly reprehensible. Of course, they don't want you to know because they need to keep the mystery. It will make it all the more poignant when the truth does come out, because they have a plan, and it is big. They need to code. It is what makes them go; the juice that makes them feel alive, and it is all leading somewhere.

How true this is. I couldn't have said it better myself.

Lets try this again

HomeSkillet — Mon, 15 Mar 2004 19:56:00 GMT

Well, it has been a while since I have posted. A long while. Sorry about that. Since I my last post I moved nearly 300 miles, changed jobs (twice) and my third daughter was born. Whew. It looks like things are (hopefully) going to be slowing down a bit so I am going to make an effort to resume blogging. I will probably focus primarily on ASP.NET although it looks like I am going to be working with Windows Forms in the near future as well.

Thinker quiz

HomeSkillet — Mon, 05 May 2003 13:19:00 GMT

These results are interesting as my major prior to my switch to programming was pre-law. You can take the short exam here.

You are a Logical-Mathematical Thinker
		Logical-Mathematical thinkers: Like to understand patterns and relationships between objects or actions Try to understand the world in terms of causes and effects Are good at thinking critically, and solving problems creatively
Like Logical-Mathematical thinkers, Leonardo based his theories on evidence rather than speculation.		Other Logical-Mathematical Thinkers include Isaac Newton, Archimedes, Albert Einstein Careers which suit Logical-Mathematical thinkers include Physicist, Chemist, Biologist, Lawyer, Computer programmer, Engineer, Inventor

Agile Requirements Modeling

HomeSkillet — Wed, 16 Apr 2003 19:50:00 GMT

Article on Agile Requirements Modeling.

.NET Debugging FAQ

HomeSkillet — Tue, 15 Apr 2003 18:12:00 GMT

Great debugging faq list from ISerializable.

Visual Studio.NET 2003 in Subscriber Downloads

HomeSkillet — Thu, 10 Apr 2003 18:20:00 GMT

WOOHOOOOOOOOOO!.
[Sean 'Early' Campbell & Scott 'Adopter' Swigart's Radio Weblog]

Sweet...

Event Log Monitoring with RSS

HomeSkillet — Wed, 09 Apr 2003 14:15:00 GMT

I've written some sample code to generate a RSS feed from the Windows Event Logs. This is very handy for monitoring servers - perhaps a poor man's SNMP monitor. :-)
[Greg Reinacker's Weblog]

Sweet....

ASP.NET Web Controls and browserCaps

HomeSkillet — Thu, 03 Apr 2003 21:38:00 GMT

Today I needed the ASP.NET Panel web control to render as a html div element in Netscape 7.0 and Mozilla 1.0 (as opposed to a html table) for several different reasons that would take too long to detail here. Awhile back I found the following code snippet but unfortunately I can't recall exactly where I found it so I can't give due credit. Anywho, place the following snippet inside the <system.web></system.web> section of your web.config file. This will cause these browsers to essentially be treated as 'uplevel' browsers, thus rendering panels as div. On a related note, I thought that I had heard that the browserCaps would be updated periodically. Does anyone know how often this occurs and where I might be able to find an updated version?

<browserCaps>
<case match="Gecko/[-\d]+">
      browser=Netscape
      frames=true
      tables=true
      cookies=true
      javascript=true
      javaapplets=true
      ecmascriptversion=1.5
      w3cdomversion=1.0
      css1=true
      css2=true
      xml=true
      tagwriter=System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter
      <case match="rv:1.0[^\.](?'letters'\w*)">
          version=6.0
          majorversion=6
          minorversion=0
          <case match="^b" with="${letters}">
              beta=true
          </case>
      </case>
      <case match="rv:1(\.\d+)(\.\d)?(?'letters'\w*)">
          version=7.0
          majorversion=7
          minorversion=0
          <case match="^b" with="${letters}">
              beta=true
          </case>
      </case>
</case>
</browserCaps>

The Last Configuration Section Handler I'll Ever Need

HomeSkillet — Wed, 02 Apr 2003 18:03:00 GMT

If you've ever seen the web.config file that ASP.NET uses, and thought, "Wow, I'm so glad they configure things that way, in this nice, easy-to-use XML file. Wish I could do that!" then you should check out the System.Configuration namespace. There's an interface called IConfigurationSectionHandler that lets you write your own parsers for your application configuration file, letting you put whatever you want in there. [CraigBlog]

I used Craig's XmlSerializerSectionHandler today to set up a custom configuration settings section for one of my ASP.NET assemblies. Kudos to Craig for the very simple and elegant solution.

What the heck, why not?

HomeSkillet — Wed, 02 Apr 2003 14:08:00 GMT

RSS at MSDN!

HomeSkillet — Tue, 01 Apr 2003 18:18:00 GMT

Our first RSS feeds are now live...[Pushing the Envelope ]

This is great guys. Thanks! One more tool to make my job easier...

TaskVision and integrated db security...

HomeSkillet — Thu, 27 Mar 2003 21:55:00 GMT

We had to re-install TaskVision today. It had been living on an R & D machine that recently bit the dust. Since it was being used quite a bit when it went down, we decided to place the db on our production db server and the web services on a .NET server so that we would have max uptime, automatic backup, etc. Didn't think it would be a probem until I tried to log it. No dice, just threw back some vague error message about contacting the network admin. However, I could login to the webservice via a web browser. Weird. Anyway, it turns out that since we didn't use integrated security like the default connection string, the db password wasn't passed beyond the first request. I don't know how long it would have taken me to figure that out had it not been for the Windows Forms Forums.

Is it just me or does it seem like there is much stronger feeling of community and a greater amount help from the community than with ASP 3.0? Whatever it is, it sure is great.

Path.Combine

HomeSkillet — Mon, 24 Mar 2003 21:54:00 GMT

I often see people using string concatenation to create directory names. Like this:

string path = "C:\\data\\" + filename; < /EM >

But there's a much better API:

string path = System.IO.Path.Combine("C:\\data", filename);< /EM >

Not only does this take care of the whole, "Do I need a trailing slash?" issue, but if you specify an absolute path for the second parameter, it will just return the second parameter. That means that someone can enter "foo" or "C:\\temp\\foo" for filename, and it'll do what you'd expect.

[CraigBlog]

This is a great little tid-bit... you gotta love this framework.. i have been working with it since beta one and I still learn something new everyday.

Wasted Hours

HomeSkillet — Mon, 24 Mar 2003 13:58:00 GMT

I'm spending some time today -- and tomorrow -- writing my own calendar control for ASP.NET. Why? Because the one Microsoft ships absolutely, positively cannot render itself without polluting everything with inline styles. That's just lazy and inconsiderate. They make these decent (not great, mind you, but functional) style containers and CssClass properties, and then they say "oh, well, we were just kidding, here take some silver background".

Grrrrrr...

[The .NET Guy]

This has frustrated me to no end as well, although I haven't yet taken the time to roll my own solution. Any chance you might have the code/assembly available for download when completed?

Mono nearing completion....

HomeSkillet — Fri, 21 Mar 2003 16:53:00 GMT

.NET on Linux and Unix soon...

http://www.internetweek.com/breakingNews/showArticle.jhtml%3Bjsessionid=HJNWMSBMWJTCSQSNDBCCKICCJUMEKJVN?articleID=7900085