Plip's Weblog

ASP.NET, Windows Forms and JavaScript Exception and Error Handling - Exceptioneer

Plip — Thu, 14 May 2009 16:05:00 GMT

Exceptioneer is a hosted system designed for .NET folks to help identify, manage and resolve unhandled exceptions. When an Exception occurs within an Application, that exception and a range of platform specific details are transmitted securely to the Exceptioneer web portal where the data is analysed and for you to handle in your own way.

We’ve implemented support for: -

If you’d like a free account, fill in this form and we’ll send you an invitation

Some of you will have heard of ELMAH, which is a cool open source project for collecting Exceptions, you can read how the two compare on the Exceptioneer and ELMAH page.

Check out our blog:

http://blog.exceptioneer.com

Check our our twitter account:

http://twitter.com/exceptioneer

Check out what other people are saying:

http://blog.sceniceye.co.uk/2009/05/exceptioneer-wow-much-nicer-than.html

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=exceptioneer

If you want Exception Handling for another platform such as Rails checkout this page: -

http://exceptioneer.com/Public/OtherPlatforms.aspx

Find me at MIX09 and win a prize!

Plip — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 00:07:00 GMT

You may or may not be aware but my company is working on a TOP SECRET PROJECT at the moment.

The project is specifically for .NET developers and will be infinately useful! There's nothing like it out there today and you could be one of the first few people in the world to play with it!

Sometime during the next couple of weeks we'll be launching it publically and we want to choose the most daring and exciting .NET developers in the World to get free and early access to our TOP SECRET PROJECT.

So what do you have to do to get access? Well it's pretty damn simple!

1. Find me (Picture below). It's not hard - I'm Ginger and Pasty White - I look like an inverted traffic cone.

2. Give me one of your business cards. (Don't have one? Not a problem - give me someone else's, I won't know!)

3. Wait for the e-mail (Or tell the person whose card you've given me they're going to get one).

Easy Peasy!

So DO IT !

Preparing for MIX09

Plip — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 00:06:00 GMT

In a little over 48 hours I'll be arriving in Las Vegas and hooking up with all the other web types for MIX09. While this is the third MIX event I've attended (I missed out on the first one) it's certainly the one I'm most excited to attend.

So to help my MIX09 event attendance run smoothly I've decided to plan ahead a little.

Meeting cool people is the main reason I'm coming to MIX09.

So who are a few of the people I am looking forward to hanging out with and why ?

Scott Cate - Old time ASP.NET buddy and all round top bloke (He'll be Live Casting the Keynotes! http://scottcate.com/blog/LiveMix09/)

Tricky - One of the best designers I have the pleasure of knowing - this guy is a usability god!

Scott Hansleman - Speaker, author, ALT.NET fanatic and beard wearer. Scott usually hurls abuse at me which is fun :)

Ryan Christensen-Schwarz - Top .NET developer and good friend - not seen Ryan since his Wedding last year in San Fran.

Thomas Lee - Thomas was a contact in Microsoft for a while a couple of years back, now he's on the team that brings us MIX - PARTY ANIMAL!

Sam Morrison - .NET Bloke from London who is running a VBUG group down there, it's his first MIX, will be great to catch up! Showing him Steak one night at the best Steak house in the WORLD*.

*May not be entirely true.

Chris Hardy - Awww Chrissss!!!! Chris is a .NET Developer in Manchester, he's worked with me for a few years and is another victim of having me attend his wedding.

Scott Guthrie - If he can spare a few moments it would be great to catch up with Scott and find out what he's been up to recently, not spoken to Scott properly since he came to the UK for REMIX:08 last year.

Phil Haack - MVC god. I need not say any more!

Michael McClary - Microsoft UK Agency chap - lots of stuff going on with this man - keep a close watch on him!

Mainly though, it's the people I don't know that I'm going to MIX09 for - I want to meet MORE cool people!

Wanna hook up? Drop me an e-mail and we'll sort it out! phil@secretvolcanolair.co.uk

What am I going to do whilst I'm in Vegas?

On Thursday night I'm heading to the "Together @ MIX09" gathering which has been arranged by Michael McClary of Microsoft UK.

I'll be uploading my Pictures here: -

http://www.flickr.com/photos/plip/sets/72157615264979609/

I'll be Tweeting here: -

http://twitter.com/plip

Come party with us - Manchester - 3rd December (Free beer and food!)

Plip — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 14:41:34 GMT

Guys,

Come and party with us on the 3^rd December at the Circle Club in Manchester 18:00 onwards.

http://sessions.screenedit.com/

We’ve even got a few design specialists who’ll be talking briefly!

Please re-blog this where relevant.

Cheers,

Phil.

VAT Rate Change to 15%

Plip — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Since the Millennium Bug nothing more serious has effected the United Kingdoms IT Systems.

What does the VAT rate change mean for your business' systems?

The VAT rate change is a very serious issue for your IT systems - make sure you are ready.

http://www.VATChange.com

DDD Site issue - Please help us and reblog this

Plip — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:36:00 GMT

The DDD site DNS is broken.

You can reach the site here: http://216.247.126.58/DDD/default.asp

Please help us and reblog this if you're a UK blogger.

Thanks Community!

Cheers,

Phil.

FastHosts Review - A load of rubbish!

Plip — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 08:58:37 GMT

Here's an e-mail I got in response to telling FastHosts (for the third time) that my server was not well and that I was certain a disk was about to die (over several weeks so no sense of urgency here).

FastHosts don't seem to care - any good host such as, ORCS Web, Rackspace or UKFast would be in the server getting it sorted not trying to invoice me before they've even looked at the problem.

Bear in mind, I'm leasing a server from them and paying them £150 (roughly) a month.

------

Dear Phil,

We couldn't see the delayed write error you sent in that attachment but I logged into your server and saw these delayed write errors.

This error is indicative of a hardware failure.

As such, you have a number of options, which include:

1. You can buy or borrow an additional drive from us. If you do this and are successful in setting a RAID mirror and then only 1 drive would be affected. If buying the drive we can then replace the faulty drive and you can then resynchronise the data from the good drive still in there, binning the original drive. If borrowing (we would do this for 7 days), you would then need to disable the RAID mirror afterwards.

Note that there is no guarantee that this process will resolve this issue but this sort of fix has worked in the past. Additionally, there is no guarantee that the drive will necessarily remain in a usable state for long enough for this to be put into place.

Please also note that if you want us to help setup the RAID mirror, you would need to pay a personal engineer service charge of £60+VAT, per 30 minutes or part thereof. There may be some downtime of services whilst these changes are made. If the original drive is still in it's original deployment condition of being a basic drive, rather than a dynamic drive, and there's a good deal of data on the drive then we would estimate that this would take at least 1 hours worth of personal engineer service work to complete.

2. If you have a backup of your data and/or want to get the server back up and running quickly, we can replace the faulty drive, building a fresh operating system install onto it and binning the original drive.

3. If you wish to try and recover data from the drive, if this is possible, we can put a new drive in the server (with your original drive removed) and rebuild a fresh operating system install onto it, take the server back offline to then re-attach your original drive. This can be left in there for a period of 7 days and after that time, we would then need to arrange a further time to take the server offline to remove the original drive.

Regards,

Chris Davis

Customer Support

Fasthosts Internet Ltd.

Fasthosts is registered in England and Wales.

Registered office: Discovery Court, 154 Southgate Street, Gloucester, Gloucestershire, UK. GL1 2EX

Which Developer Sites do you use?

Plip — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 16:43:48 GMT

A site that I've used for a long time has just relaunched with a new design and a community focused set of features.

http://www.developerfusion.com/

Please do check out Developer Fusion :-)

Manchester's Digital Underworld

Plip — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 17:34:33 GMT

I was interviewed recently and here's the result - about half way through.

ReMix:UK 08

Plip — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 16:31:06 GMT

Each delegate will receive a Microsoft Expression Professional Subscription worth over £650 which contains;

§ Expression® Studio
(Expression Web, Expression Design, Expression Encoder, Expression Blend, Expression Media)

§ Visual Studio® Standard Edition

§ Office Standard Edition

§ Office Visio® Professional

§ Windows® XP

§ Windows Vista® Business Edition

§ Virtual PC

§ Parallels Desktop for Mac (so Mac developers can install Windows Vista in a virtual machine on their Mac and run all the other software included)

§ Pre-configured virtualized server environments

http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/purchase.aspx?key=professional

NxtGenUG Silverlight Manic Miner

Plip — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 20:42:14 GMT

http://www.nxtgenug.net/manicminer

NxtGenUG Co-Founder Richard Costall & Member Pete McGann are pleased to announce their “Silverlight” Manic Miner game Beta is now live on the NxtGenUG site. Manic Miner was originally written by Matthew Smith, under games company Bug-Byte in 1983. The game was a landmark title in the history of gaming.

The original classic features 20 caverns to negotiate, and Pete and Rich had lovingly created 9 of these so far, with more to follow shortly.

Silverlight Manic Miner shares a custom built ‘time based’ engine with an XNA version of the game. A library of C# files is shared between the two systems. The Silverlight edition is also integrated into the NxtGenuG site, through Application services, and registered visitors can have their high scores recorded and shown in a leader board which refreshes every 60 seconds.

Pete and Rich will be telling their story at NxtGenUG Coventry on August 11^th 2008

Silverlight, XNA and Gaming
Matthew Smith did it in 6 weeks in the early 80's, now over 20 years later Pete McGann and Richard Costall have built Manic Miner in .NET, with an engine which works for Silverlight and also XNA. In this session Pete and Rich, talk about the .NET engine, implementations and issues on the two platforms - before Pete steps up to take the ultimate gaming challenge...

http://www.nxtgenug.net/ViewEvent.aspx?EventID=136

Manchester Girl Geek Dinners

Plip — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:34:39 GMT

Hey !

Just to let you know that on Friday 25th July there's another Manchester Girl Geek Dinner!

http://www.manchestergirlgeekdinners.co.uk/email/registration.php

Woo!

Plip.

Opera Dragonfly

Plip — Tue, 06 May 2008 17:35:53 GMT

Opera Dragonfly is Opera's all-new set of developer tools, designed to give developers a lightweight-but-powerful application that provides effective mechanisms for web standards debugging and problem solving without slowing down the browser, and fits in nicely with the development workflow. The current feature set is as follows:

JavaScript debugger

DOM inspector

CSS inspector

Command Line to allow commands to be inputed

Error Console that outputs validation errors and warnings exhibited by the CSS and JavaScript connected with the page

Proxy to allow debugging directly on mobile devices

The current release version is an alpha, so it is currently a little rough round the edges; also we decided to implement all the most critical features first, and go from there - we have big plans afoot for our developer tools and you can expect to see a lot of fantastic additions in coming months.

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/introduction-to-opera-dragonfly/

Techbash - Pennsylvania (not Transylvania I'm afraid - so no blood sucking Java Developers)

Plip — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 22:38:15 GMT

Since its inception in 2005, TECHbash has evolved into the premier technology conference in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Join an estimated 300 Developers, IT Professionals, CIO’s and Industry Experts from Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and host-state, Pennsylvania. This one day event brings together a broad spectrum of Technology Professionals to network, knowledge share and discuss existing technology solutions to business challenges, as well as preview prerelease products on the bleeding edge.

This year, we expanded to three tracks offering more presentations and providing you with more content choices representing a greater breadth of Industry insight. We will open the event with a keynote presentation from the unstoppable juggernaut, Joe Stagner, Program Manager for Microsoft’s Web Tools and Platform Division.Attendees will have the opportunity to:

Enhance technical knowledge with comprehensive and relevant educational content
Build experience on current and soon-to-be released technologies and products
Engage with sponsors, presenters, and other technology professionals
Learn how to get involved with .NET Valley, Northeastern Pennsylvania’s Technology User Group
Leave with software and other swag

For more information and to register for the event, visit the TECHbash website at techbash.com

Technorati Tags: Community News

DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper UK - November 22nd 2008

Plip — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:21:11 GMT

Get the date in your calendars guys and gals - the good ship DDD is coming back and this time it's bigger and better :)