April 2003 - Posts
The .NET Framework provides a fully managed, protected, and feature-rich application execution environment, simplified development and deployment, and seamless integration with a wide variety of programming languages. Note: This feature is not available in 64-bit versions of the Windows Server 2003 family. [Windows 2003 Feature Highlights]
Well ain't that a pisser. With all the talk about the Opteron out there, AMD got me giddy at the thought of 64bit fun, dual proc workstation fun. But alas, my hopes and dreams have been dashed yet again.
I can't sit on my wallet, because my credit card is burning.
Pragmatic ADO.NET: Data Access for the Internet World
Essential ADO.NET
.NET Web Services: Architecture and Implementation with .NET
Writing Secure Code, Second Edition
Microsoft .NET Distributed Applications: Integrating Web Services and Remoting
It is a shame Amazon.com doesn't sell reading glasses and time. Yet.
What's weird is that I am pretty darn comfortable with the material in all of these book (well, maybe not the Secure Code one). I just bought the books out of the hope I'll gain some more insight from these books, or maybe a better way of explaining how something works. The main reason I buy books like these are for recommendations to students. But I also think I keep buying books on topics I'm comfortable with so I don't feel stupid reading a book.
That being said, I didn't pick up ".NET Game Programming with DirectX 9.0" no matter how much fun it looked because game programming tends to escape me. My first "real" program that I wrote was a side scrolling, text based QBasic game. It was no Gorillas, but it was *mine*. I haven't made a game since. I think I might port Gorillas to .NET, all I need are monkey sprites... I'm talking to myself again.
I was digging around with Anakrino after I read that calling Dispose on a connection removes the object from the connection pool. From what I can tell, they are mistaken (of course it is 2:30am, hey prove me wrong if you are reading this. hello, is this thing on???). Anyways, I thought it was funny that SqlTransaction has a "Zombie" method that nulls itself off. All I could think about was SET ISOLATION LEVEL NEED BRAAAAINS. I'm drunk again by the way.
I'm also trying to put together some scripts to get my install for my classes next week up and running. I think I've got them done, so hopefully I can load up nine machines with Windows XP, SQL Server, VS.NET and the course materials in under three hours to get to easter dinner on time. Eeek.
I'm teaching an accelerated VB.NET course, basically three classes over a two week period. It is the VB6 to VB.NET class combined with an ASP.NET class and an ADO.NET class. TREEEmendous stuff here. Plus it comes with e-learners for a COM+ course, an XML Web Service course and one on programming the .NET framework. Good times. In classes like the VB6 to VB.NET class, I always get behind showing stuff in ADO.NET and ASP.NET way outside the scope of the class, and then feeling guilty about having to move on with the topic at hand and basically make a sales pitch for another course or a book. Now, the only thing I feel guilty about not coving completely in class is included with the materials. I'm pretty stoked about teaching this class if you can't tell.
Just got done teaching the "Object Oriented Programming in Visual Basic .NET." Imagine taking the stereotypical Mort and transforming them into Super Morts. Good times. We had a good time playing "guess the value" as I passed in structs and classes into functions ByRef and ByVal. I think they all began to understand what's going on in the scene, and why things work the way they do.
In Effective Visual Basic chapter one is called "Shifting from Liberal Arts to Software Engineering." I'd like to write the "Effective Visual Basic .NET: Shifting from Liberal Arts to Software Engineering." I'd love to cover the importance of the stack and heap and how it related to objects, love to get into the different types of collections and what the MSDN library is talking about with O(n log n). All you Einsteins out there are probably scoffing at the thought of anyone needing this type of book because they can easily go out and buy the Art of Computer Programming or some other geeky book, but those aren't exactly books written on non CS levels. But you'd be surprised how many Visual Basic programmers love finding this stuff out. Most of them got their jobs because they were pegged at work as being the person who really got excited about computers, and formalizing this CS type knowledge in an easy to grok format would be TREEEmendous.
I mean, how many books can show you how to drag and drop the DataGrid control? My guess: 420. Oh, I could also go gonzo and write "Effective C# ..." but I think that would set me up for all kinds of reviews on Amazon.com like "after 4 years of CS, and two in grad school I don't need 10 pgs talking about big-O notation, just tell me how to make a stupid checkbox in the datagrid! The chapter on databinding was particularly good, however." Of course, I could be wrong.
The Microsoft Download Center feed just alerted me to the Visual Studio .NET 2003 Evaluation Guide. 308 pages of wonderful VS.NET / .NET propaganda.
I'm not sure how possible this would be, but if there are hardcopies laying around and if someone from MS could send me a couple for our sales people, that would be TREEEmendous. I doubt I can get them to download a 308 pgs and sit through them, but maybe a couple of them might flip through it while waiting for a client or something...
Pretty cool site for setting up three column pages in CSS. I'm going to be doing some code-review on our companies site, and one of the things I'll probably look into doing is weening us from a table based layout too a full CSS layout. I used this templating tool that I found via Fabrice's tool list. For the simple layout stuff I do, it has worked great for me.
Also, Brad points out that the Eric Meyer's CSS Support Chart are back online curtesy of Netscape. A little out of date, but still a great resource.
And for more fun, Mark talked about CSS hacks and the latest build of Safari.
I hate using CSS hacks, it is almost impossible to do layouts that are simple from my table-layout background without using some soft of goofy hack.
I would hate to be a vendor for web controls, because it seems it would be a non-stop job creating CSS hacks to make sure your control renders fine as new browsers come out with their own idiosyncrasies. I don't know if CSS is stupid, or I'm expecting CSS to work like the table layout "hack" I'm so used to.
I'm currently in the process of setting up my course for next week, Programming in VB.NET. Basically a 5-day class to get VB6 people up and running in .NET land. Creating more Morts I guess. Anyways, this is the first class I'm teaching that has a new version of VS.NET out, and I'm not too sure how to handle this in the classroom. In my previous classes, I had a copy of the beta shared out on my instructor machine that people could install and play around with if they so desired. I think maybe only 5 people actually installed it in the classroom, and they did so on a Friday just to see if 2003 would in fact run SxS w/ 2002.
Now, for my personal / company development I'll be using 2003 exclusively. I'm only doing web stuff, and I have no problem putting v1.1 on the webserver. In fact, we'll be running Windows 2003 Server shortly I believe. I do develop some windows apps, but they are mostly for personal use so targeting the 1.1 framework won’t be a big deal. I try to keep my code pretty normal, so hopefully I won’t get burnt too badly.
But in the classroom, I'm not too sure how quickly people will be adopting VS.NET 2003. I highly doubt cost will be a factor, but the 2003 only targeting v1.1 could cause some developers from jumping into VS.NET 2003 as their primary development environment.
This week I’m going to stick with VS.NET 2002. I’ll judge the response of the students towards moving towards 1.1 and VS.NET 2003. Plus, I haven’t had the chance to walk through the book to make notes on what has changed from 2002 to 2003 (and from 1.0 to 1.1 on the framework side). I am hesitant to put both on the machines because that has trouble written all over it, especially for people just learning .NET. Maybe in one of the more advanced courses…
All very exciting stuff, but it is also a lot of work to keep up with all the new stuff. Note to self, hone up on changes between the versions and the excellent SxS article by Sean and Scott. I should probably dig into IIS 6 too in case that comes up. Our Lady of Blessed Caffeine, don’t fail me now.
G. Andrew Duthie (would it just be G.? Andrew?) is talking about ISOs and how to work with them. If you dig around you may find an old XP PowerToy that will add the ability to right click on an ISO file and "burn to CD." Unfortunately they pulled, from what I'm told is an issue with data corruption. Of your ENTIRE hard drive. Not quite sure how something that takes a file and writes it to your burner can hose a HD, but download at your own risk. I don't have a link because it was pulled from MS's Powertoy's site, but I've seen rogue copies here and there.
For much of the software I get (and MCT related stuff which also comes in ISO), I'm not a big fan of writing to a CD to use. Much slower. So I use IsoBuster. Basic functionality is free which is all most people need. I just open the .img or .iso file in IsoBuster, and drag and drop the files out. Very smooth.
Is this the same as the /GS option in VC++ and with from what I understand Windows 2003 Server? The only real reading I've done on this is Sam's article, and from what I understand is that they are doing the same StackGuard type prevention. Am I right?
I don't know why I'm so obsessed with buffer overflows, I guess I'm just kinda sick of seeing patches related to them and having to restart my machine while reading my e-mail.
And a wall poster whore too I guess. Show me the poster!.
Btw, I like the term Mort, Einstein and Egor or whatever the heck the otherone was. Makes it much easier to talk about different products and their target audiences.
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