Archives
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DoNotCall .NET
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More Validation and Cancel
Edit Big Time: Setting e.Cancel = false in the form closing event actually let's you exit the program. Go figure. And I feel like an idiot for not figuring this out sooner. Is today still Monday or something?
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Validating and Closing a Form
Ok, I give. If you set e.Cancel = true in a validating event (for a textbox for example), how can you make it so the form can be closed? Like clicking the X or even calling me.Close.
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Missing the Future
In regards to the (in)famous Missing Future article, I just wanted to throw in my somewhat related rambling.
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Underpant Gnomes
Kent's suggestion to build your own compiler reminded me of my great idea. A new programming language called D-Flat. It would be C# without the stupid case sensitivity.
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Testing User Input
Scott Lock's post about people wanting to enter 1-800-CALL-ATT into a phone field reminded me of a data entry "problem" some students of mine ran into a couple years ago. Keep in mind that while I live in the wonderful city of Louisville (15th largest US city), it happens to be surrounded by Kentucky. Anyways, these students from eastern Kentucky (think the Hatfields' home) happened to be doing some type of batch updates. If I recall correctly, they were trying to get a whole bunch of records from one hospital merged into another system. Problem was, in this batch of seemingly properly formated data, it was failing to do the update. So they went to task finding the problem record.
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70-310
Lorenzo is looking into the 70-310 exam. Not to scare you, but that exam was easily the hardest exam of the MCSD.Net track in my opinion. The problem that I had going into the exam was the title was basically yelling out "XML Web Services" so I was like "oh, just throw on a WebMethod attribute, a little WSDL and a way I go." The problem is the "and Server Components." They really should have called the exam ".NET distributed applications." I think I got more questions on remoting than XML Web Services, which would surprise a lot of people who take the tests without looking at the exam matrix (which happens a lot, many people failed the VB6 exams because they thought the knew VB back and forth. The problem, they didn't know jack about COM).
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Almost Free Full Tech Books
After signing up for Safari for a trial membership, I decided to go ahead keep it on a subscription basis. Well, not a week goes by and I have already filled up my bookshelf. You see, when you sign up you get to choose how big you want your bookshelf to be, the smallest being five bookshelves and the largest being thirty. If you "check out" a book, you must keep it on the bookshelf at least thirty days. That means if you have a five slot bookshelf, and you check out five books on the first day, it will be thirty more days until you can grab another one. It became pretty clear that a ten slot bookshelf just wasn't going to cut it for me, so I decided to go balls out and get the thirty slot bookshelf. Even I would be pressed to read thirty books in thirty days. I've managed to fill up 20 slots, but in a week a couple of my books should be available to be removed in case any new books become available that I'm interested in paging through.
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Microsoft Concedes Defeat?
Microsoft recently announced that they were dropping IE for the Mac because Safari is better due to it having access to the underlying Mac API (see Scoble for a bunch of relevant links. I guess you could have figure that out for yourself though). Besides all the irony involved in this, it just doesn't seem like Microsoft to just give up on a market. I just don't get it, especially coming after the announcement that IE can't be upgraded without a change to the underlying OS. But here's my knee-jerk reaction.
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Mozilla/IE Control
You know what would be a neat control? A wrapper for the IE webbrowser control AND the mozilla brower chumpy. It would have basically an enumeration that let's you choose which one the control creates, and have it delegate the calls to the control of your choosing. Maybe a method called IsMozillaInstalled would be nice too. Really should be easy to create I would think. Of course, I'm a complete idiot when it comes to COM interop.
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emacs, vi, LaTeX, CVS, Ghostview, xdvi, ps2pdf, xpdf, and dvipdf
I decided to start reading Open Source Web Development with LAMP over on Safari to broden my horizons. Everything is going fine until I get to this paragraph in the intro:
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IIS 6.0, Content-Encoding: gzip
Today I decided to play around with IIS 6.0 and kick the tires when it came to gzip support. IIS 5.0 was all but useless when it came to gzip unless you had some serious cash to buy third party support for it, so I was interested to see if gzip even worked. My first problem was just finding the darn thing, and I feel like an idiot for even having to post how to find the options for enabling compression. But I am an idiot, so this kinda all works out. What you need to do is hop into IIS manager, and right click on the Web Sites folder. Not the computer, not the default web site, not a folder but the web sites folder. Bring up the properties window, and the last tab is called Service. It looks a little something like this:
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Moving to Firebird/Phoenix
I moved to Firebird about a month ago. I've had some sort of gecko based browser on my machine for a while, mainly for testing out web pages and making sure they worked in non-IE browsers. After a while I found that if I designed solely for Gecko browsers, then the sites would look fine in Opera/Gecko and usually IE. The only problems I had where simply bugs in the IE CSS rendering engine, and it looks like implementing something like max-width can't be done without a change to the underlying OS.