Archives
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Friday Fun
Three day weekend coming up, and I've stocked up on the video games :-). Not really, but it does seem I've purchased quite a few games in the recent weeks. I've been pretty into Madden 2004. It has a new feature called owner mode where you have almost compelte control over a team. Sell the naming rights, upgrade the stadium, set the cost on the beer. All kinds of stuff. Make enough money to bring in the big name coaches and training staffs, fill up the roster with studs and play away. A true football geek heaven. I know people who have bought the game and have yet to actually play an actual football game. They are just simulating the game out. Crazy.
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At my signal, unleash hell.
In a car crash kinda way, I was really interested in seeing what the SoBig worm was going to try to do. Hopefully now that they've identified the servers they'll be able to dissect the payload.
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WORM_MSBLAST.D
It appears there is a new variant of the MSBLAST worm that patches your machine against the DCOM overflow. Keith should expect the black helicopter's any momment now.
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We stay up late so that you don't have to.
I guess I'm the anti-Gunderloy. Historically, like most geeks, I do my best work in the middle of the night. I might be a “night person,” but I think I just feel a little guilty “playing” on a computer during the day. If it's sunny, I could be outside running. If it's raining, I could be cleaning my apartment. But at night, the only thing I have is late night SportsCenter, girl gone wild infomercials and a couple .NET books I've been meaning to dig into. And a wide awake brain.
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KYdotNET.org
I finally got around to signing up for the KY .NET user group recently and I totally forgot about it. You see, the last update to their homepage is has news of Service Pack 1 for 1.0 of the framework; I assumed the group was dead. Anyways, I get an e-mail announcing that they'll be having their august meeting, with a talk presented by Chris Atkins. I fired up google and found out he has a weblog. Kinda cool, even if it is powered by cold fusion. Taking a look around I noticed a link to M. Keith's weblog, right here on ASP.NET Weblogs. Using my powers of deduction, I figure that makes three .NET webloggers in the great city of Louisville (16th largest city in the US).
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Ughhh...network admin time
One of the worst part of being a software guy is that everyone assumes you'd in turn be good at network admin / pc support tasks. And the kicker is you probably are, but being the network admin sucks, and they are just tedious tasks. The network admin can very well get out of doing something by pushing it off to a programmer by saying “sorry, I don't program.” Someone asks what's wrong with their PC, I can't say “sorry, I don't know” because then I get a funny look and the question “I thought you were good with computers.”
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Underrated .NET Classes
Inspired by Bill Simmon’s list of underrated movies, here’s my list of the top eight underrated classes in the .NET framework.
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sp_DontDoIt
A lot of developers commonly prefix their stored procedures with sp_. sp stands for stored procedure, and that's how Microsoft did their stored procedures, so that should be the naming convention, right? Nope. Sp stands for system procedure. As for a naming convention, I personally like usp if I'm going to use one. Frankly speaking though, enterprise manager, ADO.NET and query analyzer kinda make prefixing stored procedures with sp a bit pointless if you ask me, so I don't use them at all.
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Command Prompt Drag and Drop
Brian's post about dragging and dropping assemblies onto the toolbox was pretty cool. Didn't know that.
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Customer Controls You Can't Live Without
Today during class I demonstrated Janus System's GridEx control. Big hit. I think I actually probably sold two copies of the thing by just showing the class the Northwind demo of it. Anyways, anyone have a custom control they can't live without? One preferrably with a free demo version I can play with (or a free copy for me to use in class would be cool too).
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If Everyone Jumped Off A Bridge...
Didn't mean to start a PDC cost analysis flame war. I was just hoping to buy the DVDs of the conference. But all this peer pressure and Scoble's talk of the PDC has pushed me to the edge. I checked my schedule, and I'm scheduled to teach an Intro to Programming class. This, I can get around. As for plane tickets, I might be able to finnagle my mom's frequent flyer mileage with a little pity party. As for the $1600, well, hmmm. Hope my girlfriend will like coupons for backrubs for her birthday (side note: she would). Truthfully, I could probably drum up $1600 doing consulting work by then.
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PDC
I was going to post this in Pascal's comments in response to Robert, but what the heck:
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Microsoft's DOS Attack
I saw a link on MSDN about the DoS that was targeted at Microsoft. Cool I thought, I always like reading how people go about fixing these problems. No dice, it was just blah blah blah we contacted the authorities, no problems with MS software. Boring...
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Exchange Server 2003 Loadfest?
I just got done tweaking our site to feature the Exchange Server 2003 Loadfest. I've personally never heard of this before, but from what I've gathered is that you bring your own server to our center, and basically walk through a one day course with your system so when you get back to the office you've been there done and done that. Has anyone ever gone to one of these? Has anyone taught one of these? Does anyone actually rip out their rackmounted server and drag it in? :-).
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Ordering Pizza Online
Pizza Hut recently started offering online ordering of pizza. Papa Johns has had this for a while, and I've had great success with it. I hate ordering pizza on the phone. Using coupons is a pain, but if you don't they'll seemingly throw out some number for a price that always seems way to high for one or two pizzas. Plus you are running about a 30% risk the kid on the phone is checking out a cute customer and not paying attention to you.
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My Probably Unpopular Opinion of Edit and Continue
I don't see what the big deal about edit and continue in VB.NET is all about. Sure unit testing will save your soul, but I am willing to be that 99% of all VB.NET applications aren't using unit testing, and probably never will. Why? They probably aren't developing that many classes. Does that make them bad people or bad programmers. To me, no. They are simply putting together applications from existing components that have been unit tested. How would you exactly unit test a webform?