January 2004 - Posts
No, they are not new Microsoft code names for new and exciting technology which wont be released for years, but instead they are the names of the bands which I saw live last night at the Commodore last night.
We actually arrived late and were only able to catch last few songs of DevilDriver's set, unfortunately they were my driving force for going to watch the show. You might recognize front man Farfara from Coal Chamber, from what I hear he felt that Coal Chamber didnt go down the path that he had wanted (heavy fucking metal) so he decided to leave and start up DevilDriver. Either way, the last few songs we did get to see they really kicked ass. Damn good too see he seperated from Coal Chamber and went his own way. This bad has a future, IMHO.
Next up was Moonspell [official site] (from Portugal). They had the best set of the night (yes even better than Opeth, Ill explain why in a bit). Their dynamic set from long drawn out -slow- melodies, to extreme beats and ear drum shattering screaming was really exciting to watch. I will definetly be digging into their music more, hopefully some of the local music stores have the balls to actually keep their stuff in stock.
Last up was Opeth (iirc from Sweden). Now from these guys you would expect some serious metal., this was not the case tonight though. They gave us the excuse that their drummer was sick, and even went so far as to say he head back home. It appears that he will be back with the band tonight for their performance in Seattle. Maybe he just didnt feel like playing in Canada? So with no drummer what options did they have? Well they offered us a full refund, or a rebate of $5 at the door. We took the $5, hell we were not there just for Opeth either way.
So their solution was to have their drum tech play with them for the first part of their set, about 5 songs, all really slow, and from previous year's album releases. It felt like the crowd was going to explode. They came for metal and moshing, they got a mixture of Nirvana, and acoustic 80's rock. Not a very good impression. Half way through their set they annouced that they wanted to get into more of their heavy shit, so they enlisted the drummer form Strapping Young Lads (cant find a url), a great local band. This guy had only a few hours to learn a couple of their songs and he did it well. Amazing drums. Finally the crowd got what they wanted and they enjoyed the hell out of it. Two, maybe three tracks later (by then I had enough whiskey in my system to blur the lines) they wrapped up their set. How shitty, but I guess we were warned.
If your in Seattle tonight, or in the path of this band for this tour, get up off your ass, stop coding and check them out.
Now go back to your regular reading.
Here's a trick question hopefully someone can shed some light on. Why does this piece of VB6 Code:
For x = 8 To 10 Step 0.1
sngVar = CSng(x)
newSngVar = sngVar * 100
Debug.Print newSngVar
Next
Produce the output:
800
810.0001
820
830
839.9999
850
860.0001
870
880
889.9999
900
910.0001
920
930
939.9999
950
960.0001
970
980
989.9999
1000
Is there some sort of rounding/floating point issue that is happening which low-lifes like me are not aware of?
The fix for this is pretty obvious (cdbl() or val()) but the reason why it happens would be a "nice to know".
Can someone, anyone, make me/us a tool where i can copy an entire
... into a text box and hit a button and it will automatically rip out all of the style information then generate the correct CSS equivalent?
From:
<asp:DataGrid id=FooDataGrid BorderColor="#999999" BorderStyle="None" BorderWidth="1px" BackColor="White" CellPadding="3" GridLines="Vertical" runat="server">
<SELECTEDITEMSTYLE BackColor="#008A8C" ForeColor="White" Font-Bold="True">
<ALTERNATINGITEMSTYLE BackColor="#DCDCDC">
<ITEMSTYLE BackColor="#EEEEEE" ForeColor="Black">
<HEADERSTYLE BackColor="#000084" ForeColor="White" Font-Bold="True">
<FOOTERSTYLE BackColor="#CCCCCC" ForeColor="Black">
<PAGERSTYLE BackColor="#999999" ForeColor="Black" Mode="NumericPages" HorizontalAlign="Center">
To:
<asp:DataGrid id=FooDataGrid BorderStyle="None" BorderWidth="1px" CellPadding="3" GridLines="Vertical" runat="server" CssClass="SessionSearchDataGrid">
<SELECTEDITEMSTYLE CssClass="SessionSearchSelectedItemStyle">
<ALTERNATINGITEMSTYLE CssClass="SessionSearchAlternatingItemStyle">
<ITEMSTYLE CssClass="SessionSearchItemStyle">
<HEADERSTYLE CssClass="SessionSearchHeaderStyle">
<FOOTERSTYLE CssClass="SessionSearchFooterStyle">
<PAGERSTYLE Mode="NumericPages" CssClass="SessionSearchPagerStyle">
and something along the lines of the equivalent CSS:
.SessionSearchDataGrid {
background-color: white;
border-color: #999999;
}
etc...
Its been crashing on me about every 2 hours since I isntalled it at work. Now I have to try to roll the installation back to 0.8.xx which I have at home and is working fine.
Oh yeah, there is a new Search Bar added. Personally I like the idea, if it was more flexible. Why cant we control the items in the list which it will search (I want to add/remove specific items)? Why is it not tied into the Quick Search feature? Maybe its too early.
Just supporting some
local talent.
He has no blog so no link, but he is a board member for the
AspInsiders.
Congrats Rob M!
While I was coding some examples up (in good old notepad) for a recent presentation I wanted to show the compile time errors when attempting to set a property on a string based Generic Type to an integer value. Of course I didnt get the error. (grumble)
After much pissing around with it, a buddy at work here wandered behind me to check out what I was working on, he has been using VB.NET for quite some time now so I explain the issue too him. He laughed at me (mocking my pathetic VB.NET skills) and told me to turn "option strict on". With much disgust I tossed it at the top of the sample file and viola the compile time error finally decided to rear its ugly face. ~Of course I realize that this has nothing to do with Generics, but either way..
People wonder why I'm really starting to dislike VB.NET. Shouldnt this stuff be defaulted to on? There are many many people out there that will probably flame me for this post, but come on why bring VB to .NET and still allow VB programmers to be so damn lazy with everything (which causes so many stupid little errors) ?
Also, my final rant on VB.NET, why didnt it use the same keywords and syntax as C# for many of the new features? A simple example is C#'s "static" keyword, why do we need to remember that, in VB.NET, we must use "shared" instead. IMHO the MS VB.NET team should have copped a squat with the C# team and hashed out a common set of keywords that share functionality. VB.NET seems like VB with hacked in OOP features, no cohesion.
On a new project that I have been working on for
InfoTouch Technologies the solution is reaching a considerable side (medium to large according to Microsoft) and I have been noticing some serious performance issues with the debug experience. It literally takes 10 seconds to step over a single line of code. Very unacceptable.
There was a
recent MSDN Chat regarding the debugger which I attended (to get to the bottom of this issue). Here's part of the log:
------------------------------------------------------------
Q: Debugging is really slow and pegs cpu withen 20-30 projects are present in a solution
A: This is likely a soultion/project system perf issue, we are goign to follow up with the project system team later to see if they are working on this or have a workaround
Host: habibh (Microsoft): Q: Rob_Chartier_[MVP] - Are the performance issues only around stepping or does it also include startup time? Also, are these all VB.NET or C# projects?
Q: Rob_Chartier_[MVP] : startup time is never an issue
A: I suspect that the issue is around property evaluation. The next time that you debug, can you try closing all your data windows (e.g. Watch, Autos, etc.)? We have done a fair amount of work to improve the perf. for stepping.
------------------------------------------------------------
The important thing here is to ensure that all your data windows (e.g. Watch, Autos, etc.) are all closed BEFORE you enter into debug mode. If you close all of these AFTER you will still see the performance issue. I was bored and was playing around with the IDE and closed all the windows at design time in order to find this out. It appears to have solved the issue, for now. Now if I can only find out why it is locking a project/assembly in my middle tier causing me to restart VS.NET all the time when I need to rebuild that one specific project. *sigh*
Lastly, notice this:
Q: (Rob_Chartier_[MVP]) Edit and Continue for both C# and VB.NET. Can we expect it?
A: Unfortunately, Rob, you cannot expect Edit and Continue for C#. Things like refactoring and other IDE enhancements took precedence. Sorry.
Last night I had the opportunity to give a presentation to my
local .NET User group; I covered some of the new language features (C# and VB.NET) coming up in the Whidbey release.
Everything went without a hitch, about 100+ people showed. Lots of questions, excellent feedback.
I think I will continue on the whole Whidbey discussions and schedule a ASP.NET Preview for the same group in the next few months.
The editor over at
15seconds.com just pointed me to
this course which is being offered at
Bringham Young University in Idaho.
Notice their assignment readings:
Application Architecture: An N-Tier Approach - Part 1 By Robert Chartier
N-Tier Application Defined
Pretty cool.
Taken from the recent newsletter:
----------------------------------------
Date and Time: Monday 2004/01/12 6:30 PM
New Location: ActiveState, #400-580 Granville Street, Vancouver, BC, V6C 1W6
We hope that you all had an enjoyable holiday season and we look forward to a great year ahead.
NET BC Users Group and InfoTouch Technologies Corp. are proud to jointly present an in-depth preview of some of the new language features for the next Microsoft .NET Framework version code named "Whidbey".
Robert Chartier, Senior Web Application Architect at InfoTouch Technologies Corp., is a frequent speaker at Developer Conferences worldwide. Rob is one of the few Microsoft MVP's (Most Valuable Professional) in Canada and has been using .NET since the early beta releases.
This session is designed to fast track you with some of the new language features that will be shipped with Whidbey. Topics include generics and partial classes, in both VB.NET and C#.
The Vancouver .Net Users Group is a new community organization sponsored by Microsoft, BCIT, Pacific Online, and INETA ( www.ineta.org ), focusing on software development. There are no fees for attending and all are welcome. Please invite anyone you know who might be interested. The users group registration site is located at www.netbc.ca. E-Mail address: members@netbc.ca
More Posts
Next page »