Archives
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Why Glitches over the Holidays are Bad
We determined the source of the technical problems we are having on our servers. It seems that between Longhornblogs.com, PatchDayReview.com, and the rest of the Interscape websites, we were getting so much traffic, that our dinky little 10-Base-T network card was pegged pretty much all the time. Well, early Monday morning it decided to totally crap out on us. The problem with that is, there is minimal staff at our hosting center right now due to the holidays, so it won't be fixed till Friday at the earliest.
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.Text Tip
One of my MS friends (who asked to remain nameless) stumbled upon a nifty piece of code that you can use to help improve your .Text aggregated sites. Leave it to Steve Schofield to come to the rescue again. He talks about how to add a link to the comments of an entry on the aggregated home page. Thanks Steve! I'll be making that update globally as soon as .Text 0.95 is released.
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Technical Difficulties
A glitch on my servers brought the whole network down this morning. This means that InterscapeUSA.com, PatchDayReview.com, and LonghornBlogs.com are currently down, and may be that way for the next several hours or so. I apologize for the inconvenince, and we'll be back online as soon as possible.
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The Confusing Role Of Programmers
I was surfing the Blogosphere tonight, catching up on some of Don Box's writings, when he led me to Chris Sells. Sells, it seems, was distressed that the Don Box / Mary Jo Foley interview was just plain boring, so he left a RFC post on his blog, soliciting questions to ask him in a later interview. What I found there was startling.
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DotNet Jobs
For those of you that think the tech market has slowed down, there are plenty of .NET jobs available. dot-net-jobs.com has over 20 listings from job opportunities all across the US. Looking to change jobs? Check it out!
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Strong Naming Notes
I noticed earlier in the week that someone pointed out that you can use ILDASM to pull out the strong-name from a strong-named assembly, and recompile using a different key. I remembered an article I came across on MSDN that talked about this, so I thought I'd quote it here.
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DeadBolt.NET Re-Released
Merry Christmas Everyone! Just wanted to let you know that DeadBolt.NET is ready for download... again. In case you missed it, DeadBolt.NET is an Assembly Signing Addin for Visual Studio .NET 2003, written by Jamie Cansdale and Michael O'Hearn. Oh yeah, and it's free (my holiday present to you). We're now using the proper procedure for extracting the PublickKeyToken of the Assembly Signing Key, and it has been tested on about 20 different keys. If you download it, make sure to read the User's Guide. There is a two-page introduction to Assembly Signing, and a bunch of walkthroughs on how to use the app.
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My Christmas Present To You
A version of ScrollingGrid that actually works in a production environment. Today I've released ScrollingGrid 1.1. This new version opens up the previously private variable that sets the width to adjust for the Scrollbar. Now, if it's not rendering properly, you can adjust it yourself. ScrollingGrid was originally designed this way, but we had a design review a few weeks prior to launch, and it was determined that the property did not need to be exposed. A month's worth of real-world use showed this not to be the case, so I overrode the team and put it back in.
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Interscape Blogscape
Just wanted to let my readers know that the Interscape Blogscape is now online. Over the next few weeks, you'll see several other Interscape employees talking about various issues relating to being a start-up software company. It should be really exciting. First on deck is our CEO, Michael Mahoney. He's going to blog about a range of business topics. He's a total blogging newbie, so don't tear him to shreds just yet.
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DeadBolt.NET Suspended
Tim Heuer pointed me to an article that represents a fundamental flaw in our implementation of DeadBolt.NET. It is written by the great Don Box and Chris Sells, and describes what is going on under the covers of SN.EXE. I did a lot of research on the subject of Strong Name Signing before helping to write this add-in, and never came across this article. Hopefully, by pointing it out, more people will understand how it works, as I obviously didn't. Basically, our implementation is flawed because we're pulling the PublicKeyToken from the combined public/private key, and not just the public key (apparently, SN.EXE dioesn't pay attention to the difference). The assembly is being signed properly, we're just extracting the wrong information for the Public Key part.
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Credit Card Processing for .NET Developers
A few months ago, I had a huge problem with Interscape's credit card processing. I bloggeed about it in a post entitled “How To Screw Up And Still Come Out Ahead” It was quite an ordeal. Well, I decided that I wanted to help make the process easier for people in the .NET world. So Interscape teamed up with MerchantPlus.cc for Phase One of a two-phase system to make it ridiculously easy to process credit cards on a website. Phase One is the Merchant Account, which is the way that the cards are processed. These accounts are tied to a “gateway”, which in this case is Authorize.net, and that is included in the package. We worked to get the lowest prices possible, and we're passing those prices directly on to you.
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The Long Road To _______
Seems nowadays everyone says that MS is on a long road to somewhere. Salon.com yesterday talked about the “Long Road To Longhorn” (wich is kinda catchy). LonghornBlogs.com made it in there (top of Page 2) which was kinda exciting. Now, News.com shows it's lack of creativity the next day with “The Long Road to Yukon”. I can't wait till the “Long Road To Whidbey” article comes out. The ought to be interesting, seeing as how Whidbey is an island and everything.
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Why All The Fuss About Strong Name Keys?
A couple weeks ago, I was very strongly frustrated. Why? Because I fielded about 30 e-mails in the span of a few days that all basically went like this:
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Blog Courtesy
One of the things that I have noticed in the past few weeks on this site is a serious decrease in what I call “Blog Courtesy”. What is “Blog Courtesy”? It's the consideration that the way your posts look affects other people's blogs. For example, not checking your HTML for extra whitespace at the end of a post is a serious BlogPaux. Another one is the use of non-standard HTML tags in your posts. For example, using tags in your posts, or stray
closing tags. One little stray tag can throw off the whole site, as you can see is happening right now. I'm not naming any names, it's easy to see who the culprits are. Please, just remember that your posts are aggregated onto the main site, and not everyone uses the RSS feeds to read the posts.ScottW gave me a great tip.... if you need to display HTML tags in your comments, without that nasty “morphing <> error” that pops up with DHTML RichText Box solutions.... use an <XMP></XMP> tag. It's a tag that doesn't format anything that's inside it. I had never heard of it before, bit apparently it works... watch this:
<hello> Cool, huh?
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Only Use Microsoft Patches
News.com tells us about an open-source patch for a flaw in IE that was actually more damaging than the original flaw. Just a reminder that you should only install official Microsoft-built patches for Microsoft products. Personally, I would think that would be common sense, but I guess not.
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MicroSpeak
This week's edition of the Only4Gurus newsletter came in this morning. I think it was like a month late or something, but then so was my latest product so I don't have much room to talk. Anyways, of note this time around was a reprint from MicroNews, MS' internal newsletter, on the different lingo uttered throughout the halls of One Microsoft Way.
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Scuba Diving with Rob Howard???
Alright, this has to be BY FAR the craziest thing I've ever seen. You get on a boat in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, and spend a week with the likes of Rob Howard and Brent Rector on a .NET cruise. Here's the thing I don't get though.... is the cruise ONLY for techies? Cause, I mean.... I've never been on a cruise before, but if I were to go on one, I would want there to be, oh, I don't know, WOMEN there.
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US: Terror Alert "High"
For those of you that don't watch TV much.... holiday colors this year in the US consist of red, green, and orange.
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I don't get it...
Why, all of a sudden, is everyone and their mom building O/R mapping frameworks? Is that like some kind of “rite of passage” into the land of OOP? I would think that with so many options out there already, that people would find something else to innovate in...
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Copying, Compression, and Availability
Having completed CarbonCopy.NET this morning, I spent most of the afternoon and evening cleaning house on my webserver. Now that I have spent the day with my new hard-linked templating system, I'm much better off in many ways, but it is still lacking. I wish there was a way that I could hard-link a directory, to where new files that get added to the “virtual” folder subsequently appear in the folder's other locations as well. Right now, I have to re-run the utility if I add a new file.. Mind you, it's still a vast improvement from where I was at before, but it is still far cry from 100% ideal.
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Just A Note
I would like to reiterate my previous request for all GDN bloggers to fix their blog settings to reflect their full name, with an “[MS]” at the end for good measure. I know you guys used handles before, and that's really cool, but the blogs are read by more than just internal MS employees, and we don't know who many of you are. I don't have a nifty look program on the corporate intranet that I can go to if I want to look someone up, like you guys do. While we'd really like to get to know you all, Microsoft makes us memorize enough acronyms without adding all you to the mix. It would also be nice to differentiate the ants from the beetles, as it were.
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Sun: Another Step To Irrelevancy
Sun today says that Microsoft is forcing customers to upgrade their software due to the removal of Java.
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This Just In
Federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. rules that the RIAA lawsuits against fileswappers are illegal.
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Recursive File Count Function
Private Sub Test()
Dim fileCount As Integer = 0
Dim Dir As New System.IO.DirectoryInfo("c:\")
RecursiveCount(Dir, fileCount)
End Sub -
Windows XP Service Pack 2 Revealed
Microsoft has posted a Word document on its downloads site entitled “Changes to Functionality in Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2”. If you want to go REALLY in depth on the changes, this doc is for you. Weighing in at 73 pages, you'll know eveything you could have possibly wanted (and more) about SP2.
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I Don't Believe In Interface Versioning
I was thinking about how to implement folder recursion for CarbonCopy.NET while taking a shower earlier, and somehow my mind wandered to the topic of interfaces. In. .NET 2.0, I'm told that you'll bee seeing new versions of interfaces implemented like this: IDataReader2 for the new ones, so that old code can still support IDataReader. Does anyone else think this is a really lame way to design an API? What happens when you have .NET 6.0 (VS.NET 13.0 for those of you keeping track) in 8 years.... are we going to have to browse through:
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Making NTFS a Little Bit Friendlier
A while back, I posted in my LonghornBlog about how I wanted to have a file live in several locations in WinFS. A few hours later, I got two comments that I considered fairly condescending, because they just assumed that I knew what they were talking about, and didn't provide any further information (besides that really stupid for not knowing it was possible). Steve Maine, who is a really cool guy, jumped in and talked about a tool from SysInternals, but I could not find it after scouring the site. Disappointed, I blew it off and forgot about it.
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Feds: Tech on the Rise
... but jobs are not, says News.com. Here's my prediction for the first part of 2004.
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What's the deal?
Marc Canter's back to the blog. He's been moving, and as such was without internet access for something like 2 weeks. Wow. I don't think I could handle that. I'd start convulsions after 2 days. So what's the first thing he does when he gets back? Rips off Scoble's new blog banner. Huh. If I were Scoble, I don't know whether I'd be flattered or pissed. I guess it's a good thing they're friends. Hey, I guess if Marc freakin Canter likes it, it must be good, right?
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Rory + Caching = Honeymoon in the Bahamas
Sometimes I worry about Rory. I mean, really worry. That guy's crazy. He really likes the ASP.NET Cache. The way he talks about it, you'd think he wants to marry Rob Howard or something. He says he's toned it down, but I think he needs to get a second opinion... that therapist of his isn't paying attention.
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.NET for the Needy Auction
5 minutes left to bid on training at InterfaceTT in Phoenix, AZ. The highest bidder is at $820, and your money goes to help needy families. Go Bid!
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Here Comes IE 6.1
Microsoft is doing a major overhaul of IE for Windows XP SP2. Ryan Naraine of InternetNews.com outlines for us just what's in store. Among the changes:
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Microsoft in the Year Ahead
David Coursey: What Microsoft Needs to Do in 2004. [Via Scoble]
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Microsoft PressPass: Year In Review
Microsoft PressPass reviews the big MS news of the past year, and previews what's ahead in 2004.
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The Consulting Conundrum, Part 2
In my previous post, I discussed project management. Julie brought up an interesting point (and several agreed):
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The Consulting Conundrum
Brady commented earlier about the A-number-1 problem with being a contract software developer. I've been burned by this more often than not. So I've stopped allowing those kind of events to take place. Instead of playing Swammi The Magical Mind-Reading Bridgebuilder, I start out by charging a flat rate for what I call "Project Discovery". At this point, we build the bridge's blueprint. We interview everyone currently involved in the existing processes, and map them out. Then we separate manual from automated processes, and kill any steps that can be eliminated.
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OT: In case you're just waking up...
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ScrollingGrid 1.1 Status
Head on over to my corporate blog for some information regarding the next version of ScrollingGrid, tentatively set to launch at the end of next week, barring any unforseen curcumstances.
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Short Server Control Rant
I came across another reason today why building cool server controls is way too complicated in VS.NET. Two words: XSD Schemas. I wanted to give ScrollingGrid a schema so that it doesn't freak out on anyone, so I thought I'd be sneaky and add the following line to the end of the element definitions in asp.asd:
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A Request for all GotDotNet Bloggers
Can you guys please change your settings so that the “Author” field reflects your full name and not your blog address? It would also help if you added “[MS]” to the end of your name too, so that we know who you are. Thanks!
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Strongly Frustrated
I'm going to pose a few questions to the community. I'd like you to comment on your experiences after answering these questions:
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OT: My Crazy Day, Part One
Did you ever have one of those days that just defies comprehension? Today was one of those days. Read more about it over in my personal blog: Good Luck Finding THAT Divot, Part One.
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Graphic Rant
I've always wondered why Microsoft has not made more of it's .NET graphics available to be licensed by developers and ISVs. I mean stuff like this:
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Great .NET Blogs
Just came across GeekDojo Blogs in my referrer logs. Cool... this is some of the best .NET content I've seen in days. Subscribed!
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Microsoft Community Solutions
Microsoft has started a new section of their Knowledge Base called the Microsoft Community Solutions. These are KB articles that are written by Microsoft MVPs to help people conquer problems they face. This is ment to be much more formal than, say, a blog entry, because the article is immediately indexed by their KB engine, and comes up in KB search results.
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Test-Taking Strategies
Lots of people I know are either taking college exams right now, or their certification tests. Either way, there's a whole lot of crammin' going on. Thought I'd take a few minutes and elaborate on the test-taking strategies that have served me well.
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A Message From Captain Obvious
“Microsoft Is Not A Charity”
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Any Volunteers?
I need someone who is really familiar with VS.NET's addin architecture to help me with a quick-and-dirty 6 hour project that will be released as freeware and could a) benefit tons of inexperienced developers and b) lead to future paid development opportunities.
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Workspaces WinForms Console
Why can't the GDN Workspaces WinForms console be released as a separate standalone application? Why should I have to go to my Workspace to access it?
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Community
I've talked with several people over the past few days that aren't terribly happy with the new Microsofties that are blogging here, primarily because they feel they can't be critical of Microsoft. Frans, for example, says he might blog elsewhere because of it. I'll throw in my two cents and say that in my experience, criticism towards Microsoft, and really anyone for that matter, is always welcome and appreciated, as long as it is measured and constructive. Don't just be like “This stuff just sucks, and you guys should kill yourselves right now for being this stupid.” That's rude and insulting, and doesn't do anyone any good. Chances are, if this is your MO, you'll just be ignored.
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Using WMI To Query IIS
I need to query IIS using WMI to pull out information about the file extension mappings for the currently executing web. The problem is, I don't have clue one on how to do it, and IMO WMI is a giant undocumented clusterf$@#. Do any of you smart guys have any ideas on how to make this happen? I know there is a fairly simple query to nake it happen, I just can't figure it out.
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SexChange.NET
My good friend Martin Spedding just IMed me. He said the sex change operation went well. He sent me a picture..... I wouldn't date him, but he sure looks a hell of a lot more attractive now. Dude, uh, I mean... girl..... you might want to get make-up lessons from someone else.
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The Old Cows Are Put Out To Pasture
Wow, get them while they're hot... just got this in my newsgroup reader from mictosoft.public.msdn.general:
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Welcome GotDotNet Bloggers!
It seems that the GotDotNet bloggers are all moving over here. Does that mean the great Don Box will soon be gracing us with his presence?
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Scrolling Observations
I came across this very insightful post on the ASP.NET Forums (remember those?) about the pitfalls of making a DataGrid scroll. Great stuff. I hadn't even thought of trying points 3 and 4 that way.
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VS.NET Installer Tricks
I don't think I got the chance to blog about this yet, but with all the installer issues I've been having lately, and the lack of tips, I figured I'd better talk about it.
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Missing Post
Just to clear the air, I did not delete the announcement I made yesterday to ignore the comments that were made. The post is saved here on my computer, and that's where it will stay. I deleted it because it was causing too many negative problems with many people in this community, so I felt it would be best to remove it. I'm going to re-evaluate how I utilize my blogs, based on extremely constructive comments by WallyM, and move forward later this week. You should already see one major change to a few of my blogs, and more are coming.
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Blast From The Past
I've been blogging here for almost a year now. What a difference a year makes. I was going through some of my old blog posts, looking for some good nuggets of information that I might have forgotten about. These tips have helped me immensely, and I hope they help out some of you guys too.
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ASP.NET Forums Enhancements
Over the weekend, I made some serious modification to the ASP.NET Forums 1.0 release to support header and footer controls, for better integration with existing site designs. Jeff Sandquist also made some huge improvements, fixed several long-standing bugs, and added a neat visual smiley panel. It's pretty nifty, and now we're ready to performance test it in a live environment. More improvements are coming, but for now, check it out at http://forums.interscapeusa.com. We'll zip up the source and make it available later on this month, as a courtesy to all ASP.NET Forums 1.0 users.
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Crossposting Items Of Note
In an effort to quell some of the naysayers, yet still maintain an effective blog presense, I posted three new entries to my Corporate blog. I will continue to talk about code techniques in the context of my products here, because that's what this blog is for: to talk about what I'm doing with code. Other people on these weblogs do it too, but few of them happen to be selling anything. I will try to save more of the marketing-esque discussions for my corporate blog, since most of you aren't ISVs doing your own thing anyways and it doesn't interest you. That being said, if you want to read more, follow these links...
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Cool DataGrid Trick
Did you know that you can trick the DataGrid's ButtonColumn to use an image for a button without having to use a TemplateColumn? It's actually really easy. In the DataGrid Property Builder, change the column's Button Type to “LinkButton”, then use regular HTML for the “Text” property, like so:
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Page Event Lifecycle (Not So) Mysteries
For the past few hours I've been working on upgrading the Interscape Store to handle some new promotions we're doing. One of the features I've been wanting to add was the ability to see the cart's total change if you add a promotion to it. Right now, it's not possible because of a limitation in the Commerce framework that I'm using (XHEO|Commerce, it's pretty nifty, but not released yet), but I just finished coding a really elaborate workaround that seems to be doing the trick.
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Overloaded Properties in VB.NET?
I'm getting ready to finish up the marketing on a product I've recently acquired and am ready to release, but before I can, I need to ask a question. Hopefully all you intelligent developers out there can give me an answer. This question applies to VB.NET developers only. (Yes I realize the looping syntax below is in C#, the product is written in C#, the code is targeted at VBers.)
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GenX.NET Update
I just uploaded a new version of GenX.NET to InterscapeUSA.com. This update is free to all customers, and I'd strongly recommend that anyone currenly evaluating it download the update. It includes several new features, updated documentation, and a few critical bug fixes. You can get more details here.
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ScrollingGrid Update
Well, ScrollingGrid has had over 50 downloads in the past two days. Looks like a lot of people are trying it out. Now you have a few more reasons to.
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Disable Simple Sharing in Windows XP
Have you ever tried to share something in Windows XP, and came across that stupid “Simple Sharing” dialog? Wouldn't you like to disable it, and get to the Windows 2000/2003 version? Well, it's really simple. In Windows Explorer window, select “Tools | Folder Options”. Then select the “View” tab, and scroll all the way down to the bottom. Uncheck the last tab “Use Simple Sharing” and click ok. Now you're all set. :)
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In The Market for a New Installer
I've just downloaded ActiveInstall 2004, and I'll be evaluating it over the next few days. I'd love to have some other opinions on what you think about it. I'd rather not hear about how I shoudl try INstallShield or what not, I'll be evaluating that next. I'd really just like to get some comments on what people think about this particular product. It's only $258 on Xtras.net, which puts it well within my price range.
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M3 Anyone?
Did anyone else notice that the screenshots in ScottGu's post this morning aren't from the PDC build of Whidbey?
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The Future of RSS
Scoble asks what we want to see next from RSS. I'll tell you what I want, and I'd love to be able to have the time to make it happen myself.
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Have You Seen Our Website Yet?
Have you seen Interscape's website yet? Well, you should take a minute and check it out. We're using some really cool technologies to put out a simple yet effective website. Take the design for a second. You want to get a jump on MasterPages in ASP.NET 2.0? Then you should check out XHEO|Webskin. It's a very effective templating solution that allows me to now have to worry about mixing content and design, and it is very similar to MasterPages. I converted my entire site from Webskin to MasterPages in about 10 minutes. (Now if I only had a 2.0 GoLive license....)
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ScrollingGrid is LIVE!
Well, I finished an all-night marathon wrap-up session last night (midnight to 10am), and finally got ScrollingGrid completed, and all of the website changes online. As of 10am this morning, ScrollingGrid is now available for all of you to test out and buy. The download comes with a built-in 30 day free trial, and you can purchase it right from Visual Studio .NET. It comes with a User's Guide that walks you through all the nuances of the control.
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DataGrid Tips
In preparing a Users Guide for the eminent ScrollingGrid release, I came across this article on MSDN's ASP.NET Portal. Our very own DataGridGirl gives us the Top 10 DataGrid Mistakes. It's a good read, and very informative.
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The Ever Changing Process of Building Processes
So I've been spending the past few days updating the build processes for all the software I've been working on. The problem is that, while I'm not the first person to ever have to build installers for commercial components using the deployment tools in VS.NET, I'm the only one willing to talk about it. Several searches on Google for information on nuances like what an “Environment String Value” is in the Registry Editor have turned up utterly fruitless.
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This Is Why I Only Went To Five PDC Sessions
The tagline for PDC was “Make The Connection”. For me, that was very true. I got to meet so many cool people there, and had lunch with people like Lili Cheng, Robert Scoble, Chris Brumme, and Erin Joyce, among many others. Had I spent my time making sure I went to every session I wanted to go to, I would have missed out on a lot of those opportunities. This is exactly why I didn't kill myself to get to the sessions... now I can sit at home, in my spare time, really sit down and take it all in and understand it.
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Thinking about changing the title of my blog...
You know, I've been pondering this problem for quite some time. It seems that people get the wrong impression from my blog title. They assume that it is a self appointed label bestowed upon myself by myself, for the purpose of letting everyone know how great I am. Nothing could be further from the truth.
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Building A Better Server Control Experience, Part 3
Building a Better Server Control Experience, Part 3
Architecting For Simplicity: Don't Build It For Yourself -
Dynamic Registry Installer Class
I wrote some simple yet effective code last night. Since I can't put it in the Interscape Base Library, I'm making it available here. Have at it:
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I Can't Have What I Want
I have determined why there aren't more quality processes in place in the community for server controls. It's because Microsoft makes it darn-near impossible to install controls in the intuitively simplest manner. In fact, the whole process is completely counterintuitive.
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Another Long Night
As if I wasn't trying to solve enough problems today, here's what I just got finished tackling:
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Why Rob Howard Rocks
I really don't need to say anything, this article speaks for itself. A must-read for anyone that does any database work whatsoever. The last sentence is the best analogy for not writing complex SQL that I have ever seen. A gem of a post... great job.
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Let the FUD Fly
I was going to write a post about the completely ignorant and now infamous “Wronghorn” article Scoble posted about last night. Well, looks like I don't have to. Sebastien Lambla did a KILLER job writing an intelligent and hilarious post, complete with a link to Neopoleon's PDC bathroom incident. It reminded me very much of a similar article that came across my inbox about a year ago regarding the .NET Framework. It was filled with exactly the same crap as this one was. I fired off an e-mail to the guys' editor, ripping apart the guys argument point-by-point, and lambasting him for not doing any kind of fact-checking whatsoever. Two weeks later, I had a job writing for CNET Networks. Go figure.
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How To Screw Up VS.NET 2003 In One Easy Step
Step 1) Install the VS.NET 2003 Documentation Update because you forgot you already had the MSDN Library from your Universal subscription installed.
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My Requirements For Templating in Whidbey
With the launch of ScrollingGrid only hours away, I'm working on upgrades to my website to allow for it to handle some new features we had planned when we had multiple products for sale. In doing so, I wanted to rearrange the site architecture, similarly to the way I rearranged my website graphics structure a few weeks ago. The problem with my current templating solution, as far as I can figure out, is that most of the control loading is based on physical file locations, not virtual locations. This means that I can't have a single skin directory that is virtually included in all my applications, so that template changes get propagated to http://www.interscapeusa.com, http://support.interscapeusa.com, http://demos.interscapeusa.com, https://secure.interscapeusa.com, etc. I could be wrong, and I have yet to really discuss the issue with Paul, but at this point, having screwed with it for several hours, I have the distinct feeling that the answer is no.
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Microsoft's Committment to ISVs
In my corporate blog yesterday, I talked about a nifty new thing that the Microsoft Partner Program put together for ISVs. Very exciting.
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Welcome Another MS Blogger
I was just about to shut down my computer and go to sleep (yes I am fully aware that it is now almost 6:30am and I am not asleep, I was working on the Version Commander and did not want to go to sleep yet), when I got a neat little e-mail in my inbox. My apologies to Julien Ellie, because I'm going to include his e-mail in this post:
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On Tap For This Week:
Here's what I'm working on for this week, and the weeks ahead:
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Fed Up With Project Versions
It's kind of a pain in the butt to have to compile stuff to two different versions of the Framework. I haven't dived into Whidbey too much, but I sure hope MSBuild lets you define which version of the Framework you want to target (I'm pretty sure it does, but I could be wrong). At any rate, I have to maintain two versions of my projects and solutions. It's kind of a pain to go through and edit my project and solution files after I'm finished with the 2003 version so I can compile in 2002, so I spent most of the night coming up with this solution: The VS.NET Version Commander.
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Building a Better Server Control Experience, Part 2
Details matter. Especially in building solutions people pay for. You've heard of the term WYSIWYG? Well why isn't the term YGWYPF more prevalent? It stands for You Get What You Pay For, and it's more true in today's economy than most people realize. So where are the little details in server controls? What are the mundane, time-consuming details that set apart a proof-of-concept from a true solution? Over the next few posts, I'll address them.
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Building a Better Server Control Experience, Part 1
Building a Better Server Control Experience, Part 1
Your Code Is Broken..... Or Is It? A Look At Coding For The Requirements -
PatchDayReview.com Update
I just finished a long overdue update to PatchDayReview.com. With PDC, GenX.NET, ScrollingGrid, LonghornBlogs, and ever other stupid little distraction getting in the way, keeping the patches updated kinda fell by the wayside. But, the first round of updates has been completed, and I'll work on Part 2 tomorrow. It's good to see Microsoft rolling several fixes into one patch now. Good call.
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Visual Studio 2003 Documentation Update
For those of you that don't have an MSDN subscription, you can download an 80MB update to the VS.NET 2003 documentation. I'm told that it contains 5000 code samples, bug fixes and content improvements. The link I gave you is a direct link to the file (in English), so have at it :).
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How To Repair Your Outlook Files
I had an interesting problem today. I woke up this morning, after having stayed up till 4am answering several questions about my new server control, and I found that my Outlook was acting very strangely. I had a scare earlier this week, because I had to hook up my mom's virus-riddled hard drive to my server. Having already scanned for viruses several times and coming back with nothing, I decided that my Outlook files were getting corrupted.
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Questions about ScrollingGrid
Well, there you have it folks, you have three different options for enhancing your UI with a scrollable DataGrid.The solution you use is up to you. In the meantime, feel free to e-mail me or reply to this post with any more questions you have. And be sure to check back on Monday when we release the product. Customer feedback is an integral part of our development process.
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The Scrollable Area Problem
David Burke talked today about Julia Lerman's article on scrollable areas, more specifically using a <DIV> tag to make a DataGrid scroll. It's kinda funny he mentioned that, because I'm a few days away from releasing my next killer control, which is based on a similar principle. I wasn't planning on talking about it before it was done, but since it was brought up, I decided to let the cat out of the bag a few days early.
Workspace Woes
Well, Vault is looking mighty appealing after my Workspace decided to mysteriously malfunction. So much for working on my next control tonight. Oh well, I need to update PatchDayReview anyways.
Relief like you can't imagine...
I finally got the merchant account problem squared away. It's not an appropriate post for here, so you can read about the whole ordeal here in my corporate blog. I know the site design needs work, but it's not exactly on my list of priorities right now. This incident caused us to totally change direction on our cash flow situation, and I'll be blogging about that process in my corporate blog over the next few days.
Dittoheads Unite!
New Blogger
Just wanted to wanted to welcome a new blogger to the fold...
Keep the SimpleGeek away from the Kool-Aid
Methinks the simplegeek has spent too much time in his office this week:
Great Info On Avalon
Just thought you guys should know that, over on LonghornBlogs.com, some of the PMs from the Avalon team are now actively posting some great stuff about XAML and Avalon. You can tell who is who by the “[MS]” designation after their name. A few more will be posting in the next few days, so go check it out!
Open Letter to Eric Sink
Dear Eric,
The Power of Blogs, Part II
Here's the other cool part about blogging. I can tell you guys about people you should not be dealing with, ever.
.NET Tidbits
I'm working on correcting a flaw in GenX.NET 3.0's CsvFormatProvider, where translating data fields that contain commas produces errors. In researching the problem, I found out two things:
Download all the PDC materials...
This is my first post from NewsGator. Too bad it doesn't support categories. At any rate, this just came across my NewsGator feeds. Early & Adopter have written an app to pull down all the downloads from PDC-related sites and dump them to your hard drive. Man these guys are awesome. Take it away, guys!
Welcome to The Blogosphere!
I was looking through my server referrer logs, compiling statistics for LonghornBlogs.com, when I came across referrers from ErinJoyce.com. I happened to sit next to Erin during the Day Two keynote at PDC, by random happenstance, and we had a couple really nice discussions after that. She's a very nice woman, and extremely informed. Can't wait to see what else she has to say. Subscribed!
Script Encoding in Server Controls?
Does anyone know if this technique is cross-browser compatible? I know that DbCombo.net uses it to encode the javascript in IE, but I'm not sure if it works anywhere else. Any thoughts?
Cause Everyone Likes Free Stuff
I like free stuff. Most people do. The thing that I like even more than getting free stuff, is giving free stuff away. Thats why, for the rest of 2003, my company (Interscape Technologies) will be giving away a ton of free stuff. Every two weeks, we'll have another contest where we'll give something else away. That being said, I'm proud to announce the first giveaway:
My Motivation for Blogging
I was right smack dab in the middle of a post about the latest “Ballmerisms” from another SteveB speech, when a most insightful e-mail arrived in my inbox:
Assembly Resource Viewer
Need to see the resources in your assemblies? Look no further then ASMEX. Much better than DLL resource editors.. very helpful, ADN shows embedded files too, not just embedded icons.
I really thought I blogged more from PDC....
Man, this past week just flew by. I really thought I had blogged more about it. There were a few times where I went to post from the Internet Alley, and I stepped away from the machine for a few seconds to talk to someone, and it automatically logged me out. Oh well, I'll give your aggregators a rest and bring the blogosphere up to speed on my exploits next week. I must say that it was probably one of the best experiences of my life, and I thoroughly enjoyed meeting everyone that I did. I met some outstanding individuals that really have a passion for this stuff, and it was great to talk and share experiences.
Microsoft Fires Stupid Blogger, Scoble Gets Links
Scoble got linked on MSNBC.com in an article about blogging. Microsoft recenly fired an intern who lapsed judgement when posting information he was privy to a few days ago. Gosh, I wonder why he got fired? Maybe because he was dumb?
The Day is Finally Here!!!
It's Official! GenX.NET 3.0 is complete and has been released to the public! Check it out today at http://www.genxdotnet.com. GenX.NET is the first DTS engine available for the .NET Framework. Using an application architecture that will be used heavily in ASP.NET “Whidbey”, GenX.NET 3.0 is extremely extensible, while still being simple to use. It features 100% integration with ADO.NET, and supports ANY ADO.NET Data Provider. You can format and output data into a variery of ways, and GenX.NET has the most features for your buck of any other component available.
The Tuesday of Randomness
Yesterday may very well have been the coolest day of my life. It started out with a chance encounter with Erin Joyce, columnist for InternetNews.com. She wrote a killer article on blogging and Longhorn last week, and by pure chance, sat next to me at Eric Rudder's keynote. As Paschal pointed out, she quoted me for her article on WinFS. (I'll cut her some slack even if she got my company name wrong. That was quite interesting, and she's a really interesting lady.
Made it to PDC... First Thoughts...
OK, I braved the Grayhound, and am going on 2 hours sleep, but I'm here, and I have a few thoughts about what I've seen so far...
Stuck in Phoenix
My flight was rescheduled for Tuesday morning, which means I'm screwed. Gonna get on a Greyhound tonight if I can't get a rental car. If you're stranded in Phoenix, there is a bus leaving tonight at 1:45am, and gets in at 8:50am. Call me at 480-699-1046 or my cell 480-710-2770. Lets see if we can get this taken care of... I have to be there in the morning.
STRANDED PDC SPEAKERS
If you're a speaker at PDC and you're currently stranded somewhere, call Robert Scoble on his cell.... (408) 314-8233.
LAX CURRENTLY CLOSED
Due to wildfires, LAX is currently closed. If anyone is in-transit, you will probably be delayed. I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to get there.... I may be renting a car. If any of you get diverted to Phoenix, call me at 480-699-1046 or 480-710-2770 and, depending on what I decide to do, we may drive out (only about 6 hours from Phoenix).
Let us not forget....
While there will be a lot of MS guys talking at PDC, and it will be a hige deal for everyone involved, let us not forget the thousands of MS employees who have worked tirelessly to bring the code, demos, and cool stuff that make up everything that is being released this week. These guys are definitely underappreciated and deserve our thanks.
PDC-Related News
OK, now that I've FINALLY got everything squared away with my company stuff, my online store is finished, GenX.NET is moments away from launch, and my PDC plans are finalized... here's an update on what is going on next week. I'm really excited to meet all of you, and it should be a really great experience. So without further ado, here is what's going on RE: PDC.
Cool Contest
Just caught this neat contest on LonghornBlogs.com. First prize is a Media Center PC for $1500. Pretty cool.They'll be using .Text to post screenshots of the contest. Anyone up for writing a voting module for .Text?
Bluetooth Woes
Well, I got my new Bluetooth keyboard today, and I was unable to get it working with Windows Server 2003. I got the Bluetooth stack working (Hacked the XP QFE for it), but couldn't get IntelliPoint and InteelliType working for it. I'm really pissed off at Microsoft on this one, because Windows 2003 is newer than Windows XP SP1, and Bluetooth should be supported and enabled. And the stupid Intelli____ software should be able to work with it too. So, after having just wiped my computer 4 days ago, looks like I'll be wiping it again Thursday morning to downgrade to Windows XP. If I really need to do something on 2003, I guess I'll just use VMWare. I waited a year to get this keyboard, I'm not just gonna let it sit in my closet while MS sits on its butt over this one.
GotDotNet Workspaces Upgrade
I'm surprised no one noticed it yet (well, not really since most people probably use them through Visual Studio), but the team at GotDotNet released an upgrade to the Workspaces. From what I can tell, here are the new features:
HOW TO: Configure Windows Server 2003 for DTC
Many of you may have read my earlier rants about my problems with transactions on my servers. Well, this little situation has occupied most of my brain for the better part of the week, and thanks to the guys at OrcsWeb, it is no longer an issue. I'm going to detail here briefly what to do, and then later next month it will appear in an article for Builder.com.
Referrer problems with new blog update?
Is anyone else having issues with their blog referrers? Mine seem to be all hosed up after the latest update. Every one seems to point to weblogs.asp.net. Any ideas?
Final BOF Session Times (and Rooms) Posted
MS just finalized everything for the BOF Sessions at PDC. This year, I'm running 2 marathon back-to-back sessions. We'll start off Monday evening with a conversation about how to start building ASP.NET 2.0 features into ASP.NET 1.X Server Controls, and right after that we'll talk about everything blogs that is developer-related. Here are the official write-ups:
Words Cannot Express...
... the relief I feel now, having FINALLY fixed the MSDTC issue that has been plaguing me for OVER A WEEK now. FINALLY everything is in place for me to launch my products, and God forbid, make some money.
StringWriter Encoding Hack
A few months back I blogged about the problems I had with the System.IO.StringWriter when dealing with XML. This whole dealing with XML things is not very intuitive IMO. There are way too many steps involved in making it work. My other problem with it is kind of complicated to explain, so I will try my best.
TweakXP for Windows Server 2003
TotalIdea seems to have taken their TweakXP tool for Windows Server 2003 offline. It's actually like it doesn't even exist anymore. Their new website (www.totalidea.com) doesn't even mention it. I stumbled across a Polish Microsoft site that still has it. This is the only place you can currently get it, so make sure you grab it while you can.
Who screwed up the Weblogs?
Someone stuck some DHTML transition code in their post, and it's screwing with the way the site is displaying. Can whoever did it please take it out? It's kinda distracting. That would be really cool. Thanks :)
Scoble's Been Busy
Robert just posted the list of nearly every blog that he follows. Over 500 people just got a serious hit of Google juice. Interesting.
Me = Kid + CandyStore
I got my MSDN discs today. I'm so excited, but I was kinda disappointed cause i figued they put the binders together for you. Then I thought “well, that doesn't make sense now does it?” BTW, these binders are freakin awesome. So I figured, it's a pretty quiet weekend (the calm before the storm of PDC) So I'll throw this out to you guys for some feedback:
Bluetooth in Windows Server 2003?
Brian was having trouble getting his new Bluetooth keyboard working on Windows Server 2003. I recently ordered the Microsoft Optical Keyboard/Mouse for Bluetooth. The problem is, the Platform SDK says that Windows 2003 supports Bluetooth...
My Biggest Beef with VS.NET
My biggest beef with VS.NET deals with assembly references. Since I'm a component developer, these issues are near and dear to my heart. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, and have decided to put it into three very clear scenarios to help people understand the problem. These use cases are extremely common, and the problems encountered are a royal PITA. See for yourself, and read on.
Compilation Woes
The code for GenX.NET 3.0 FINALLY went RTM today... one of the complications of such thorough documentation (generating docs from source code comments using Fesersoft's still unreleased update to VB Comments Creator and NDOC) with source code control is that, if you find problems in the docs, you have to update the source code. So I've been pouring over the Object Reference, making sure that everything is 100% accurate, with no typos or grammar mistakes. Since we haven't made the providers public in this release, there are tons of comments in the code that never made it into the public API (but will be available in the SDK). One of my biggest beefs is when documentation is incomplete, inconsistent, or not in the same “voice” throughtout. So I've taken extra time (well, the same time that I take with my code) to make sure that it's all in the best possible state of completeness. In case you didn't know yet, I'm kind of a hard person to please when it comes to code quality.
BOF Sessions Simplified
Jeffery McManus took a few minutes and simplified the PDC BOF Schedule for us. There will be some changes over the next day or so, but oh well. My Server Controls session will be changing days, as I won't be getting into town until late Sunday night. I'll be posting final BOF times shortly.
MS: Please Improve KB Searches
Why didn't a search of the MS knowledge base for DTC come up with this?
Why I Dislike Symantec
So, I just got off the phone (a little while ago now) with Symantec Technical Support, and I sit here in front of my computer with a renewed dislike for everything the company does. I don't want to say hate, because I don't really feel like ranting today. I am however, extremely disappointed at the whole mess I went through today.
How to Hose a Server in 3 Easy Steps
Step 1: Start using a component that requires transactions.
Monkey See, Monkey Do
MSNBC.com reported today that a group of researchers have given monkeys neurological implants that let them control a robotic arm with only their minds. Take a few minutes and read the whole article... it's absolutely fascinating.
Offline Notice
LonghornBlogs.com and PatchDayReview.com will be offline for the next several hours while I troubleshoot some pretty serious COM/MSDTC issues. I'll post more about it after I get the servers back online.
My Next PC
LISP.NET
I've seen a lot of people talking about LISP lately. I have no idea what the heck it is, but I was searching my hard drive for a User's Guide I wrote for GenX.NET, and I found this link. It's a LISP compiler right inside the .NET Framework 1.1 SDK. Look on your hard drive at this location:
PDC BOF Sessions
Well, I just got notified that my Whidbey Server Control BOF session was accepted. That brings the number of BOF's I'm running to two. WOO HOO :). Next week I'm going to hit this stuff up heavy, so be sure to send me some ideas. Oh yeah, and I'm also running the Weblogger BOF session. In addition to what is listed, we'll also be discussing the future of LonghornBlogs.com, getting your feedback, and signing up bloggers. Both sessions are going to be awesome, so make sure you're there if you're at PDC. I'm really looking forward to it. :)
Dubbya.NET?
Well, at least SOME parts of the government understand the coolness of .NET. George W. Bush's re-election website runs on ASP.NET. HA! Take that Howard Dean! Your plain jane HTML just can't stand up to the awesome power that is managed code. There is only one problem. Dubbya's blog is not powered by .Text. I don't even think it's his blog, just someone on the campaign. ScottW, come on man. Get to lobbying! Just cause MovableType was on CNN doesn't mean you can drop the ball like that. ;)
My Tablet PC
Someday....
Drew's been busy..
HOLY COW! PDCBloggers.net just launched a slew of new features to the site. They have a new user control to put on your site, as well as a brand new design, and a whole bunch of PDC related materials. Go check it out! Great job Drew & Gang!!
It's All In Your Head
OK, so GenX.NET has been slower to launch than I wanted it to be. WAY slower. Part of the reason was because we've been building the the new “Store” and “MyAccount” sections of the website. Since the hostages have not been freed yet, I've had to start over on a lot of my DB work. But, since the new system runs completely on top of XHEO's yet-unreleased application suite, I haven't had to do a whole lot of DB work thus far. The biggest problem though, has been all in my mind.
HOLY SH!T!
Look everyone. Posts by Rob Howard and Scott Guthrie... in the same week!!! And look, ScottGu posted 3 times. Woah.
Why I Love Working With Microsoft
I get asked all the time, “Wouldn't you love working for Microsoft?” My answer is always “Hello no, I'd rather work with them. That would be much cooler.” Well that's pretty much what I do now, although on a largely unofficial basis. I did, however, come across one of the reasons that Microsoft is my favorite company. I thought I'd share it with you.
Make Adobe Acrobat 6 Load Faster
Here's how to do it:
Are YOU In Design Mode?
Scott Hansleman talks about page instantiation while designing ASPX pages in the IDE [via Daniel Fisher]. Good stuff.
Writing Secure Code
So, after reading “Writing Secure Code, Second Edition”, I've totally changed the way I program. Here is a prime example, taken from the book:
New Bloggers Added
I just added some new bloggers to LonghornBlogs. Read all about it here. Welcome aboard guys!
I'm dumb
Why? Because I JUST NOW started using the Data Access Application Block for building middle tiers. Uh, yeah I should have done this a long time ago. Well, I haven't needed to do any middle-tier development for a while now. I just slayed 300 lines of code from my custom XHEO|Licensing web service implementation, which is always nice. Maybe I'll be able to wrap up this conversion quicker than I thought.
Today's News:
This just in. Scoble gets interviewed by .NET Rocks and gets torn a new a-hole by Roy Osherove. Film at 11.
Website Organization Strategy
One of the biggest problems I've always had with maintaining several related websites is that I can never keep my images synched up. One other related problem would be that, if I ever threw an image up onto the web server, and referenced it on another site, it would throw off my web server statistics. A perfect example is the signature graphic I use on the ASP.NET Forums. That would throw of my stats by thousands of visitors every week.
First Day Stats
OK, my new ventures have been up for a full day now, and here are some statistics.
Caching Confusion
OK, so I was getting this funky error on www.interscapeusa.com, and it kinda pissed me off. I couldn't track down why the site would randomly insert JavaScript into my web pages, throwing a really odd error in IE. Well, it turns out that Paul added a really nifty feature to XHEO|WebSkin that fixes the Framework 1.1 PostBack issue (you know, the one Microsoft still won't release a public fix for). Well, I was caching my pages without varying the parameter, and so at one point, a Netscape browser requested the page, and that output was cached. So when IE browsers hit it, it gives you the JavaScript bird and throws an error.
Big News #3: New Home for Patch Day Review!
Well, my Patch Day Review has gotten pretty popular. So popular in fact, that I decided to make it a service of my company, and give it a new home. www.patchdayreview.com runs on the same .Text blogging engine, which allows me to have a lot more control over the format of the site, and automatically creates an RSS feed for me, which was the main reason for using this engine. You'll notice a slightly different format that what I was using before. This is because I wanted to be able to have patch categories, so you can see what alerts affect which products. So from now on, you'll see the patches individually, and you'll also see a summary post for the week. This is the one place where I hope I don't have to post a lot.
Big News #2: New Community Site
OK, this has been several weeks in the making, but thanks to Robert Scoble, and the amazing graphics work of Paul Alexander, THE next exciting community is officially online!
Big News #1: It begins....
Non-techie .NET Book request
My business partner wants to get up to speed on .NET, but he comes from a sales and marketing background, not a technical one. Do you guys have any recommendations for good books on .NET for someone coming from a completely non-technical history? Maybe like “.NET for Dummies” or something to that effect? Please let me know. if not I'll have to write one.
Blogs back online
I finally got my other blogs working again. Since my old hosting provider won't release the hostages, I'm going to have to completely rebuild them. I'm going to pull my best posts out of the Google cache and, even tho my permalinks won't work, hopefully Google will reindex and all will be well. Cross one more thing off my list.
Coming together
Just two more days until the big launch. Today was a very good day, as now the new servers are all up and running, DNS issues are mostly resolved, and two new community websites are up and running. Now, just gotta wait for the domain names to resolve properly, and those sites should be totally finished and out of my mind. Two more full days of work, and the past two years of work will finally be completed (well, begun really).
HOLY CRAP!
Seven long hours of work later, and I FINALLY get my new web server to talk to my new SQL server. Geez man this was getting ridiculous. For whatever reason, after installing SQL on the server, I could not connect to it through EM on my local machine. The ports were wide open, but my EM was doing a really good Stevie Wonder impression. The web server couldn't see it either.
It begins...
I've been heads-down all week working on the finishing touches to everything I have going on. The DNS settings started transitioning over to my new servers, and I've been hard at work prepping the new production servers for the new websites we are launching. It's getting pretty intense now. Only two more business days and the rest of the weekend before the big launch day. This time it cannot be missed, due to the timing of other announcements that are outside my control. Things are moving well tho. I'm in for a few sleepless nights, that's for sure.
I'd love to go to a PDC Bloggers Party But.....
How about we all go to Universal Studios instead? Um, that would be way more fun than not drinking and yakking for hours about BS that we're all gonna be yakkin about all week long anyway.
No More MSN Chat
Microsoft Patterns and Practices Goodies
I stumbled upon the ASP.NET Checklists today (courtesy of Roy Osherove), and have been roaming around the Patterns and Practices section all day. I've found some truly outstanding gems, and just in time to configure my new servers that are slowly coming online.
Weblogger BOF Is On!
WOO HOO! The Weblogger BOF session topic was selected as one of the first 23 picked on Saturday. I'm really excited that it's a go, and very soon I'm going to put together a working group to help determine how the session is going to work. Currently, the following people are signed up to help:
How to alleviate spam, a simple perspective
It seems to me like the easiest way to get rid of SPAM would be to have mailservers check to see if the IP address of the e-mail sender resolves to the domain references in the “From” field. This would require people like me to register their home computers in their business DNS system when sending business mail, but so what?
The real deal, eh?
Who does this guy think he is, Joe Scarborough? I am constantly appalled by the commpany that I work for, and the meaningless drivel they publish. If the media has a liberal bias, then the tech-media version of the political parties would have to be Microsoft (Republicans/Conservatives) v. Linux/Sun/Open Source (Democrats/Liberals). Haven't I read this before? Oh yeah, I have. Scott McNealy talked the same kind of smack 4 months ago. Here are some highlights:
The power of blogs
I was going over my referrer logs a few minutes ago (still hoping for page view stats someday), and I've been really surprised by the varied nature of how people come to read what I write. I keep seeing this referrer in my logs in regards to my post on the Disneyland accident: http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=DISNEYLAND%20ACCIDENTS. I'm an egotist by nature, I'll freely admit it. I like to click through my referrers and see where they're coming from. So I click through. It turns out, thanks to an anonymous poster by the name of “Mr. M. Mouse”, I am #7 on that list of search results.
I'm at a loss...
So many of you may have noticed that I've been fairly quiet over the past few days. A few people have IMed me expressing concern, and for that I thank you guys. Rest assured, my absence is not anything health related. Unfortunately, the same is not true for Paul at Xheo.com. He has come down with a very persistent case of food poisoning. I hope he gets better soon, and I would ask that you all keep him in your prayers, as he has been sick for the past week.
.NET Continues Its Quest for Complete World Domination
Holy Buffer Overflows Batman!
Buffer overflow errors are not just Microsoft's problem. Nor is it just a Windows issue. News.com today reports that IBM's DB2 Database program for Linux has an easy to exploit buffer overflow vulnerability that lets anyone get root access to the entire data store. Yeah, ok the RPC issue in Windows was a big deal but MSBlaster was only a nuisance. Slammer was the same way... it flooded ports and brought databases offline, but the sensitive information inside was not compromised.
COMPLETELY Off Topic
... but I though you guys would get a kick out of this.
Blaster vs Everyone, Round 2
Scoble points us to a report on MSNBC that says another MSBlaster-like virus has been released into the wild. It tries to exploit the vulnerability I duscussed in last week's Patch Day Review. If you have not patched yet, you have less than 48 hours before this one will hit in force. You would be well advised to stop what you are doing and patch right now. PLEASE, for all of us.
Before I'm misquoted....
Before I get slammed for racism here, let me just say that the point I was trying to make in this post not to say that hating Microsoft is akin to racism. The point WAS, however, to quote Chris Rock in Dogma, “You can change an idea, it's a whole lot harder to change a belief.” Some people will go to the grave thinking that anyone who works at Microsft should rot in hell. (Not me.) Just like some people will go to the grave thinking that blonde haired, blue eyed white people should be the only ones allowed to live free (ALSO not me). Because it is a belief that Microsoft sucks, is bad, or evil, that these people hold. And they will likely hold onto it at all costs, because for them, it validates their reality.
More whining from the MS Haters
Datagrid Girl points us to a site called microsuck.com that talks about, well, why Microsoft sucks. It looks a lot like Microsoft's old site, which is kinda funny. It also whines about why Microsoft is bad and portrays the typical childish rant about backwards compatibility, slams MS for wanting to be compensated for illegal software copies, et. al. And what's better, the site shows it's true childishness right in the title tag of the site. Woo hoo. Let the misconceptions roll.
Where do you want to go today, dirtbag?
“Word has it that I was next in line to become one of those little Office Assistant thingies..... but I try not to spend my time thinking about 'what-ifs'.“ Red vs. Blue [via Scoble]
Builder.com Article #6
Woo hoo. Here is my sixth article on Builder.com. Basically, it's how to idiot-proof your assembly versioning when you target different versions of the Framework.
Not screwed too badly after all
OK, my hosting company hasn't jumped ship, as I finally got throught to someone on their end. I'm still going to need to find a new hosting company very quickly. This was the last straw.
I think I'm screwed...
Well, I woke up this morning, and my entire web farm is offline. After about an hour of investigation, I find out that my hosting company's entire network is offline, and no one is answering their phones. The last local server backup I have is from August 1, and I don't know if I have any local database backups.
What Is Skype?
From the makers of KaZaA, ladies and gentlemen, I give you P2P VoIP: Skype.
Trillian Pro 2.0 Released
Cerulean Studios has released the final version of Trillian Pro 2.0. They've also redesigned their website, and done a fabulous job with it too. It's only $25, so why don't you go pick yourself up a copy? It's awesome.
Office 2003 Available Monday to MSDN Subscribers
Via News.com.
In Memoriam
This message is to programmers and people worldwide, not just to Americans:
Microsoft is so nice...
Dear Valued Microsoft Customer,
PDR: 10 September 2003 Special Edition
This warning supersedes the warning that discussed the MSBlaster vulnerability. What that means is, this alert deals with the same problems that the MSBlaster one did, and more. If you're reading this, stop what you are doing, and either download the scanning tool, or just install the patch immediately. Don't fool around with this one. The more people that patch, the less likely another MSBlaster will show up.
What to look forward to today
Well, today is going to be a pretty decent day. First off, today is MS Patch Day, meaning that once again it's time for my Patch Day Review. I'll put together a list this afternoon and post it this evening, Hopefully it won't be as long as last week's, cause that means lots of vulnerabilities.
myKB 4.1 Released
Scott Cate, leader of the largest .NET Users Group in the US, the AZDNUG, has just released version 4.1 of his killer myKB application. He has made some tremendous improvements on the application's speed, and his work is phenominal. myKB is extremely easy to use, and will be powering an extremely significant portion of my company's business for a long time to come. If you have not signed up for a free account yet, you are seriously missing out. Do yourself a favor and go check it out today.
Nifty Web Services Trick
Thanks to Brady Gaster for this neat little tidbit. Did you know that you can control the look and feel of the Web Service access page that .NET generates? Habib Heydarian from the Visual C++ team clues us in:
Dialog Base Classes Released
For my 300th post, I finally got around to getting Jesse Ezell's WebForms Dialog Classes zipped up and put on my site. Included in the download are both VB and C# source code files. I'm gonna try to whip up a few samples that make use of it. If you use them in your code, make sure you give Jesse credit. If you enhance the code, make sure you shoot me an e-mail to robert at interscapeusa dot com, so I can evaluate it and include it in the download. Thanks Jesse for this really killer code.
PDR @ Only4Gurus.com
Carlos Aquino was kind enough to begin hosting a copy of my weekly Patch Day Review on Only4Gurus.com. I'm currently working out the details on how I want to move forward with it from here. My weekly PDR is targeted at “ungeeks” who don't have a clue about what “NetBIOS” or “RPC” is. but everyone else can read it too. The will be a little humorous, and sometimes sarcastic, cause serious things don't ALWAYS have to be taken so seriously. If it's boring, ungeeks won't read it. You'll see at a glance how severe it is, and I'll have a recommendation on what do do. Most of the time, the recommendation will be to install the patch. And laugh more often.
Kinda freaked out
I just found out that one guy died and 11 people were injured when a locomotive separated from the cars on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad at Disneyland. Both my twin sister and I were just there not 4 days ago. My twin worked there 2 summers ago, and said it might be the first death in the park where Disney is at fault.
My Recommended WiFi Configuration
I had a request from one of Scoble's loyal readers to post my reccommendation for a WiFi setup. I helped Scoble set up his when I was in Redmond last month, and from what he says, it seems to be working great. So here it goes.
CSS Fun Part II
Richard Bornost pointed me to an entry in his blog where he talked about CSS. Plenty of reading for me over the weekend, when I bone up on CSS layouts so I can fix my Corporate Blog. It will be nice to be finished with this project I am working on so I can get paid and get back to my stuff. I've lost nearly two whole weeks of work. Man it's frustrating.
New BOF Topic
I posted another BOF topic as well. I'm not leading this one as much as I am coordinating some people who I want to lead the discussion. It's shaping up to be pretty cool... I'm hoping that as interest grows I'll be able to post a “Scheduled to Appear” list. Anyways, here it goes:
Updated BOF Topic for PDC
OK, I got a little flak for my old BOF topic. I was told it sounded too much like a marketing piece than a group discussion. So I had the wording changed. It now reads as follows:
I love TweakXP .net
Last night, I posted about the new version of TweakXP for Windows Server 2003. Well, my computer is running TONS faster. The biggest performance increase came from the “Enable Core System Performance” tweak, in conjunction with offloading my paging file to another disk. Another tweak that really increased startup performance was the “Speed up Network Access” tweak in the “Windows Tweaks II” section. Since I'm on a cable modem, startup would often take a long time while the network got its bearings and pulled an IP from the router. Now startup is nearly instantaneous after login.
Fun with .Text
I spent this morning customizing my skin for my Corporate Blog. I decided to rant this morning about Business Process Outsourcing, so I figured I might as well make my blog look like my corporate site. Overall, the templating experience in .Text is not bad. It was fun *sarcasm* trying to track down what CSS entry was affecting which section, and I am still having problems with my menu not going to 100% of the height, but oh well. I may move the site to a basic table format so it is easy to manage. CSS can be wholly unpredictable sometimes.
PDR: 3 September 2003
Everyone keeps coming up with these themes to write about every day. You know, some kind of summary of the stuff they came across during the day. After my rant about software updates, I'm going to post a weekly synopsis of the patches released on TechNet. In case you didn't know, every Wednesday is Microsoft Patch Day (corroboration here). So I'm starting a weekly Patch Day Review (PDR). Each week, I'll give you a brief summary of the new patches available and give you direct download links, so you don't have to wade through all the garbage to get to them. This took me a lot of time to compile, so I hope it's useful to someone.
Have your website e-mail you errors
A friend requested that I post about this. It's a little snippet of code that I whipped up to e-mail me when my site craps out. It has come in handy a few times, and led me to extend the concept for a future software product of sorts. This one is different than most you'll see because I have it send me the stack trace too. You can also extend it to do any inner exceptions and inner stack traces. This is helpful when toubleshooting website components.
Great Windows Administrator Resource
This site needs no explanation. It's extremely basic, but hey, it works. Maybe they should get a myKB.com account and move it to there. It might be a bit more user friendly (and RSS accessible) that way.
More cool tools
I got lots of feedback yesterday about some really great SQL Diff programs. Thanks guys. I can't wait to check them out.
My New Favorite Tool
I needed to do a SQL Diff today <coughing>Yukon team pay attention</coughing> and I came across a great program called Beyond Compare. It lets me load up 2 files side-by-side, and shows me where there are differences. It let me compare the outputs of SQLEM-generated scripts, and see where changes were made. It was a HUGE help. It is not without problems though. Line editing is clumsy (you can only edit one line at a time, and you can't edit the file directly) however they do make it easy to copy text between the files. All in all, it's a great product, and well worth the $30.
Microsoft = bullet-riddled software
I was catching up on Neowin news, and I saw an entry entitled “Microsoft software 'riddled with vulnerabilities'”. I was shocked, nay dumbfounded, to see so many pro-Microsoft comments. Especially along the lines of my rant before I left for the weekend. A few quotes:
Weblogger meet @ Downtown Disney
Just got back from Cali. Since it's the first time I spent a whole weekend away from my computer, I'm going to blog about it in my personal blog. I did however, get to spend nearly three hours with the nefarious Paul Alexander from Xheo.com (He was the only one that took me up on my weblogger meeting offer). I was really glad to finally meet the guy after doing buiness together for so long. I'm really excited about the stuff we have going on over the next few months. The guy is really down to earth, one hella nice guy. Supposedly he's coming to Phoenix in the middle of October. Anyone up for a .NET Golf Tournament? We can play a few rounds and then party at my place on the tenth green. Any takers? Dan... Brady... Scott??
Why I got out of the hardware biz
So I decided to upgrade my RAM today. Little did I know it was going to be an ALL DAY EVENT.
MSBlaster.B Released by 18 Year Old
You know, this really pisses me off. It gives young adults like me a really bad name. The guy is an idiot, and now he could face 10 years in prison for being an idiot. I would say “serves him right”, but look at the damage he helped inflict. He helped cost Microsoft millions of dollars. He forced MS to ask hundreds of employees to give up their free time to help out customers with the fix. This cost MS not only in having to employ extra staff, but also in lost development time. He helped cause thousands of people significant headaches.
Phil Weber Is Awesome. Also Titled: I get what I want in Yukon
In this post, I talked about what I want to see in Yukon.
READ THE DIRECTIONS
As I add this killer stick of RAM, and my computer turns on but won't POST. I'm like, WTF??!?. So I dig through my closet for the manual on my motherboard.
I love Outlook 2003
Wanna know why? Because the new Junk Mail Filtering system is amazing. Honestly, it catches about 99% of the junk mail I get. I don't mind if it misses a few, but so far, it has not sent good mail to the junk folder EVEN ONCE. It great. I'm to the point where I'm almost comfortable with it just deleting the junk mail automatically. We'll see how it's track record goes after it goes RTM.
I learned a really neat trick this week
shutdown /r /f /m \\computername
Weblogger Dinner Anyone?
Hey, I'm gonna be in Anaheim / Los Angeles this weekend. Anyone want to get together for some kind of weblogger event? Maybe a beach party. That would be awesome. Drop me a line atrobert@interscapeusa.com. I'll be in the area Saturday afternoon to Monday evening. It would be really cool to meet some of you guys.Dialog Base Class
I just spent the last 20 minutes cleaning up Jesse Ezell's Dialog code. It's pretty cool. The only problem was, the way he posted it on his blog, it was extremely difficult to cut and paste into VS.NET. Well, and I'm not a C# guy, so it was hard to understand until I could see it properly indented and so forth. Fortunately for you, I turned it into a class file that I'm going to post on my personal site tomorrow. Oh yeah, and I ported it to VB too, so all you VB guys can understand how it works as well.
IExpress.exe
Typing IEXPRESS.EXE in the command box launches IExpress 2.0 wizard to let you create an installation package.
Here's an Idea..
Hey Yukon / Whidbey Teams:
Did you know...
I was talking to a developer friend of mine yesterday. This guy works as a programmer at a console games development company. They do work for the Xbox and PS2. Did you know that the Xbox runs on .NET? Supposedly the Xbox SDK requires you to have Visual Studio .NET 2002 and develop in Managed C++. I had no idea. I wonder how tough it would be for developers to write their own games for the Xbox. The only problem is, the code has to be digitally signed. Unfortunately for us, Verisign only accepts an arm or a leg for payments.
Trillian Goodness
Trillian 2.0 has a spell checker that works just like Office's. It even autocorrects (which can be a pain once in a while). No more typing “teh” or any of the other dyslexic crap that my figers do. WOO HOO!!!
Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM)
Ever wanted to write AD-enabled apps and test them on Windows XP?
Funny stuff
Hilarious. I'm reading “Writing Secure Code, Second Edition” right now, and I love it. I can't believe I've been developing for this long and didn't know this stuff. For sure, we'll be doing a security code review on GenX.NET 3.1, when we add suppoer for binary outputs. Right now it's all just string stuff. Great book that everyone should read.
SQL Server Autoupdates
Randy Holloway talks about SQL Server updating. Recently, I had the pleasure of talking to one of the Program Managers for SQL Server “Yukon” at Microsoft (unfortunately I don't remember his name). Since I had his ear for a few minutes, I queried him (pun intended) on all sorts of information regarding the next release. (I can talk about this next part since it's related to public knowledge anyways). I asked him some questions about having the CLR inside the database, and was pleased overall with his responses. A few questions later, I asked him about patching and updates, and he said basically what this article said. This naturally led me to my next question:
My PDC BOF Topic
I took the plunge today and decided to propose a BOF topic for PDC. In case you didn't know, BOF stands for Birds Of a Feather, and according to INETA, is “an hour-long interactive discussion on a topic proposed in advance by a PDC 2003 attendee.” Since I'm going to be there, I'd love to lead a discussion others of you out there. So I've proposed the following topic:
Microsoft Solution Framework Study Guides
I've decided to take the plunge and get my MCSD, It's an expensive process, but I'm hoping that maybe I can gain something from it, and help others in the process. To that end, I've put together a series of very simple study guides on my personal website to help you guys out. I will be more than likely expanding this area in the near future, and probably making it look prettier. For right now I just wanted to get them out of my Pocket PC.
My blogs are back up!
Ugh, what a day man. Actually, the past 2 days have been pretty messed up. I still can't figure out how the hell my SQL server shut down and rebooted to Linux. It's not a virus, because it's only attached to my web server box, and directly to the monitoring station. The closest thing I can think of is: when the box was set up, they did a quick format instead of a normal one, and the last OS on the disk was Linux. So when the hard drive failed, the system automatically rebooted, and went to the first partition available on the boot sector. That sounds real farfetched, but it's the best guess I can offer.
Almost forgot...
I can confirm Robert Hurlburt's statement that Generics will be fully supported in VB.NET (meaning that you can create and consume them). It's actually a change that was made at the CLR level, and all .NET languages will be able to support it. Some languages will not semantically be able to support it, but the feature is baked into the Framework. This is not a secret, it just hasn't been talked about for some reason.
Wanted to take a second
And thank a bunch of people for an absolutely wonderful time last week. It was wonderful to finally get a vacation, and what better place to relax than in beautiful Seattle. It was so much better than Phoenix... I may have to move there someday. First off, thanks to the indefatigable Robert Scoble, for letting me crash at his place. It was definitely a pleasure spending a week with a legend. Second, I'd like to thank Dare Obsanjo, Joshua Allen, Jim Blizzard (man I want his job), Thanks to Mike Sax and Sam Gentile for some very lively conversations at the weblogger dinner. Oh yeah, and Robert Wlodarczyk is a hell of a guy. Had a lot of fun talking to him after security kicked us out of the mall.
DCOM Vulnerability Scanning Tool for Administrators
In case you didn't know about it, this slick little tool lets you scan networks for the vulnerability.
Arizona .NET User's Group
Tomorrow night, Phoenix hosts the one, the only, ROB HOWARD. That's right, the Valley of the Sun (affectionately known as Hell, or currently The City Without Gas) is hosting the main man of the Microsoft Web.NET team. So walk, ride your bike, take the bus, carpool, or get in that gas-guzzling monstrosity of an SUV (who cares if gas is $2.50 a gallon here!) and get your butt down to SRP tonight at 5:15pm. You're in for a real treat. If you're there, be sure to find me and say “Hi!”. I'll be the guy in the blue “Microsoft.NET” hat and an white ASP.NET t-shirt. Be sure to check out www.azdnug.com for more information. There are only 40 seats left open, so be sure to get there early.
Updating Tool for Sysadmins
I wanted to take a second and point out a tool that I install on every network that I build, so that I can centralize my patch management. It's called Microsoft Software Update Services, and it runs on Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003. It allows me to synch up local patch copies with MS' public server, and lets me redirect all machines on my network to pull Automatic Updates from my local updates server, instead of MS' public server. This way they can only automatically install updates that I have tested and approved.
Ports for MSBlaster and variants
MSBlaster runs over port 135. If you are running Windows 2000, find out how to activate TCP/IP filtering.
Where is YOUR finger pointing?
Following Sam Gentile's rant last week about career responsibility, and G. Andrew's curious and (sorry) misunderstood comment about filtering, I'm going to make a bold statement that will probably piss a lot of people off:
Swept under the "Second Wave"
I'm back in Phoenix now, and I'll be posting the rest of my blog entries from the week later this afternoon. At this point, I'm trying to get some stuff done that I missed yesterday, due to an internet attack that you may not have heard about yet.
Done for the night
As you gathered, I finally got Scoble's wireless working, but not before purchasing a new Linksys Wireless-B router. I should be a reseller for Linksys or something... I sell enough of their stuff for them. I'm about finished for the day, but I should have some really juicy information that I am allowed to post tomorrow regarding the next version of VB.NET. Should be juicy.
Hecklers
[originally written at 5:45pm]
Control developers unite!
[originally written at 3:05pm]
Waiting for the start of the meeting...
[originally written 9:15am]
A thing of beauty
[originally written at 7:45am]
Another young guy developing software :)
I “met” Shane Bauer today. Chatted for a bit over IM. He's 19, and a really nice guy. Moderator of the ASP.NET Forums too. Working on some slick software too. It will be interesting to see how it progresses. Welcome to the fold, Shane!
The week ahead
This upcoming week is shaping up to be one the most memorable in my young life. I'm taking a trip to geek mecca: Microsoft HQ. I get to meet Scott Guthrie, Rob Howard, Don Box, et al. And if that weren't enough, Robert Scoble was kind enough to let me stay at his place. I tell you what, that guy is truly awesome. He didn't even give it a second thought.
Basic .NET: Framework Compatibility Issues
My fifth article for Builder.com is now online. This is the first of a three-part series on .NET Compatibility. These articles stemmed from my “No-Brainer Compatibility” rant, and will hopefully provide a crystal clear explanation as to how to tackle these issues in an intelligent manner. Coming up in two weeks is part two: Developing Components: Assembly Identification. You won't want to miss it.
Calendar Server Control
Yesterday I posted about needing a ASP.NET Calendar Server Control. Well, I found the greatest control ever written. Seriously. You can check it out here. I don't really think I need to say anything else. I can thing of like a half-million uses for this thing.
Killer Server Control Idea
Has anyone created an ASP.NET Calendar server control? Not just a datepicker... I mean like an appointment viewer like Outlook. That would be SOOOO money...
Workspaces Tips and Tricks
Jason Alexander posted about a source control bindings issue. Good news. You don't have to rebuild the project. I'm going to give you a walkthrough on how to rebind, and I'll give you a few other nifty tips as well.
See you at PDC!
A little Weblog flair for PDC 2003 Attendees. Feel free to repurpose on your Weblog if you are coming to the PDC.
Note about the new Trillian
Since Trillian Pro 2.0 now supports separate buddylists per each sign-on, anyone from the .NET realm that I am in IM contact with should only use robert@interscapeusa.com (the one that says (Robert McLaws, Interscape Technologies) in your buddy list. The one that says (Robert McLaws, Personal) should be used for friends and family, and you can remove it from your list without my Trillian prompting you to re-add it. Sorry for the inconvenience, but this should make it much easier to start separating home life from work life :)
I LOVE TRILLIAN!!!!
Trillian Pro 2.0 Beta 1 has support for RSS!!!! WOO HOO!!! Who needs an aggregator now?
New Aggregated Page
Most of you probably use aggregators to read the Weblogs @ ASP.NET, but I still go to the homepage to get my news. Well, ScottW has posted a fabulous update, with some serious CSS upgrades. Nice job Scott!
Battle of the Blog
News.com has a feature on RSS v. Atom. Quoted: [”However, just looking around, I observe that there are many people and organizations who seem unable to maintain a good working relationship with Dave.” - Tim Bray]
MSDN Mag
MSDN Magazine has an RSS feed. Subscribed!
*very confused*
Camera Phone Stops Crime
MSNBC.com has a report of a kid that used a camera-phone to catch pictures of a would-be assailant. These pictures led to his arrest.
XmlTextWriter + StringWriter = Headache
I've come to the conclusion that .NET doesn't really make coding easier (yet), because most Framework classes are incomplete, and use Inheritance as an excuse to leave them that way. Case in point: XmlTextWriter.
Is it just me...
Or are the workspaces wigging out tonight?
StringBuilder Size Algorithm
When I posted about this before, someone noted that cycling through all the items would be a performance hit. Well, as you can see, I'm really only cycling thru the tables in the DataSet, and in the case of the DataReader, I'm only accessing a property that already exists.
Webservices + SSL = Good or Bad?
Right now, I have all my web services under one project, secured behind SSL. I have not decided if I want to move the to a better location, like http://webservices.interscapeusa.com, or something like that. Basically to move them out of the SSL security. Now, I'd like some opinions in terms of the effect... is the latency of SSL combined with the serialization of data into XML substantial? Is it worth it to have your data stream encrypted, or would it be better to use WSE to make sure the data is encrypted and not the whole stream? Is there something I'm not considering here? Please leave me comments, thoughts, and suggestions. Thanks.
VSIP Corroboration
“Be sure to read the EULA” - John Tobler
DAL Article Finally Out
My long-awaited article on Data Access Layer security is here! None of what I talk about is really new information, but it is put forth in a very unique way. Here's an excerpt:
Whidbey Information
MS made a lot of information about Whidbey public today. While I cannot elaborate in any way about the features, I can confirm that they exist, and that they are pretty awesome. They've done an outstanding job enhancing the developer experience. And this is just the Alpha.
VS.NET Shortcuts
Having just registered for and been accepted to the Visual Studio Integration Program, I've been going through the included Help collection, and found some neat little tidbits. These actually have nothing to do with the VSIP SDK, but the SDK did lead me to some great docs in the regular VS.NET 2003 Help Collection.
"No-Brainer Compatibility" Explained
For several weeks now, I've been talking about various issues in regards to component versioning and Framework compatibility. A few months ago, I got so frustrated by the issues that were raised, that I said I was going to start a task force to solve the problem. This task force was informal and basically consisted of Paul Alexander (XHEO) and I (Interscape Technologies). Over the past 6 months, I have really enjoyed working with Paul, and I am constantly amazed at the work he achieves. Together, we've been able to make some headway in the industry as a whole, and we have several extremely exciting things coming up in the future.
Congratulations ScottW
I was the first to say it last time, and I'll be the first to say it again. Congratulations Scott on the new version of the Weblogs. It looks extremely professional, and I love the new selection of skins. I can't wait to pimp mine out with .NET-related graphical goodness. The new admin site is extremely clean. Now, I'm just waiting for my stats.... ;)
.NET Framework Graphics - "No Brainer Compatibility"
Paul Alexander was kind enough to put together a series of really slick graphics elements that were designed to denote which version of the .NET Framework a particular component was compiled to. This is ideal in situations where you either a) only have one compiled version of your app, or b) have separate installers for each version.
Special Thanks
I'd like to take a minute to give a special thanks to Roy Osherove for his assistance this morning in tracking down a particularly nasty bug in my XML format support for GenX.NET this morning. I'll go into specific details later about what happened, and what a still unexplained nuisance, but I can finally grab a quick nap, knowing that the code for GenX.NET is now officially 100% complete.
Newbies Pay Attention
Ok, this may be common knowledge for most of you, but for the rest listen up:
Great Idea for an MS Product
My friend Brian had a great idea for an MS Product today. I've dubbed it "CleanSlate". CleanSlate would basically be a hard-drive image on DVD of a system preinstalled with the following, configured to MS best practices:
Rebutting Scoble on Corporate Secrets
I took some time tonight to reply to Scoble's long awated in-depth conversation about Corporate Secrets. I bugged him to write about this some time back, and I'm glad he got around to it. His blog has been awfully bland lately anyways. If I had a quarter for every time he said "You'll just have to wait until PDC", I might actually be able to afford to go ;).
Why I Use Visual Studio.NET
I was at RegExLib.com, and I saw this ad:
Your TabletPC Thoughts?
OK. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna buy a TabletPC. Confronted with the hideous thought of spending the next 6 hours reading documentation on all the Alpha and Beta software I got from MS this week, I cannot think of any other way.
Cool StringBuilder Tip
One of the great things about the StringBuilder is it's ability to dynamically resize itself for situations where it is dealing with large strings. It was very helpful in building GenX.NET, especially since I wasn't always going to be writing to the file system anymore. Back in the 2.0 days, each time I loaded up a new line, I wrote it to the file system, so performace wasn't really a factor. Now it is. The problem is, however, that this dynamic resizing can sometimes come at a performance hit IF you are adding to your string beyond 1000x.
Microsoft Sitting Pretty
Courtesy of eWeek:
*Dumbfounded*
Did any of you guys know that the DropDownList control has a new property in VS.NET 2003? It's called SelectedValue, and it gets the value of the selected item, or sets the value to an item based on a string.
NDOC 1.2 Release Candidate 1
No developer should be without this tool. There are no exceptions. Grab it here.
The Relentless Pursuit of Excellence
I was at Starbucks for a decent part of the evening tonight, doing what I had hoped to be the last of my famous JPCRs (Java-Powered Code Review) for GenX.NET 3.0. Fortunately, I was wrong, it will not be my last review for this release. I say fortunately, tho I have been up for the past 6 hours making changes to the entire architecture AGAIN, because it is definitely for the better. I don't know what it is about White Chocolate Mocha Expresso that gets my brain going, but I think I'm hooked for life.
Ascii Movies Reloaded
Another Google Gift
Want to add a URL to be indexed?
Blogging For Exposure
So you're blogging. That's really great. You can say you have these altruistic motives for doing so, but at the end of the day, you're doing it to get exposure. This is especially critical in the .NET community, as there are hundreds of thousands of us lowly code monkeys vying for attention. So how do you make yourself stand out from the crowd?
Welcome New .NET Blogger
I'd like to take this opportunity to personally welcome Paul Alexander to the fold. For those of you that don't know, Paul is President of Xheo.com... that company that brings you the best software licensing system on earth. The stuff that this guy does with .NET just blows my mind. Paul is a close, personal friend of mine, and I'm glad he's taking the leap into the world of blogging.
Nifty Desktop Update
I just posted an updated screenshot of my desktop. Thanks to Tony for sending me the extra graphics.
My New Nifty Desktop
Everyone's been going nuts over Tony Pino's desktop lately in the .NET Desktops contest, myself included. I was more taken by his graphics work than anything else. Well, he was kind enough to hook me up with the picture file, and a tip on how he did it.
Free Your Mind
You are Morpheus, from "The Matrix." You
have strong faith in yourself and those around
you. A true leader, you are relentless in your
persuit.
What Matrix Persona Are You?
brought to you by QuizillaCircular References No More
I solved the issue I had with my circular references. I used Anakrino to reverse engineer the System.Data assembly, and I determined That MS puts their SqlServer classes in the same assembly as the base data classes, so it's not really the end of the world if I have a few default providers in with the main engine classes.
Circular References
Putting the finishing touches on GenX.NET 3.0, and I have stumbled across a disturbing problem. I KNOW that the architecture is not good enough yet. I want to be able to have the data transformation engine completely separate from the data transformation formats, which I have done already. There is a huge problem tho. I hope I can explain it adequately.
My Vote for Best Outlook AddIn
New TweakXP Supports Win2K3
Along with a new version of MSN Messenger, Microsoft has released a new version of TweakXP with support for Windows Server 2003. Find out more about it here. Thanks to msfn.org for still being reliable in neowin.net's unexplained absence.
Multiple Monitor Heaven
If any of you use multiple monitors, you'll love this application.
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Dear Partner Robert McLaws,
New Blogs Announcement
I've been expanding my blogging to talk about other aspects of my life. You may have noticed in my news section, I quietly posted links to my new blogs a few weeks ago. While I'm still working on some new templates (namely one that looks like my company website for my corporate blog) I'm going to go ahead and announce that they're out there.
Can't See Past The End of My TaskVision
OK, so I wanted to start implementing a simple system for managing my projects, without the expense of MS Project. I also wanted something that I could access on my Pocket PC. So I downloaded and installed the MS TaskVision client and server programs...
VPN Heaven
I FINALLY got the VPN running on my network. Why haven't I tried these things sooner? This is SO COOL. Now I can browse my web servers like my desktop is in my datacenter....
OT: Note to Windows Media Team
Hey guys,
My 200th Post
As I blogged about earlier, the other day I sat down and cranked out 3 articles for my Builder.com column. They all had to deal with versioning, and they were all based on conversations I had on my blog. I sent Paul Alexander from Xheo.com (someone get this guy a blog already!) my article on SxS versioning and the Framework, which stemmed from a heated debate with Frans Bourma, and he replied with this single comment.
Lots of .NET Blogs
Check this site out.
Windows Mobile 2003 SDK
I'm logged into my MSN Messenger account from a virtual Windows Mobile 2003 Phone from within VS.NET. HOW FREAKIN COOL IS THAT?
StrongBad's Desktop
"My desktop, eh? You know, a clean desktop is one of the most important aspects of computing today. I mean, look at my deskop:
Change on my desktop....
I was looking at Roy Osherove's Desktops Contest, and I have but one thing to say: I want Tony Pino's desktop. I don't care what I have to do to get it. KILLER.
"Hey Cwapface.... bwow it out your ear....Crapfully yours, StwongBad."
Wired.com has an interview with the creators of HomestarRunner.com. If you haven't seen the website yet, it's hilarious. You don't know it yet, but StrongBad will be the reason you go. "Matt: Everybody loves an asshole. " Hmm....
Productive Evening
I just got back from another java powered evening at Starbucks. Man why am I so productive there? Must be because it's pretty distraction-free. You might go, "WTF is that guy talking about, there are tons of distractions there. Like hot girls." See, I've found this great example about how my brain works, and I'm gonna share it with you.
The Best Just Got Better
I just got an e-mail that ASPnetMenu has released a new version a few days ago. Excerpt from the e-mail I received:
Feature Highlights
This control has always been the best IMO, and I think it's really cool of them to release it as V1.1, meaning it's free for all existing users. I would HIGHLY recommend you get started on it today. While you're at it, you should be using RichContentRotator too. All the pizazz of Flash without the need for a plugin. DHTML does the trick :).- Industry-First Navigation Features: Automatic highlighting of the selected path, with support for ItemSelected and ChildItemSelected styles; Paths can be selected through URLs, query string parameters, or ASP.NET postbacks; new support for a host of navigation methods;
- New Tab Strip Interface: An extra user control is included to enable multi-level Tab Strip navigation types;
- IE5 on Mac: Full support is now provided for Internet Explorer version 5.1 on Macintosh;
- Rendering over Windowed Objects: Menus are now properly rendered over any windowed object, including Flash movies, Java applets, or any custom ActiveX object;
- New Examples: The number of examples included with the product has been expanded greatly -- with new design and programming examples, and an all-new set of navigation examples;
Holy Speech Enabled Websites Batman!
Amid much fanfare, the next release of the .NET Speech SDK (now entitled Speech Application SDK) Beta 3 is available. It's not downloadable, and requires VS.NET 2003 (no surprise there), but they've added a ton of killer new features, not the least of which is PocketPC support (I KNEW there was a reason I bought my iPaq... now if I could just get Windows Mobile 2003...)
Neat Little Tip....
I was reading this free chapter from OReilly on "Mastering VS.NET", and I came across an interesting little factiod:
MS' IE Division should pay attention to this...
My friend Dalton just pointed me to a browser based on the IE engine (so it requires IE to be installed. It does everything you wished IE would do, including popup-blocking and tabbed-browsing. It's called MyIE2, and it just might find it's way into my laptop today.
Sweet programming tip
Duncan Mackenzie tells us about a slick way to get the icon for a file type. I'm hoping this code is for ASP.NET, but I haven't looked at it yet.
No .NET Developer should be without it
The VS.NET Project/Solution Converter - Switches projects, solutions, and assembly bindings between VS.NET versions. A must-have for your toolbox.
Proper Website Design
I saw this great tutorial for building a killer website. Check it out.
Namespacing and Code Organization
Mads talks about namespacing and organization on the Workspaces. This is what I've come up with, maybe it will help you out.
How I was Fooled by Dave Winer
You know, I had so hoped that Dave Winer would prove me wrong, that maybe he really had changed. So I hear from the comments in Scoble's link to me that he's back, and posted this melodramatic soliloquy (look it up) on his site. He says "I made my point." Unfortunately Dave, you made a point all right. It just wasn't the one you wanted.
Mr. Server Controls.NET Gets Married!
Congratulations Nihkil! Enjoy your honeymoon.
Scripting News Offline
Roy talks about Dave Winer taking ScriptingNews.com down. While I agree with Roy that it is kinda sad, I think it is a good thing. With Dave's health the way it is, maybe he needs so time to re-evaluate his situation. Like me, he's really good at rubbing people the wrong way. He's been really successful at this RSS stuff, but because of that I don't think he's had a whole lot of time to enjoy it. Maybe some good will come of it. It takes a lot to walk away, and it takes a big man to know when is the right time to do so.
The smooth one attacks
What kind of kiss are you?
You have a surprise kiss! Your partner is always
pleasantly pleased to have you jump outta no
where to dote them with a fun peck on the cheek
or more passionate embrace. super markets and
work places are your favorite places to attack
your loved one with all your love =p
What kind of kiss are you?
brought to you by QuizillaOh God I really am a geek....
I head on over to Gnome-Girl to see how she's doing (not cancer, woo hoo!), and she's got a link to the Geek Test that's been really popular the last few days. So I go to check it out. What is the first question?
Nothing more to say...
Halley Suitt talks about the motivations for blogging. I agree 100%. This is why I will be breaking out my blogging efforts onto other spaces, powered of course by ScottW's powerful weblogging software. My corporate weblog is already online, although not officially launched yet. My personal blog will be up soon, and I'll aggregate all three together into a page very similar to the Weblogs @ ASP.NET home page. Will anyone care? Probably not. Does that bother me? Umm.. no. Is my story more interesting than these guys? Hell no. But I'm gonna do it anyways. You should to the same. I've seen your code.... got the guts to show us your soul?
I feel for ya Scoble..
"Brad Wilson just IM'd me and said I'm not being rational. That I'm coming across as really angry. Hmm. Passion != anger." [Robert Scoble]
BlogPulse
I checked out BlogPulse today, courtesy of ScottW, and to my surprise, I found out that one of my links shows up for Person #26 - Dave Winer. Specifically this post when I not so subtly called him a "self important pretentious asshole". I'm sure a few of you could probably say that about me too. I was also linked 2x on the same day ScottW was notable. Anyways, I thought that was pretty cool. I love blogging.
Windows Mobile 2003 Disappointment
HP will not have a ROM update with the new OS for my PPC until October. :-( Man I hate waiting for new stuff. At least they'll have an upgrade for my device.... before it didn't even show the 3800 series being available.
While reading Scoble...
Scoble had a post on a new Windows-powered Cameraphone, on the same site that previewed a new design from Motorola that will knock your socks off. Thought I'd bring it up again and post a link. Let the salivating commense.
Exxxxcelent!
Ok, I kinda threw this test cause everyone says I'm like him, and I knew what answers would get me here, , but here it is anyways:
In other news
A child who shot his parents pled guilty and faces 20 years in prison. His defense was going to be, get this, that he thought he was in the alternate reality of "The Matrix". Sounds like a load of crap to me. Like a jury would have believed that. Now, I'm not going to advocate anyone killing their parents by any means, although who hasn't wanted to at one time or another? But if you're gonna do it, come up with something kind of plausible like, "my Dad was trying to rape me" or, "they made me sleep in the mud with the dog" or "they made me live in a closet under the stairs". You're already in deep doodoo, you're gonna go and make it worse by claiming you're too stupid to tell the difference between a movie and real life? Gimme a break. Funny, I don't remember Neo shooting his dad in the movie....
Like a proud parent
I listened as a long-time PHP/MySQL programmer finally recanted and jumped on the .NET bandwagon. BOUT FRICKIN TIME lol. I've been round and round with this guy for over a year now, and he's always been all "PHP doesn't suck ya jerk". Well tonight he came online just to tell me that, while PHP still doesn't suck, .NET is and will always be better. Then he went back to bed. I was so proud I could cry. :)
WTF??? Redux
Alas Poor Alsop
Several people have commented on Alsop's MS article in Fortune. One quote stuck out in my mind.
New Things Today
Gosh, I'm so stoked about all the new things that cropped up today:
Breaking the silence
Just wanted to formally announce that as of right now the GotDotNet Workspaces v1 are live and kicking. Congrats to Andy Oakley for all his and his team's hard work. Those guys rule. I'll be making HEAVY use of this system, and it's VS.NET integration.
Funny Stuff
Some anonymous coward called Scoble a "self-important pretentions asshole". Hmm. Maybe he hasn't read Dave Winer. The guy even says in his comments that he doesn't take criticism very well. Hmmm, I know a few people like that....
What CAN We Blog About???
Ok so we can't write about:
Been out the last few days
Ugh. I'm in the middle of a move, and my internet connection is off. I feel naked. I'm going thru withdrawl.... can't get my daily dose of Scoble....
GotDotNet Workspaces
From Andy Oakley (one really cool guy) GDN Workspaces Preview site is live! I CANNOT wait for VS.NET IDE Integration. I tried it today but it didn't work. I think they have it tied to www.gotdotnet.com, which obviously won't work until the site is live. OMG I'm so excited... GREAT JOB GUYS!
Reasons for coding
Matt Reynolds says the language debate is over. Really?!!? I didn't know we started that nonsense back up again.
I've been blogging a lot about "meaning of life" type stuff as it relates to coding (which IMO is sometimes more interesting than seeing someone's code). In the likeness of one of my heroes, Joe Scarborough, here's Rob's Real Deal:King Solomon said "Whoever loves money never has enough; whoever loves wealth is not satisfied with his income." If you are coding a particular language just because you get paid more, maybe VBers aren't the ones making the"*BIG MISTAKE*". Why do I code? Because I genuinely love to solve problems, and it excites me to write code that works in new an imaginative ways. Success lies not in wealth, power, possessions, or achievement. It is a journey not a destination. You're focus should be using whatever language makes you the most productive, helps you grow in your potential as a programmer and as a person, and helps you benefit others. When those three things come, everything else will follow.
I'm not tryin to be preachy, and if I am I apologize. Just passing along some wisdom that was recently passed to me and did me a lot of good.SURVEY: Documentation
OK Guys, I'm working on the final draft of the docs for GenX.NET 3.0, and I'm curious. I've been adding XML comments to my sealed and private classes and functions, in an effort to keep my code spit-polished and consistent. Now, NDOC lets you specify whether or not private entities are included in the comment files. My question then is twofold:
A) Do you think that having MSDN style docs for your public object model and your complete object model is a good idea
AND
B) Would you find a separate set of complete object model docs helpful if you purchased the source code for a component?
Please give me your thoughts.OT: How do you define success?
Today has been a fabulous day. Too fabulous for words. I can't wait to blog about it on my peronal site today, after i get it set up.
I cannot even begin to properly convey my disgust
Ok, I know I'm a control developer, so I may be a little biased here. I also know that I can be a bit harsh, and I've been really working on toning down my criticism and being more positive. After screwing around with .netSHIP for about 10 hours now, I can officially say that it is the most atrocious piece of code ever written. And I've seen some whoppers in my day, too. I was nto impressed at all with the IBuySPy Store Admin architecture, but this one takes the cake. I would start picking apart it's problems, but I don't know where to begin.
Alright, I guess I'll start with the Object Model. Or should I say, lack thereof. Granted, my object models are not amazing pieces of work (although I am extremely happy with GenX.NET 3.0), but OH MY GOSH. Ummm.... ever heard of NDOC? I'm going to assume not since the samples have no documentation whatsoever. I think they must think that my name is Swammi the Mind Reader, because the SURE don't use intellisense to make things any easier. Now, I'm trying to "divine" how to get the data out of the component. so in the end, my employer spent $300 on this component, $125 for the product itself, and $175 for the time to implement.
Aren't solutions supposed to SOLVE problems?Versioning Redux
Frans says:
That's all fine what MS thinks I should do but what I think MS should do is make their IDE able to work with older CLR's so people can choose a new IDE while writing a control for 1.0 or 1.1. MS didn't even bother creating a config file for a library so a library can be made runnable on 1.0 with redirects.
I would have responded in my comments, but I wanted everyone to know this:
The guy I talked to at MS said that redirect policies in the web.config file apply to all subsequently loaded assemblies, including components. This means that your component should run if the user add binding redirects in the web.config. You can also use publisher policy files and register the same binding redirects in teh GAC, but that is much more of a pain.I have reached the final straw
Details to follow. Cross item five off this list Excuse me, I have to go break something now.
Can today get any better?
WOO HOO! Man I love getting stuff done. I'm more productive than I've been in months. Oh yeah, and I'm moving to a condo on Monday... ON A GOLF COURSE!!! Nothing like hitting the back 9 to start your day...
Was supposed to post this a while back
Here is the policy that we have adopted for GenX.NET 3.0, and will be using in the future on all components:
My condolences...
to Kirk. I know what it's like to have to lose a friend. My favorite dog was ravaged by Lymphoma and had to be put to sleep. Thhe tumors had pretty much taken over her back, and nearly closed off the passage to her stomach. We didn't find out about it until it was too late.
YAY!!!
Thanks to the FABULOUS help of Daniel Bright, I am now blogging from w.Bloggar. THANK GOD. I was getting really tired of losing killer posts due to an accidental tap of the Backspace key. How annoying. IT HAS SPELL CHECK TOO!! Oh man, this makes me so much happier than I was earlier. Wanna use w.Bloggar too? See Dan's settings here.
*puzzled*
Why did attempting to open one of the .NET Posters cause Acrobat to need a file from the Frontpage 2003 CD, Acrobat to force the client to stay open while viewing a PDF in the browser, and then crash IE when it closed?
WinZip 9.0
A new version of WinZip is out. Now I know, the first thing you're gonna say is "Windows XP has compressed files support". Ever tried deleting files out of an archive? How about deleting non-empty folders? Had a field day with that the other night. Nope I think I'll stick to WinZip.
Anything out there better than .netSHIP?
You know, I really dislike this component. I dislike everything about it. For one thing, the owner has been extremely rude to customers on the ASP.NET Forums. I dislike the support. I dislike the fact that they don't have a free trial. I dislike the fact that they don't have an enterprise license, and the component takes almost 9 hours of work out of my paycheck to purchase. I dislike that the data comes back as a collection and not a DataSet. Most of all, I dislike it because I am relegated to using it because I can't find any other component that supports as many shippers. Have you guys seen anything better, or am I going to have to either force myself to live with my discontentment or write my own?
Just a note, not a war.
Scoble says that VB.NET is not dead, and it's actually picking up some steam inside MS. *whew*. To anyone that said that my career was dead if I didn't switch to C#: "I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries." Hey Scott, name that movie.
*raises right hand*
In case you haven't seen it yet, Jan Gray invites us all to take the Managed Code Challenge: Here's an excerpt:
FINALLY
Well, it only took two months, but a project actually got finished over here at my job. The interns at DeVry did a great job putting it all together. Check out what they did at www.quickiebusinesscards.com. Wish them luck, cause it's their graduation project, and they're giving the presentation tonight.
Corporate Error Reporting & TaskVision
Having just completed the 128MB memory dump to Microsoft about everything I was doing when Shaun b0rked up my computer, I discovered the new CER tool is in the works. I use it to help manage problems with my hosting servers. Really nice tool. Hopefully it will be done faster than the bug fixes for TaskVision. I've been wanting to install the tool for weeks, but I guess it had a kind of funny problem.
#$%^&*(#$%
Well, one of my co-workers accomplished what I couldn't do in 7 months of testing Windows .NET Server (now Windows Server 2003). I've been a beta tester since Beta 2, and I've never gotten a BSOD. Until today. His monitor went dead (it was attached to a Mac, go figure), so he wanted to borrow the 2nd flat panel display that's attached to my laptop. I went to disable the 2nd desktop in the Display Settings right as he pulled the VGA cable, and WHAMO! BSOD. I haven't even seen one of those in XP yet. I mean, XP has crased before, but this was the good ole, blue screen. Shaun is now my hero.
w.Bloggar issues
I saw that Don Browning and Travis Higley are trying to get w.Bloggar to work on the Weblogs @ ASP.NET. Had a discussion with ScottW about this the other day, and he said that "w" will not submit to Windows Server 2003-hosted sites (which is what www.asp.net runs on). Not exactly sure why at the moment. Scott said he was working on a WinForms app of some kind to handle client-side blogging.... don't know where he's at with it tho.
That's it...
Ya know, I leave you guys alone for a few days and look what happens...First, Oracle works to screw up PeopleSoft's acquisition of JDEdwards, then the Terminator runs for Governor in California (isn't that how Reagan became President?) and the ImClone CEO gets 7 years at Club Fed. Sheesh. ;-)
WTF???
<sarcasm> Ok, who screwed up the WebLogs? ;-) Well, it was either Me, Marcie, or Paschal. Thought this was kind of amusing. It's not at any one person's expense. I just think it's funny to see aseemingly blank post from me hogging up the page. Hey, can I make it do this more often? </sarcasm>
Another great night of coding
Well, I'm finally finished with GenX.NET 3.0. At least, the code is finished. I have tons of documentation to write, and then one more White Chocolate Mocha Frappuccino-powered code review tomorrow afternoon. For those of you who don't know what this is, I print every single line of code out on paper, and seclude myself in public (the seclusion is from the computer not from people) and edit the code line by line. I pretend that I've never seen it before, and check the documentation for consistency and correctness. I also pour over every line and make sure my naming conventions are all predictable, I've properly disposed of all of my objects, and that everything is cordoned off into #Regions effectively. IMHO, this is a MUST for any coding project. Not only does this usually fuel some last minute refactoring (like my Sunday afternoon session did) but I can't begin to tell you how many "compiled but still might cause a problem" bugs I've caught.
PowerUpdate: System Unhosed
It occurrs to me that I may have been a tad harsh in my assessment of the VSNET2003 VB Commenter PowerToy. I also might have been hypocritical, having blasted Frans for taking such a negative stance against VS.NET 2003 a couple weeks ago. An e-mail I got from someone at MS has prompted me to elaborate on my earlier post, and offer some constructive criticism instead of just being a cold heartless bastard.
Maybe they Adopted TOO Early lol
I wake up this morning and hit my favorite Radioheads (besides Scoble of course)... and this is what I find:
AVOID THE POWERTOYS
Jeff Key tells us about the VS.NET 2003 PowerToys. Having just tried them out, I can say:
And suddenly, everything clicks
It's 2:37AM MST. I'm sitting here, continuing my quest to refactor GenX.NET. Just when I thought my code couldn't get any cleaner, it got cleaner. Not only did I remove my dependence on specific ADO.NET Providers, which eliminated nearly 1000 lines of redundant code. Not only did I move my output system to an "Output Provider" architecture. Not only was I already TOTALLY STOKED about this code...
*a light switch flips*... off
Now that I've reduced my codebase for GenX.NET 3.0, I just figured out how to reduce the size of the output file by 50%-90% in some cases. Here's the part where I'm at a loss...
But everyone listens to Gartner...
Gartner says to avoid Linux. Hmmm. Wonder what that means for us?
Jealousy rears it's ugly head
Attention TechEd Attendees:
WOO HOO!
I LOVE MICROSOFT. This is not news. Here's why, tho.
Five AM and all's well...
*WHEW*
Thanks Jesse
Jesse's been a big help to me over the past few days. Not only has he provided the code to a really awesome part of the IDE, which is the inspiration for a killer new project I'm working on, but he's also come up with a way to provide your own stylesheet for the WebLogs. I am now also using his sheet, although I will be experimenting with my own version when I have the time. At this point, that will be sometime in the early 20's.
Following Through On My Promises
A few days ago I promised to blog about MS' recommendations for versioning in .NET. Well, while visiting my .NET Resources link, I came across this article, and I don't think I could have written it any better. Check it out, and be sure to browse those resource links... there's good stuff in there.
Remapping ASP.NET Runtime Versions in IIS6
Earlier last month I saw someone complain that you could no longer use aspnet_regiis in Windows Server 2003 running IIS6. Having just repaved both my employer's and my personal machine to run WS2K3, and installed VSNET2002 and VSNET2003 SxS, I can gladly say that this is not the case.
WELCOME TO THE WEBLOGS @ ASP.NET
WOO HOO. .NETWebLogs... Now hosted by the ever popular Microsoft, who as of today, kissed and made up with AOL. Scott has done a fabulous job with the WebLogs, and it's great to be on the most popular .NET website on the Internet. Scott, keep up the great work, and I'm looking forward to this continuing to be the single best resource for .NET information by the people who use it every day.
Component Versioning Proposal
I'm working on an article (well, one of several that I am currently working on) about how to handle versioning in .NET. This is sparked by several threads about handling Framework versions, and my experiences with Xheo beta testing their components. Paul Alexander and I have a great relationship in regards to the software we write. Neither one of us has fully taken advantage of the situation we created for ourselves, but hopefully that will change in the very near future.
More Chocolately VB Goodness
Talked with Joe Feser today. Man what a freat guy. He's a frickin smart guy too. Informs me that he's finishing up the next version of VB XML Comments Creator (I think it needs a new name tho =) ). Yes, that's my logo for GenX.NET in the corner. I need to clean that logo up a bit and send him a better copy.
Feedback Desired
In further thinking about GenX, I wanted your opinion. Do you think that a .NET utility that has nothing to render should still have design-time support? Personally, I don't think that it should, but I've been wrong before and I'd like to hear what you think. Please send me an e-mail or leave me some comments and tell me what you think.
My love affair with DotNet continues
In my ever-continuing quest for knowledge, I have been toying with an idea in my head about rewriting GenX.NET (my flagship ADO.NET Exporter component) to make better use of the OOP techniques that .NET has to offer. This would be the third major rewrite of the component. The first time I told Brady Gaster about it, he said "Why not use an Interface?" For Brady, that kind of thing is a no brainer. He used to program Java for Wells Fargo, and now he's probably one of the greatest C# coders I've ever seen. The way he cranks the stuff out just boggles the mind.
Early & Adopter ROCK
Courtesy of my hereos, those guys who redefine bleeding edge, you can now add WMI to the Server Explorer in VS.NET 2003. Gosh, ANOTHER reason to switch??!? I dunno... <wincing> I think I should stick with 2002.
Death of the Consultants...
Consultancy.... R.I.P.? ZapThink seems to think so, at least, according to News.com. Well, I am construing it just a bit. What they actually said is that, with the advent of Web Services, consultants have to focus less on getting systems to communicate, and more on, God forbid (or Allah as the case may be) Business Process Rearchitecture. This is long overdue in my opinion.
Need I say more?
What kind of sexy are you?
he he he ;). Yep, that's me :).Rescinding earlier comments...
I'm not going to put any more effort into trying to solve the "framework compatibility" problem that was discussed, because after talking with some people over at MS (thanks RobH and Scott Louveau) I've decided to stand by my original statement. The only responsible thing that control developers should do is have a build for each version of the Framework. I don't want my 1.1-compiled app trying to run on 1.0, and you shouldn't either. You want to give your users the best experience possible, and by only providing one version, you are not doing so. I will blog about a few possible solutions that MS suggests within the next day or so, but I agree with them and their recommendations.
Coding on drugs...
Ever tried coding on Nyquil? It's quite an experience. You should see the code I came up with while working last night. Actually.... scratch that. I'd rather not embarass myself about it.
Taking the Initiative
I'm taking the initiative, and creating a "Combating Framework Hell" Task Force to solve the issue of being unable to programmatically redirect assemblies to use different versions of the Framework. Anyone who is interested, please reply to this post or use my blog form to contact me.
"Framework Heck" Interpretations and Community Responsibility
Frans seems to be getting awfully riled up over the backlash from his post. I can say this because I had this lesson taught to me as well: As a developer blogging in this community, you have a responsibility to clarify what is opinion and what is fact. What Frans effectively did is back up PeopleSoft's horrendously ridiculous comment that .NET is IT asbestos. By saying "ISV's: do NOT upgrade to Visual Studio.NET 2003! " you are sending not only a bad message to the community, but a message of opinion masked as fact. If versioning issues are your only reason, (pardon my bluntness) sorry but IMO, your reason is not good enough to justify such a harsh stance. The reason I can say anything about this is because I have been guilty of this before, and have since had to change my thinking.
NEWS BULLETIN
Chris Sells ceases to make fun of VB developers. Also, Moon spins off into outer space. Film at 11.
*sigh*
Unfortunately my idea for rerouting assemblies to 1.0 programmatically does not work. The problem is that there is not currently a way to unload an assembly (to the best of my limited knowledge). If you could, what I would do is prevent it from trying to unload the referenced assemblies and load the 1.0 assemblies instead.
C# Design Patterns
Scott doesn't like "C# Design Patterns". I can't say that I do either. It was horribly written and very hard to follow. I will be looking into Slavomir's suggestion very shortly.
Has anyone
tried out my code yet? I'd really like to know if it works.
.NET 1.1 Issues Continue
Frans Bourma comments on the issues he has with VS.NET 2003, and even goes as far to say that if you are an ISV, you should not be building tools to .NET 1.1. Wow. That's a pretty rough statement. Well, I'm an ISV and I upgraded to VS.NET 2003 six months ago, and while it means that you have to exert a little more effort, the improvements alone are worth it.
OK Day, Better Evening
I was looking through the pingbacks/trackbacks in my blog, and I found out that there are over 100 links to my quasi-rant on how .NET 1.1 is not an upgrade to .NET 1.0. WOW. That's kinda cool. Scoble's pretty popular, and he only has 16 readers
. I think those same 16 read my blog, because all the rest are Google links.Edit While Debugging in VSNET2002
Go to Tools... Options, then click the Debugger folder, select Edit and Continue, and make sure both checkboxes are checked for C# and VB. This way you can edit ehile debugging and not have the debugger get pissed off. You can also set whether or not the debugger will restart execution, warn you, or ignore the changes and continue debugging. One step close to Edit and Continue in VB..... still waiting tho.
Community Petition
This is a petition to get our community members that have been assimilated, <ahem> ROB HOWARD and SCOTT GUTHRIE, to blog more often. To sign, please enter your name in my comments. Lets see if we can't get them to dish out more dirt about what's going on in Redmond.
b0rg lovers across the globe cheer!
SCO moves to sue all Linux users. 'Nuff said.
Why I think dynamic queries are an extremely bad idea
I've been thinking about this for several days now, and I have finally formulated an opinion about the whole "dynamic query" argument. I'm going to throw my hat into the ring and give you my two cents.
Cool new skin for Trillian
I cannot express enough the coolness of Trillian. Don't get me wrong, the new Windows Messenger 5 beta is pretty nice, and MSN Messenger 6 will kick butt, but you can't beat being signed into 5 different screen names at once. If you're active in the .NET community at all, it pays to make use of it. As you'll see in the screenshot, the ability to nest groups and rename contacts can be invaluable.
DANGER WILL ROBINSON
WARNING!!! Do NOT use Frontpage 2003 to edit user controls. It thinks it's an aspx page and tries to add the @Page Directive to it, killing the control. It does this right before saving, so if you delete it it will just put it back in again.
Architecture Happiness... well not quite
I'm so excited. In one of my fits of retardedness, I got upset because the database table names in one of the website components I'm building collides with the table names from another app. I was lathering up in the shower, all worried about having to recompile and re-deploy to three sites, I remembered that my architecture allows me to only have to confine the changes to the Data Layer. Man I love 5-tiered architecture.
Passion is a GOOD thing
Paschal noted that I insense passion in people. Some may take that negatively, but I think it's a good thing. Why? Because most people could care less about anything, and if I can create an intense desire in someone to speak their mind, and God forbid, maybe even care, then all the better.
Hold on to your hats
It's finally here! My new article on the Windows 2003 Platform Wave. Grab your surfboard and hand on, cause this ain't your mother's dry humor. My wit and sarcasm go unedited for the first time, so you'll get a good look at why Early & Adopter are my heroes. There is a heated discussion going on about it as well, so go check it out.
Speaking of Geek Movies..
Saw X2 on Friday. I've never seen a more culturally-relevant movie. Want proof? Check this out.
PLEASE
...delete your blog tool test posts. Do you leave tracing on when you deploy a website? Then please don't leave the main feed messy.
In case you couldn't already tell...
I was out pretty much all last week, buried with 5 different projects that all had to be finished (surprise surprise, none of them are yet), but I've been taking some time to catch up on my blog. I wanted to bring a couple of things to your attention.
Lies!
So I didn't have to be in the Top 20 in HS after all... Don't you hate it when you're lied to by authority figures? My guidance counselor should be ashamed of herself.
Please Note:
I was NOT accusing Sean and Scott of actually smoking weed. I love reading their articles because they have inanimate objects such as Win2k3 and the Framework talking to themselves. Not only that, but they create these funny personalities that just somehow fit the object. I was just commenting that most people are only this funny when they're high, and Early & Adopter can accomplish it minus toxic carcinogens.
From the "You Should Have Known That Already" Files...
No wonder I work better when the radio's on....
More news from Early & Adopter
Further proof that combining an MS Beta ID and weed is a bad idea. I know they don't roll doobies with their whitepapers, but most people have to be high to be this funny.
Move over Sean & Scott..
Neo's takes the ranks as the coolest early adopter. (Sorry guys, you couldn't keep that trophy forever.) I wonder if he's tried out Windows Server 2003 yet.
ARRGH
I lost ANOTHER one of my best posts to the BlogAdmin tool. <sigh> Will SOMEONE PLEASE help me get a good WinForms tool set up so that I can blog without losing my posts?
How to make your users forget the fact that you screwed up...
Developers....
START YOUR ENGINES!!!
Programmers and Society
Chad Osgood continued a long-running discussion about programmers. Here are my 2 cents.
I love these MS articles...
I just came across an article about how Microsoft.com was running Windows Server 2003 back in July 2002. I think it's really cool to see how MS does this stuff. I think they're still lacking in the Server OS Best Practices arena, but that's ok. They're getting better, and that's all I ask. :) .
.NET Speech SDK Beta 2 and .NET Framework 1.1
I wanted to make you guys aware of a solution for the incompatibility between the .NET Speech SDK Beta 2 and .NET Framework 1.1. I'm kinda proud of this fix, because I worked with the .NET Speech team to help them develop it. It sure made my life easier. I'll tell you what, MS has the nicest tech support / development people on earth, I don't care what anyone else says. I've also made it available to my list of rapidly-growing .NET resource list.
More cool things from Office 2003
I just got work that a company called ScanSoft (makers of Dragon NaturallySpeaking) are working on a plugin to Office 2003 to convert PDF files into editable documents. You can sign up for the plugin Beta at ScanSoft. Hook me up! WOO HOO!
Sometimes you come across some really cool stuff...
You know, I have this serious problem. I'm sure most developers feel the same way. let me elaborate.
First post from a PocketPC
I'm testing my new fitaly keyboard. It's pretty cool. I'm not typing faster just yet but I'm getting used to it. It really well thought out layout. I'm going to try to work on a whole article for builder.com using it. I haven't decided if I like this better than MS Transcriber or not. We'll see. You should check it out at http://www.fitaly.com. This took 4 minutes and 12 seconds to write.
In other news...
I found a very interesting article on the .NET Framework from Yale. Good read.
A new reason for self-censorship
I was surfing the web tonight, looking at several things that have caught my interest over the past few days. Every once in a while I like to see what a search for my name comes up with on the various search engines. What I came up with surprised me. A great many people are linking to me. I saw a few places where I was only one of a handful of .NET resources. While I like being outspoken and opinionated, because many people find my opinions interesting, I don't want those opinions being linked with me as a .NET resource.
My new toy
I got my PocketPC a few days ago. Man this is one cool piece of equipment. I am totally geeked out now. I bought it off of Brady for $700, and man did I get some cool stuff to go with it.
Cool info
How to change CSV to XML using XSLT. This will come in handy when I rewrite GenX.NET to be xml-based.
Good news on an early Thursday
Scott Guthrie informs me that a fix for the infamous DoPostback bug in 1.1 will be available within the next few days. Apparently, they ported a QFE patch from the 1.0 codebase, and it reintroduced the bug into the system. At this point they are working on an installer for the QFE.
Saddam Hussein = Hitler???
You be the judge.
Courtesy MSNBC. What's that in the background of the mural? A giant penis pump? A missile launcher? Either way, the dude has issues.Speaking of wasting time...
You know, I 've looked at Fabrice's list of .NET tools, and seen the announcements of the ASP.NET Forums, and i can't help but wonder...
Microsoft's Been Scobleized!
And Scoble has be A$$imilated. It's Official! Robert made it official today that he was just hired as a Technical Evangelist for the Longhorn team. His job will consist of building community during the development process, which is obviously ongoing. I think he mentioned something about coordinating internal blogging as well, but don't quote me on that one. Congrats, Rob! Hope those b0rg implants don't hurt too badly!
OK so anyways...
Actual .NET Coding.
Today I have discovered...
WOO HOO Part 2
Public copies of the MSDN that integrates with VS.NET 2003 have been posted by MS. Check out this blog entry for more info.
Thanks guys...
For the great discussion going on in this thread. It's nice to see that some people know how to leave respectful and constructive comments, even if they differ from my opinion.
My feelings at this point...
Imports System
Imports System.WebMoved for my own benefit
My dad gave me something I couldn't pass up posting. Whoever wrote this gets SERIOUS props in my book. I will cherish this forever. :)
ABOUT FRICKIN TIME....
Let me tell you something. It is such a pain in the butt taht I cannot find any best practices on things relating to web hosting. I can't find anything on hot to configure AD for a domain that not only has a website, but also is the host for other sites. I cannot find anything on general hosting provider best practices. But today I found something close.
Sometimes you just gotta chuckle
I just got back from church a while ago, and was taking about an hour to catch up on the events of the week. I've been trying really hard lately to stay focused on the many tasks that I have to accomplish during the week, and not concern myself with the happenings elsewhere, but as many of you may have gathered already, I like to be and stay informed. So I jump to MSNBC, my favorite source for news (that in and of itself does not make me a conservative, evern tho it is a conservative network . I just like it because it's Microsoft, and everyone already knows that I'm a Microsoft whore).
whew...
I just finished cranking out an article for builder.com on the next "platform wave" coming out on the 24th. It will be the first in a series of articles discussing the new technologies becoming available to developers in the near future.
OK here it goes...
"Maybe they'll get it if you write it in another language" [Tim Marman]
Gosh man...
What about
CUT THE LANGUAGE CRAP [Scott W.]
do you guys not understand? it means STOP TALKING ABOUT IT. Not, "I AGREE WITH SCOTT"..... and then talk some more about it. It means grow up and move on to something else. There's anew framework out there... go install it and blog about it. Do something other than waste everyones time filtering through garbage posts.Taking it one step further
I'm going to stress this to everyone. Do not even think about using VS.NET 2003 until you read this article. You will save yourself a lot of headaches, and a lot of frustrations.
MORE VS.NET 2003 Info
In my previous post, I talked a lot about the new Framework 1.1 and VS.NET 2003, and how they deal with the old stuff. After reading the first comments of my last post, I realized it might take more explaining than I thought. This may be a hard thing to swallow, so clear your mind, and be ready to take the red pill:
More VS.NET 2003/ Framework 1.1 Info
I've seen post all over the net about people nervous about installing VS.NET 2003. Having worked with it for several months now, let me allay your fears.
Something to note about .NET 1.1
Just to let you guys know, the build numbers haven't changed between the Framework 1.1 Final Beta and the Release. (v1.1.4322). I'm going to assume that this means that Paul Wilson's bug goes unfixed in the final release, but I'll let Rob Howard or Scott Guthrie answer that for me.
Another article completed
I finished my third article for Builder.com last night, and I'm really stoked. In case you haven't noticed by now, I really like writing about .NET, even thou you wouldn't notice it from my blog. This article is entitled: Preventing “Middle Child Syndrome” In Your Data Layer. Now, you're probably sitting there going, 'WTF does that mean?' Well, here's a sample:
Something worth fighting for.
I caught this article on MSNBC a few minutes ago, and one Iraqi's words really touched me, and I wanted to share them with you.
Reinforcing previous statements...
Windows Messenger and MSN Messenger are 2 different platforms. How do I know? Because I just got invited to the Windows Messenger 5.0 beta. COOL. I won't say anything about it obviously, but I'm excited.
A witness to history...
In my brief 21 years on this earth, I have not witnessed too many things that have been truly awe-inspiring. I was alive when Challenger exploded, but I only remember watching video.. I never saw the real thing. I've seen video of the Berlin Wall falling, which was a pretty cool thing too, but I don't remember watching it live. This morning, I witnessed history, and I've never been more proud to be alive, and more proud to be an American.
Further clarification.
I think Scott is mistaken. I wasn't talking about a checkbox column at all. The code I posted used a button tied to the DeleteCommand event to delete an item from the datagrid based on the ID in a hidden field for that row. The DataGridCommandEventArgs class holds the information (including the text for each column) for the entire row in a collection called Item.Columns on postback, and you can do whatever you want with that information. I don't need the MetaBuilders control for that, because I am not selecting a row. I'm working with a row that fired an event.
DataGrid Columns
I have to write this over again AGAIN. GRR. CLARIFICATION: I was angry at the WebLog app for losing my post again and having to start over. It's been doing that to me a lot lately.
I told you it could be done...
For those of you that thought I was a retard when I said I knew you could add images to the dropdown server control.... HA. I found one. It's pretty awesome too. Well worth the $30. The ListView version is free too. Real slick. My props to FunkeLab. Good stuff.
I just found...
My new favorite news site. I am using this new file download program called BitTorrent. It's really cool. It was originally written for Linux (please don't stone me, I wasn't going to use it either), but it was ported to Win32 as well. It has an extremely small memory footprint, and I've seen it hit download speeds of 130kB/s. Pretty darn fast. Faster than eDonkey/Overnet (.NET P2P client) ever gets me.
Compatibility
Lately, there has been a lot of discussion about compatibility. FrontPage 2003 has made leaps and bounds in this arena with a new browser compatibility wizard/tester, but I am still of the firm belief that you should code to 1 generation below the current technology, if you're going to do it at all. Personally, I'd rather give people another reason to upgrade than continue the status quo, but I dunno.
Information about Office System 2003
Just so that you guys know, the following information was posted on the MS newsgroups regarding Office 2003:
Just so you know
In case you haven't seen the news yet, we've begun a significant incursion into Baghdad. It is 10:12PM MST, 9:12AM in Baghdad Time. We have now taken over the Ministry of [Dis]-Information, and at least one presidential palace. Check out MSNBC for more info. Just thought I'd give you guys a heads-up.
Images in a Dropdown
Anyone of an ASP.NET Server Control that allows images to be placed in the ListItems? If you could point me to one that would be fabulous. Thanks!
Food for thought
For those of you considering the current war the antethesis of amazement, this might change your mind. NARA (The National Archives Online) says that 58,198 people died in the Vietnam conflict. Granted, that was over 10 years of fighting, but you have to figure that's about 5000 deaths a year. In three weeks of fighting, our military has only lost 80 soldiers, and only 150 have been wounded . I don't know about you, but as a former Air Force cadet, that makes me pretty proud of my countrymen. These guys are well-trained, and are doing their job very well.
WOO HOO!!!
I FINALLY got my Builder.com checks today! I'm so excited... I've been waiting for these things for weeks. I was afraid they would go all Wrox on me. Now I can finally submit my other articles. They're really good... i think you'll like them. If you haven't yet, check out my articles on deleting information directly from a paging datagrid. If you ever want to delete something right out of the datagrid, this is info you need to know. Be sure you check out the second article, which is the meat of the problem, here.
Been a busy day today
Well, this stuipd box does not save your text if you accidentally navigate away from this page, so I have to start ALL OVER AGAIN, GRRR. Note to ScottW: If you set the content-expires header to a decent sized number (say 2 minutes), it won't try to grab a new page every single time, and keep the stuff you typed if you click somewhere else by mistake.
My long search is over
My search for the best .NET TreeView control is finally over. No offence to the ASP.NET Team, of course, but this control supposedly handles all browsers, not just IE. XML TreeView does it all. I could use XSLT to transform my RSS feeds into a really slick little navigation system. (hint: be looking for this very soon). At only $20, it fits in very well with the way I do business.
VMWare Workstation link
Wanted to give you guys the link to download VMWare 4.0 Beta2. This is the latest build, and it's easy to get access to. Why my phone number was a required field, I'll never know, but who cares? It's pretty cool. I'm going to install it tomorrow.
Civic pride & my morning rant
I read this morning that my hometown and current residence, Mesa, AZ, is the nation's 19th safest city. Right on. I'm sure it has nothing to do with the large Mormon population in the city tho ;).
Will wonders never cease
The army is using dolphins to hunt for mines in the Gulf. How frickin cool is that? Something out of SeaQuest. Worried about AlQaeda addtack divers Fear not! Deploy the sea lions (no, not sea monkeys).
You thought <b>I</b> had balls.....
I saw a fantastic article today that really says it all. I'm not going to spoil the fun... just go check it out.
More misinformation from my OTHER employer
This time CNET.com comes through with it's own misinformation. I just read an article on RSS, and I was amazed at some of the valuable resources that were completely overlooked. I love CNET (read: I have yet to be paid), but some times it amazes me what makes it to "print". This is not an attack on the author of the article nor anyone else, I'm just pointing out a trend.
Scoble does .NET
Scoble, always the one in the know, posts his take on what .NET is. My response: good answer. I hope Steve Ballmer was listening.
Apple & Al
Yahoo reports that Al Gore has joined the board at Apple Computer. Who better to help the company then the guy who invented the Internet ;).
Someone get this guy his pacifier already
It amazes me how far off base Sun's CEO is. A few quotables:
Good morning
I saw this outstanding article on adding a control to the toolbox programmatically. I'm DEFINITELY going to have to take advantage of this.
Other Axis of Evil Wannabees
Other Axis of Evil Wannabees, by John Cleese
Was just walking out the door...
and had to post about the Anti-War Babe. Now, I'm all for the war that will be starting tomorrow, but let me just say this: For her I'd give piece a chance (as in break me off a piece of that!).
Joyous Morning
Finally, after 2 weeks of very long, hard work, my employers new website is finally online. I'm thoroughly excited, because now I can talk about what they do. The company is myKB.com Inc., and they build knowledge base software. The system is really slick, and the architecture is top-notch. We've been working really heavily with RSS over the past two weeks, and I will be working on a series of RSS-related items over the next several days, including a detailed white paper on everything I'm working on. It may very well be the coolest thing I've ever done.
Warning: Post contains gratuitous ranting. Viewer discretion advised.
I haven't had a good rant in a few days, and I just dealt with something that really burns me up, so I'm gonna talk about it.
Question for the .NET Community
Does anyone know of a really good TreeView control? Preferrably one with examples I can look at? I need to see if I can find a better one for my boss, because the one they are using is less than desirable. Thanks guys!
SQL Injection Article
Roy pointed to this article about OO SQL Injection avoidance. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to disagree with him entirely about his excitement for this method. It still uses direct query strings, which is the biggest security risk imaginable. There is a real simple way to stop SQL Injection attacks, and it will be the focus of my next article on Builder.com (still open for business unlike Wrox): use Stored Procedures (SPROCS), and explicitly deny SELECT, INSERT, and DELETE privleges on your tables. Think what happens if someone gets your connection string and gets access to your database... they could have a field day.
Just short of an orgasm....
I wiped my computer today to make way for the 15 disk monster of the Office 2003 Beta that came in the mail yesterday. Unfortunately I can't talk about it due to the "shut up or die" clause in the NDA, however I will say this: My blog now has a new front-end a la Don Box. I used InfoPath to generate a set of really nifty forms in about 5 minutes for all the different web services that ScottW has exposed. I'm feeling a little giddy :). Maybe at some point I'll use the PIAs that come with Office 2003 to run an installation checker routine, and make the InfoPath forms I just created available to anyone who has it installed.
Delegates in VB.NET
I saw this great post a few minutes ago on delegates, and needed to archive it for future reference. I'm giving a crash course in delegates for the AZDNUG next Tuesday, and I need a bit of a crash cource myself. Thanks Kirk!
VB.NET = C#.NET in 2K3 and beyond
Addy Santo posts in this entry: "it seems (at least at first glance) that C# programmers are getting lots of new goodies which the VB guys aren't."
Attack of the Roberts
Had a wonderfully interesting conversation with NEC's sole Blogger, Mr. TabletPC himself, Robert Scoble. Scobie's been to many geek parties in Silicon Valley lately, and he says he's partied out for a while. I think sometime soon we need to have a party for all tech bloggers named Robert. So far it would be me, Scobie, Rob Howard, and Rob Fahrni (please don't shoot me if I left anyone out). I would probably feel like the odd man out tho, since those guys are heavywaights in the industry and I'm just a lowly coder. It would still be cool. I wish I lived in SV so that I could go to all the cool geek parties (or maybe just stand outside and watch lol).
38 reasons to be disappointed....
Tim of LooselyCoupled disappoints me. I'm disappointed for two reasons (I know the title of the post said 38, I'm getting to that), the first of which being the fact that he asked the name of the song I referenced in the title of this post, when I clearly said later in the same post: "(In case any of you didn't know, the title of this post [Hold on Loosely] was a reference to a song of the same name from the 80s)."
Wearable Computers, Redux
This is amazing. It's a far cry from what they have on display at Imagineering! in DisneyLand. My only question is: When does this stuff come out, and how many of my kidneys will I have to sell to get it?
Hold on Loosely....
Tim of Loosely Coupled mentions that he was thinking of an ASP.NET Server Control instead of Snarf. Tim, I think you missed the part where I said that Snarf was based on a server control that he created, and Brady and I are putting the finishing touches on it now. It's a templated control, and it allows you complete control over the output. It includes caching on a feed-by-feed basis, and of course you can manipulate it programmatically. I'm using it right now in a proof-of-concept project that will blow your mind . More on that later
ASP.NET News Aggregator
[Loosely Coupled] "I wonder if [an ASP.NET News Aggregator] exists."
Website Redirection
I now have my domain name (www.robertmclaws.com) redirecting to this blog. This is because my website sucks right now because I'm busy making other people's sites kick some major butt. In the meantime I will continue posting about the cool things I come across. If you're new to my site, welcome. Have a look around, I have links to pretty interesting things, and more are to come.
Snarf! Rules
My friend and coworker Brady Gaster came up with the coolest RSS aggregator I've seen in a while (besides NewsGator of course). Snarf stands for Simple News Aggregator for RSS Feeds. Say you're on the go, and not on your computer, but you still want to check on your newsfeeds. Well, click the link on the tatochip.com home page, sign in, and your RSS feeds are right there in IE's search bar. It's all based on Brady's RSS server control, which will be available to the public soon. I would highly recommend it to everyone to give it a go and see what it can do. I know Brady will be adding several features to it over the days and weeks to come.
Mr. ASP.NET
For those of you that are not yet aware: Rob Howard is freakin awesome. If I ever have a problem and can't figure something out, and I have no where else to turn, Rob always has the answer. Anyone that says that Microsoft is not envolved in the developer community can suck on a dead dog's nose. The b0rg rule!
Shortsighted
Rogelio Morrell "How can a product use more XML than the other? XML is XML everywhere you go. But I can understand that InfoPath might be more XML oriented (in that is using XSLT, XPath, etc) than say Word or Excel, because the only save in XML.
Move over Apple...
This is the funniest thing I've seen in a good long while. My recommendation: watch it several times to catch all the in-jokes.
Clueless
Anyone know how to flush the local DNS cache?
If you're not worried yet...
This is what I'm talking about when I talk about the "pease at any cost" impotent wusses over at the UN.
AZ Bloggers
In case you didn't know, I reside in Mesa, Arizona. I was approached online by Justin Rudd about an AZ Bloggers list, which I think is pretty cool. Good to see other from the Valley of the Sun (this week is should be changed to Valley of the Rain) blogging. If any of you know other Valley bloggers then please let one of us know.
Wow
One of my rantings got the attention of the great Don Box. He didn't say anything other than it was interesting. I wonder what he thinks about it.
Smart Displays
I saw the Viewsonic airPanel Smart Display at *Fry's Electronics [shudders]. Since they're still relatively new, I'll explain how they work.
Interesting Comments on Open Source
" [James Avery] The open source movement is really only going to provide software for geeks like me to play around with before we go to work to build Microsoft applications."
2nd Article on Builder.com
My second in a series of attempts to bring some legitimacy to the .NET area of Builder.com is now online. This article discusses the subject of deleting data in an paging DataGrid. This is a fairly common task but one that has not yet been discussed elsewhere.
Directory Listings
Caught this thread on the ASP.NET Forums. It's pretty sweet for keeping directory browsing off. Of course, it would be really easy to extend the system into a hyperlink-builder. You could even extend it into a server control that enumerates through the files in the directory for you. Something like that might come in useful. Do you guys think I should write about something like this for my Builder.com column?
Why Microsoft is a good neighbor
Ran across this article a while back, just wanted to bring it up here. I'm preaching to the choir of course, but oh well. Maybe you can use these in your next discussion with an MS-hater.
Working hard or hardly working...
I have not been doing much .NET blogging lately, and that's because I haven't been doing any .NET work to speak of. To the two people who probably read this thing with any regularity, let me bring you up to speed.
GAC Mapping
I saw this really awesome article here: http://dotnetweblogs.com/Jkey/posts/3006.aspx on how to access the files in the GAC. Really frickin awesome. Now I can troubleshoot GAC errors without having to deal with GacUtil. I plan to test this extensively.
Windows Server 2003
Saw an interesting link online today. It's how to configure Windows Server 2003 in a workstation environment.
Pissed Off Again.....
What follows is the contents of an e-mail that I sent to MIcrosoft Watch regarding their misquote of an MS employee. Crap like this really makes me angry. I doubt that it will ever do any good, but maybe you guys can all send in enough "tips" like this that they post a retraction,
AZDNUG
I went to the Arizona .NET Users Group meeting for the first time last night. I had been meaning to go for nearly a year now, but have lacked the means and the motivation to get there. Man it was so cool. I realized that I've been holed up in my apartment too long. It was so great to get to socialize with people who know what I'm talking about when I mention "System.DirectoryServices" and "Bitwise Operators".
Weather-Related Empathy...
I've been reading all your blogs this morning about how bad the weather is back east, and I have only one thing I can say: I'm glad I live in Mesa, AZ. All it ever does here is rain, oh yeah I almost forgot about the heat. The drought out here has been horrible, and we received a welcome 6 inches of rain over the past 3 days. The earth is so parched that for the most part it sucked right into the ground. I know it's probably bad out there, but just remember we've had once of teh worst droughts in decades, and this precipitation will definitely help out the water situation.
Early Morning
Just woke up, and headed off to work. I wish I could get a .NET-related day job, instead of this $11.50/ht network admin job, but hey at least it's a job. I know too many developers that are unemployed. It's a shame.
The Growing Scourge of Global Irrelevance
While I have been using this blog to comment more on world events than .NET development, I promise I'll start talking more about coding in the near future.
Friday's Security Council Debate
Just when you thought the UN Security Council would get a clue....
Best Cartoon About Columbia
Continually Amazed...
I've been sitting here for 2 hours now watching todays UN events unfold on TV, and it amazes me how weak our global leaders are. Bush's State of the Union address was a very powerful opener for today's events. Colin Powell, one of the planet's most brilliant and political advisors, gave the best case to date on how the world is being deceived. He brought it down to the most basic level, so that even Gomer Pyle could understand how it effects everyone, and the other countries. Yet the cowards that run the worlds nations sat there, heard teh same information, and are still convinced that inspections are working. It completely amazes me.
President Bush's Eulogy for the Columbia Seven
HOUSTON, Feb. 4 — Their mission was almost complete, and we lost them so close to home. The men and women of the Columbia had journeyed more than 6 million miles and were minutes away from arrival and reunion. The lost was sudden and terrible, and for their families the grief is heavy.
Our nation shares in your sorrow and in your pride.
We remember not only one moment of tragedy, but seven lives of great purpose and achievement.
To leave behind Earth and air and gravity is an ancient dream of humanity. For these seven it was a dream fulfilled. Each of these astronauts had the daring and discipline required of their calling.
Each of them knew that great endeavors are inseparable from great risks. And each of them accepted those risks willingly, even joyfully, in the cause of discovery.
Rick Husband was a boy of 4 when he first thought of being an astronaut. As a man and having become an astronaut, he found it was even more important to love his family and serve his Lord.
One of Rick’s favorite hymns was “How Great Thou Art,” which offers these words of praise: “I see the stars. I hear the mighty thunder. Thy power throughout the universe displayed.”
David Brown was first drawn to the stars as a little boy with a telescope in his backyard. He admired astronauts, but as he said, “I thought they were movie stars. I thought I was kind of a normal kid.”
David grew up to be a physician, an aviator who could land on the deck of a carrier in the middle of the night and a shuttle astronaut.
His brother asked him several weeks ago what would happen if something went wrong on their mission? David replied, “This program will go on.”
Michael Anderson always wanted to fly planes and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Air Force. Along the way, he became a role model, especially for his two daughters and for the many children he spoke to in schools.
He said to them, “Whatever you want to be in life, you’re training for it now.” He also told his minister, “If this think doesn’t come out right, don’t worry about me, I’m just going on higher.”
Laurel Salton Clark was a physician and a flight surgeon who loved adventure, loved her work, loved her husband and her son. A friend who heard Laurel speaking to mission control said, “There was a smile in her voice.”
Laurel conducted some of the experiments as Columbia orbited the Earth and described seeing new life emerge from a tiny cocoon.
“Life,” she said, “continues in a lot of places, and life is a magical thing.”
None of our astronauts traveled a longer path to space than Kalpana Chawla. She left India as a student, but she would see the nation of her birth, all of it, from hundreds of miles above.
When the sad news reached her hometown, an administrator at her high school recalled, “She always said she wanted to reach the stars.” She went there and beyond.
Kalpana’s native country mourns her today, and so does her adopted land.
Ilan Ramon also flew above his home, the land of Israel. He said, “The quiet that envelops space makes the beauty even more powerful, and I only hope that the quiet can one day spread to my country.”
Ilan was a patriot, the devoted son of a Holocaust survivor, served his country in two wars.
“Ilan,” said his wife, Rona, “left us at his peak moment, in his favorite place, with people he loved.”
The Columbia’s pilot was Commander Willy McCool, whom friends knew as the most steady and dependable of men. In Lubbock today, they’re thinking back to the Eagle Scout who became a distinguished naval officer and a fearless test pilot.
One friend remembers Willy this way: “He was blessed, and we were blessed to know him.”
Our whole nation was blessed to have such men and women serving in our space program. Their loss is deeply felt, especially in this place where so many of you called them friends.
The people in NASA are being tested once again. In your grief, you are responding as your friends would have wished, with focus, professionalism and unbroken faith in the mission of this agency.
Captain Brown was correct: America’s space program will go on.
This cause of exploration and discovery is not an option we choose; it is a desire written in the human heart. We are that part of creation which seeks to understand all creation. We find the best among us, send them forth into unmapped darkness and pray they will return.
They go in peace for all mankind, and all mankind is in their debt.
Yet, some explorers do not return, and the law settles unfairly on a few.
The families here today shared in the courage of those they loved, but now they must face life and grief without them. The sorrow is lonely, but you are not alone.
In time, you will find comfort and the grace to see you through. And in God’s own time, we can pray that the day of your reunion will come.
And to the children who miss your mom or dad so much today, you need to know, they love you, and that love will always be with you.
They were proud of you, and you can be proud of them for the rest of your life.
The final days of their own lives were spent looking down upon this Earth, and now, on every continent, in every land they can see, the names of these astronauts is known and remembered.
They will always have an honored place in the memory of this country, and today, I offer the respect and gratitude of the people of the United States.
May God bless you all.My First Entry
It's kind of a sad day to start a weblog. Today was the memorial for the brave astronauts of the Columbia. Below is the full text of Bush's eulogy. I will only say one thing: On the morning they were coming home, Cmndr. Rick Husband, while completing the preflight checklist, asked Mission Control if they could stay longer. Unfortunately, they got their wish, and now they get to spend eternity in the place they so greately loved. Thank you, Michael Anderson, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, Rick Husband, William McCool, and Ilan Ramon; for your service to this and your respective countries, for daring to look up towards the heavens, and riding to the stars on the hopes of a grateful nation.
