March 2003 - Posts
[Craig Andera]
Congratulations Are In Order
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Second, to Ingo Rammer, who has joined the wonderful experience that is being a DevelopMentor instructor. Welcome aboard: I've loved it for the last 3+ years, and I'm sure you will too.
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Wow... I wish our company hadn't taken away our educational budget because of the economy.
One ASP.NET book to rule them all. In the last 2 years I have seen a lot of ASP.NET books and they all pretty much suck, whoops, are a bit lacking in real information-) (The notable exception, of course, is Developing Microsoft ASP.NET Server... ) I mean, who really wants to read 500 pages of dragging DataGrids and the like around and setting properties? Do you really need a 1000 page book to figure out how to drag and drop and set properties? So, I have been waiting with great anticpation DM'er Fritz Onion's book as he is one of the crown princes of ASP.NET and I must say that Essential ASP.NET With Examples in C# just absolutely rocks! Right down into the architecture in Chapter 1, Bing! HTTP Pipeline in Chapter 4, Valifation, Data Binding, Custom Controls, etc. In other words, the real stuff. This is the one ASP.NET book to rule them all! Excuse my enthusiasm, I am fueled by Red Bull at the moment-) [Sam Gentile's Blog]
Too... many... books...
Must... keep... reading...
Zzz...
Wow, exactly how I feel. I was in the middle of Essential ASP.NET until I was stopped and given Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective on Object-Oriented Design and told to read that first. As I noted before, I've been waiting for Fritz Onion's book since I took my Guerrilla .NET class in August 2002. (Oh well, I guess I'll just have to wait a little longer.) I'm also in the middle of Code by Charles Petzold. And my wish list contains way too many to list. Now my biggest wish is just to have more time to read all of these books along with my daily list and blog reading. Sad thing is everyday a new book comes out that I want. Such is the life of a programmer.
For those of you who wanted to attend but could not, here are the slides and code for Chris Kinsman's talk today at the NYC .NET Develpers Group meeting. The talk was great and I learned a lot. I think I'll be attending their meetings regularly. The speakers seem to be high quality, they feed you (great NYC pizza), and today they had many goodies (ie all kinds of book, tee shirts, and magazines) to give out. All this for my $15 parking. ($15 for 3 hrs of parking?!?! Jesus Christ NYC is expensive!!) Not a bad deal.
I also got a chance to chat with Chris briefly after the talk. Seems like a really nice guy and very intelligent. I asked him why he stopped blogging and, not surprisingly, he said problems with Radio. So I suggested he ask Scott if he could move here. I would love to see him make the move. This community seems to have drawn quite a crowd of bloggers and therefore readers. Congrats to all of you especially Scott. I'm quite honored to be blogging amongst some of the best in the industry. (I'm getting teary eyed.)
Update: Some of you noticed that the actual presentation slides weren't available from Chris's site however they are now available here.
Today, as I was cleaning up and adding error handling to our ASP.NET application which will be going live soon (YES!! Our first production ASP.NET app!), I found an interesting article on how to get stack trace information from an exception. This gave me the ability to have a nice clean custom error page that includes the line number and file name where the exception was thrown. Beautiful thing.
Oh and in case you are having trouble accessing the exception information from your custom error page, which I imagine everyone will at first because it's not intuitive, I found this thread on the ASP.NET Forums.
For all those interested, this Thursday there will be a meeting for the NYC .NET Developers Group. You can find a list of their monthly events and information about the group on their site. They seem to be bringing in some pretty big name speakers so I'm going to give it a go. Here are the details for this month's meeting from their mailing list (with a few links added) so make your plans accordingly:
Topic: Creating Smart Clients with .NET
Abstract: What started the massive migration away from rich client
applications onto the web? Are those reasons still valid with the
release of .NET? Did we give up too much in this migration? The
session will take a close look at integrating windows forms controls
in the browser. The code access security issues with this technique
will be discussed as well as a solution for distributing policy
updates. Finally we will wrap up with a look at dispensing with the
browser altogether and moving to a pure smart client architecture
that auto deploys a rich client to the end user.
Speaker: Chris Kinsman, Vergent Software
Chris is the founder of Vergent Software and formerly the VP of
Technology for DevX.com, a web site that provides information for
developers. He has extensive experience with .NET, Web Farms,
Clustering, Data Access, and Scalability. He just finished
writing "Visual Basic.NET Developer's Guide to ASP.NET, ADO.NET and
XML" and "C# Developer's Guide to ASP.NET, ADO.NET and XML". Chris
has spoken at a variety of conferences including VSLive and
Microsoft TechEd, and is the track chairman for ASPLive.
Date: Thursday, March 20, 2003
Time: Reception 6:00 PM , Program 6:15 PM
Location: Microsoft, 825 8th Avenue (50th Street), Floor 18
This first issue of Ingo Rammer's long awaited Distributed .NET Newletter has been sent out. If you haven't signed up for it you can do so
here.
I'm quite excited about this one. Since you guys don't all read the comments I get on my blog I thought I'd share a really great discovery with you from the comments left by Raj Chaudhuri's about my post entitled Good Luck Don... Wow these tips are really helpful. This really gave a good deal of the ablities I greatly miss as a regular user, and I don't have to compromise security to have them. Just the kind of knowledge I need to keep me chugging along in my Keith Brown-esque ways. Unfortunately, Raj didn't leave contact information but thank you very much Raj. (This maybe the missing person here.)
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http://www.iunknown.com/Weblog/Microsoftvs.OpenSource.html
It's always interesting to see what people thing about this whole situation. My favorite line is the following:
How this ultimately plays out is anyone's guess. But it means that we're in for some exciting times over the next few years.
No matter what it looks like some good healthy competition that will be good for the users.
Don Box has decided to
jump on the
bandwagon and not run as admin on his machine. (At least he will be doing this soon.) Good luck, Don. It's not easy. Even with the
encouraging words from Craig, everyday I contemplate giving up. Craig has also figured out a
work around on WS2003 which Don will be able to use but unfortunately for me this
doesn't work on Windows 2000. Oh well, perseverance will have to do for now...
[Sam Gentile]
I found this review of Essential .NET: Volume 1, The CLR by Don Box and Chris Sells via the 123Aspx Daily Update. I've been planning on picking this book up for awhile now, as soon as I find the time to finish up a few of the other books I have laying around, such as Programming Windows Security by Jeff Brown.
This review doesn't sound great though, and some of the others I've seen on Amazon.com are similarly disappointing. Bearing in mind I've never actually read Essential COM so I don't really know Don's (book) writing style - has anyone else read this and want to share some thoughts or opinions on it??[.NET Weblogs ]
The "review"you cited and the "reviews" on Amazon are indicative of the people I wrote this for last summer. It's a CLR book and at that, is most excellent in helping one understand the fundamentals of the CTS, method invocations and core concepts. If someone is coming from the "I don't want to know anything about what I program on, just show me C# and ASP.NET code" crowd, look elsewhere.
I second Sam's opinion. I read the review and I rated it with a score of 1. That review is terrible. The book is good. You can read my pseudo-review to give you and idea of what the book is like. I'll do a more thorough job in my future review of books but I believe my review is still more useful and honest than the one mentioned above. Basically the book is for people who already have at least a relatively solid understanding of the CLR but want to understand more advanced topics and the inner workings of the CLR. Some stuff will fly over your head if you don't have an understanding of COM but you definitely don't need to understand COM to gain a lot from this book. The book is not about COM and Don Box knows that but it makes sense to me that for some advanced topics you will need to know something about the predecessor of the platform you are working with. COM is not dead. You still need to deal with it when faced with legacy code and many Windows APIs. The book is no where near what I would call a programming book, in fact, Don Box says that from the get go. If you are expecting a light read or just an overview of the CLR look elsewhere. If you are expecting a book to teach you how to program look elsewhere. If you want a more thorough understanding of the CLR and already have a base to work off of this book is for you. Please read the preface before reading the book. Don Box does an excellent job explaining the goals of the book, his writing style, and everything you need to know when deciding whether to pick up a copy of this book.
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