May 2003 - Posts
For those of you who haven't seen the news .NETWeblogs is now weblogs.asp.net. Individual blog URLs have changed accordingly eg mine is http://weblogs.asp.net/sibrahim. You can find out more here. Please take the time out to adjust your links and news aggregators.
Unfortunately the auto-redirect does not update your links in SharpReader though some day I hope it will.
I just came back from seeing Taj Mahal at that Blue Note in NYC. Wow is that guy still good. The show was amazing and I'm very glad I took the time out to see him. Sang his ass off and the band was great. I thought the band was ok until I really got to see them go at it. It's unreal how you sometimes don't realize how good a musician is until they bust out with a solo.
Tomorrow should be a rough day. I spent too much time playing with XmlTextReader, XPathNavigator, and XmlDocument at work over the past two days to find out which would be best for my current project. Not a waste of time by any means but now I'm behind. More on that later....
If anyone one is going to TechEd in Dallas, TX drop me a line.
I just registered today :). I'm extremely excited. Until today the word was we would have no educational budget. It didn't take me long to spend my part when I found out. I thought the hardest part would be deciding between TechEd, WinDev, and DevCon but that decision was made for me. Other conferences like PDC were simply out of the question because they didn't offer something that we could use immediately. Anyway, let me know if you're going maybe we can grab a drink.
Craig decided to
jump off the non-admin bandwagon. He's in part the reason I got into it so it's sad to see him go. Craig has also been supportive of other people's efforts to make the switch including my
own. He says he'll make an effort to get back on it soon. Stupid Quicken.
[simplegeek] via http://woodster.com/rss/dotnet.aspx
Nikhil Kothari (of ASP.NET Fame) Blogs
Yesterday, I went to my first Northern New Jersey .NET User Group meeting. The topic was ADO.NET: Performance Tips and Tricks the slides and demos should be here soon. I also met DonXML and I can verify that it's not Don Box. Funny thing is I found out because he made a reference to Don Box's "COM is Love" phrase to which the presenter replied sarcastically "Ok there Don" and so DonXML let him know it was actually his name. I put two and two together and introduced myself.
But, anyway, I'm digressing. The best tip/trick I got out of the presentation was about connection string keyword values. Apparently there is a connection string keyword called "Enlist" whose default value is true. Enlist specifies whether or not to create an implicit transaction for your database calls. If you are following the recommended guidelines and using stored procedure and explicitly creating transactions when you need them, you might want to consider setting the value of Enlist = false. Leaving the value = true makes you needlessly incur the overhead for creating and destroying the transaction when you don't need one, for example, when you are doing a SELECT. Here's link to MSDN's info on connect strings.
I never realized how much reading I do each week until yesterday and today. I've been out of commission because of my cousin's wedding which was this past Sunday. Many of my family members came mainly from FL and CA to NJ to celebrate the occasion. So to spend time with them I had to skip my daily reads for a while. My time with them was great aside from their bitching about how NJ sucks and how our weather was terrible. Oh well that's family.
But after all the shindigs were over it was time for me to catch up on my reading. To my surprise I had about 500 messages from the Windows OT group, 5 days or so of DevelopMentor digests, and about 600 blog entries in SharpReader. I'm still a long ways behind and I feel like deleting all these things but I'm so afraid of missing out on new .NET news or news on the technology front at all. Oh well, I guess I'll spend the rest of this week catching up.
You are visiting an island on which two tribes of natives live. One tribe has black soles and always lies; the other tribe has white soles and always tells the truth. There are three natives standing near you. You can't see the bottoms of their feet, and indeed you find out it is extremely rude to look at another's soles, but you are
curious so you ask the first man, "Sir, what color are your soles?" Now he happens to understand English, but he can't speak it, so he replies in his native tongue, "Glub Glub". You turn to the second man and ask, "Sir, what did he say?" The second man replies, "He said he has white soles." Now to be sure, you turn to the third and
ask, "Sir, what color of soles does this second man have?" The third man replies, "Sir, he has black soles."
Now the question is, what color of soles does the third native have?
Please read this before posting a comment.
Jalil sent me this
link today. Thought I would share it with you.
I was thinking more about user groups last night after
posting about my frustration with their content and my ideas on a new group. I came up something I think user group organizers should consider. Why not implement a system to indicate the level of expertise that is required as a prerequisite for the presentation? MSDN, for example, use a "Level of Difficulty" scale ranging from 1 to 3, 1 being beginner. This may help members to decide which meetings to attend. While you may argue that doing this may prevent people who are beginners from attending advanced topics and vice versa, it's better than having frustrated member who become turned off because they don't know what to expect and simply don't show.
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