Scott Sargent : Codeboy's Blog

I've edited yesterdays doom gloom post

2007-07-17T21:02:00Z

I've edited (gutted) yesterday's doom and gloom post. It caused a great deal of confusion.

Change is a good thing or perhaps it will be

2007-07-16T13:13:00Z

Ok there was a post here that caused a good deal of confusion. It lead some people to understandably think that i was very unhappy with my job or my employer. That's definitely not the case. I'm very happy to work where i do and really could not imagine working anywhere else. That's the truth. The post that was here was about something else entirely and while yes it was career related it was not in any way shape or form a complaint about my employer. I apologize for the confusion that this post has caused. The bottom line is I love where I'm working, the team at my company that i work with and am excited about working with new people who have recently joined the company. The post referred to something else entirely.

Scott "Causer of Great Confusion and Distress" Sargent

Blogging from Word

2007-02-16T16:17:43Z

I'm about to start a new project that involves using word's metablog api capabilities to let users post rich content to a website that I'm the developer on directly from word. As such I wanted to try out word's blogging functionality and see how I liked it, how it worked etc.. So here's a test post that is totally devoid of any other type of content.

selectSingleNode and FireFox

2007-01-25T19:21:00Z

Ajax is cool, for sure. However sometimes its not so easy to work with, Ajax brings back a problem to web development that had been going by the wayside for a few years. You see when I started back in early 2000, we had MS IE, Netscape 4, AOL and a slew of other browsers to support. Writing interactive web programs for that collection of browsers was roughly akin to writing source code for multiple platforms. Actually that's just what it is, i guess the analogy works too well. ASP.NET made a lot of this much nicer, ok well in truth I worked on intranet based projects that locked into one browser. So while the problem may not have gotten any better I couldn't see it ;) All that changed a couple years ago, working on very public sites again they had to work in FF and IE, granted this is much better than the old browser collection. So one problem i had yesterday was Firefox kept barking (rudely) about selectSingleNode() is not a function. It sure is, its part of an xml element! i said, but it persisted. After much googling, i was able to write this function to wrap the functionality. I'm sure there are better ways of doing this, but this is the one I found. Judging by the amount of googling that i did to find the bits & parts, there are some out there with a similar problem. I guess what i don't understand is why it takes three lines of code to do this in FF and only one in IE. Is it that coming from an IE background my point of view is skewed? Or is this just legitimately more difficult in FF? I'll bet that most frameworks (atlas/etc..) have this built in and I just didn't see it. Post a comment and tell me if that's it!

    function SelectSingleNode(xmlDoc, elementPath)
    {
        if(window.ActiveXObject)
        {
            return xmlDoc.selectSingleNode(elementPath);
        }
        else
        {
           var xpe = new XPathEvaluator();
           var nsResolver = xpe.createNSResolver( xmlDoc.ownerDocument == null ? xmlDoc.documentElement : xmlDoc.ownerDocument.documentElement);
           var results = xpe.evaluate(elementPath,xmlDoc,nsResolver,XPathResult.FIRST_ORDERED_NODE_TYPE, null);
           return results.singleNodeValue; 
        }
    }

Just a little bit of Rewriting

2007-01-25T19:10:00Z

I was trying to figure out the other day how to do url-rewriting on a handler basis, so I could key in on exactly what was re-written and not affect the app on a global basis. I found this blog post by Jeffery Palermo and it was just what I needed. This is perfect because the app that i'm currently working on tends towards having very nasty urls, a problem i don't have the time to fix globally *yet*.

The Five Things Blog Tag Game

2007-01-05T16:09:00Z

I've been blog tagged by one of my co-workers Kyle Beyer. I've worked with Kyle for about a year now on a few of Telligent's sites that we manage. I've heard about this game from others and seen some fascinating posts, definitely learning a lot along the way. Others have far more information about the origin of the game, I'm afraid i couldn't do that justice so I'm just going to get to the five things about me.

1. I've just finished building my first house. That was something that I never thought i'd be able to do, build a house by myself (ok i confess, i just wrote checks & signed documents) but I got it done and I'm in the house. Why did i build the house? good investment? Stop throwing money away on rent? More space? Ok these are all excellent reasons to build a house, but not why I did it. I wanted to have a room and a place to listen to my stereo system as loud as i wanted. I never got complaints in my old apartment but you can't crank the subwoofer & speakers and not feel at least a little bad. I cant at least. But now in the house I can, I love the way the subwoofer throws you back into your seat when something explodes.

2. I'm a .net developer focusing on databases and websites, but one of my passions is video games. Playing them but some day I want to be able to build them. Games & game engines are among the most complex of software that's being written today. 3D Math and physics are mind bogglingly complex, I love complex things. So for me game dev is a great hobby. I'm completely self taught as a computer programmer. I took a couple of courses in databases and C/C++ but most of what i know and use every day i'm totally self taught. At times I wish i'd taken more CS courses but I'm really grateful with my ability to teach myself new technologies and computer concepts. So I hope one day to have taught myself how to build realtime 3D Graphics software. With a helping portion of AI too.

3. I've recently come to the understanding that my music collection is woefully lacking and have been buying new cds, trying new things to try to expand my horizons musically. Ok this isn't all that interesting, and acutally is probably a tad boring. However if you're reading this you have a favorite cd. Leave me a comment and let me know what it is! Not your all time favorite, but what's being played most in your cd player at the moment. Please no country or Rap, its good just not my thing. On a similarly related note I absolutely love movies and dvds. (see #1) I've nearly 300 dvds and am always looking for more.

4. I just got my first tattoo. I've wanted one for a while and decided that the time was right. I mulled over the design, trying to draw it myself, but my computer skills seem to have replaced my art skills and I decided to just let an artist do it for me. Seneca at Unique Arts in glens falls did a fantastic job. Why did i want a tattoo you may ask? Well i think they look really really cool, I wanted something to be a symbol of a memory of a loved one that I lost a while ago. I don't have pictures of it, I'll try to post one later. While this was my first i'm not sure if its my last. Family is not so accepting of tattoos, so if i go quickly for the fully covered look i'll probably shock quite a few of them. That being said i could definitely see another tattoo at some point.

5. When i was younger i wanted to be (in order) a Road Fixer, a GI Joe guy, a fighter pilot, an engineer that designed things, a business man, a computer programmer, a Fire truck (see the movie Crazy People ) and a Computer programmer.

I'd Like to see these people carry this on: Rob Howard, Jason Alexander, Bill Staples, David Penton and Scott Dockendorf

IIS.NET Is Live

2006-05-23T19:31:00Z

IIS.NET is live, I wasn't the first to post this and hopefully I won't be the last, but IIS.NET is finally live, I've been working on this project for what seems like months and months now, it feels incredible to see it come to life as living breathing site. Definitely check out all of the great content on www.iis.net there's a ton of awesome articles and dozens & dozens of cool things in the techCENTER. There's also blogs and forums so you can read about what MS's IIS team members are up to and help each other / get advice in the forums. Very cool stuff.

This was pretty Funny

2006-01-06T19:10:00Z

Saw this come through the other day, Jason blogged about it:

http://jasona.net/archive/2006/01/04/16.aspx

Fixing Wierd Problems

2006-01-05T20:31:00Z

Here's an odd compiler error that I got today while working on a directx sample:

x:\ssargent\projects\introdirectx\chap01\d3dinit.cpp(84) : error C2664: 'MessageBoxW' : cannot convert parameter 2 from 'const char [19]' to 'LPCWSTR'
Types pointed to are unrelated; conversion requires reinterpret_cast, C-style cast or function-style cast

Now it turns out this is an error thats partially caused by Visual Studio 2005. I don't claim to know which is better but apparently code that was written in vs2003 might expect a multi byte character set while VS 2005 defaults to a Unicode character set. This little error is caused by that difference. To fix it in vs2005 just switch to a multibyte character set. Right Click on Project -> Properties -> General -> Character set. This fixed it for me, perhaps this will help some others. This was also in this thread: http://www.moon-labs.com/cgi-bin/YaBB/YaBB.cgi?board=book_board;action=display;num=1135734768

Football and MVP

2006-01-05T15:42:00Z

College football is over :( but it was a really good season this year. My favorite teams didn't do as well as I'd hoped, it looked for a while like Bama might stand a shot at the National Championship (however remote) it was not to be though. And Michigan well they lost a lot this year, its pretty sad when they have as many losses as the giants do. C'mon blue what was wrong with the defense this year? I was absolutely estatic to see that Texas had won, not sure what Hook-em Horns means but apparently thats what they did. I'd really been getting sick of the USC is the best thing for college football ever or people & announcers saying that no one can keep up with USC they're just college football gods. Well by what I saw one guy was able to defeat them almost by himself. And that was pretty cool...

Well yesterday was the MVP Award day, but not for me. I didn't get re-awarded MVP status this year, I remember thinking about it that if i lost MVP status that would be a huge deal. Well Its amazing how things change your perspective because I think its a good thing. There were more deserving people in front of me and that's pretty cool that they got recognized. Congradulations!! What will I do? well going to florida with Kara for one, this will be the first time i've ever gone on a vacation so I'm pretty excited about that. I've taken vacations before but never gone anywhere, I heard sanibel island is nice. I'll get back to my prior levels of community involvement, this has just been a nice break. I'm thinking of branching out into other communities as well (3D Gfx / Game Dev for one)

Once again, Congradulations to the MVPs!

Looking back at 2005 and forward to 2006

2006-01-03T20:24:00Z

Its 2006 pretty hard to believe that a year has passed, I remember well how 2005 started, me studying for a job interview out west. I didn't get that job which was a good thing, because it paved the way for me to work at perhaps the best company on the planet. Still I can't believe its been a year, well technically it hasn't been as 2/4 was the date I started. Let's not get bogged down in details though cause what fun would that be? 2005 was a pretty amazing year for me, started working for telligent full time doing lots of cool .net stuff, started building a house (pay a lot & wait a lot basically...) and met someone really special :). Hey come to think of it, i just summed up one year in just a single sentence, well that's cause its time to discuss cool geeky stuff.

Technically my strength and passions have always been towards asp.net & managed code. A funny thing is starting to happen though, more and more I'm finding myself wanting to play in the unmanaged world of C++, ok that's not really new for me but doing the heavy 3D Gfx stuff with DirectX is and that's where I'm spending more and more of my free time. I'm loving reading some of the awesome books that are out there about doing 3D Game Engines & Graphics with DirectX. I've dabbled in this before but never really got anywhere with it, one book i'm currently reading really said it well: this stuff isn't easy and with 3D Game engines more than anything else you need a well laid out and thought through approach. I'm hoping that spending the time in the 3d Game Dev worlds will help me become a better and more disciplined programmer in more respects and in professional programming (.net, asp.net sql etc..) as well. Here's a professional New Years Resolution (Increase the size and complexity of projects that I can handle well on my own). Through better planning, development practices and discipline I think i can get there. Also, I really believe the answer for me is not in managed code, its in the C++ world where things are quite a bit less forgiving. See, if I can build some of these engines or add new things to them successfully its got to be in C++ where things aren't as easy. I'll have to handle memory management and all of the other fun challenges C++ brings. This if successful will teach more discipline that will be very useful back in the managed world. I've already learned something new: 3D Graphics w/ DirectX requires quite a bit more Math than ASP.NET does. So here's what I'm reading:

Ideally, I'll get good enough to make things like you'd see in here:

GPU Gems 2

OK, that's about it for today from the technical side. Another new years resolution: get back to artwork. I used to be able to draw pretty well, I've lost some of that so i'd like to get it back. I've my first project and that's to create a design that might be used as a tattoo. If it gets Inked, i'll post it for people to see.

IE 6 Rendering Bugs

2005-09-07T14:17:00Z

Now that I'm working fulltime for Telligent I'm finding my duties to be changing a bit from what I've traditionally done. I'm doing a lot more HTML/CSS design type work for the various projects we do. I think its a great thing and I'm learning a ton. At times though I'm quite a bit behind the eight ball in terms of what's what with CSS as its very much still a learning process for me. Well here's the Welcome to Last Week (or perhaps last year?) that I ran into today.

IE6 Rendering bugs. One of my projects uses a div-css / table less layout, floating divs with out the use of tables basically. The strange behavior that was reported was that the text was disappearing, and only appeared after the text had been hilighted. After googling for a while, I was able to find this website: http://pear.reversefold.com/badIE/ basically the cure for the problem was to add a height attribute to the main content DIV.

So in the end being able to google to find the solutions to problems is quite a nice benefit of living life in last week (as far as Html / CSS is concerned).

My $.02

SQL 2005 Installation Tips

2005-07-28T15:20:00Z

Hello everyone, its been far too long since i've last posted. I discovered something today that helped me out, I'm sure its common knowledge by now but for me it really saved quite a bit of work. So although its not news I wanted to post it on my little blog. Ok here it is: Basically i'm working on a project that needs both Whidbey Beta2 as well as April CTP of sql server. I thought or hoped that since these two seem to play to gether on my main dev workstation that SQL 2005 would just install into the laptop w/o any fuss. Well this of course wasn't so. SQL2k5 claimed to have a utility that would "fix" the computer for me. It got close but what was great was that it showed me what was wrong. Or so I thought. I uninstalled everything that the sql Build Uninstall Wizard found but still sql wouldn't install the .net fx more specifically, when it got to that step it would just say beta components detected and die. So here's what i eventually discovered. If you go into the Redist folder of sql2k5, then to the 2.0 folder you can manually install the framework, and when you do this it lists all the things that are incompatible. Just remove these and away you go!

VSTS Unit testing

2004-09-07T13:26:00Z

This post is predominantly about unit testing, but first a little dilbert: It seems that everyone in a the software development field knows about dilbert, I am absolutely positive that Scott Adams works for my company and has been in many of our meetings. Well, sunday's dilbert describes in a single comic most of our projects. Here's a link: Sunday's Dilbert Its really kind of frightening how accurate that is at times.

On to unit testing, I've been playing with the Beta1 refresh that's available on MSDN Universal lately, the VSTS stuff in this build is very very cool. My favorite feature is the unit test generation feature. My biggest complaint so far is that there doesn't seem to be many options I've seen for the unit test generation stuff. For example, the class that i'm unit testing requires a call to an Initialize() function for it to work, It would be very cool if i could have a dialog upon unit test generation that would allow me to specify the correct way of creating the object. Ie, calling initialize(), passing some data etc.. Basically, for my three classes it generated 107 tests, and that's quite a few tests to go through and edit. Granted, i've got to edit them to add intelligence & functionality, but every little bit helps. I'm also wondering if it would be possible to have some sort of templating system? If i could supply a default template for unit tests to use and perhaps a project level template as well.

Another thing I've noticed, if you remove unit tests your test view isn't updated. I'm wondering if that could watch the unit test assembly and look for changes, if it changes then reload. Its not that big a deal to just hit reload but when i'm getting into the habit of compile unit tests, run tests, getting an error that testid {someid} cannot be found is confusing at times. Another idea, perhaps hitting run tests could automatically compile the unit test assembly if needed. It seemed like it was trying to do so, but wasn't in the end? This was confusing, I wasn't sure exactly what was supposed happen when i hit run tests (beyond running of the actual tests).

Great Work, VSTS looks awesome.

MSBuild and Custom AssemblyVersion Attributes

2004-06-15T02:46:00Z

I've just started working on getting into MSBuild, one of the first tasks that I'm looking to accomplish is the ability to have MSBuild generate custom assembly version numbers. I'd like to be able to do a build and have MSBuild generate a assembly version number something like 1.0.40615.22 where 4 is the year, 06 is the month, 15 is the day and 22 is the hour (military time). I know i could write a task to actually edit the assemblyinfo.cs file (well truth be told i'm not entirely sure how to do this :( but i can figure this out without too much trouble). What I'd really like though is to have the task completely ignore the AssemblyVersion attribute and always generate the custom number N.N.YMMDD.HH (perhaps i have the AssemblyVersion attribute omitted). I'd like to not edit the assemblyinfo.cs file on every build to stay away from source control issues. I don't really want to get into having to check out and check in the file every time. What i don't really understand is why this isn't built directly into the AssemblyVersion attribute itself, you can already specify 1.0.* to have it generate a time based version number (i believe its time based, but not entirely sure)

What's the easiest way of accomplishing this task? Perhaps a nice solution would be to specify the YMMDD.HH in the AssemblyInfo.cs file directly which would at runtime be translated but not require editing the file on a per build basis. I think this is what I'm going to shoot for. I think this version number scheme is similar to the one that Microsoft uses, but they've probably got a much more involved and complicated build system than I'm looking to employ. Does anyone know of how to accomplish this through (or something similar) through a custom msbuild task and not involve editing the AssemblyInfo.cs file?

Scott