Wayne Allen's Weblog

Kirk on Buy or Build

Another good post from Consultants Guild member Kirk Miller.

• Who's Process?
• Who owns the kingdom?
• How long is that line?
• Let's figure this out

Data Input Validation Using ASP.NET Forms

Kirk Miller (another Consultants Guild member) has a great introductory post on data input validation for ASP.NET forms.

One of the truisms that most web developers I’ve spoken to agree on is that end-users of a website are innately ignorant and will mess up data entry in a web form if given the chance.

Faster Firefox

Want Firefox to run even faster? If you've got broadband change the following settings by typing about:config in the address bar.

• network.http.pipelining = true
• network.http.pipelining.maxrequests = 30
• network.http.proxy.pipelining = true

Enjoy!

Keeping Databases In-Synch With Your Source Control

Call for Participation - Agile 2005

Call for Participation - Agile 2005
July 24-29, 2005. Marriott Hotel, Denver, Colorado, USA.
http://www.agile2005.org

March 1:  Submissions due for Tutorials and Workshops

March 15:  Submissions due for Research Papers, Experience Reports, and Educators' Symposium

Agile 2005 integrates the best features of the Agile Development Conference and XP Agile Universe to create an exciting conference about techniques and technologies, attitudes and policies, research and experience, and the management and development sides of agile software development. The agile approach focuses on delivering business value early in the project lifetime and being able to incorporate late-breaking requirements changes.  It accentuates the use of rich, informal communication channels and frequent delivery of running, tested systems, while attending to the human component of software development.

Agile 2005 gives attendees access to the latest thinking in this domain, and bridges communities that rarely get a proper chance to exchange ideas and thoughts. It brings together researchers from labs and academia with executives, managers, and developers in the trenches of software development. Agile 2005 is not about a single methodology or approach, but rather provides a forum for the exchange of information regarding all agile development technologies.

We invite submissions for the following:

• Research Papers
• Experience Reports
• Tutorials
• Workshops / Peer to Peer Sessions
• Educators' Symposium

Other conference activities include:

• Introduction to Agile (for Agile "newbies")
• Executive Summit
• Open Space

FOR MORE INFORMATION:  http://www.agile2005.org

Leaving Text Behind Again

Jon Udell wrote a piece (and another) about some technology Jonathan Edwards at SubText is putting together (demo).

Looking at the demo gets me excited about the future of writing code. I get tired of fighting text while trying to express an algorithm. It also reminded me of Prograph CPX which I used for many years. Prograph was based on the data flow graph that could be built of any algorithm and made a lot of sense. Turns out for Pictorious that being a niche language provider is not very profitable and they moved into professional services a number of years ago and in fact seems to have disappeared.

IE Clipboard Data Exposure

Via Simon:

IE allows script to read the contents of the clipboard! Some nefarious person could easily grab your clipboard contents and post them back to their server.

A fix from the comments:

Tools -> Internet Options, Security.

In the appropriate Custom Level section(s):
Scripting, Allow paste operations via script option
Set this to "Disable" or "Prompt".

FormatDesigner

Chris Sells has a tool called FormatDesigner that helps you create those nasty formating strings.

.NET Constants are Really Constant

From Haacked  How Constant Are Your Constants in .NET

When one assembly references a constant in another assembly, the compiler will embed the value of that constant into the assembly.

This could really lead to some hard to find bugs. Imagine deploying just the library with the changed constant, and none of you applications that depend on the constant changing their behavior!

... it would be better to make this a public static read only variable...

Haaked's recommendation is a good work-around for those "constants" that might need to be changed during the lifetime of the application.

This reminds me of my previous post on Public Variables In VB.NET Modules in that the compiler does unexpected things to your code.