Archives
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New design for Codeguru
Codeguru has a new design, quite nice and of course a lot of articles.
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New technology
Not really geeky but good fun :-))
A new technology to change a printing image on a billboard with the weather dry or not :-)) -
Locking a database design, is it really possible ?
I wish I could see some improvements in the future version of SQL Server and .Net about their dependances.
I try to explain. In SQL Server if something happen to one of your database, whatever the catching error system you implement, you finish all the time by broken your beloved .Net application. -
Kafka-soft world
Funny post from Paul. Welcome to Kafka land :-)
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Background compilation
Paul Vick started a thread to provide a better understanding on a bug Roy mentioned earlier.
Very interesting, the first part is about background compilation. -
Official: Broadband will be for every school in Ireland
This is great news for Ireland and Education (and also good one for my agency).
The Government announced yesterday the agreement to provide Broadband access for all Irish schools !
The but on this story is the blur surrounding the applications around this. The thing I am sure enough is that the site Scoilnet I developed will surely be upgraded to include more 'heavy' content like videos or live conferences.
The other good thing is the project to provide each school with a website (imagine something like 4000 .Net websites!).
But I am a bit concern about the OS schools will implement. The person here in charge of the project (and of course not an IT :-( ) seem to push too quickly on a sort of Linux platform.
Help Microsoft ! I don't want to be a Linux developer :-))
I disagree in the sense that no really technical analysis has been done on the feasibility and the support of such a project like that. We talk here about 4200 schools !
Thankfully I know that Microsoft are on the ranks for this project, and I hope we can have at the end the same infrastructure they were able to build in Northern Ireland. -
VS.Php - Php integration for Visual Studio .Net 2003
From Jcx.Software
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Is this the oldest Microsoft web site ?
I am not sure if this is for real or a good fake, but if it's true Microsoft changed a lot since :-)
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Nemerle new language for .Net
Nemerle is a new hybrid (functional, object-oriented and imperative) programming language for the .NET platform.
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I told you this blog is good :-)
Like Roy I did also the test:
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Terabytes disks are at the door
Bill Gates was right when he predicted the arrival of Terabyte in our daily vocabulary. But it seems that some companies are moving faster than expected. -
Multi projects and deployment
If I have to define a wish list wish for the next release Whidbey I would like surely to add this.
I have a web project A deployed on a production server. After few months of good services, the site needed some new features and improvements.
So I deployed another project A on another development server B to implement and test the changes.
The difficulty here is the site A in production must continue its life cycle with daily updates.
So I am stuck here by the fact that I can't have on my development machine twice the same project using the same name, for two different servers.
Of course I can change the name on the server B, but when I would like to put it in production, I will have a lot of issues with page inheritance because they refer to B and not A.
On my development PC, obviously my local IIS don't let me having twice the same name -
A big thanks !
Just to say thank you to all the people who give me some help and support this week end regarding the mess I had with some SYN flood attack.
The registry tweak worked fine. So now the site is working well again, but a big but here, the attacker still continue is dirty job.
Thankfully the Firewall block well everything, but it's quite amazing that nothing can be done against such assholes. -
Somebody has an idea to block SYN flood attack ??
I am really angry against the blokes who launched a SYN flood attack on one of my servers three weeks ago.
The problem is this continue again and again. I am so tired and fed up to play cat and mouse with spoof IPs.
The firewall resist well, blocking the attack and sending me back an alert by email.
But sadly, I can't make the site performing at his best. It seems that blocking is not enough, and the site is so slooow when the attacker come back. -
Xen On Track to Debut as 'X Omega'
At the same time, Microsoft's Research division is making the new language available to product teams inside the company for possible use or inclusion in forthcoming products.
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Polyphonic C#
Polyphonic C# extends the C# programming language with new asynchronous concurrency abstractions, based on the join calculus. The language presents a simple and powerful model of concurrency which is applicable both to multithreaded applications running on a single machine and to the orchestration of asynchronous, event-based applications communicating over a wide area network.
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A new small tiny PC
Vulcan announce a new small PC the Flipstart. And the brain behind Vulcan is only the cofounder of Microsoft Paul Allen.
So should be a serious stuff.
- Windows XP 1Ghz
- 30Gb hard drive, USB2, Wifi, Camera 1.3Mpixels ! -
Icons get older too :-)
Couldn't resist to post this KB. Now the problem I need to try to see the effect. So what's next a tomb icon for 5000 users. LOL :-)
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10 Things Developers Currently Do w/ SQL That They Shouldn't
Doug Seven talk about the mistakes to avoid with SQL Server like login with sa in a connection string.
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Good fun with Q
Just have some good fun with this compilation of KB articles. Some are really amazing.
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Computer Glitch Identifies Anonymous Amazon Reviewers
The glitch, reported Saturday by The New York Times, replaced pseudonyms with reviewers' real names, laying bare a culture of self-promotion and potential for revenge among authors and users of Amazon.
I wonder if some .Net writers self promoted their books too LOL:-) -
Create a Site Search Engine in ASP.NET
Another good stuff found in Developer Fusion, great site by the way.
This time written by Stevan Rodrigues and to show how to build a Search engine in your .Net project. -
Make your Classic ASP code work like in ASP.NET
Christian Calderon developed an interesting tool to provide some of the .Net events to classic ASP scripts.
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Useful Color tools
A nice collection of online tools if like me you have to play with colors, or you just want to avoid some bad choices:
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Devdays what Devdays ?
Just my two cents on Roy post about Devdays in Israel.
What I can say is the situation is probably one of the worst in Europe, maybe in the western world. We suppose to be the cutting edge country for hi-tech, we have an impressive Microsoft mini-campus, I am part of a growing developer community, and yes to my knowledge we still not have a DevDays or some kind of PDC.
The only thing eventually we got this year is a Longhorn preview with some weird stuff in the goodies bag. A Visual Studio 60 days trial version, some brochure about .Net career opportunities, and ... yes yes a Twix (in case we could be starving after the lunch) :-))
At least Roy you get a book, not bad isn't it -
Debug JavaScript in ASP.NET Apps
If you build your client scripts using Page.RegisterStartupScript, it's quite difficult to debug startup Javascript code.
Here you will find a solution using the debugger keyword in Javascript and Visual Studio.Net. -
INETA 2 years today
Read this great post from Bill Evjen about the second INETA birthday today.
Happy birthday :-)
Extract: -
Very young developers
Interesting poll found on CodeProject.
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Martian Spirit :-)
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Writing YABE (Yet Another Blog Engine) in ASP.NET 2.0
John Lam relate his experience on building a blog engine with ASP.Net 2.0. Brave man, because it's surely an adventure to play with alpha bits.
By the way John, do you have any place where we can see YABE ? -
A Journey of a Thousand Miles
Summary: Chris Sells begins his "Longhorn" Solitaire project at the ground floor, exploring the initial decisions developers will make when building new applications targeting Longhorn. (12 printed pages)
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FreeTextbox 2 soon
It seems that some bloggers are aware about a soon to be release version 2 of the popular FreeTextBox.
The main changes seems to be the compatibility with different platforms and browsers( Mac, Windows, Linux, Mozilla, Opera, Netscape and of course Internet Explorer).
Revjon if you read this post, can you give us more details ?
By the way I just noticed that a version 1.6.5 is ready for download and it's dated 8th of February. -
TodoList 3.03
TodoList gets better and better. Check the last version. Cool !
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Gush
Thanks to Stefano Demiliani for this link to Gush. Instant Messenger, aggregator, all in one, customizable and open source.
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SMTP/POP3/Imap4/Webmail freeware
Lumisoft has developed a fully-featured Webmail C# app with sources and free.
Via Scott -
Error catch in Whidbey
I forgot yesterday t mention the cool way you can catch an error exception in Whidbey at debugging time.
You indicate which error you want to stop on, and when you debug, Whidbey stops and show you the line where you have the issue with a nice bubble and soem advices on how to fix the error.
Neat but one question. Does this system can apply to any errors ? I think about the type of errors like Internal Network Connection (mostly linked to SQL connections and the pool).
Can we will have a way to extend the list to some new errors ? -
Treemap demo
I just received this from Pat Piccolo:
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Passing parameters to an ASP.NET page running in an IFRAME
I am building a content management intranet for my company. The website is based on DotNetNuke, and uses the excellent FreeTextBox control in order to enter HTML into the articles. One of the best features of FreeTextBox is that you can easily add your own buttons and functionality to the control. For instance, the built-in function for adding images didn't meet my needs. My images are stored in SQL server, and require a custom 'src' property in order to retrieve the image. No problem - I added a new button to the control, and built a small aspx page that opens in a modal (popup) window. The popup window allows the user to choose an image to insert, or upload a new image to be inserted. But that's where my problems began.
The Problem
If you've never tried to run an aspx page in a modal window before, then I've probably already lost your attention. But if you have, then you've most likely run into a rather odd problem. Just opening and running an aspx page in a modal window works fine, but if you need to do anything that causes a postback, a funny thing happens. The page opens up in a new window. Worse yet, the new window that opens doesn't have any of the data that you just submitted. The whole thing is a total wash. And javascript isn't terribly helpful. What to do?
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I am not sure comments like this ..
.. make things moving in the right direction:
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Microsoft Security Bulletin MS04-007
I did some search (not too difficult) on my previous post and yes a patch has been launched today. But not yet on automatic update. check the Start menu on your PC and ask for windows Update
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Windows Critical Flaw admitted by Microsoft
From BBC website. I am not sure but it seems to be new flaw.
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Longhorn Preview: just few thoughts, nothing seriously damaging :-)
The preview day is always an expected event, especially when it's a first one I participated, because I don't remember Microsoft having other preview before.
First detail for the Microsoft team, we are talking about Dublin, so understand mental traffic, and total grid locks.
So please next time, can you try a start at Am rather than 8:Am. Not everybody live on Stillorgan road.
OK, now back to the main story, the conference. 5 parts, Longhorn overview (David Chappell), Avalon (Lester Madden), WinFS (Hans Verbeeck), Indigo(Clemens Vasters) and Whidbey (Nigel Watling).
I don't know if it was the time, but everybody was so silent. No loud 'Developers, developers, developers', no clapping, just a religious silence.
I can tell that Clemens Vasters had the most difficult part Indigo, with no demo, and just after lunch, the right time for a nap. By the way, very interesting piece of technology which will be made available before Longhorn, something for next year.
Just few thoughts on what I saw today. But before of course this is just my opinion and maybe I am wrong.
Avalon presentation give me this idea of deja vu, and after few demos I got it. It was seeing Logo meeting XML. No I am not joking. For the youngsters, Logo is this brilliant language created in the 70s/80s, using the concept of turtle to draw anything. XAML has this notion embedded in it, of course using more an XML approach, but the attributes, the coordinates, etc.. are stuff already done in the past.
The thing I don't get with Longhorn is that as developers, we can create a lot of nice things, but only for Longhorn users. for the other OS, we have to provide a downgraded version, so no fancy rotated animated button.
If I am right, Longhorn is not a server, so how we will deploy a navigator form for other platforms ? The answer this morning was not expected, create 2 versions of your application. Not sure I like that. -
40 today ;-)
Well I am not going to post too much about this non-event but believe me it's still strange those kind of round numbers, when your birthday come.
Every decade make you closer to a dinosaur than a cheetah, but hey what can we do to stop the clock?
Next post will be on the Longorn Preview day in Dublin with some thoughts. One I can already post in this note is this.
I saw some nice graphics showing the evolution of storage and the quantity of information we're dealing with today.
The point related to my post is the date. Having now 1970 out of the graph make me feel older. 1980 was the first entry just on the left corner and I suspect will disappear soon. -
Longhorn and Whidbey in Dublin tomorrow
I'm joining the crowd tomorrow to see the first Irish official presentation of Longhorn and Whidbey tomorrow in Dublin (By the way it's kind of funny that it will be also my 40th birthday ;-)).
Well Duncan and other Irish bloggers, maybe we can meet somwhere in UCD tomorrow ?
Let me know. And for the birthday cake, I like chocolate ones ;-) -
ViewState Optimizer
Thanks to Colt Kwong for this link to Flesk.Uploader.
By the way have a look to their other tools. One seems to be a good idea to avoid bloated pages with viewstate. -
;-)
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XML critical patches
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Rory and the pool
Interesting discussion going on with last Rory post. Make me also that Rory since few posts sounds more serious in his writings.
What's up Rory some brainwash after .Net rocks ? -
Close() or Dispose()...
Interesting post from Jim Blizzard.Still the debate continue but yes agree MSDN docs are the reference.
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Lesson from the incident
OK I know we all have to check our posts before posting, no problem with that.
But without Scott help I was unable to delete the bloody post.
So I think it's bit scary to see that .Text is on the shoulders of one man, and what a great man :-)
No more seriously it should be a good idea Scott to have a kind of offline management tool for .Text, something we can use as a Window application.
IMHO I think our blogs management would make thing more secure and easier, if something like I did happen again and you're not free to fix it or maybe in Hawaii for some long holidays you deserve surely. -
htmlArea - Turn any text area into a WYSIWYG editor
Price: FREE! *
• Version 2.03 - IE 5.5+ for Windows only (changelog)
• Version 3.0 (beta) - IE 5.5+ (Windows)/Mozilla 1.3 (all OS) cross platform functionality.
* Go ahead and use it free in any web form you like. See the license agreement for the minimal restrictions. -
Update on my previous post
Hey guys just calm down ! Don't bombard me with hundred of mails !
I am not a bot and I can make mistakes like everybody isn't it Robert ;-)) -
Apologies ;-)))
Sorry about that, but I screwed the main feed using an html keyword in my last post, and for some unknown reason, the online .Text editor has transformed this keyword
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TreeMap.Net
MS Research has been working on an interesting thing: .NET components that display hierarchical data as a set of nested boxes.
For questions or comments, go to the microsoft.public.research.netscan.discussion newsgroup.
It seems that this tool was used first to do a newsgroups survey and analyze their importance in cyberspace.
The site C2i give an example on how to use TreeMap to show the space files are using on an hard drive. -
Powerful New T-SQL Syntax Gives SQL Server a Programmability Boost
T-SQL in Yukon is still there, the proof an excellent article on MSDN.
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Cookies or cookieless ?
I just have a look at some stats on one of my project and I discovered that more than 53 % of the users of this website are still blocking cookies.
I'm surprised because I was quite sure that the cookies was now accepted by most of the Internet users. I am not sure where this coming from, if it's the type of users (teachers, schools, parents, kids) but it's a bit strange.
Thankfully I don't use any registration process on the site, but sadly I lost for these users the ability to track their session time on the site. For example the stats software is unable to give me an accurate number of new vistors versus returning visitors.
The solution I know will be to switch in cookieless mode, but I don't like really the ugly Url I have with this option.
Anybody there who had the same issue with cookies ? -
Undocumented stored procedures
Thanks to Manuj Bahl for this:
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Scoilnet up again
OK I think I identified the IP responsible for making my server down today.
So because I hate this kind of practice, I make this trace route available for this communty. I know Microsoft folks are reading this blog, so if this can be helpful in their battle against those assholes, yes It will be after all a good day for everybody ;-)
It seems to take origin from Turkey, but it could be a fake ip, I don't know. This IP is coming a lot of time in my logs and yes I am quite confident this is the one (note the pingpong trap at the end of the route).
So I blocked this list of IPs and hope it will be ok for now.
Tracing route to 194.125.233.179 over a maximum of 30 hops -
Yukon
What's about Yukon available for MSDN subscribers ?
I would like to have my hands on Yukon like many others. I can play with Whidbey Longhorn but what's about Yukon ? -
Scoilnet down :-(
After checking my logs, I decide to close Scoilnet for the day. Sad because I feel useless against such denial attack.
I am not sure if it's related to the Mydoom story (well I didn't know I was famous as Microsoft or SCO;-)), but the imbeciles behind this forced me to shutdown the site for today.
The log entries increased by a factor 3 in less than an hour so unfortunatly it doesn't let me other choices.
Bastards :-(( -
Solitaire patented ? ;-)
LOL. Thomas Warfield who like and develop a solitaire game has received a letter from a lawyer claiming that a patent exist on ... Solitaire ;-)))
Are we going mad ? Are we going to patent everything, the air we breathe, the footpath I'm walking on every morning, the melody I just created in my shower ! Crazy world. -
Folder permissions in Windows 2003
Is there something special in the security approach in Windows 2003 ?
I have really a painful experience with this OS on one server with folder permissions. What I want to do is a really basic thing, an upload folder where users can upload their images.
Works fine on my laptop with WinXP, but there, not a chance. I really tried everything, including giving full control permissions to Everyone on this folder.
I know it's not the best practice, but I can't figure out why it's still not working. The only thing I have 'special' is that the website itself is not under wwwroot, like I usually do in production sites.
Any idea ? -
Portable geek gym
Phillip Torrone's has a great way to make jogging a fun geek experience ;-)
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Dispose and close or close without dispose
I just finished reading the comments on Rory's last post. And well I can admit I am confused.
The comments posted there make me think that nothing is absolute in the way you can deal with .Net coding. That sounds strange. -
Hosting Windows Forms Designers
Tim Dawson show in this article how you can use in your Windows application the same designer than VS use. If you are interested in building an IDE.
Good overview of the designer architecture. -
15 part webcast on VB.Net !
That's surely good stuff from MSDN:
Join Dr. Joe Hummel on Tuesday, February 3rd at 1PM Pacific Time as he begins a 15-part webcast series on software development with Visual Basic .NET. -
Reflector is now obfuscated
Reflector (3.4.6.0) is now obfuscated using Brent Rector's Demeanor. As a side effect the file is now a bit smaller.
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UK Postcodes
This web service takes a UK Postcode as input parameter and queries PAF database in a matter of second and then returns you the FULL UK postal address that meets the Royal Mail standard. A Fully functioned Windows application front-end has been written to consume this service. download is available on request
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Longhorn Developer FAQ
If you want to have some answers on Longhorn and all the concepts around this OS, check the MSDN Longhorn FAQ.
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IDEA#.Net is coming
A new IDE is coming for C#, and it's a major one from Java world IDEA.
This is a post to resume more and less the news from Luke Hutteman I got via Scott Galloway: -
Forgotten Password Wizard Prompts You to Insert a Disk into Drive C
I didn't know it was already April fool in Microsoft ;-))
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New MSDN Center