Archives
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64bit
Well ain't that a pisser. With all the talk about the Opteron out there, AMD got me giddy at the thought of 64bit fun, dual proc workstation fun. But alas, my hopes and dreams have been dashed yet again.
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No elephant books.
I can't sit on my wallet, because my credit card is burning.
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Close, Dispose and Zombie.
I was digging around with Anakrino after I read that calling Dispose on a connection removes the object from the connection pool. From what I can tell, they are mistaken (of course it is 2:30am, hey prove me wrong if you are reading this. hello, is this thing on???). Anyways, I thought it was funny that SqlTransaction has a "Zombie" method that nulls itself off. All I could think about was SET ISOLATION LEVEL NEED BRAAAAINS. I'm drunk again by the way.
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VB.NET, Stack, Heaps, Pointers and Causing a Nuisance
Just got done teaching the "Object Oriented Programming in Visual Basic .NET." Imagine taking the stereotypical Mort and transforming them into Super Morts. Good times. We had a good time playing "guess the value" as I passed in structs and classes into functions ByRef and ByVal. I think they all began to understand what's going on in the scene, and why things work the way they do.
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VS.NET 2003 Evaluation Guide
The Microsoft Download Center feed just alerted me to the Visual Studio .NET 2003 Evaluation Guide. 308 pages of wonderful VS.NET / .NET propaganda.
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CSS Stuff
Pretty cool site for setting up three column pages in CSS. I'm going to be doing some code-review on our companies site, and one of the things I'll probably look into doing is weening us from a table based layout too a full CSS layout. I used this templating tool that I found via Fabrice's tool list. For the simple layout stuff I do, it has worked great for me.
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VS.NET 2003 in the classroom
I'm currently in the process of setting up my course for next week, Programming in VB.NET. Basically a 5-day class to get VB6 people up and running in .NET land. Creating more Morts I guess. Anyways, this is the first class I'm teaching that has a new version of VS.NET out, and I'm not too sure how to handle this in the classroom. In my previous classes, I had a copy of the beta shared out on my instructor machine that people could install and play around with if they so desired. I think maybe only 5 people actually installed it in the classroom, and they did so on a Friday just to see if 2003 would in fact run SxS w/ 2002.
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IsoBuster
G. Andrew Duthie (would it just be G.? Andrew?) is talking about ISOs and how to work with them. If you dig around you may find an old XP PowerToy that will add the ability to right click on an ISO file and "burn to CD." Unfortunately they pulled, from what I'm told is an issue with data corruption. Of your ENTIRE hard drive. Not quite sure how something that takes a file and writes it to your burner can hose a HD, but download at your own risk. I don't have a link because it was pulled from MS's Powertoy's site, but I've seen rogue copies here and there.
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cl OpenBSD.cpp /GS?
Is this the same as the /GS option in VC++ and with from what I understand Windows 2003 Server? The only real reading I've done on this is Sam's article, and from what I understand is that they are doing the same StackGuard type prevention. Am I right?
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I'm a Mort!
And a wall poster whore too I guess. Show me the poster!.
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Certifications
Ok, more talk about Certifications going on from Kirk, Duncan and Joshua talking about certifications. I have some certs, and I plan on getting some more. Mostly because taking those tests is a personal goal with a definite results. Right now I'm aiming for finishing my MCDBA, but I'm slacking because the tests I need to pass are admin related. Well, I'm not much of an admin. Yet. I have tons of resources available to me because of my job (MCTs get all the MOC courseware to download), and lots of talented people around me to pick their brains. Hopefully the end result will be a smarter, more admin-savy Phil.
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Friday Shenanigans
Don't click this if you are someplace where it would be considered inappropriate to see a puppy peeing on a laptop [via Hard|OCP].
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The Sports Guy and Iron Mike
I'm a big fan of sports writing and I think Bill Simmon is one of the best out there. He has a TREEEEmendous article about Mike Tyson and his pigeons. My whole perspective on Mike Tyson just hooked.
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Mozilla for Testing Web Apps
Normally, I try to avoid Slashdot articles because reading about MS stuff is like watching FoxNews cover the democratic national convention. But here's an article that while poorly written does have a good point Using Mozilla in testing and debugging web sites. The article is pretty much just showing how much better Mozilla is than IE for debugging websites, but it still points out some nice features of Mozilla. One thing it does leave off is Checky. Checky does all sort of validation on your pages. Normally you just hit F10 and the agent runs (which I have it do HTML and CSS validation), but I'm having trouble with the beta 1.4 version of Mozilla. Still a great tool. If your website isn't displaying properly in Mozilla, you probably goofed on the CSS someplace that IE is letting you get away with.
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Pocket TaskVision
.NET Compact Framework Sample: Pocket TaskVision via the Download Center feed.
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Wide Spread Piracy
CNet is reporting that a volume license key is already floating around the net for Windows 2003 Server which "could lead to widespread piracy of the software." They go on to mention the fact that Microsoft will make it impossible for people to update their servers that are using this key. I cannot comprehend why one would install a server that can't be updated. I guess the same type of people that would run their company on stolen server software are the same type of people that wouldn't update their server too.
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SimCity Updates
Totally off topic, but SimCity holds a special place in my heart because the original SimCity was what got me hooked on computers. Anyways, Simcity 4 had some bugs that prevented the biggest sky-scrapers from appearing. If you want to see something scary, check out their message boards. People were threatening lawsuits against Maxis, demanding that the patch be released immediately, and making all kinds of threats about Maxis telling them to tell a date they will release the patch, and Maxis could only tell them soon. Be thankful that you only have to develop mission-critical software, and not games for 15 year olds. SimCity.com has a poem for the patch:
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VMWare 4.0
VMWare 4.0 is out. Upgrade (you do already own VMWare, don't you?) for $99.
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More SharpReader
One little cool feature I found while playing with SharpReader. I was dragging links around from Brad's site, and it was adding them with no problem. Until I got ot Ingo's site. It couldn't add the site for some reason. So I went to Ingo's site, found the RSS uri and did it myself. Weird, I wonder why drag and drop doesn't work for that site. Well, it seems it uses some sort of hueristics to make a good guess at the RSS file for a webpage. I had actually been dragging links to the blogs, not the rss file from Brad's site. Neat-o. Not perfect (adding Tim's site picked up the uri for the MSDN feeds for his feed), but still a nice little feature.
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OPML
I'm playing around with the highly acclaimed SharpReader, slowly adding in a bunch of links. Anyone willing to post their OPML file with their links of .NET (and development in general) file? Adding in dotnetweblogs.com RSS helps cover a lot of the blogs I read, but there are still 100s more it seems.
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browseCaps
Mitch was asking about an updated Browsecaps file. Supposively, CyScape is keeping this updates. All you have to do is give them your life story so they can probably spam the hell out of you in exchange for a browseCaps.ini file from freakin' Feb 2000. Great....
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More InfoPath
As Don said: "It's important to note (as James Snell does) that InfoPath was developed by the Office team for the Office customer. "