Steal This Code

OK - Confession time.

I am new to the coding game. I strted this after an aborted "career" in Accounting. I found myself spending more and more time slicing and dicing the data in SQL. I liked it, and I hated accounting, and so I made the leap. This was after the bust of 2000, so you know I was ready to leave my previously chosen field.

But what this mean is: I feel like I am lacking some base fundamentals of the field. I can tell you how Depreciation works, but I am not able (yet) to discuss the intracasies of memory buffers. My response is to go to the web, but most of the resources there are to solve a particular problem. However, I have found a couple of great theory resources that I use daily. I just wanted to share them with you guys:

MIT Open Course Ware - Quite possibly my favorite resource. Who'da thunk you could get an MIT education for free. (You don't get the sheepskin, but what they hey....)

InformIt Blogs - Another source I go to every day. You need to poke a little deeper to get to the theory, but its in there.....

Joel - I am betting that most of you know about Joel. He does tend towards more management issues, but there are some excellent discussions of theory in his blog as well.

So, if you are in my boat, what resources do you have for these more general concepts about programming as an engineering dicipline?

There - that wasn't so bad a confession was it?

I just posted the first article in my series 'Building Custom Controls'.  I learned a great deal about the process from this simple control.  Not the least of which was the inherent challenges of building controls that do the bulk of their work at the client.  I also got some good ideas about what kind of control to tackle next.  If you have a suggestion let me know here. 

In the meantime, I am working on a post about adding and testing custom controls.

So I am working on the self-validating text box, and the first issue I ran across was the namespace naming convention. Just what the heck should the namespace be for these controls? I finally settled on something similar to the Microsoft convention – At least I know it works.

MyCompany.Web.UI.WebControls

Will I ever have a need for classes under my web namespace that are not web controls? Well – I hope so. I have in mind a web counter since so many of my customers request one, but lets save that for another day. In the meantime I hope to keep my namespaces as flexible as possible.

In the back of my mind, I knew that I would only build the dll at the webcontrol level. This way I won't dump a whole bunch of 'extra' functionality that the project doesn't need. Of course this means more maintanance.

How do you guys typically do this?

Besides the obvious answer (Visual Studio) what do you folks use as text editors? I just downloaded two Vim and UltraEdit. I plan on trying to use Perl some in Windows, but I use the Text editors now for HTML development.

A tool I have really come to like (if you have Firefox) is the "view formatted source" plug-in.

This has proven to be an invaluable tool for viewing HTML source. I just wish I could save a page and edit it locally with this tool. If I had the time I'd write that myself.

So give your fave text editor a shout out - tell me why you like it.

There are so many times when working on a project I find myself thinking - “I just did this exact same thing on my last project.”  So I do the old cut-and-paste routine, and move on.  While it ain't best practices, it has served me well enough.  Then the inevitable happened.  A client requested a change that closely mirrored a change in a control that I was working on for another client.  And I began to seriously look at creating a control library so I would only have to make the change once.

So, over the next few months I plan on building some controls, and writing some articles about it.  Since I mainly do web-programming, I plan on starting with web controls.  I am probably going to start with a self validating text box, since this is the problem that started me down this train of thought.

The other day while working on an ASP.Net website with some simple ADO.Net CRUD functionality, I was getting the most frustrating error.

"Line 1: Invalid syntax near 'spMyProcedureName'." But I ran the stored procedure in Query Analyzer, and it worked fine.

Typically my response is to go to the web, but a search on the error message turned up only people with the same question - and no answers that worked for my situation.

After much searching through code, and admittedly some yelling, it finally came to me what the problem was: I had not set the command type to 'StoredProcedure' on the command object.

Dang literal computers.

So, I'm the new geek on the block. Slowly but surely I am moving my old posts over to this site. Let me know if there is anything you would like to see me write on: I specialize in SQL and ASP.Net (using C# mainly). Looking forward to lots of feedback! Talk with you soon!

Jeff