.net
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.net
I see this a lot in projects that I have been involved in where the code goes something like this: if (log.IsDebugEnabled) log.Debug ("Connecting to Database"); conn.Open(); or something similar when calling the other logging methods (Warn/IsWarnEnabled, Error/IsErrorEnabled, etc) Here's the point of this short post...you only need to check the log setting if what you about to do is time consuming. For example, if you are going to walk through a collection of objects and get a list of ID's that you...
I was working with log4net recently and had put a lot of the configuration information in the web.config file for an ASP.NET 2.0 web site. Ideally, this was not what I wanted because I want to be able to change the configuration of the log4net without recycling the web application (a side effect of changing the web.config file). After spending a fair amount of time reading out on the web--a lot of people said it can't be done. It took me piecing together multiple settings to finally get this to work....
Well CodeMash 2008 is only one week away. This year will be much better--these guys are smart. This is probably the first conference that I have heard of (though I don't claim to have heard of them all) that has something for everybody! That's right, and I'm not talking about .NET, Java, Python, Ruby, etc. I'm talking about these guys have it planned to be very family/kid friendly too. Hooking up families of geeks to spend time together. They pick a cool venue, but they don't stop at the code monkeys--they...
If you haven't heard of it, the guys at Microsoft Labs have release a new framework called "Volta" You can read more about it here. Key: You need VS2008 and .Net 3.5 to get this to work, but it looks to be an interesting way to delay distribution decisions until they absolutely have to be made. They are then made declaratively and the framework takes care of the plumbing...
Just read on ScottGu's blog, VS2008 is released into the wild. Go get it already
Well as far as speaking goes, I am done for the year (that I know of). This year I spoke at: Cincinnati-Dayton (Dayton-Cincinnati) Code Camp 2007 Findlay Users Group Dayton Users Group Day of .NET in Ann Arbor DevLink 2007 in Nashville Heartland Developer Conference in Omaha I'm starting 2008 off with speaking at CodeMash in Sandusky, Ohio. This one I am really looking forward to. Last year I just went as an attendee and had a blast doing things like running the lazy river with Bruce Eckel and Dianne...
I'll be speaking in Nashville in just a couple of weeks. There are a lot of great speakers in the lineup--top notch if you want a lower cost conference to go to. There's still time to sign up if you haven't already. devLINK October 12 - 13, 2007 Nashville, TN
Congratulations to Jeff Blankenburg on his new position as Developer Evangelist for Micrsoft in the Heartland. He'll be taking over for probably the best description of an "evangelist" as there is from a technology standpoint--Drew Robbins. Drew did a fantastic job as the Heartland DE, and from what I hear we will now have to share Drew with the rest of the World. Long before he did the DE thing, Drew really made the Central Ohio .NET User Group come together. Don't know how to say much more without...
OK, so I have been doing some presentations where I address this whole "bad GROUP BY" stuff, and I get the question, show me when it doesn't work. Here it is: Suppose you are to run a query that returns the Largest Order ever for all of your customers and the date that order was placed. We quickly run off to our SQL tool of choice and run the following: select CustomerID, CustomerName, Date, Max(OrderTotal) from Customers join Orders on Customers.CustID = Orders.CustID group by CustomerID, CustomerName,...
Earlier, I blogged about adding shortcuts to the Open and Save dialogs of Office. To hide one or more of these shortucts: Navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\... Find\Places\StandardPlaces Where [version] corresponds to your Office version: 9.0 = Office 2000, 10.0 = Office XP, 11.0 = Office 2003, 12.0 = Office 2007 Select the sub-key of the Place you want to hide. Create a new DWORD value within the sub-key named "Show" Set the sub-key value to 0. Close the...
In response to my post on Generating a PDF from Reporting Services, someone asked how I would join two PDFs. The problem is that I can't just take two PDF byte streams and run them together because there is PDF metadata that starts and ends each document. The way that I have gotten around this is use the ITextSharp library. Our PDFs were stored in the database, so we grabbed each PDF and appended it to the first PDF (I didn't put the code in for the data reader--an astute reader of this entry should...
Have you ever wanted to add a custom folder to the Places Bar when saving a document in Office. Office displays several shortcuts on the Places Bar in the Open and Save As dialog boxes. By default this is limited to My Recent Documents, Desktop, My Documents, My Computer and My Network Places. You can add additional shortcuts to this list by: Navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\... Find\Places\UserDefinedPlaces Where [version] corresponds to your Office version:...
For the longest time, I have used Notepad2 as a replacement for the default windows Notepad editor. However, after re-reading "The Pragmatic Programmer" chapter on tools, I have decided for an upgrade. David Hunt, et. al. suggest that your editor be: Configurable, Programmable and Extensible OK, so I wanted to create some custom highlighting schemes for some files that I was working with. After looking into Notepad2's source code, I realized I was going to have to recompile every time I wanted to...
This post is primarily for Steve since he has been bugging me about it. (Forgive the VB, but this is what I did the demos in). Steve doesn't like doing SQLRS, but personally, I'd like to do more of it. I just can't seem to come up with any clients that want to do it. Any way, here is the process of creating the PDF without using the Report Viewer. Create a reference to the Reporting Services Web Services then get a variable reference for it: Dim ws As New SQLRS.ReportingService Dim creds As New System.Net.NetworkCredential...
Here are a couple of things that I have read or heard in the past, but I needed them again this last week. Therefore, I thought I'd blog them so I know where to find them next time. 1) Disable the ability to request WSDL definitions from ASP.NET web services. Typically this is done by typing "?wsdl" after the web service (http://…webservice.asmx?ws... You may want to turn this off in a production environment. To do so, add the following to your web.config: <webServices> <protocols> <remove...
I've slacked off on posting this, and I know that attendees bloggin about an event is a big part of these community events not having to spend big money on advertising. So here it is (and I'm not just attending, I am speaking too): Click the image to find out more
Jim Holmes (one of the organizers of the CodeMash conference) has declared Friday, 19 January (today) to be Windows Developer Tools Day. This is in recognition of the release of his joint work with James Avery called Windows Developer Power Tools that was recently released. Having worked with James on a book before, I know these guys put a ton of work into it (from what I see, it weighs in at about a ton, too!) My Developer Tool of choice: TestDriven.NET Jamie Cansdale (formerly a Microsoft MVP)...
This morning was a great talk about where code is going directionally. It's interesting to note that a lot of the language enhancements (on any platform--Java, Ruby, Python, .NET) are centered around making code more like we think. Ideally, this is dynamic languages that center around Domain Specific Languages. I'd love to quote Neal's comment about COBOL verbatim, but I'll have to give you the gist: "Will all this DSL (domain specific language) stuff mean developers will go away. No. COBOL was supposed...
We kicked off the CodeMash meeting tonight with a panel discussion of languages led by Bruce Eckel. Bill Wagner couldn't make it, so there wasn't much to represent .Net. Things didn't get started right on time, but the event looks to be promising. Can't wait for some of the sessions tomorrow. On my list for tomorrow-TurboGears, Rails or End of Tiers (haven't decided), Enterprise Smart Clients, and Bridging .Net and Java. Aside from recording the Keynotes, I expect to keep pretty busy...
OK. I blogged about it before Christmas, but I have to talk about it again. I got a gift from MindJet this year. Mind Manager Pro is an awesome way to do mind maps. I had used FreeMind in the past, but MindJet's product is just so much more. I planned my 2007 Goals with it (though if I got more detailed, I'd have to kill you). What I really love is being able to bind a MindMap to TFS. This is an awesome way to collect and view requirements as well as keep in Sync with Team System. Stop me sometime...
I didn't realize that this option was off by default, but if you want to see the keyboard shortcut for a toolbar item, just follow these steps: Before: Change: Right-click toolbar, click "Customize..." After:...
If you visit here you'll find the announcement that the .NET 3.0 components have been released. The only indication that anything is still CTP are the VS2005 Extensions (Orcas?). Download and enjoy
OK. So the first controls out of the gate are fairly simple, but they are the result of a presentation I did for the Cincinnati and Columbus .NET User groups. Why 0.5? I only have half the controls I had planned on when I got started. Find the source and an install here. I have one other control ready to go, but I am waiting for confirmation about permission to use some Javascript from a book. Next up: a full featured calendar and possibly an option transfer list. Any ideas for controls you use on...
Job description: "Spotlight Mobile was started in 2002 by graduates of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at Cornell University. We're known for our innovative mobile applications, from WiFi-triggered museum tours at the Smithsonian to GPS-guided tours of the Canadian Rockies. We also write apps for the desktop and increasingly for the web. We're a small company, but we are growing. We need smart programmers, but what we really need are smart _people_. We wear a lot of different hats and work with...
One of the more difficult aspects of consulting is helping people change. Often the arguments "It ain't broke" or "We don't have time" come into play. In a previous post I mentioned that Visual Studio Team System won't change the way you get work done. Unfortunately, "status quo" is the easiest thing to do. True, we are pressured with deadlines, management or marketing agreeing to deadlines before allocating the resources to complete the projects, etc., but that's why it's even more important to...
Alright, the purists are taking Rocky (Lhotka) out for another bout. It seems some of his comments on DotNetRocks got under some (fr)agile skin. Check out the discussion here. Listen to Rocky's comments here and his followup on his blog here...
Actually, it's what a bunch of teens will do to you. Our youth group set a goal of collecting $750 for a Christmas gift for our missionaries. If they gave $1000 we would shave our heads. They did it $15 and some odd cents. I'm just telling Jim Holmes that it is the fault of the Dayton-Cinci Code Camp on Saturday. ...
In case you didn't know...the VSTSBeta2 VPC that Microsoft distributed via MSDN and DVD (I got mine at the Columbus .NET User Group) expired today. That's only because the version of Windows 2003 was an Evaluation edition. Now, if you have a valid license, here are the steps to getting it working again...NOTE: This requires going through the MS Activation Process unless you have a VLK. disconnect host from any network that would reset the clock Set computer date to prior to 10/17/2005 Log in to VPC...
This link is one I should start putting up for my students—Teach Yourself To Program in Ten Years. Unfortunately, companies think that one week of training will make their people developers. I always preface my courses that we are introducing syntax and features, but they are not necessarily best put together in the prescribed method. This goes back to a post I made back in November about viral coding. It’s cool to do the demos to show the point, but is it really the best way to do it—probably...
Recently (March 17, I believe) I attended a User Group Meeting in Columbus and watched a presentation on Web standards. Probably the thing that caught my eye first was dumping tables in favor of CSS. Beyond that, I was thoroughly impressed with the Firefox browser that Brian Prince was using. OK, so I had downloaded it before, but had never really given it a test drive. After his presentation, my subsequent install of Firefox, and using CSS/Firefox (with the WebDeveloper plugin) I’m sold. I’ve...
I hope to see you there... I guess after breaking your hip and not being able to work, you just have to hope an pray you can come up with the right combination to make it. I have to keep hopes alive for PDC2005 in September as well
OK. So when does what we write become a coding template and just a simple example??? I was reading through Fritz Onion’s most excellent expose of ASP.NET (Essential ASP.NET). In the VB.NET version of the book (and I am sure somewhere in the C# version) on page 76, when discussing configuration files, the example on page 76 has a DSN with User=SA and Password = nothing. Now this has been something that has been preached for the longest time (well before he wrote the book at least). Do I think...
OK— So I am teaching SQL Administration this week, and I come across an example of database objects in SQL. Now, I have taught this class at least 10 times over the last three years and it has never really bothered me, but today it did. Probably because I have donXML’s article on “Viral Coding Examples…” In this particular example, they were showing a clustered index on the Lastname of a customers table. Now, why is that a “bad” thing? Well, first an investigation...
OK—I’m moving my blog from my basement to GWB. I’ve been working on my own now for about 6 months and I’ll probably continue to post to my blog about technical stuff and working independently. Speaking of which, I just got off the phone with Dave Donaldson who also recently went independent. Working independent does not mean working alone. Hopefully, we will be able to put some stuff together between a group of guys like James Avery, Drew Robbins and others here in Columbus,...