Geeks in general have issues with people perceiving them poorly. I know 'cause I r one. There was a point in my career where I hit a wall that I could not see. I had (I thought) good ideas, but no one listened so I pushed harder to no avail.
After my boss took me aside and coached me gradually, I realized after a year or more that I was the problem. I was so caught up in my own world that I forgot I was surrounded by smart, intuitive people that actually wanted to know me for me. I tried so...
Many of you use timestamp in LINQ to SQL because it's easier for us figure out if an object is new or not. This is specially useful when we need to track the state of objects in disconnected/N-tier scenarios. An important thing to note, though, is that the timestamp column is mapped as a System.Data.Linq.Binary property in the LINQ generated object so it is part of the XML serialization when you use the LINQ to SQL objects in Web Services/WCF services. The real problem is that System.Data.Linq.Binary...
I met Lisa through my interaction with Microsoft as a VB MVP. We got a chance to hang out some at Tech Ed 2008 and via the VB mailing list. She's got a great sense of humor and is also one of the smartest people I've met. She's also incredibly busy, so I've been chasing her via email to bring you these NINE Questions with Lisa Feigenbaum:
1. Where are you from?
Los Angeles, in the Encino area. (Yes, like the movie Encino Man.) It’s part of the San Fernando Valley. I’ve toned down the accent...
Hearing both of these guys (Paul Nielsen and Louis Davidson) together was awesome (another DevLink Nashville plug). They share common views, but also differ on a few things which was really nice to hear. Even the experts have their own ideas which leaves room for us common folk. No absolutes, lots of grey or gray depending on which side of the pond you find yourself (someone's commentary here).
A few items that I knew were bad are cursors among others. I liked the bantering of normalization...
The second annual Houston TechFest is coming up on September 13 at the University of Houston. If you are in Houston on the surrounding (huge) area and would like to come and geek out you should sign up. Last I heard from the organizer, there were 500 signed up to attend. This year there is a great cast of speakers including my buddies Christian Thilmany (Microsoft), David Walker (SharePoint MVP), John Cook (Virtualization MVP and SQL Guru) and Tim Rayburn (Biztalk MVP). I am doing two sessions...
Recently I posted a comment to an article talking about only billing hourly and not entering into fixed bid contracts. I agree with the post (for the most part), but felt compelled to respond to one of the comments. I thought I would include this in my blog because I think it is an interesting topic.
The focus here is not how we estimate from an Agile approach (read Agile Estimating and Planning if you are looking for that). Here, I am addressing a specific argument that Agilists "can’t estimate...
An easy way to convert data to/from base64 (or uuencode/uudecode, quoted-printable, url encode/url decode, JIS, Yenc, hex, or even creating md5 or sha1 hashes) is to use the NetCmdlets convert-data cmdlet. To encode: PS C:\> convert-data -data "Hello, World!" -to base64
Data Size Format
---- ---- ------
SGVsbG8sIFdvcmxkIQ== ...
I've maintained that we're hosed, no matter who you vote for, but now there's mathematical proof that regardless of how you vote, you're voting for a white liberal male. Here's the math. 1 Liberal Black Male + 1 Liberal White Male=1 Liberal White Male + 1 Conservative White Female So first, Black Male and White female cancel each other out. They're basically the same thing--both minorities, both oppressed citizens of these united states. That leaves us with: 1 Liberal Black Male + 1 Liberal...
Posted By:Robert May
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8/29/2008 11:12 AM
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Today's Code a la Carte is quite simple but is often a mistake with many new programmers. First, let's look at an example and the resulting output.
Example Code:
using System;
namespace ArrayDisplayExample
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
String[] saNames = new string[3];
saNames[0] = "Matt";
saNames[1] = "Steven";
saNames[2] = "Anna";
Console.WriteLine(saNames);
...
Posted By:Matt Christian
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8/29/2008 11:14 AM
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The CRM 4.0 installer has a nice new feature. The ability to get upgraded setup files prior to running the instalation. A nice step forward to hopefully address setup issues which are often present in the first release of the components.
Now for my Grip...
I've rarely been lucky enough to get it right the first time. Usually I have to run the installer, fix a few things, and repeat until succesful.
The problem is that their isn't any 'memory' of the upgraded setup files. If you have to run...
Finally I was able to button up my MCPD Enterprise. I have been sitting around with the need to take that one last exam and get everything all buttoned up, but with the amount of work I have been doing over the last year or so it has been virtually impossible to get my certification taken care of. As luck would have it I have run in to a quiet period between contracts and was able to on a whim go to a testing center and get the test over with.
I will say that I was not overly impressed with the...
In case you didn’t know, Windows XP SP2 provides a very cool update feature. It works like this: you have a main product, and the Quick Fixes / Service Packs that are applied to it. When you repair your setup for the main product, all the updates are also applied. When you remove, the cleanup is done for all. And it also looks cool on the Add/Remove Programs screen: You’ve probably seen it before in Vista, and thought that that was a Microsoft only thing. I really prefer the way it looks in XP....
As this is my first post in this blog, it’s probably best I introduce myself. I’m Rob Gray, a team lead at Spectrum Data Systems International (http://www.sdsi.com.au). We are the Australasian vendor Tritech’s (http://www.tritech.com) VisiCAD computer aided dispatch system for emergency services.
We’re a small team but we’re passionate about what we do. Being a small team, from time to time we all get wear different hats. One day I’ll be developing, another I’ll be supporting a customer,...
ToString() and the underestimated IFormattable
Everyone knows you always should override the ToString() function on you custom objects. But most programmers (including me until yesterday) leave it there.
I ran into a problem these days where I wanted a specific xml representation and a tap separated representation of the same custom object. The "experienced" programmer would just write their own format function. But it felt more old fashion and...
So my wife bought a toy to help my son celebrate his success during potty training. Jason has recently decided he is a Thomas the Train fanatic so she naturally bought him a train from the series. When he finally reached one of the milestones she had set we gave it to him.
So I went to open the toy and found out she had bought Diesel. For those that don't know Diesel is the nominal bad guy. As a bad guy though he really doesn't rate all that high. His main trick, from what I can see, is to...
We have released a new update for BIDS Helper. This release adds: support for Teradata data sources in the Dimension Health Check and fixes an issue where the properties page for the Package Deploy feature was not appearing under some circumstances...
I was reading this article on BBC today, online maps 'wiping out history', and I couldn't believe what I was reading. For me, this is just another example of someone who cannot cope with the fact that the Internet is changing their jobs, just like the librarian I wrote about in this other article. This article now is about the president of the British Cartographic Society, Ms Mary Spencer, saying that the Internet maps are leaving important landmarks that are part of History out, and that people...
More of a note really, but lets (for example) say we've defined a Contract for our Managed Addin Framework (MAF):
[AddInContract]
public interface ISimpleCalc : IContract
{
double Add(double x, double y, params double[] theRest);
}
if we use the PipeLineBuilder to generate the Pipeline for us, we'll find the contact defined in our 'AddInView' and 'HostView' projects as:
public interface ISimpleCalc
{
double Add(double x, double y, double[] theRest);
}
Which is obviously...
BizTalk Test Workshop
I’ll be running the first public delivery of the BizTalk Test Workshop I have been creating on the 18-19th of September in Stockholm. It’s a two-day course that covers an introduction to test strategies, and then looks at applying those strategies to a BizTalk project. Unit testing, stress testing, integration testing, functional testing and user acceptance testing are covered. NUnit, VSTS Test, BizUnit and Load Gen will be used as the main testing tools, with InfoPath and...
Posted By:Alan Smith
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8/29/2008 9:51 AM
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Just wasted a few minutes trying to install the latest and greatest beta of IE8. Kept receiving the very unhelpful message: "Extraction Failed" And then the penny dropped - simply Run As Administrator! Technorati Tags: IE8,Install failure,Extraction failed...
InterKnowlogy is always on the cutting edge of the Microsoft Platform so its not surprise that we were among first to build applications in WPF, Silverlight and now on Microsoft Surface (a touch screen computer embedded in a coffee table). I'm excited to show you two applications that we released recently. First one is VirtuView - a 3D environment for viewing and annotating patient's examination results on anatomic models. This application is a evolution of our earlier Angiographer that we build...
Anna Wrochna on justifying/aligning text, and Ronnie Saurenmann on WCF without a web server.
If you find yourself in Austrailia, take a look at DevSTA Challenge 2008... it hasn't started yet, but it looks cool, and great prizes!
From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight and text-align:justify. Anna takes a pretty good shot at getting text justified on a page... her results are very nice, but wow... what a bunch of work! Serving Silverlight applications on client PCs without a web server using...
While performing an upgrade from Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 to 4.0, the upgrade installer halted early on with the following error message:
Microsoft.Crm.Setup.Server.ShutdownCrmServerAction failed
Turns out that at some point the IIS Admin service was shutdown and disabled. Not sure how this occured since I had been running CRM 3.0 just prior to the install.
So if you get unlucky enough to get this message, open up your services and Enable/Restart your IIS admin service. The setup continued...
So there's some manly competition going around the Geek community. Evidently Chris Williams challenged Darcy Lussier to do the 100 Pushup Challenge. What kind of junk is this challenge? Over the past couple of months, I've been working on both pushups, situps and squats, with NO BREAKS. I'm up to about 35 of each. But isn't having all of these breaks between sets of 10 and 15 pretty wussy? Ok ok, so each of them outweigh me by 100 pounds, and can toss me around like a rag doll, but pahleeze,...
