June 2005 Entries
There's an older post over on the dotnetjunkies blogs about how to do continuous database intregration. This was something we struggled with on my last project - we could build everything but the database. We came up with a suitable work around, but it wasn't ideal.It looks like this article has everything we would have needed to get our database into the build process. Too bad it's too late now. Although, I think I'll be implementing this for the Tourney Pool Manager before next year...
Well, maybe not everything, but FTPOnline has a listing of a ton of articles about ASP.NET. There's even quite a bit about ASP.NET 2.0, which is cool.Now, I just need to find a few days with nothing else to do and read all of them
I'm trying to find an easy way for our team to share code, and the best way to gain adoption of something is to make it easy. Well, most of us spend all day in Visual Studio.NET, so why not find something that can be used in the IDE?I found CodeShare. It's a VS.NET add-in that allows you to add and retrieve code snippets from a central repository. It looks pretty cool, and I'm looking for a server to install it on so I can test it out. If it works as advertised, then I'll start talking to the "higher...
Mike Torres has an interesting post that's mainly about cross-posting, but he mentions something about being able to flag all posts that link to a particular URL as something you're not interested in. That got me thinking. Wouldn't it be cool if your aggregator could look at all of your posts and have the ability to group them by URLs they link to. Then you could quickly sort them by link count, and you'd get a good feel for what is hot. For example, over the past few days, if I were to do that,...
News.com had the story Monday night, and by 11:30 Tuesday morning, Scott Guthrie had a great article describing in much more detail what they're building.I've been a little down on AJAX, but I'm starting to come around. One of the downsides I posted about AJAX was cross browser support, but I also said a framework development company, such as Microsoft, could alleviate that problem.The other reasons still stand - back and forward buttons, bookmarks, etc., but those are mostly related to how you use...
I posted that there was a feature I was very much looking forward to in CCNET 0.9.2, but didn’t' know when it was going to be released. Well, it's now officially out. You can read the release notes to see what changes were made, but there are three things that make it a must for me to get the newest version:1. Using Vault source control now supports automatically getting the source2. Filter modifications by username3. CCTray doesn't show the exception message box by default.I'll be upgrading a few...
I ran into this today, and if it was available, my life would have been easier. Here's the problem I came up against.Let's say that you have an object that has two properties: color and shape. You need to do something based on the combination of those two properties. Here's how you could do it now: 1: if(myObject.Shape == Shape.Round) { 2: if(myObject.Color == Color.Red) { 3: // Do something 4: } else if(myObject.Color == Color.Blue) { 5: // Do something 6: } else if(myObject.Color == Color.Green)...
Make Magazine has a cool article about taking a PC and building your own media center - right down to including a gaming system using N64 controllers and emulators.One of the cool things I found was the streaming music using SlimServer, although I tried to set it up, and while I could see the streaming going, there was no music. However, I think it would be cool to get one of their devices, and use it to stream music through my receiver, since I don’t have any immediate plans to build a DVR...
Somehow I missed this when it first came through the aggregator, but I got it on an update. Anyway, AJAX.Net is now open source and hosted at Sourceforge.The CMS project I'm pseudo-involved in is using this, and, although I haven't been involved in the implementation of AJAX.NET, we got it up and running in a day - very nice
No, it's not out yet, but I saw one of the features they added, and I want it now! It supports getting the latest version automatically from Vault instead of relying on a nant script to do so for you. This would be a huge benefit to me right now, because I'm having issues with not being able to do this right now.Here's why: I am only building one project, and I have multiple projects because I am monitoring a bunch of folders. I only want to rebuild projects that need to be rebuilt if something changes...
I installed WSS as part of my Biztalk ramp-up - Biztalk uses it for some of it's services, such as BAS. Anyway, it took me a few days before I realized how much WSS messes with the rest of your sites. It locks down ASP.NET development to the point of unusability (yes, I know that's not a word, but it should be!). You can't debug your apps, and once you turn that back on, you can't use session. Until you turn that on too! Oh - and before you do all that, you have to tell WSS that the virtual directory...
I saw a demo of this at Tech Ed, but now I found it on MSDN. The Patterns and Practices team has created a sample that covers how you can use Integration patterns effectively. They did a couple of very cool things with this. First, you can view a flash demo of how it works - that means you can still get all of the benefits of learning the patterns without the pain of installation. The second is how big the real solution is - you can install it across 6 different servers, and it contains 40 projects....
I've started working part time on a very interesting project. It's a CMS project, but it's focused around a C++ back end system that the CMS site will interact with. It's all COM-based, which means we'll be using COM interop. Fun!Anyway, my role isn't really to build the CMS site. I'm developing the framework we'll use to build CMS templates, as well as setting up continuous integration so we get automatic builds. Well, I got the build process done today, and there's parts that I'm happy with and...
I've been using VPC as my primary development environment for a couple of months now, and I've found my first annoyance. I thought I had a solution, but it didn't work out as I'd hoped.First, the problem. I work on multiple clients, and often, I want to look at code that I wrote for one client to use it as a sample for another client - more often than not lately, it's with build files and how to do something I've done before. I can't really run two VPC's at the same time efficiently - I dedicate...
If you haven't seen it yet, Scott has updated his list of tools that every developer should look at. This is by far the most comprehensive list of useful utilities I've seen thus far.I looked through my utilities I install, and I only found one that something from his list doesn't cover - Active Ports. This shows which ports are in use, and by what process. I've used this a few times when I was wondering why a certain port wasn't available.Of course, I found one thing that wasn't on his list, but...
Ben Carey has a question about frameworks, and is seeking feedback about how we keep our frameworks clutter-free.I've worked on a couple of frameworks, and I've seen both the good and the bad in them. The bad usually results when the framework isn't tightly controlled. What I mean by that is that everyone has the opportunity to modify the framework, even if they don't have an understanding of what the framework is for. You see, this is a concept that not everyone grasps. Developing a reusable framework...
There's a knowledge base article about how you can split a web project into multiple projects. It's not the simplest process - you have to edit project files by hand - but it would be nice to be able to split certain sections of a web project into their own projects. Personally, I think this would force me to think much harder about how I want to divide up my projects and make sure that over the long haul, I don’t end up with a bunch of garbled code. I like to try to keep my code segmented, but inevitably,...
There's a new version of Skype out there. Personally, I'm a huge fan of Skype - the quality for me has been as good as a cell phone call, and I use it on a regular basis to communicate with team members on the other side of the country. The latest version changes up the UI a little bit - I think it looks much cleaner. No word if they've fixed the range check error though
Ok. I'm new to BizTalk Server, but I think I got this right. Please let me know if I didn't. I have an existing application that uses an object. I want to take this object, allow BizTalk to accept messages of that type, and map them to another message type that can then be sent out to a third party verification system. Sounds like a pretty typical scenario to me.It took me a while to figure it out though. First, I added a reference in BizTalk to my business object class. Then I created ports that...
I first heard of CodeZone from someone in Australia, and I've been getting the magazine since last summer.Well, they finally launched something for the US crowd - MyCodeZone. It's a portal for developers, and I got a chance to talk to one of the team members. They are actively looking for feedback on what is good and what isn't, so this is your chance to make it what you want.I may spend some time in this. I've never gotten into online portals like My Yahoo, but then again, there's never been anything...
Well, now that I'm back from Tech Ed, it's time to look back through my notes and start writing down my thoughts on what I did and what I saw. I'm starting that right now, but I wanted to get some things out there first. While the technical content at Tech Ed is awesome, I'm debating if the content was better than the people you get to meet and interact with. I'm not sure. I think I've made a few contacts that could potentially be life long relationships. That's more important than the technology...
I got a chance to talk with the GotDotNet team about the future of Workspaces as well as the whole GotDotNet platform. And I got a free shirt. I think I mentioned that before!It was surprising to see how apologetic they were for the software, even though they didn't write it. They called it a prototype in production, and when you look at how slow it currently is, that's probably pretty accurate. None of them are happy about the performance, but it does seem to be getting better.Not many know this,...