September 2005 Entries
A while ago, I posted about the launch of ZondervanBibleSearch.com. Well, what I didn't mention was that Brian and the team made a video about it and submitted it to the PDC show-off.It was accepted, shown at the PDC, and it's now up on Channel 9. Nice job, guys...
Late last week, I posted about being able to bind to an enumeration, and expressed my doubt of it's usefulness in most situations. Well, I was Haacked! Phil posted a followup of how it could be done. Remember, my doubts were because of situations where your enumerations are often times multiple words, and not having spaces would create a problem. Phil, using the ever useful UglinessFactor enumeration, introduces the SplitUpperCaseToString function, which, as long as your enmerations follow Pascal...
As some of you may know, I'm one of the owners of Tourney Logic. We're working on the next version of the bracket control, and I'm having an issue that I'm trying to work through right now. The Tourney Bracket Control (TBC) is a server control that's a little different than most I've seen - especially with some of the changes we've made recently. Here's why (I think) it's unique. In our control, you add a collection of one type of custom control (teams), and based on how many teams are in that collection,...
I've been lax on blogging lately, and I have a back log of things that I wanted to get out there. I don't want to put up a post about each, mainly because there isn't enough for that, but I do want to get some of this out there, so here it goes.First, James Avery was looking for a data modeling tool that's cheap, and he found one even better. DBDesigner 4 - which is free! He says there's a SQL plugin available, but I couldn't find it. Anyone know where it is?Next, Sachin Narute has a series of posts...
Having lead a couple of development teams, I found this post by Jeremy Miller to be pretty informative. My projects have been relatively successful, despite what I did to try to derail that, and it's a constant learning experience to know what the best way to lead a team is. Reading other's perspectives who have different persectives is always nice, and Jeremy provides some good insight.The best part about his post is that he lists out not only what he does that works, but also relays what he's done...
Steve M. over on Brain.Save() has a nice little post about JSON, which stands for JavaScript Object Notation. I've heard the term JSON, but never realized what it was or how it can be used. Most of the time it's used in conjunction with AJAX, which makes sense because (especially in .NET) you're dealing with objects when you work with data. Being able to still deal with objects in Javascript is very helpful. Even without AJAX, being able to easily create dynamic objects in Javascript is pretty cool....
A while back I found the release notes for RC2, but no formal announcement about it's release - but I did speculate it would be a few days. It took a little longer, but it has been released. From the updated release notes, it looks like a lot of the work went into stabilization and CCTray. Both make sense - with release candidates, it's not about new functionality. It's about fixing what's there. The CCTray is an exception - it was completely rewritten, so changes are probably happening based on...
Anyone else out there using Plazes? What is Plazes? Glad you asked. Have you checked out Virtual Earth? Well, you know how it knows where you are? Well, this is the open answer to their solution. If enough people sign up and register their locations, it could be useful. Until then, it's up to us to enter new areas so it can become useful.Technorati Tags: geotag | location...
I haven't seen a formal annoucement yet, but the release notes are posted. Given that it's the next release candidate, there isn't much new here, but it should be less quirky and more stable. RC2 hasn't been released yet, at least not from the looks of the download page, but the last time I saw release notes get updated, the release followed shortly
My trip to California was eventually a successful one. I say eventually because we pounded our heads against a wall for quite a while working through the Biztalk framework to get what we wanted. Every problem we ran into, we would find a solution, usually resulting in us calling into a DLL to handle what we were trying to do. And since it started out as needing to do database lookups, we migrated to calling into our already-built shared library, since it already had the caching capabilities we wanted...
Chris Anderson has a nice post that consolidates his definition of The Long Tail. I've heard a lot about the long tail lately - we even have work that's banking on the idea behind The Long Tail - but I've yet to find a concise definition of it. Well, who better to provide it than "The Man" himself
Nope. I haven't gone religious on you (yet)! But Brian posted today about the launch of Zondervan Bible Search, which is a very cool application that I had a small part in. It's a pretty simple yet elegant site at first:It's cool because of the technology behind it. Zondervan has a very powerful desktop application called Pradis that gives users the ability to browse, search, and read the bible in many different flavors. It's something we (back in our Sagestone days) helped develop (we, as in Sagestone,...
Angus Logan provided me with a great link today about improving Virtual PC performance. I thought I'd seen most of the performance optimizations, but this is much more detailed than I've seen in the past. I'll definitely be looking at these in the near future
As I've mentioned before, I'm a big fan of CodeKeep. I'm subscribed to a few of the feeds to see the new snippets come across, and today this one did. It's in Spanish, which is cool, but I have no idea what it does!Still, it's cool to see it being used. This really does have some potential
Scott Guthrie has a series of greats post about Web Projects in VS 2005, including a lot of details about how much better it is than VS 2003 offers. I'd expand more on it, but Scott does an awesome job by himself, so just go read them for yourself.These are posts that Scott aluded to a while ago, and his follow ups are very informative, and relieve (I think) a lot of the fears that are out there about the new project-less web projects in .NET 2.0. Warning: These posts are long! If you don't have...
Can someone explain to me tagging? I understand the idea behind it, but I'm more looking for a way to implement it on a blog. I know that Technorati allows you to tag using a rel="tag" in your links, and the end of the URL is the tag, and Technorati will use post categories as tags, and that seems fine - if you want to lock into Technorati. Del.icio.us has pages that you can link to for each tag, but it doesn't actually tag a post. So what's the best way to tag blog posts? I'm considering using a...
Over the past few weeks, I've been struggling with a few small issues I have with my home-grown blogging client, dubbed the Rosscode Blogger (creative, huh?). It still did it's main job, but it wasn't fitting into my new blogging habits. First, what is it, for those who've never read any of my posts about it. When I blog, I sometimes publish to more than one blog at a time. Every post ends up on Rosscode.com. Technical posts end up on GeeksWithBlogs, work related content goes to my NuSoft blog, and...
If you don't know who Infragistics is, you should definitely check them out. I've used a few of their products in the past, and the hierarchical datagrid is awesome! Anyway, it looks like some of their developers are now blogging
Well, I'm back in Michigan after a week on-sight, and driving my Cavalier isn't quite as fun as the Dodge Charger, which is what I had as my rental car in California. Yeah, my car is cheaper to drive, but it doesn't quite have the pick up the rental did. Anyway, here's a picture of the car:Well, the guys I was working with thought the car needed a new look. So, right before I was leaving to head back to San Francisco, one of them "decorated" it for me: In case that's not readable (my phone isn't...
Over the past few months or so, I've been more and more impressed by Newsgator. Yeah, the software is great, but that’s not why I've been impressed. Although, I do have to say that FeedDemon is a very good aggregator. There's some things missing, but I almost made the switch from Newsgator Outlook Edition to FeedDemon. Outlook freezing up doesn’t really bother me, but FeedDemon doesn't have that issue, and syncs very quickly. I may still switch - we'll see.Anyway, that's not the main thing that's...