GeeksWithBlogs
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GeeksWithBlogs
As I discussed in my last post, we created a TimeSpinner control based on the Extended WPF Toolkit’s ButtonSpinner. Now, the toolkit has a DateTimeUpDown control that will display a date or time and allow the user to click the spinners for each time part, but I needed a little more. I needed the raw text to be editable and I wanted the spinners to just modify the minutes portion. I also wanted to have special parsing based on the number of characters entered. 4 chars:Parse as military time. 3 chars:...
Our software will automatically generate pick up and drop off times based on distance of trip, how many other people are on the bus, how long it takes to drop them off, etc. We display these times in our custom TimeSpinner control based on WPF Extended Toolkit’s button spinner. Since the computer is generating the time, they are often not human-friendly. 6:00 AM is a lot easier to remember than 6:03 AM. So we give the users the option to modify these times. Using the spinners, they can adjust the...
Sometimes it handy to force the user’s attention to a specific screen. We can do this with a dialog, but sometimes the user doesn’t know that window is on top. To draw the user’s eye to the window, I like to place a backdrop between the rest of the application and the dialog window. I use the following code to make that happen. 1: public bool? ShowDialogWithBackdrop(Window win) 2: { 3: //create backgroup 4: Window backgroundWindow = new Window(); 5: backgroundWindow.Top = 0; 6: backgroundWindow.Left...
On Jan 16, 2011, we are expecting a new addition to our family. Ben is going to learn words like “share” and “don’t put that in the baby’s nose”. We expect he’ll do great...
We recently added OAuth to MentionNotifier so that users can quickly view and edit their subscriptions without needed an additional login. This is enabled by default for new users, but existing users will need to do the following steps to associate their subscriptions with OAuth: 1) Go to http://software.engraph.com... 2) Click “Sign in with Twitter” 3) Verify that your twittername and email are correct 4) Click "Associate with OAuth" This will also allow you to reply to notification...
Since my Dell D610 is three years old, I decided it was time for a new lappy. I finally decided on a E6400 from Dell. Finally a machine that can actually run Vista. Here is my score: So far I love it. I can have VS 2008 plus a couple virtual machines open and it doesn’t even blink. Technorati Tags: Dell,E6400...
I asked my first question on stackoverflow today. I want to make sure I’m unsubscribing from PropertyChanged events properly. Please head over and put in your two cents. Technorati Tags: PropertyChanged,.NET,StackO...
TeamBuild is such a powerful tool. We use it to run our unit tests and publish our apps using ClickOnce. Recently we started using it to publish a web service. This code depends on MSBuildTasks from Tigris. <PropertyGroup> <DeploymentFolder>**S... FOLDER ON WEB SERVER**</DeploymentFold... <DeployServerName>**WEB SERVER NAME**</DeployServerName... <ApplicationPoolName>... <VirtualDirectory>Rep...
I prefer to use web-based solutions when possible, but the other day the publish feature of google docs wasn’t working right, so I needed to install Windows Live Writer. I quickly found out that WLW doesn’t play nicely with Windows Server 2008. Since WLW is written in .NET, I just installed it on an XP virtual machine and copied the Program Files folder over to my Server 2008 machine. Simple. Technorati Tags: Windows Live Writer,Server 2008...
Like most developers, I run SQL on my main work computer. I find that the RAM usage gets quite bloated at times, so I have a handy bat file that I run to restart the SQL service, giving me my RAM back. Here are the simple steps to achieving this: 1) Right click on your desktop and create a new text document. 2) Rename file to restartSQL.bat 3) Click yes on confirmation to change a file name extension. If you did not get this error, you will need uncheck "Hide extensions for known file types" on the...
Here is how to post to GeeksWithBlogs from Google Docs.Click New -> DocumentSelect "Publish as web page" from the Share menuClick setup your blogSelect "My own server/custom"Select "MetaWeblog API" from the drop down listEnter (no www) http://geekswithblogs.net//... your user name, password and blog titleClick Test...
Testing publishing a post to GeeksWithBlogs from Google Docs
Chelsea and I went to the movies last night and saw Todd Reesing (the KU quarterback) and Derek Fine (former KU tight end) standing in line at the ticket counter. Turns out they went to the same movie as us too (Baby Mama - which was pretty funny). Technorati tags: Kansas Football, Todd Reesing, Derek Fine, Lawrence Kansas...
I fixed the error I posted about yesterday. I updated the post to say: Update: I had also uninstalled VS 2008 Team Suite trial, when I went to install VS 2008 For Developers, I didn't have enough space, which is why I had uninstalled VS 2005 in the first place. I freed up some space and installed VS 2008 and now all is working. Technorati tags: TeamBuild, MSB3147...
After a couple years of dating and exactly one year of living together, Chelsea and I got engaged yesterday. We are planning a small beach wedding off the North Carolina coast in March 2008. She's always wanted a beach wedding, and well, that's all that counts. Plus we found this really cool self proclaimed hippie beach bum to perform the ceremony. This will be the third EnGraph wedding in as many years. Kyle and Allie got married in 2006 and David married Becca last May. After working at EnGraph...
Last night, Kyle, Allie, Chelsea and I went to the Buzz Beach Ball here in Kansas City. Jeff Julian (sporting his very GWB appropriate geek shirt) and Doug Butscher (who I think I saw crowd surfing) were also there. I really liked Life In Jersey, the opening band. They sounded like Senses Fail and were really excited to be playing. Come to find out they are a local Kansas City band. Shiny Toy Guns stole the show in my opinion. They kind of have a Lords of Acid meets Roxette feel to them. Their whole...
Robz, my buddy from Topeka, just started a blog here on geekswithblogs! Even though he is a K-State fan, I try not to hold it against him. Let's all give him a warm welcome. Technorati tags: Rob Reynolds...
Dru was kind enough to tag me on how I could be a better developer. I think that in addition to being a better developer, I also need to deliver better applications. We all have different reasons for our geeky ways, and mine is to create applications that save people time. So here is my list: Start giving more talks - I really enjoy giving my talks on Ajax.net and Real time GPS implications, but I'm not an expert on AJAX and most people find my opinions on GPS to be a bit "abrasive". I need to isolate...
Intro to this series of posts. Some of the code I use for UI validation came from Paul Stovell, who is working on a WPF Element that acts like WinForms 2.0 ErrorProvider control. Paul's control didn't quite fit my needs, so I've tweaked a few things so I can provide visual validation in a generic fashion from my base class. All of our objects implement:Public Event InvalidProperty(string PropertyName, string ErrorMessage);Public Event Validated(object sender);Public bool IsValid; Our objects also...
Intro to this series of posts. Some of the code I use for UI validation came from Paul Stovell, who is working on a WPF Element that acts like WinForms 2.0 ErrorProvider control. Paul's control didn't quite fit my needs, so I've tweaked a few things so I can provide visual validation in a generic fashion from my base class. All of our objects implement:Public Event InvalidProperty(string PropertyName, string ErrorMessage);Public Event Validated(object sender);Public bool IsValid; Our objects also...
Intro to this series of posts. There are a ton of posts out there about data binding with INotifyPropertyChanged objects in WPF, so I won't regurgitate what other people have already written. There is one point that I haven't see much clear documentation about that I would like to cover. Hosting data bound custom controls. Let's say we have a location control that is bound to a location object like so: <TextBox Text="{Binding Path=Address1}"/> <TextBox Text="{Binding Path=Address2}"/>...
The last month or so, I've been wallowing in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), trying to determine if it is the correct direction for our next version of our flagship software, ParaPlan. WPF is flashy and fun and bubbly, but there are not many examples of real world enterprise applications that are built around WPF. After much research, and significantly pushing back our deployment timeline, we decided to rebuild ParaPlan 4.0 using WPF for our UI. We were able to use our existing 2.0 UI framework...
The Google Maps API blog talks about adding driving directions to their API. This is something that I am excited about adding to Where's Tim. I've had directions to me on my real time GPS site for a while (see the post here), but I've always just shelled out a url to maps.google.com. Now I can retain the users of that feature on my site and not have to send them away (hoping that they will come back). This is also big for the mashup "industry" as well. Visually understanding where an object resides...
After much frustration, I've finally configured our TeamBuild proj file to publish our ClickOnce app, and increase the version number (kinda an important step). The Vertigo blog talks about using SolutionToPublish, but that doesn't work for all situations. Specifically, when your solution contains projects that reference other projects. So I started playing with the MSBuild Community Tasks Project, and came up with the following Xml for my proj file: This tells the .proj to use the community project:<Import...
Last year, Kyle and Allie got hitched, and tomorrow, David (one of our AutoCAD studs) is marrying Becca. Congrats David! I guess that leaves me as the last stud in the stable :) Technorati tags: David Collins, EnGraph, Wedding...
I wrote some code that is meant for people that want to easily implement INotifyPropertyChanged after using the "prop" code snippet. It will take code that looks like this:public int DriverID { get { return _driverID; } set { _driverID = value; } } And return it like this:public int DriverID { get { return _driverID; } set { _driverID = value; OnPropertyChanged("DriverID"); } } It also will ignore any triple slash comments and #regions. So you can copy your entire #region --Properties-- into the...
I've been using NewsGator for a while now (my post about switching to it), and it's not bad, but I discovered the mobile version of Google Reader last night. This morning I found the Homepage reader widget and that was the nail in the coffin of NewsGator. The mobile version works so slickly on my PPC6700 and I've always liked the UI of the web version. So thanks NewsGator, you've been good, but I'm all google now. Technorati tags: NewsGator, Google Reader, PPC6700...
Chris (who I meet down at SC Code Camp 2006) left a comment on my C# connection string validation code pointing out some flaws in my code. He suggested playing with System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCo... I redid the code to take advantage of this helper class. Here is the updated version of the code. Note that I only validate Data Source, Initial Catalog, User ID and Password because that is the only thing our software uses right now.public static bool IsValidSQLConnectionString(...
I'm having trouble installing .NET Compact Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1 on my PPC6700. I want to play with the new version of NavXS, but when I try to download the framework from here, the installer tells me: Any ideas on how to load the framework on my PPC? I haven't been able to find a cab file anywhere. Is it a Vista thing? Technorati tags: NavXS, Compact Framework, Vista...
Update - I made the code better here Here is a code snippet I use to validate SQL connection strings: /// <summary>/// Checks a connection string for validity/// </summary>/// <param name="cn">SQL Connection string to validate</param>/// <returns>True if connection is valid.</returns>/// <history>/// [Tim Hibbard] 12/03/2006 Created/// </history>public static bool IsValidSQLConnectionString(... cn){ bool RV = true; try { if (!cn.Contains("Data Source"))...
Some really content come out of GeeksWithBlogs. One of the best ways to spread that information to the rest of the community is via Digg. Via this search, you can search stories submitted to Digg that have the url "geekswithblogs". You can also get the same search via RSS. Help your fellow geek bloggers out and digg posts that you find interesting. Technorati tags: GeeksWithBlogs, Digg...
Ever since moving to Lenexa, our internet has been really slow. In Lawrence, I was getting about 6.5 mb/s down and 760 kb/s up. Now I'm getting: Any suggestions for a better ISP in Johnson County? We are with SBC now and our contract expires this year. Technorati tags: EnGraph, SBC, Speedtest.net...
A while ago, I blogged about how I was having problems with how I set up references when we switched over to Team Foundation Server. I was linking internal dependencies to the build folder on the build server. This caused excessive network traffic (and delays when working from home) and failed builds (because TFS couldn't clean the build folder if I have a solution open with a reference to that folder). I've since found this branching guide on CodePlex. This has fixed all my problems. It took me...
I've thought about posting this for a while now and responses to my architecture post by Dave and Dru have got me thinking about it again. I avoid open source frameworks or libraries in our production desktop applications. I don't have a problem with third party when it comes to web applications or internal apps. I use AjaxPro and skmRSS on Where's Tim and my home site. I use Indy.Sockets all the time in our internal apps. Where's Tim is just for fun though and if it goes down, it's not that big...
PhoneNews.com reports that Sprint has delayed releasing PPC-6800 until October of this year. This release date will enable the phone to use EVDO rev A and also will be loaded with Windows Mobile 6. I can wait a couple months, I just hope my PPC6700 can hold on until then. Update - Looks like it has been bumped up to June 2007 Technorati tags: PPC6800, Sprint, PhoneNews Trackback...
When we decided that ParaPlan 4.0 would be rebuilt in .NET (from Access), we decided not to redesign the SQL database. Even though we have some inefficiencies in our db we want to decrease development time and allow our beta testers to be able to switch back and forth between our Access front end and our .NET front end. As development began, we decided that we needed an object for each table and that we could eliminate some of the database inefficiencies in our objects. So we have an Appointment...
I have a couple helper methods that I use all the time during my data access layer. I figured I might as well post them and hopefully help others out. I use the code from this article to pull my field names, that way I can build code like this:public override IEntity PopulateFromOpenIDataReader... dr) { const int ID = 0; const int NAME = 1; const int COMMENT = 2; const int ADDRESS1 = 3; const int ADDRESS2 = 4; Doctor rv = new Doctor(); rv.ID = (int)DataValidation.GetValu... ID, 0);...
I have a couple helper methods that I use all the time during my data access layer. I figured I might as well post them and hopefully help others out. I use the code from this article to pull my field names, that way I can build code like this:public override IEntity PopulateFromOpenIDataReader... dr) { const int ID = 0; const int NAME = 1; const int COMMENT = 2; const int ADDRESS1 = 3; const int ADDRESS2 = 4; Doctor rv = new Doctor(); rv.ID = (int)DataValidation.GetValu... ID, 0);...
The guys over at NavXS have just released a new Windows Mobile client for their social geocoding network. Feel free to add me as a friend after you download the software. My user ID is tim@timhibbard.com and it is directly tied to data from Where's Tim. Technorati tags: NavXS, Social Geocoding, Where's Tim...
Cursor on Target (CoT) is an effort by military and governmental branches, FFRDCs (federally funded research and development corporations) and private companies to standardize an electronic portable data format to define location based data. I am the biggest geo-geek that I know, so obviously I was very interested when they contacted me about implementing their format into Where's Tim. These guys have done a great job of making a simple schema (12 required fields) that is easy to implement. I blogged...
I've been working on implementing CoT XML standard for describing location based data. Here is the C# code for an .aspx page that will render XML More infomation about CoT can be found here: using System;using System.Data;using System.Configuration;using System.Collections;using System.Web;using System.Web.Security;using System.Web.UI;using System.Web.UI.WebControls;u... System.Web.UI.WebControls.W... System.Web.UI.HtmlControls;... System.Xml;public partial class cot : System.Web.UI.Page{...
Mike Wolleben talks about how the US military is looking at using WiMax for electronic communication. Now all they need is an XML standard for describing location based data. Hint, hint, more info coming soon. Technorati tags: WiMax, CoT...
I'm playing golf tomorrow in Kyle's JRM tournament. As if I didn't have enough problems finding my tee shots, it is supposed to snow tomorrow :) In related news, not to be obsessive, but I just created changeset 666 on our Team Foundation Server. It's also Friday the 13th which happens to be my sister's 14th birthday, so happy birthday Christina! Technorati tags: Golf, Kyle Archer, JRM, snow, TFS, evil, Christina Hibbard...
Where's Tim hasn't been getting much attention the last couple of months. A little bit here and there, but nothing like the Digg days of last summer. I've got several requests for information the last week or so though. Joab Jackson (who did a National Geographic story last October) is working on an article. Ronan Fitzgerald (who did an article in The Guardian) has been emailing me about the Social Geocoding studs NavXS. Davey Winder is also working on a mashup article. I'll post the links to these...
We moved most of our stuff from our Lawrence office to our new EnGraph office in Lenexa yesterday. Putting all our stuff into Jonathan's trucks. See the basement page for reference. David was nice enough to paint! Server room...populated! No logo yet :( Gotta have the KU hoop My new desk ...with all my junk Technorati tags: EnGraph, Lawrence, Lenexa, Kansas, Kyle Archer, David Collins, Jonathan Umscheid, KU...
Yesterday Kyle, David, Jonathan and I walked 18 holes at St. Andrews in Overland Park and then did some planning at our new EnGraph office in Lenexa. Here are some pics: David teeing off Water hazard? Our new desks! David and Jonathan's office Server room...finally! Technorati tags: Golf, EnGraph, Kyle Archer, David Collins, Jonathan Umscheid, St. Andrews, Overland Park, Lenexa...
The last year in the Pendleton & Sutton building has been good for EnGraph. It is our first office and I remember when we just moved in. However, we've added new members to the company (and are still looking for more), and an office in Kansas City just makes sense because all the developers but me live in the KC area. We just signed for a place on Strang Line Rd that used to be occupied by Kyle's brothers company, ASB. We move in on Monday and I'll be driving there everyday (which will make Where's...
The Google Maps API blog talks about adding support for GeoRSS enabled feeds on Google Maps. That means you can take the Where's Tim Messaging Feed and view the last 50 message people sent me on Google Maps You can also take my location feed and view it on Google Maps. Since my location feed contains Yahoo Maps, clicking on the GIcon will show a Yahoo Map on the Google Map! Technorati tags: GeoRSS, Where's Tim, Google Maps, Yahoo Maps...
Chris West has posted his picks for the first and second round and also his picks up to the championship. I still like my picks better, but it's cool to see his thought process for each of his decisions. Update - Fixed the link Technorati tags: NCAA, 2007, Chris West...
I agree with Dru's comment on my post yesterday about overriding Equals(). I now want to implement a static function into my objects that will compare two objects. Again, I'm stuck between two ways of doing it. I could accept specific object types (static bool Equals(MyObject a, MyObject b)) or just accept an object type and cast it (static bool Equals(object a, object b)). I'm leaning towards the latter way as it allows me to define that method into the interface that all my objects already implement....
The next task in our Team Foundation Server is going to be id 666. Maybe I should not work today and just watch basketball. Technorati tags: Evil...
I find it frustrating that the SqlCommand object doesn't automatically set the CommandType to StoredProcedure on instantiation. If you look in Reflector, you'll see that _commandType isn't initialized to anything. I thought Microsoft wanted us using stored procedures. Anyways, I got tired of always writing this code: SqlCommand CMD = new SqlCommand(spName); CMD.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure; So I wrote a little function that I keep in my DAL classes: private SqlCommand NewSqlCommand(string...
A couple weeks ago, I blogged about the pain in my hands because of tendonitis. Since then, I've followed all directions from my doctor, took my medicine and even switched to using my left hand for the mouse. The pain only got worse, and it got to the point where my hands, wrists and forearms were throbbing. It hurt to drive, play with the dogs, use the remote control and my productivity with EnGraph was going down the tubes. Some days I would have to quit at 3 PM and just read a book. By the way,...
I updated my article of the class to extract constants from a database for clean code freaks like me that want every field name to be defined by a constant. The original post is here. The code is here. Technorati tags: C#, code comments, .NET, Database...
Update - Found a solution here I've had a problem ever since installing TFS, and I've not blogged about it yet because I wanted to figure out a good solution first. I haven't found the solution, so I'm hoping for some good advice from the brilliant GWB readers. We have quite a few dll's and controls that we reference from our applications. For example, we have our SQL Connection String control that lives in the EnGraph Controls team project. If I want to use the SQL Connection String control, I add...
My girlfriend got me a Sirius radio for Valentine's day. More specifically, a sportster 4 with pause, rewind and fast forward. I can set my favorite teams and it alerts me when they are playing. I can set favorite bands or songs and it will alert me when a station is playing it. It even has a built in FM modulator so I don't have to hard-wire it to my stereo. Plug and play, it just works! My Saturn is officially geeked out now. It already had the GeeksWithBlogs sticker, my TomTom and Where's Tim....
When I build data access layers, I like to define a const for each column in the query like this: const int CLIENTID = 0; const int STATUS = 1; const int FIRSTNAME = 2; That way, I can pull data like this: newClient.Name.FirstName = reader.GetString(FIRSTNAME); And if something changes in the database, I know I only have to change the field that FIRSTNAME references. However, sometimes, tables can be quite large and it becomes a pain in the wrist. So I wrote a class that uses the EnterpriseLibrary...
Update: 02/27/2007 added support for raw SQL Strings When I build data access layers, I like to define a const for each column in the query like this: const int CLIENTID = 0; const int STATUS = 1; const int FIRSTNAME = 2; That way, I can pull data like this: newClient.Name.FirstName = reader.GetString(FIRSTNAME); And if something changes in the database, I know I only have to change the field that FIRSTNAME references. However, sometimes, tables can be quite large and it becomes a pain in the wrist....
I've been having a lot of pain in my hands the last couple of weeks, so I went to the doctor and they told me it is tendonitis. That's good news considering she originally thought it was carpal tunnel. They gave me some pills and showed me some exercises to help with the pain. I still feel like a wuss though, talk about the ultimate geek injury :) I've paid a lot of attention to ergonomics. I have a natural keyboard, good chair, good mouse, multiple monitors. I guess I'm not doing enough. I found...
Yesterday, Jonathan Umscheid started full time with EnGraph. He's been working on a contract basis for us for a bit now and it's great to have him on board full time! Jonathan and David are doing some really cool things with our AutoCAD project and they really need to start blogging about it! We are still looking to fill a position for a .NET developer that will help Kyle and I on our transportation and GPS software (you might even get your own Where's Tim). Technorati tags: Jonathan Umscheid, David...
We got Joey a new friend last weekend. She's a 7 week-old Beagle-Pug mix (Puggle). It took them a little bit to get used to each other, but they are playing together really well now. Technorati tags: Puggle...
PhoneNews reports that a version of Google Maps has been released for Windows Mobile. I downloaded and played with it last night on my PPC-6700. It works really well and it integrates with your contacts list. It is interesting to note that is uses the old version of the street maps and older satellite images. Also, the final version of Window Mobile Device Center is now released. Technorati tags: Windows Mobile, Google Maps...
I originally started reading blogs to become more knowledgeable about technology. I've learned a lot, but somewhere along the line I picked up way too many subscriptions. Anytime somebody talked about something cool, I subscribed to them. Anytime somebody linked to Where's Tim, I subscribed to them. I find that my daily grind though FeedDemon brings me a lot of repeated posts and things that don't really interest me. I skim through all the feeds and rarely pick up anything that is worth the read...
I was digging through some old VBA code today, and found this little guy: On Error GoTo i_cant_belive_i_have_a_erro... I actually remember when I wrote that. It was when we were still working from Kyle's spare bedroom and I didn't even have a desk. I was working on some old card table with my crappy Compaq laptop. Technorati tags: Old code, EnGraph, VBA...
I blogged the other day about a class I wrote to help manage a VPN connection. Since then, I've made a couple changes and updated the article to reflect the code changes. -Created an overloaded, parameterless StartManaging method to make it easier to start in a new thread-Listened to the PowerModeChanged event and paused the timer if the computer is coming back from standby-Cleaned up a few issues-Added code comments The class code is here. If anybody wants to see the form code that is consuming...
David added some more hard drive space to our Team Foundation Server yesterday. Technorati tags: David Collins, EnGraph...
Windows has pretty good VPN management. It's pretty good at redialing the connection when the connection is dropped, and for the most part it works. However, sometimes it thinks it connected to the VPN when it's really not, and it doesn't validate the connection to a specific internal IP. We needed something that was a bit more robust and could disconnect and reconnect if it couldn't see a specific IP. This class I wrote takes a VPN connection name and an IP to ping and will use rasphone.exe to connect...
Clarification - The specific program I am working with here has the word "updater" in the name. This flags the UAC that it needs admin rights. Full Trust ClickOnce plays nicely with UAC otherwise. I've been battling all day with how one of our ClickOnce applications works with the UAC in Vista. I've found two ways to get past the "Cannot Start Application" message: Run IE as an administrator The first way is very painful and not useful for a repeatable process, but it works. Assume your ClickOnce...
Somebody from Sprint must have read my blog post about not being able to receive text messages from Where's Tim. Either that or somebody decided that we were not sending spam through our servers. Either way, I am now getting text messages people send me on Where's Tim. I also publish these messages in a GeoRSS enabled RSS feed. Since the feed does have GeoRSS, you can even view the last 100 messages on Where's Tim. Technorati tags: Where's Tim, GeoRSS, Sprint...
In a recent post, I talked about wanting a TFS group called ParaPlan_Stud that contained Kyle and myself that we could assign tasks to and view in our "My Work Items". Much thanks goes to Mickey Gousset, who wrote a book that you need to get, for helping me with this. I originally made this a blog post, but it was a bit lengthy and I didn't want to flood the front page, so I added it to my articles. http://geekswithblogs.net/t...
In a recent post, I talked about wanting a TFS group called ParaPlan_Stud that contained Kyle and myself that we could assign tasks to and view in our "My Work Items". Much thanks goes to Mickey Gousset, who wrote a book that you need to get, for helping me with this. Here is how we did it: Created Project Group call ParaPlan_Stud and added Kyle and myself to it. Edited Task.xml To access the Task, I had to edit the xml file that defines the task. Using the VS 2005 command prompt, I entered: witexport...
Kyle and I are running into a small problem with Team Foundation Server when it comes to assigning tasks. In a typical software development company, a Project Manager receives a bug or feature request. He then assigns associated tasks to his developers. Once the developer is finished, the task is re-assigned to the PM for review. At EnGraph, things are a bit more collaborative. Partly because of our size, but also because we like to manage support and development from a team perspective. Back to...
Dear Firefox, You're fast and light-weight. You're pretty much everything I want in a browser. However, my browsing heart is not satisfied by you alone. See, I'm a developer, so I download a lot of tools that are wrapped in .exe and .msi files. When I want to use one of these tools, you make me download the file to the desktop before I can run it. I don't understand why you must clutter my desktop so much. I don't need the file on my computer, if I want it later, I'll just re-download it. I appreciate...
I came to work this morning to find a pile of snow where I usually park. It didn't seem like we got much snow this weekend, but it sure looks impressive all piled up like that. If you look closely on the left hand side, you can see the bus that I blogged about here. Technorati tags: Snow, Lawrence Kansas...
All this talk about the iPhone (hurry and grab quicktime killer before it's too late) reminded me of Lance's post about converting a PocketPC into an iPod. I guess Apple is close to finding out how many times they can beat a dead horse. Technorati tags: iphone, quicktime killer, Lance Robinson...
I installed Vista on my main development computer today and am proud to report my score: .score, { font-weight:bold; font-decoration:none; font-size: x-large; cursor: hand; background-image: url(http://www.shareyoursco... color: #ffffff; font-family: verdana, arial; width: 80px; height: 80px; background-position: center center; vertical-align: middle; background-repeat: no-repeat; text-align: center; } 2.6 Honestly, I'm just happy to have glass, unlike my laptop. P.S....
As Kyle blogged about and I blogged about a couple months ago, we are still looking to hire at least one person to do .NET development in the Kansas City area. We have some really cool projects going on and we just don't have the resources to take everything on. We are thinking about advertising in CareerBuilder. They have some good packages for print and internet exposure. Has anybody worked with CareerBuilder? Have any good or bad stories? Know any friends that are interested in working with .NET...
When migrating our TFS from a workgroup based install to Active Directory, we got a couple errors when running Team Build. Access to the path 'C:\...BuildLog.txt' is denied To fix this error, I simply deleted the root Team Project folders in Windows Explorer and re-ran the build. The build then recreated the folders. You may have to run the builds in a specific order if your solutions reference assemblies that live in these folders. The other error occurred after a build started: TF42004: Team Build...
Jeff Julian - Mr. GeeksWithBlogs - was nice enough to tag me, so here are five things you probably don't know about me. 1) I have a chapstick addiction. It's bad, I go through a stick every couple of weeks. It's really not my fault though, my Mom and sisters are just as bad as me. 2) I'm a bad driver. I feel sorry for anybody that has to ride with me. I go out of turn at four-way stops, run too many yellow(ish) lights, liberally interpret lane dividing lines, and generally assume that I have the...
Moving our TFS Server to Active Directory wasn't that bad. I followed these instructions from MSDN. They are meant for people moving from one domain to another. But the steps worked for moving from a TFS workgroup based install to a domain based install. All of the tasks that were assigned to Kyle or myself were migrated over to our new domain usernames and using this handy permissions tool, I was able to get all of our permissions set correctly. The only problem is initiating a build. When I right...
I added my main workstation to our new Active Directory domain last night with out a hitch. This morning, I added my Vista laptop and ran into a bit of a problem. So I added a DNS role to the server and was able to add the laptop to the domain. Then we started in on Kyle's laptop. When attempting to log on, we got "The system cannot log you on now because the domain engraph is not available". After much googling, I discovered that the DNS role was incorrectly set up. I thought that just removing...
We were supposed to get Visual Studio Team Edition for Developers in the mail by the 20th of this month (Dec 06). It still hasn't come and I don't see it on MSDN. Time to get back on the phone with Microsoft. Technorati tags: VSTS, Tired of waiting...
Iain Martin (a student on the post graduate diploma in journalism at Cardiff University) wrote an article about the mainstreaming of geography and geotagging journalism. He talked briefly about Where's Tim and included some of my quotes on how GIS will impact various industries. He even mentioned Social Geocoding. Well, it was in a quote from me, but he still published it! He also spoke of Jerome Dobson and his concerns of loss of privacy. It's funny how we always get mentioned together in articles....
Jeff shared his Vista score, and I am almost embarrassed to share my laptop's score: .score, { font-weight:bold; font-decoration:none; font-size: x-large; cursor: hand; background-image: url(http://www.shareyoursco... color: #ffffff; font-family: verdana, arial; width: 80px; height: 80px; background-position: center center; vertical-align: middle; background-repeat: no-repeat; text-align: center; } 1 I still love my D610 though, this thing hums. Literally. It does this...
A couple weeks ago, I blogged about Sprint blocking my SMTP server from sending text messages to my cell phone from Where's Tim. After I changed the code to send messages people send me through a different mail server, it worked fine for a week or two. I noticed last week that they were not coming through again and sure enough, they blocked me again. I apologize to anybody that has sent me a text message on Where's Tim and I haven't replied. I still kind of get the messages via the RSS feed, but...
I loaded the new Sprint Mobile Email java client on Kyle's phone (MM-A920). The install was easy, I connected it to EnGraph's mail server in less than a minute. The interface is simple and you can even enable SMS alerts when you get a new message. Technorati tags: Sprint, Mobile Email, Kyle Archer...
I've been chin deep in confusion the last week getting EnGraph to be official Certified Partners and installing Team Foundation Server. Luckily for me, there is a lot of good information online so I thought I would post a mini-guide: DO ask lots of questions to your Microsoft rep about becoming certified DON'T freak out when the partner's site opens 15 new Internet Explorer windows DO follow the competencies instructions as close as possible DO worry when you don't hear back from Microsoft after...
Dave Donaldson, who gave a great presentation at HDC, talks about working with TFS and changing the reporting interval from the default time of 3600 seconds. Technorati tags: TFS, Dave Donaldson...
The GIS folks at Kansas University have put the slide decks from GIS Day 2006 online. Hopefully they will have the videos posted soon. My slide deck (in pdf) is here. Here is my wrapup post for the day. Technorati tags: GIS Day, Kansas University...
The roads are disgusting today, so I am working from home. It's nice to get laundry done and have Cold Pizza on in the background, but I miss my monitors. I've been with EnGraph for 3.5 years now. The last nine months we've had an office. For a year, we worked out of Kyle's basement, and the rest of the time, I was working from home. I love having an actual office. Mostly because it provides a needed separation between personal and professional life. I found that I had a hard time shutting down when...
Actually, it's raining ice :) But it's better than nothing. I miss Minnesota where we had real snow all winter and it actually stuck. Here in Kansas, we get a little bit of snow and then it is gone tomorrow. Note the fantastic GeeksWithBlogs.net sticker on the Saturn. Technorati tags: snow, sleet, Lawrence Kansas, GeeksWithBlogs, Saturn...
Yesterday, Phog Blog (a blog dedicated to Kansas University sports) posted Dartmouth: Bad At Basketball talking about how statistically awful Dartmouth is. The main blogger there posted a comment predicting a 90 - 37 victory. He wasn't far off, the final score was 83 - 32. Interestingly enough, Florida (who was #1 and was beaten by Kansas on Saturday) also crushed their opponent yesterday by a score of 83 - 27. After the fantastic matchup last Saturday, I get the feeling that KU will be compared...
It is so much easier to create, raise and handle events in VB.net than C#. In VB, it is simple: Public Event MyEvent()RaiseEvent MyEvent()Private Sub MyEventHandler() Handles MyObject.MyEvent In C#, I have delegates and protected voids all over the place! Thankfully, VS takes care of the code creation for handling the events, otherwise I would pull my hair out trying to match method signatures. I'm sure there is a good reason for making this so difficult. I know that it is possible to fire events...
A couple French websites talked about Where's Tim today. After translating them to English, I was a bit surprised to read the negative/paranoid connotation of the comments. Maybe the intent was lost in translation, but one guy mentioned radio controlled missiles and burglary. Translations here, here and here to see comments. I have not been to France or hung out with anyone that has spent an extended time in France. That being said, I wonder if something about the French culture or government spawns...
I decided at HDC 2006 that it was time to make the switch from VB.net to C#. Not because it is better, but because all the presentations I go to are in C#. I hate having to convert languages in my head and since I give presentations every now and then, it's not fair to my audience to make them convert in their head. I've come to my first road block in migrating to C#. I really like the My. namespace that VB provides and C# doesn't have anything like it. I need to access the My.Computer.Network.IsAvail...
As an update to this post, this is how you enable Access 2007 to work with your Access applications that require extended security. 1) Open "Customize Quick Access Toolbar" menu to the right of the office button2) Select "More Commands"3) Click "Trust Center" menu button on sidebar4) Click "Trust Center Settings" button on main pane5) Click "Macro Settings" menu button on sidebar6) Select "Enable all macros"7) Click "OK" to close Trust Center8) Click "OK" to close Access Options Technorati tags:...
I'm working on an article for a special personal tracking issue of a magazine. It's due next Monday and I would like some other people to look it over before I submit it. If you have some spare time this Thanksgiving weekend, send me an email and I'll send you a copy to proofread. Warning, it's mostly about Where's Tim and Social Geocoding, so if you're tired of reading about that on this blog, you're probably not going to want to read this :) Technorati tags: Writing, Where's Tim, Social Geocoding...
All the audio and video clips on LJWorld.com and KUSports.com are in quicktime format. To Jeff Croft, Matt Croydon and all the other developers over there, please give us another format. Haven't you read that people hate quicktime? Their office is four blocks from EnGraph headquarters. Maybe I'll bribe the development team with a free lunch. Pepperjax for the LJWorld geeks if you let me watch Julian Wright clips in a format other than quicktime. Technorati tags: Lawrence Journal World, Lawrence Kansas,...
When you send me a text message on Where's Tim, I just send an email to my cell phone at myphonenumber@messaging.spr... Turns out that Sprint didn't like that and block messages that came from my mail server. So I switched it to send through a different server. I wonder why they cared? I guess they saw a lot of traffic coming from the same SMTP server and assumed it was spam. [Update here] Technorati tags: Where's Tim, Sprint, SMS...
Matt Dunbar & Co. did a fantastic job putting together GIS day at Kansas University. My favorite part of the day was judging the student competition. Seven students gave ten minute presentations on unique uses of GIS. They showed everything from a geographic boundary of where grits are consumed (apparently South Carolina is the capital of all that is grits) to a traffic analysis of SW Douglas Country in Kansas. The winner was Lincoln Lewis. He showed how to make GIS data pretty using a suite...
The people putting on GIS Day at Kansas University tomorrow built a Google Maps mashup showing where are the presenters and attendees are located. That's a lot of people. I hope they like listening to a .NET geek ramble on about GPS :) They are going to video record each session, so if you don't get a chance to make it (Kyle), you'll still be able to join in on the fun. They will also be posting the slide deck from each session. Technorati tags: GIS Day, Google Maps, Kansas University, GPS...
You heard it here first. Social Geocoding is a social network with a layer of location awareness. A million little Where's Tim's running around interacting with each other with "friends list" based permissions. NavXS, Dodgeball and Loopt are all examples. Come listen to my talk at KU tomorrow if you want to learn more. Technorati tags: Where's Tim, Social Geocoding, Social Networks, NavXS, Dodgeball, Loopt, Kansas University, GIS Day...
I'm driving to Jonesboro, AR today to install ParaPlan for our newest client, EAAAA. I'll be driving through Clinton, MO. You might remember that we stopped there on our SC Code Camp trip. It's also Jeff Julian's hometown. Watch me here. Technorati tags: Where's Tim, EnGraph, South Carolina CodeCamp, Jonesboro, Clinton, Jeff Julian...
My sister, who I saw a couple weeks ago, has been invited to be a blogger on Lame Duck Hunt, a political blog ran by very smart people. So smart in fact that they decided they needed the expert environmental whisleblower enabler that is my sister. Go Carrie! Her first post is here. She works for an agency in Washington DC called PEER that protects government employees who report irresponsible environmental behavior by the entity that employs them. They work with the employees so that "agencies must...
Tim from GPS Review revisits the idea of submitting a GPS tracklog to your insurance company to prove you are a good driver in exchange for better rates. This particular program is in the UK called "Pay as you Drive". David Starr talked about a similar program in Canada a couple months ago. I still think this is a good idea. In order for GPS to be profitable in the consumer market, the end person being tracked must be in full control. In both of these cases, participation is voluntary and the consumer...
Sorry Dave, but your signature was the only way to describe my new office monitor setup: Technorati tags: Excessive...
According to the RSS specification, the pubDate element (when the item was published) must be formatted like this : Mon, 28 May 1979 19:45:32 GMT I've posted an article with C# / VB.NET functions that will accept a DateTime object and return a string properly formatted to meet the pubDate specification. Technorati tags: RSS, pubDate, Code, .NET...
Kansas University (right here in Lawrence, KS) puts on a Geographic Information Systems day every year. A couple months ago, Matt Dunbar contacted me and asked if I would speak about personal tracking. My talk is titled "Big Brother is on MySpace. How GPS will change our everyday lives (in a good way)" After some shameless promotion of Where's Tim and EnGraph, I plan to talk about how real time GPS can add a new dimension to social networking sites like MySpace. I also plan to talk about enhancing...
Heartland Developers Conference 2006 in Omaha was a huge success! Joe Olson, Phil Wolfe and everybody else involved did a great job getting everything put together. Day 1: Joe Stagner did the opening keynote on Federated Logic. Basically using data sources that live anywhere on the internet with ASMX web services. He even talked a little bit about GPS and web based mapping solutions. Something that is near and dear to my heart. Next, I went to Dave Donaldson's talk on Power Programming with Attributes....
Joab Jackson published an article in National Geographic that give a very basic introduction of GeoRSS and a couple examples of it's use. One of the examples was Where's Tim!! GeoRSS is a way to add geographic information to an RSS feed. Most generically, it is used to add a latitude / longitude point to an item. To add GeoRSS to your existing feed, add the namespace to your rss element like this: rss version="2.0" xmlns:georss="http://www.ge... xmlns:gml="http://www.openg...
David, Steve and everybody else involved did a great job in putting this event together and keeping the chaos at an organized level!! My talk on AJAXPro went really well. 25 or so people showed up and everybody seemed to understand the power of AJAXPro and several of them told me afterwards that they had projects that could use this technology right now. I've talked before about why AJAXPro is better than XMLHttpRequest. It also had advantages over ATLAS (Microsoft's AJAX library) in that AJAXPro...
Kyle and I are at the airport getting ready to head to Salem. Tulsa TechFest 2006 was awesome. Lots of attendees and great sessions. They did a great job keeping everything organized. And to Chris Williams, my laptop acted up when I plugged into their projector too, so it had nothing to do with your projector, my laptop is just possesed. More details about TechFest later, I met some very interesting people. I've never actually gotten a GPS reading at takeoff or landing, but I'll keep trying. Technorati...
This weekend, I'm heading to the Tulsa TechFest 2006 to give my AJAXPro talk. Sunday, Kyle and I are going to Salem, New Jersy to see one of our clients. The Heartland Developers Conference is coming up the week after that. I'm speaking at the Kansas University GIS day in November. I will be speaking in the same session as Dr. Jerome Dobson. I've heard that he is not a big fan of GPS, so that should be interesting. My talk is called "Big Brother is on MySpace. How GPS will change our everyday lives...
Google announced that you can now view Google Homepage Gadgets on any website. Earlier this year, we released a gadget that is basically a mini Where's Tim. You can still add this gadget to your Google Homepage. But now, thanks to Google, you can also now view this gadget on any website. I have placed it on my blog, just under the GWB ads. The gadget works just like Where's Tim. It updates automatically every 15 seconds, and the icon turns green when I am moving and red when I am stationary...
Since Kyle and Carl are out of town, I figured I may as well sneak off to the golf course and play a round while it's still nice. I went with my buddy Bryan and shot the best round of my life. I'm normally a mid 90's golfer, but today, everything just worked and I walked away with an 83!! I was driving my tee shots over 300 yards, my wedge was accurate, and I actually made putts! It was a great feeling and I probably won't shoot that well for a long time, so for the moment, here's to me...
I was looking at Sami's Where's Tim, and noticed he was at the Stockholm airport. Now, I don't know this for a fact, but I think he gets GPS data when he is actually on the plane. I've seen speeds upto 325 kph in his location RSS feed. That's over 200 mph. I'm going to keep my eye on him today. He was in Paris a couple weeks ago. It was right around the time that I added flickr support. It was so cool to see the satellite images of where he was and pictures that other people had taken of where he...
I've posted an article that shows how to create an Google Earth KML file by writing to the response stream. The code is for this page: http://timhibbard.com/demo/... That page creates a KML file that show Memorial Stadium in Google Earth. The code also shows how to use query strings to create a KML file for any location like this page: http://www.timhibbard.com/d... Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City. Read the article...
The following code shows the guts of an ASPX page that will return a KML file that will load in Google Earth. We use an XmlTextWriter to write an XML file to the response stream. We set the ContentType = "application/vnd.google-ear... so it will automatically open in Google Earth if the user has it installed. The page accepts 3 query strings.lat - latitude of geographic pointlon - longitude of geographic pointicon - url of icon that will plot the point If query strings are not provided,...
On recommendation from Jeff, I'm trying out NewsGator. After 12 hours of use, this is what I think: Love the mobile app. The interface is pretty and smart. It marks my items read on the server side, so I don't read posts twice. It also allows me to "clip" a feed, so that I can look at it later from the computer. The app is a bit buggy though and often just exits. The NewsGator Online is ok. Nothing special except that I can see how many people subscribe to a particular feed. It's a little slow, but...
Geo-Names has released a utility that will scan an RSS feed for geographical content and spit out a GeoRSS feed. So you can grab the RSS feed for this blog and convert it to GeoRSS. Since Where's Tim understands GeoRSS, you can view the geographical data of my feed in relation to my current location here. You can also use the same utility to spit out KML and view the data in Google Earth...
I added new functionality to the FeedMap wrapper service that generates GeoRSS. You can now use the query string url= to get blogs around a specific blog. So for example if you wanted to see the blogs around my blog, use this url: http://timhibbard.com/where... You can then view that data on a more visually stimulating platform, like Where's Tim. Here's the 10 feeds closest to Jeff: http://www.timhibbard.com/w...
This code shows how to use an ASPX page to render RSS with embedded GeoRSS tags. It calls from the FeedMap service. I talk more about the functionality in this blog post. Imports System.Xml Partial Class FeedMap Inherits System.Web.UI.Page Dim place As String = "" Dim lat As Double = 0 Dim lon As Double = 0 Dim count As Integer = 50 Dim rssUrl As String = "" Protected Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Load Try place = Request.QueryString("place") Catch...
GeoRSS is an extension of RSS that allows for geographic information to be associated with a blog post, an event, a gps location, a photograph or any other information where geographic information would help better describe the item. Several websites are recognizing the value of GeoRSS and are adding these extensions to their feeds. Most recently, Wordpress is using GeoRSS to add maps to their posts. One of the things that Jeff and I talked about on our roadtrip is adding GeoRSS tags to ESS. ESS,...
We are hanging out at Chris Williams's coffee / game / wifi shop, Reality Check here in Greenville. Jeff, John and I are doing some last minute polishing up of our talks for tomorrow's CodeCamp. Dru and Joseph are getting ready to do a podcast with Chris. The Where's Tim / PodcastStudio.net mashup has been quite a success!! The guy that traded a red paper clip for a house sent me an email talking about how he liked the technology and wants to use GPS on his future adventures. Very cool!! I also did...
As I talked about earlier, we've add geocoded pictures from flickr to Where's Tim. With a flickr=true query string, you can see pictures taken in the area of my real time location. We've added a little UI under the map that will allow images to be turned on or off and also the ability to only map pictures that match a tag. Tag support is also supported by query string (flickrtags=), and the following url will map flickr pictures taken close to my location with the tag ppc6700: http://www.timhibbard.com/w...
In addition to passing a date as a query string to get history on Where's Tim, you can also pass the values "today" and "yesterday" to get the history for those days. http://timhibbard.com/where... http://timhibbard.com/where
The FileSystemWatcher is very useful when you need to be notified of changes made to a specific folder. You can raise an event when a new file is created, or deleted and you can also filter by file type and choose if you wish to monitor sub directories. The only problem with the object comes with large file transfers. The created event is raised as soon as the file transfer begins to your watched folder, not when the file has finished transferring. So if you need to move a file or pull data out a...
Today, Flickr released geocoding for photos on a Yahoo map. Hopefully, they will add GeoRSS tags to their RSS feeds so I can easily overlay pictures on Where's Tim (like I talked about earlier). As a side note. Jeff Croft and Matt Croydon have already geocoded their pictures, so Lawrence has way more geocoded pictures than any other city around. It shows that this little town has geek power :) Via TechCrunch...
Look at how happy Kyle looks :) This means that David's laptop (January 06) is the oldest workstation at EnGraph. It's great to work for a company that understands how to properly equip their employees...
A fellow Lawrence developer, Dru Sellers, is going to be talking about software patterns tonight at the Kansas City .NET meeting. Dru came to the office yesterday and gave me a dry run of his presentation. It was very informative. Check it out tonight at 6:00 PM at 8700 State Line...
Jeff, John, Joseph and I are all driving down to Chris William's Code Camp in South Carolina next month. Jeff and I were talking about the trip this morning. We are leaving Thursday (Sept 14) afternoon, which I'm glad because nothing is better than Nashville, TN at midnight :) We are trying to think of some ways to make the trip interesting for the GWB faithful. One idea was to take pictures and post them to flickr and create a feed that Where's Tim can understand so you can see our pictures along...
EnGraph was nice enough to get me a framed dollar bill for my first sale of Where's Tim!! Thanks guys
DG left a comment on this post asking how to use Response.Redirect with a KML file.It's simple. Just add a MIME type on your web server for Google Earth like this: application/earthviewer .kml
The "get directions to Tim" on Where's Tim wasn't working quite right after I added the AJAXPro caching. That's fixed Sami has been driving all over Finland recently. Right now he is on the border of Finland and Sweden. You can watch him here. I've been able to do a lot of coding this last week. I added a bunch more functionality to our application updating framework that David will be using in his applications. Hey David, start blogging...
The other day, I blogged about talking with Terry Rombeck from the Lawrence Journal World. He wrote a good article about using tracking teens and if GPS is an appropriate tool for that. The article is in today's paper and online here. Digg it
Kyle says I need to stop complaining, but it's freakin hot in here. Apparently the AC is not working on our side of the building. Normally, I would just take my tagged laptop and go work from home, but I'm homeless :) I'm working with a potential client for a Where's Tim that will show a whole new market for real time GPS. It's going to be neat...stay tuned...
It's the end of July in Lawrence, and that means moving time. All you see is trucks packed as tightly as possible up and down Tennessee and Kentucky street. Every year I've been lucky enough that I've never had a lapse in residence. Usually I was able to move into the new place early. This year, the house that Matt, Evan and I share kicked us out today at noon and the new place we are moving into will not let us move in until tomorrow morning at 8:45. It's kinda crap that Swan Management wouldn't...
Dru came up the other day and we looking at implementing caching into Where's Tim. Turns out, the AJAXPro library that I use already contains caching capabilities. So take an AJAX function like this: <AjaxPro.AjaxMethod()> _ Public Function GetYahooTraffic(ByVal xmlAddress As String) As Traffic() and then add a AjaxServerCache attribute to the function. The "300" is the number of seconds that the data should be cached. Like this: <AjaxPro.AjaxMethod(), AjaxPro.AjaxServerCache(300... _...
Clint Batman from ThinkGeo was nice enough to let me use their geocoding engine on Where's Tim. Their engine supports regular geocoding (enter an address and get latitude / longitude) and reverse geocoding (enter lat/long and get address). The API is easy to consume (3 functions) and the results are intuitive. So now when you are viewing Clint's real time location on Where's Tim , the extra stuff like city information, weather and Yahoo traffic will work...
Dru Sellers is coming up to Lawrence today and Kyle and I are taking him to Pepperjax. After that, Dru is going to help me out with implementing some caching into Where's Tim. Hopefully that will help with the next Digg effect...
Carl Kurt, president of EnGraph now maps his real time location on Where's Tim using a real time GPS phone. He also has an RSS feed for his location, and a Google Homepage widget.Now we have three people being tracked in Lawrence (Carl, Clint and myself). To watch us all at once, go to Where's Tim, select "All Available" from the "Select person to track" combo box and push "Track" click here...
I've never been a big fan of Garmin. Mostly because when we started working with GPS a couple years ago, they snubbed Kyle and I when we tried to set up a meeting to see if there was anything we could do to help each other. They told us, "We don't work with other companies". I'm starting to become a fan though. I really like that they blog on a regular basis. Jeff likes his Nuvi and David likes his Edge. Like I talked about yesterday, their mobile product is good for the GPS market. What really won...
Mike Pegg blogs that the video from the Google Geo Developer day is now online. This was the one where I shipped him a phone so he could be tracked on Where's Tim. You can see where he talks about Where's Tim at about the 1:47 mark...
311 has been my favorite band for about 13 years. I heard "Down" on the radio and just fell in love. Their music has changed a lot over the years, but their lyrics have always had a positive message. "Do what is right, don't be a jerk, don't pay attention to jerks". Growing up, I turned to music as most kids do to help find their identity and 311 was there to influence me in the right directions. My best 311 experience was 311 day (March 11) in 2002 in New Orleans. They played for almost 4 hours....
Clint Batman from ThinkGeo (a GPS company in Lawrence) is now showing his real time location on Where's Tim His url is http://timhibbard.com/where... His location is also available via RSS...
Tomorrow afternoon, Kyle Archer and Allie Stuckey are getting married. It's been pretty cool to watch their relationship grow over the years and someday they will have short kids! Kyle's such a dork...he built an entire website for the wedding....and if you want to see a great picture of me, scroll to the bottom of this page...
I blogged a couple weeks ago about how Google Maps announced support of KML (location information file for Google Earth), and that the KML files that Where's Tim generates where not loading correctly. Well, sometime between now and then Google fixed the bug and now you can see my current location that was meant to be viewed in Google Earth on Google Maps!! Ok, it's not that cool for Where's Tim since it already lives in Google Maps, but it has potential for other applications. The query string in...
I am having lunch today with Clint Batman from ThinkGeo, another GPS company out of Lawrence. They have some additional hardware that might be useful for us and maybe we do some things on Where's Tim that he might find beneficial to his products. Plus the sweet salsa at La Familia can't be beat...
Jeff and John were nice enough to give me a tour of the GeeksWithBlogs headquarters yesterday in Lee's Summit. They also treated me to my favorite food, Culvers!! They went over Team Foundation Server and I am really excited to start using that. We need to finish the last step of our certification before we get to start playing with it. Jeff also tagged my top: and pimped my saturn: Thanks guys...
I'm heading up to Kansas City this morning to meet with Jeff and John. They are going to show me Team Foundation Server. I need to decide if we are going to switch to TFS or stick with Vault before I can start using what I learned from Raymond Lewallan on continuous integration. Watch me on Where's Tim. Or if you feel like using a super beta MapPoint ClickOnce app, try this one...
In my last post, I talked about wanting to add GeoRSS tags to the RSS feed of the text messages people send me on Where's Tim. The first thing I need is to find out the users location based on their IP. So I wrote a class that communicates with the hostip.info API to generate a object that contains location data based on that ip. The article with the code is here: http://geekswithblogs.net/t...
Like Lance talked about yesterday, I added GeoRSS tags to my Where's Tim Location feed. Essentially, all I needed to do was reference the GeoRSS namespaces: xmlns:georss="http://www.ge... xmlns:gml="http://www.openg... and add the georss:point tag By adding that one little tag, I was then able to drop that RSS feed on top of mapufacture and get this. And Lance was able to mashup the RSS feed using RSSBus with a Yahoo local search and find the closest pizza place to me, and also...
Last night, I attended the Lawrence Technology Association mixer at Netopia here in Lawrence. Ends up that Netopia does a lot more than the broadband services that I blogged about yesterday. I ended up chatting with Sam Snyder and Jesse Stanely, two QA guys and they gave me a couple of live demos of their products. One was Timbukto, a remote desktop application that works on Mac and PC. The other one was an end to end solution for tech support. It's called eCare and it rocks! A client submits a ticket...
I added the Where's Tim API + Google Maps demo code to the article about showing the code from my AJAX.net talk. http://geekswithblogs.net/t
I'm off to the LTA meeting at Netopia (a local broadband and wireless provider). Hopefully it will be as interesting as the May Mixer
Too many Google Maps mashups force the user to enter a zip code, or select a state before displaying the data to the user. This interrupts the user experience and takes away the "browsing" capabilities that Google Maps offers. This article shows how load data from XML using the Google Maps AJAX helper when the user moves the map and display only the points that are in the viewing range of the user. http://geekswithblogs.net/t...
2 years ago I meet Jeff Julian at DevEssentials in Kansas City and he set me up with this blog. My first post here. Thanks to all the GWB members for making this a great community
I'm down here in Wichita for the WichitaDevelopers.net Code Camp. I left Lawrence around 5:45 AM and got here just in time. Raymond Lewallen started out with a talk about smarter ASP session and cache use. I can't wait to incorporate that into Where's Tim. Next I talked about using the AJAX.net library. It was the same talk I gave at the Kansas City .net user group last week and I think I did better. Even though Jeff wasn't there to explain some of the "under the hood" stuff, I was able to give a...
I posted a comment on Raymond Lewallen's blog saying that I was looking forward to his talks at the WichitaDevelopers .net Code Camp this weekend...long story short, I'm giving a talk on AJAX.net, come check it out if you are in the area. I'm going to have lots of practice for Chris's SC Code Camp...
Jeff Julian and John Alexander were nice enough to let me speak about the AJAX.net library last night at the Kansas City .net User Group meeting. I've never spoken in front of that many people before, and it was quite an experience. I didn't do a very good job going over the concept or the history of AJAX, but Jeff was there to bail me out. Thanks Jeff!! I really appreciate the feedback that people left me and I look forward to giving this talk again at the South Carolina Code Camp. I have a new...
Clint Batman from ThinkGeo gave a great demo of his GPS software at the May Mixer at the Lawrence Regional Technology Center last night. They have a web based tracking system built in .NET similar to Where's Tim. They have some features that we don't, and they have a few things that they do better than us. We also have some features that they don't, like RSS feeds, mobile version, ASMX interface to our data, and WeatherBug integration. Hey Clint, give me a call sometime and we can sit down and see...
TechSmith, makers of Camtasia gets my "2nd best company of the day" award for posting comments to Kyle Archer's post and my post about Camtasia. It's great to see companies keep bloggers on their radar. In case you were wondering, the "Best company of the day" award goes to (again) EnGraph Software...
Kyle Archer has been blogging up a storm. 3 posts in 2 days...Go Kyle! He doesn't really hate Depeche Mode, but he was disappointed in their stage walk off the other night (so was Doug Butscher). He also found a cool product called Camtasia Studio that is going to allow us to quickly publish our PowerPoint presentations to the web. [EnGraph] [Kyle Archer]...
Jeff gave a good talk last night at the Kansas City .NET User group about the Provider Model. Material available here. It's something EnGraph could benefit from, but probably not something we are going to do right away. I need to get a better handle on generics first, that would make our products better. Jeff also set up a Google Group for the user group...check it out...
A year ago we were working in Kyle's basement, now look at us. We even have an official nameplate at our new office!! [EnGraph]
Like I talked about yesterday, We are building a real time GPS web solution for Smiths Detection. The pieces are starting to come together, but the GPS data still points to my current location since their Cloudberry account is not completely set up. The web site is at maps.livewave.net, check it out and watch for more changes this weekend. [EnGraph] [Where's Tim] [GPS] [AVL] [Google Maps]...
Google has an API for their personalized homepage, and of course it is really easy to consume. It is an XML file with a place for HTML / Javascript. I created a striped down version of Where's Tim using their API. To install this module on your homepage, click here. Google provided a method for asynchronously downloading data, _IG_FetchContent (which I talked about the other day). To consume this method, you provide the datasource and the function you wish to call after the data is downloaded: function...
Jeff had a good idea. Start a Google Group for developers in the Kansas City / Lawrence / Topeka area. This will help us carry on the conversations we start at the monthly KC UG meetings as well as provide a place where you can ask programming questions where you know the persons face. I think it is a good idea. Jeff talks more about it on his blog. [Kansas City] [Lawrence] [Topeka]...
Well, like I said yesterday, I was pretty nervous for my interview with Good Morning Kansas on ABC 49 in Topeka. Kyle was nice enough to go along and we got there around 5:45 AM. Heidi greeted us at the door and said that she had been watching on Where's Tim and already knew I was here!! We went over some basic stuff about the site and she explained that I would be going into the studio around 6:00 and get familiar with the set and the anchors. We went in the studio and she introduced me to Blake...
KTKA 49 is interviewing me tomorrow for the Good Morning Kansas show. They found Where's Tim a couple weeks ago and talked about it here (warning, uses quicktime, fix here), and they want to do a follow up interview. So if anybody in the Topeka / Lawrence area wants to check it out, it is supposed to be on around 6:15 AM (Sunflower cable channel 12) or so. I was pretty nervous for the podcaststudio.net interview, and I am REALLY nervous for this thing. I've never been on TV, and it's live, yeah...I'm...
One of our servers went down today. It's been on its way out for a while and today it just would not boot up. It keep blue screening at startup. I tried Knoppix like Jeff talked about earlier, but that didn't work for me. So I stuck the hard drive in my other desktop and after many bad sectors in scan disk, the computer booted up. When I tried to open the drive in explorer, it would say "F:\ is not accessible. Error performing inpage operation". So I called Alex over at One Stop Technology Solutions...
I wrote an article that has the code we use to update our ClickOnce applications. The class encapsulates the main functionality of the Application.ApplicationDepl... class and works asynchronously. It can be called with one line of code: Dim updateCO As New UpdateClickOnce("EnGraph Manager", True, True)...
I read two aggregated sites. .NET developers and Geekswithblogs. Every morning, I open up my RSSBandit and in each feed is usually 30 - 50 new posts. That's too much for my attention span and often I just skim through the titles until something catches my eye. So I have deleted the aggregated feeds and imported the OPML file and that way, I'll be able to trim out the duplicates, the non-English, and the boring ones. And I won't have to look at that daunting 50 unread posts number. Except the OPML...
Darren posted a comment to my SignFile error post: I just got the same error, but found a fix pretty quickly. Like you, it was on a rebuilt / different PC from where the original app was published, and I found it's due to the certificate signing the ClickOnce manifest. Go to properties on the project, and to the Signing tab. You've probably got 'Sign the ClickOnce manifests' selected. Click 'Select from Store...', and select a certificate from the current PC. If there are no certificates available,...
We added two new rss feeds for Where's Tim -The text messages people send me - More info -The "Get directions to Tim" requests - More info Eventually, we will also put this data on the site, but for now we have temp pages for the text messaging and directions. We still have the news feed, my location feed and cool people that linked here feed. We will always keep our Where's Tim rss page up to date with new rss information...
Garmin has started blogging. They even welcome feedback in the first post. Here is my first feedback for Garmin. Check your routing routine on Garmin Mobile, you ran me on almost a mile of gravel road on a trip from Lawrence, KS to Pella, IA. Don't get me wrong...it's a pretty good app, as I talked about earlier. It just needs a bit of work yet. Also, set up an ASMX or REST api so that developers with the correct authentication could access a person's GPS data...
I am still getting a "SignFile" task error when trying publish a ClickOnce application like I talked about before. Several people have googled "SignFile task error" and "CertificateThumbprint" and have found my previous post. Has anybody solved this yet? I have looked through the manifests and haven't seen anything that resembles this. Note that the application builds, it just will not publish...
Jeff and John are talking about Generics tonight (6:00 PM) at the Kansas City .NET User Group. I'm excited, I need to learn more about this. Map to location
On Where's Tim, you can now see where I was on a specific date. Entering a date in this box: will get you this: Clear History = Removes the history overlay Export History to XML = Generates an XML document with the lat/long data Disable Auto Update = Temporarily disables the Auto Update feature so you can move the map around and browse my previous locations without the map recentering itself Note that the history function doesn't work that great in Firefox. And that getting dates with a lot of data...
I talked earlier about integrating WeatherBug data into Where's Tim. Chris Sloop has been a lot of help and was even nice enough to include Where's Tim on the WeatherBug's API example page. He requested that I share some code, so here it is:Basically, to consume WeatherBug's API, I:1) Make a call to the Where's Tim webservice2) Parse the zipcode out of the .Place property of the GPSData structure3) Pass the zipcode into a function that builds the REST url4) Load the url into a System.Data.DataSet...
Minh T. Nguyen has a site that is "an aggregated blog of non-Microsoft .NET developers". I subscribed to their feed yesterday and have seen good content come from there. I also saw that Jeff Julian was aggregated there. Any other GWB members there
Chelsea and I had a good trip to South Carolina. Chris Williams was nice enough to invite us to take a tour of his company, Blackbaud, but we just didn't have time, thanks anyways Chris
In the PodcastStudio.net session the other night, I told Jeff and John that I have never had problems with Google Maps, or any Google API. Well, I think I might have found something. I was redesigning the layout for Where's Tim, because, well, I'm an awful UI designer. And I was putting everything into a 2x4 table and I set the left column width at 25% and the right column width at 74%. The upper right hand cell contains the div tag that eventually becomes the Google Map and I set the width of that...
I had a great time talking with Jeff and John the other night. As I listened to the podcast, I noticed a few things that I should clarify. Lat/Long = Latitude & Longitude, and x and y way of locating a geographic point on a map. For example, the Lat/Long of Allen Fieldhouse in Lawrence, KS is -95.25438, 38.954069. We used the AJAX.net library by Michael Schwarz. It is very easy to use and had wanted to talk more about it, but we ran out of time. All you do is modify your web.config, register your...
I just finished talking with Jeff and John from PodcastStudio.net. We had a great talk about Where's Tim, GPS technology moving forward, consumer adaptation, the negative misconceptions of GPS, how the web is opening up with API's and web services, and good old fashioned geek stuff in general. Jeff talked a little about it earlier. He might have it up tonight, so make sure to subscribe to their feed. Technorati Tags: Google Maps, Where's Tim, ASMX, AJAX, Podcast...
Last week, Scoble asked if we would port Where's Tim over to Windows Local Live. This morning, Chandu Thota (MapPoint all-star) sent me an email letting me know to contact him if I need any help working with WLL. Hey Chandu, I also have a ClickOnce version of Where's Tim in the works using MapPoint that I will probably need some help/guidance on too.I'm excited to work with their new API...I need to work on sending vehicle manifests and receiving messages from vehicles for Sean before I go on vacation...
Chelsea and I got a new puppy Christmas Eve...Joey Allen. More pics here
Kyle thinks I should try Feedblitz (RSS to email). There are a few feeds that I would like to know right away when something is published. I usually have RSSBandit running, but I set up a few feeds anyway: Kyle Archer Jon Box Jeff Julian Ryan Gregg Google Blog Search: "tim hibbard" It's not as "on-demand" as I wish (updates only once a day), and even if you get the paid subscription, it only updates every 4 hours...not fast enough. I'll give it a try for a bit though...
Kyle talks about the EnGraph Christmas party
Pictures of the t-shirts that Kyle made for the EnGraph christmas party. Good stuff. Thanks, Kyle...
Based on a request from one of my .NET heros, Jon Box, we put together an article about Where's Tim, the technologies that we used to create it, the various functions, some source code and the future of GPS. The article is here. Technorati Tags: GPS, Where'sTim, AVL, Google Maps...
The messaging and get directions to Tim on Where's Tim now works properly on Safari thanks to some javascript changes I made here and here
According to Blogflux mapstats, here is my browser breakdown: This blog:Internet Explorer = 73%FireFox = 20% Where's Tim:Internet Explorer = 44%FireFox = 34%Safari = 6% Interesting how much lower IE's share is on Where's Tim
The messaging feature of Where's Tim was not working in FireFox and Safari. I changed my javascript code from: var msg = document.getElementById(... frm = document.getElementById(... To: var msg = document.getElementById(... frm = document.getElementById(... That seemed to be the fix for Firefox. I admire you web developers, this...
The get directions to Tim feature on Where's Tim wasn't working quite right in Firefox and Safari. I changed my javascript code from: Window.Navigate(url); To: Window.Location=url; And that fixed it in Firefox, I haven't had a chance to test on Safari yet...
New! Check out the new ClickOnce Where's Tim Tasktray alerter! http://timhibbard.com/where... When I tell people that I keep a GPS enabled Nextel phone in my car and anybody, at anytime can see my current position, they always ask, “Well, aren’t you worried about that?” I always say, “No, one day everybody will use their current location to assist them in their everyday lives.” While most people aren’t as comfortable with this level of transparency, I believe the social and business benefits of...
I got great roommates, Matt and Ev, so I wouldn't do any of these, but they are hilarious: 10) Collect potatoes. Paint faces on them and give them names. Name one after your roommate. Separate your roommate's potato from the others. Wait a few days, and then bake your roommate's potato and eat it. Explain to your roommate, "He just didn't belong." 9) Move everything to one side of the room. Ask your roommate if he knows how much an elephant weighs, and look at the floor on the empty side of the room...
Kyle's response to the new Get Directions to Tim feature: cool, but not enough. He wants to be able to enter an address and have it generate a route. That makes sense. A business AVL application would use addresses rather than lat/long. I'll see what I can do. I'm starting to run out of screen space on Where's Tim, I wish I was a better UI designer...ugh. I've always wanted to learn how to do those "virtual" windows that appear on a webpage. You know, like those annoying ads and request for surveys,...
Kyle asked for it, so now on Where's Tim, you can get directions, and distance from anywhere to my current location. Push the "Get Directions to Tim" button, a dialog box will instruct you to select a location on the map, you click on the map where you currently are (you can still drag and zoom the map), and using AJAX, it will generate a Google map with driving directions and mileage from where you selected to my current location. Like I was talking about before, we want Where's Tim to resemble...
Using Yahoo's REST Map Image API, and EnGraph GPS components, I was able to create Where's Tim Mobile. I've only tested it on my new Samsung A-940, please let me know how it looks on different devices.http://www.timhibba... Technorati Tags: REST, GPS, AVL, EnGraph, Where's Tim, Mobile Development...
So Kyle and I were talking about Where's Tim, and we decided we need to make it more of a replication of a business Automatic Vehicle Locating (AVL) solution. So when we are talking to potential clients about what EnGraph can provide them, we use this page as an example. One of the things that every AVL product needs is messaging. So we added a feature where you can click the icon and in the info window is a place to enter your return address and message. Using AJAX, the message is sent to my cell...
Is there a geekswithblogs blogger that hasn't talked about the VS 2005 release yet? :) It's cool to see so much excitement. Let's build some killer apps...
One of the guys from WhatIsMyIp found my blog from their webstats page. I guess this post that I wrote about them is sending enough traffic their way to get some attention. Maybe they will start resolving host names to IP addresses on that cool Google map and get me to dump Geobytes
We made it to San Angelo and back (no thanks to Continental Airlines...never flying them again!). Kyle talks about it here. I'm looking forward to Jeff Julian's talk Tuesday night about XML Serialization at KC.net user group...If you're in the Kansas City - Lawrence - Topeka area, make sure you come check it out...
dlrider left a comment to my post about Access 2003 security: I came across this page looking for this solution. Thanks. I know nothing about Runtime (and the MS site isn't clear to me) so I thought I'd ask the knowledgeable... If an application is put together as a runtime package, can a user with full Access open it as a normal .mdb and make changes? The simple answer is yes. The user accessing the .mdb via the runtime can view your Access application as if they were using the full version of Access...
My roommate Evan (you may remember him from here) took my Nextel this afternoon to go look at a new car, I was watching him on Where's Tim and I about died laughing when I saw him miss his turn, pull a quick maneuver and head in the right direction. Next week, Kyle and I are going down to San Angelo, Texas to deliver our EnGraph GPS solution. Sean is going to get a kick out of watching his 30+ vehicles drive around western Texas. Their region covers over 16,000 square miles. Our ParaPlan software...
Mike Pegg and Lance Robinson report that WhatIsMyIp.net is now using Google Maps to show an IP's location. It's nice visually, but it doesn't resolve host names to an IP address. Most of the IP addresses that I need to locate are in the host name format. It's not that hard to add the functionality, here's a free code sample. I'm going to stick with Geobytes...
Well's, One Stack Mind, and tayker all say the same thing, "I hate quicktime". Maybe you guys should check out quicktime killer. Technorati Tags: Quicktime
I got an email today from somebody that wants the source code for the "Fly to with Google Earth" function on Where's Tim. Essential, I created a base XML file, used an XMLNodeList to parse and change the base XML file, saved the base XML as a KML file, and used a Response.Redirect to launch the url with the KML file. Here is the base XML file that I used. Note that the file HAS to be saved with the .xml extension. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <kml xmlns="http://earth.go...
It's not exactly what I'm looking for, but it's getting closer. Via javascript you can view up to the last 25 cities from BlogFlux. You can then create a web site like this (which is acting funny right now...I think it choked on this city: 't Goy, Utrecht, Netherlands). AhmedF blogs about it here...
I don't know much about XML standards, so maybe Jeff can help me out with this. I think there should be a location based standard that RSS aggregators and future websites (like Where's Tim) can consume. There would only need to be a few items needed.- Title of location- latitude- longitude- Time stamp- Web linkPeople could syndicate their current location, companies could syndicate their store locations. Cell phone companies could have a standard data format for their location based services. As...
Hey Jeff and John, it looks like you guys are getting close to 10,000 posts. That's a great milestone for a great community!! We sure appreciate all the work you guys do
Where's Tim has been getting a lot of attention lately. And as I watched Matt drive around the other day, I realized there is something very interesting about seeing him move across the map. When it comes to business applications, knowledge is money. Our ParaPlan Pro application supports geocoding, which means we can transform a street address to a latitude and longitude. So for each of our client's trips, the software knows when that person was supposed to be picked up, and the exact lat/lon coordinates...
Ontario Empoblog alludes that there isn't many bloggers in Lawrence. Maybe they just have not found feedmap yet, but here is a list of Lawrence bloggers that I read:looking out the fishbowl (rss)Gimpysoft (rss) Matt Strausz (rss)Here in Katie's Head (rss)Adrian Holovaty (rss)I'm not the best at titles (rss)My Life as I tell it (rss)My Space and Junk (rss) - Lenexa, but close enough Nathaniel Haas (rss)Quinton Cheney (rss)The Snoop Zone (rss)Thoughts From Kansas (rss)Rob Reynolds (rss) - TopekaLet...
I really like the MapStats provided by BlogFlux. They provide a Google Map with the location of people that have hit my blog as well as referrals and pages visited. I'd like to see them open the data up a bit, they have been messing with RSS a bit, but it's not quite right yet. I'd rather have a web service where I could query the hits by a certain date range. That would be cool. Then I could overlay the data and see if the same people that hit my blog also hit Where's Tim and/or EnGraph. That's...
Here you go Jeff, since you like green so much, I made a couple buttons on BlogFlux. Geekswithblogs blogger: Kansas Geek:
Matt Strausz of Smart Start is finally blogging. We set up his company's website at discountASP.net (thanks to Jeff) and installed Community Server 1.1. Very easy installation. Matt's blog...rss...
I took the function that creates the .kml file for Where's Tim and wrapped it in a web service. Contact me for access. If you just want to test it, use “test“/“t... for username/password. Syntax: Dim WS As New KMLCreatorWebService.Mappin... InputStructure As New KMLCreator.KMLInfoInputStru... = “This is a test“InputStructure.D... = “Automatically generated“InputStruct... = 38.945InputStructure.Lon = -94.568InputStructure.UserName...
Inspired by what Rob did with geotagging Flickr, I built something similar with Where's Tim that I talked about yesterday. You can click the “Fly To With Google Earth” button and it will generate a .kml file that will open inside of Google Earth. It wasn't that hard to generate. I used a XmlDocument to load the core .kml file (I actually renamed the base.kml file to base.xml because XmlDocument will not load a file that doesn't end in .xml) I then use a XmlNodeList to find the specific...
It's not really a “buzz”, but Quicktime Killer is getting some people talking here, here and here.
I need to rebuild one of my machines soon, so I have compiled a list of applications that I can not forget to install: Snippet CompilerNUnitNDocDesktopSid... BanditCDexSource Gear VaultWWMXStimulsoft .NET ControlsActive PortsDVD ShrinkGoogle EarthMicrosoft Anti-SpywareLavasoft Ad-AwareRed Gate SQL ToolsMapPointVirtualPCLine CounterISObusterOutlook KnockoutNetMeterw:BloggarEvan Is A Bad Computer UserQuickTime KillerNetPing...
Clint Batman and Spatially Aware do some cool stuff with .NET mapping controls for a reasonable price. EnGraph spends way too much on maps from MapInfo. We want to set up a meeting sometime next month and figure out exactly what we need to do to convert our applications to use their maps. They are a local company from Lawrence too...
I'm coming after you!! 100 posts down, 410 to go :)
In the 12 months before I started blogging, our website received 11,000 hits. In the 12 months after I started blogging, we had 122,000 hits. Now we have Kyle blogging (rss) and we are giving away free applications and .NET controls. I think EnGraph has the best Paratransit software in the market, and hopefully people will keep going to our website and finding out about it...
Scoble links to Sahil Malik wanting VirtualPC images for beta downloads from MSDN. This is a great idea, and as much as Microsoft is pushing VPC, you would think they would go for it
QuickTime Killer: This application is intended for people that use or consume Sprint Video Mail, as Sprint uses QuickTime for viewing thier movies. (or anybody that hates QuickTime) Of course, as soon as QuickTime is ran, it adds itself to startup, which is very annoying to me. This application will remove QuickTime from start up and kill any running QuickTime processes. This application runs silently at start up and closes itself as soon as it takes care of QuickTime. Download...
DateBox: This control contains a textbox. When the user double click the textbox, a calandar control is displayed. The user can select the date, and the date will be displayed in the text box. The developer can get the date by calling the .TheDate property. Download Just dll SQL Connection String Builder: This control contains 4 textboxes and labels for Date Source, Initial Catalog, UserID and Password. The developer can pass in a valid SQL connection string and the individual elements will be parsed...
We have released SQL Connection String Builder .NET Control. This control is designed for situations where you need your user to enter their own SQL connection info. It has 4 textboxes and labels for Data Source, Initial Catalog, User ID and Password. You can pass in a full connection string and it will parse out the elements and display them in the proper field or you can let the user populate the data and pull out a valid connection string using the .ConnectionString property. The connection string...
I am using VB.net, reworking one of our GPS solutions and I have class A that inherits from class B and implements interface C. I defined Events in interface C and when I raise those events from class A, they do not bubble up to application D that consumes class A. I found some information here, that says I need to define my events in class B and raise them by calling a overridable sub in class B. But I had trouble with that as well. The whole thing is not very intuitive, I wonder if I am missing...
You can now create managed add-ins to outlook using Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005. This will make a lot of headaches go away...like this one. More info here. Linked from Paul Stubbs
2005 KC Dev Con was good. The speakers were informed and the sessions got to the point quickly. There was the expected Microsoft spin...plugging VS 2005 and making sure we knew that EVERYTHING was being ran inside VirtualPC. There must have been a memo about it...We heard VirtualPC over 40 times I bet. I attended the Smart Client Track where Jon Box talked typed datasets, binding sources, background workers, as well as a bunch of cool stuff you can do with Visual Studio Tools for Office. I'm still...
I'm off to Dev Con 2005 in Kansas City. It's very exciting. I love these one day geek jam sessions
We have several products that rely on VPN, which is obvious based on my many many many posts on VPN. The problem with VPN, is that every configuration is different and since we are not responsible for setting up or manage our clients VPN, it becomes very difficult to support. I think we can provide a more stable product using .NET remoting, so we have been doing research and testing. It is so nice that there are so many smart people out there blogging about it. I'll post some of my initial code out...
One year later, and it's now time to move back to Lawrence, KS. It's been a good year, but I'm ready to get back. This time, I'm going to rent a U-Haul
Yesterday's KC .NET UG meeting was good, especially considering the speaker wasn't there! Jeff Julian and another guy (sorry, I don't know your name. If you read this, please let me know your blog address) talked about using RSS and blogs to get information and drive traffic to your website. Jim Erwin and Doug Butscher sat behind me and we had a good discussion about paired development, I'd like to see EnGraph try that sometime, but deadlines are already tight. Kyle Archer came along and he had a...
To connect to a VPN connection inside .net without using any api's do the following 1) Create a VPN connection using the Windows new connection wizard 2) Follow steps 1-4 in this post 3) Create a shortcut to that VPN somewhere, preferably somewhere the client can't find, like All User\Application Data 4) Use Process.Start(the .lnk file) inside your application to shell the VPN connection When you execute this code, the VPN will connect silently without any prompts to the user...
I blogged a couple weeks ago about a SEHException we were getting in our Public Sub Main due to Application.EnableVisualSty... Basically the solution was to insert an Application.DoEvents after the EnableVisualStyles call. Well, that has been working until today (which happens to be the day I have to demo this to our owner). So I made EnableVisualStyles an option in the application. So now the code looks like this: If AppOptions.EnableVisualStyles = True Then Application.EnableVisualSty... End...
Following up on a previous post...here is some more information about our GPS solutions. The whole suite is really starting to take shape. We have a little more tweaking to do on our end of the software, and then we deliver it to a client in New Jersey in a couple of weeks...its very exciting...
I posted a while back about having trouble with my Compaq Presario 2585US laptop not returning correctly from standby. I thought I found a fix, and it worked for a while, but then it started acting up again. I *think* it had something to do with installing XP SP2. I saw an article about it somewhere, but I don't know the link. Anyways, it turns out to be a BIOS upgrade and more information can be found here. Once I ran the upgrade, it returns from standby just as expected...
Chris wrote an interesting article about how to loop through an array in the most efficient way
My boss asked me today what blog stood for :) I explained the concept, how they helped increase the speed of knowledge and how it was an opportunity to help bring more attention to ParaPlan and EnGraph. He didn't really believe me until I told him that 23% of all external links to our website in 2004 are from my blog...his ears perked up a bit and said "Well, you bloggers keep blogging away!"...
Lately Jeff has been talking about ESS. Here is a way that it could help us. We could use it as a means to let our clients know where we are and how we can be reached. We could have an ESS feed that would contain our appointments and future trips. We could then build an aggregater into our applications and our clients could click a link that would say "Where's Tim" or "Where's Kyle" and it would let them know and what number to call to contact us. I posted earlier that some our clients don't always...
A couple days ago, I posted how we finally got a RSS feed up. The problem is since we are hosted on UNIX, I couldn't put a nice blog system like .TEXT up. We are moving to a Windows based server soon, and then I can use something like that. Anyways, I still wanted a RSS file so I found a RSS generator called RSS Builder built by Wim Bokkers. The only problem I had was that RSS Builder didn't support the comments tag. Since we don't have an actual blog, I wanted to put an email address in the comment...
Yesterday, I posted how ClickOnce takes so long to publish because it uploads dotnetfx.exe every time. Well, I found that after you have successfully published you application, you can go to My Project -> Publish -> Prerequisites and uncheck "Create setup program to install prerequisite components". Since the Publish utility doesn't recreate /publish.htm, your application installer will still install dotnetfx.exe on the target computer if needed. And you can have that 10 minutes of your life back...
Having troubles running your Access 2000/XP apps on Access 2003? This is due to the new security settings in Access. Update: Instructions for Access 2007 For the full version of Access: Open Access 2003 from the start menu. Go to Tools->Macro->Securit... (you may have to "reset" your toolbar if this menu does not show up. Tools->Customize->Too... Tab->Reset) On the dialog box that opened up, select "Low", then click "OK" For Access 2003 Runtime: Set or create the following registry...
The concept of web services is great, and I'm always looking for new ones or new ways to use the power of web services. I made a list of good ones I've found so far Most developers have their own style of programming, their own dialect. So using another developer's function, to get the result that you are looking for, can be frustrating. Some want you to enter a string and return a structure, some want a string and then return a structure. The documentation for this is usually minimal. Most developers...
Well, after attending DevEssentials in Kansas City and listening to Jeff Julian speak on the importance of community and blogging your individual development efforts, I decided it would be a good idea to start blogging on my own. I have been moblogging for a while, but this is my first official text post. I live in Lawrence, KS and develop in .net, SQL, and VBA Access for a small virtual company. I have been programming ever since my Dad gave me a Mac Plus and ZBasic at the ripe age of 10. I also...