surrealization.com
Occasionally I come up with something worthwhile
Windows Server 2003 SP1 KB FIX
Friday, July 28 2006
Well, my first reporting of a bug to Microsoft (via the phone, through product support services) has finally resulted in a KB article.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/913548/
I submitted this bug to Microsoft on November of 2005 and it finally made a public KB article on June 1 of 2006. At least this was a relatively minor issue.
Host the Windows Workflow Foundation Designer In Your Own App
Monday, June 19 2006
Mostly for my own reference, but here is an article on MSDN for hosting the WF design surface in your own application.
ScottGu Article on DLINQ
Monday, June 05 2006
Scott Guthrie has posted part 2 of a series of postings on LINQ . This one gets into DLINQ specifically and definitely starts to show off some of the reasons why you'd want to use it (iterating over your own object collection is neat and all, but doing SQL queries in code without SQL and System.Data is a spectacular demonstration). I'd still like to see more of the nuts and bolts of how to enable LINQ on your own custom objects, however....
When Your MSIs Just Won't Uninstall
Wednesday, May 24 2006
Mostly for my own reference, but if you're in a situation where you have an MSI that says it is uninstalled successfully but still leaves a good deal of files on your machine, Microsoft has a tool to help clean up the Windows Installer configuration.ScottGu Article on LINQ
Monday, May 15 2006
Scott Guthrie has the best article I've seen so far on LINQ so far. He's glossing over how to do some of the fancier stuff such as supporting all this stuff in your own objects (so instead of just a List and arrays), but overall the article demonstrates LINQ incredibly well.
I wish I were smarter
Friday, May 12 2006
Seriously, read this article:
Light's Most Exotic Trick Yet: So Fast it goes... Backwards?
I like to read up (or watch up on Nova) on the dumbed-down scientific theories presented for the layman. It's just baffling to me how people can me up with this stuff.
Great Lisp Article
Wednesday, May 10 2006
I've been debating learning Lisp over the past few months but never could get into it. I've had Lisp books on my Amazon.com wishlist for quite a while but haven't bought them yet. So I found this Lisp article via John Lam that describes Lisp in a manner that is incredibly accessible to people without any Lisp knowledge other than "it works on sets" (which makes no sense by itself). Great article, I'd encourage anyone to read it. I'm actually going to go out and buy my Lisp books that I've been putting off....
Please Please Please Think About Where You Put Your Menu Items
Monday, April 24 2006
I did some work in InstallShield today and went to check in my merge module to source control. I've never been a multi-keystroke shortcut kinda guy (ALT+P L I for instance) so when I have many menus to navigate through I usually use the mouse, albeit rather quickly. Sometimes when I'm not careful, I'll go a tiny bit too far and hit the next menu item. Usually this is not a big deal, but when you put Check In and Undo Check Out right next to each other it most certainly is a big deal. This wouldn't be too bad if InstallShield actually gave you a warning before undoing your checkout. Visual Studio...
Source Code for the Built-in ASP.NET 2.0 Providers Now Available for Download
Thursday, April 13 2006
Ala Scott Guthrie's weblog, Microsoft released the source code for all the built-in ASP.NET 2.0 providers (membership, site map, session, etc).
I'm actually rather surprised they did this. I'm impressed they would understand the value of showing their source code (not in the way all the anti-MS zealots want) to the various real-world components they have. It's one thing to read an article on MSDN and get a Hello World example, it's another thing to see the code they actually wrote.
IPTV
Tuesday, March 14 2006
Ars has a good introduction to IPTV and points out one major problem that has me wondering how useful the technology will be to the average multi-television home: simultaneous streams. IPTV won't similar to cable in that all channels won't get pushed to your house. Instead, only the channels you request will get sent to your house. This means that your phone line's bandwidth is the limiting factor in how many channels you can receive at once. There are people on tivocommunity.com who frequently talk about having a dual-tuner DVR in their bedroom and two on their main television (and I'm sure they...
Tivo Home Media Engine For .NET
Friday, March 10 2006
Everyone who's been unhappy that TiVo only released their Home Media Engine APIs for Java can be a bit relieved. Gary at ByteBuilder has released a version for .NET. It doens't contain a UI toolkit, but it gives you a great start to building .NET server applications that enable your TiVO to interact with them. I've been packing for the past two weeks (that's about how long ago he put up the code) so I've only barely gotten to look at the code. It's similar to the Java APIs but takes advantage of some .NET specific classes and to un-Java the API. I'm hoping to be able to start building something...
CableCARD Overview On Ars
Tuesday, February 07 2006
ArsTechnica has a good overview of CableCARD (what it is, what's coming in the future, what's going to obsolete it). Even though there will potentially be a new technology shortly after CableCARD 2.0 (which offers 2-way communication features for capabilities like video-on-demand and pay-per-view), I still can't wait to get my hands on one of the Series 3 TiVos with CableCARD support. I'm curious, since TiVo constantly updates their software, if it will be able to support the software-only CableCARD successor when it comes out. As long as the runtime environment for the software isn't a hardware...
What do you do when the owner of a project get hits by a bus
Tuesday, February 07 2006
On my other blog, I've posted about the need to keep your work maintainable by other developers on your team. It's a bit rambly and I mostly wrote it because of my recent (past couple years) work on building installers. Here's an excerpt: I can't even remotely explain how important I feel the "hit by a bus and now we don't have any who knows [x]" behavior in companies is (or rather, the lack of said behavior). I think it's just a common behavior when you have a single person work from start to finish on a given section of a software application: you have the guy who wrote the interface, the girl...
Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Applications
Monday, February 06 2006
On the VSTA blog they posted some info about the upcoming Visual Studio Tools for Applications a couple days ago. Included is a link to the Visual Studio SDK which includes VSTA.
I'm glad that there's finally a powerful script engine support for applications to embed (without having to completely reinvent the Visual Studio wheel) within themselves.
Announcing Waterfall 2006
Saturday, January 28 2006
I love it. I especially like WordUnit, a document testing framework which enables document-driven documentation and Project Bureaucracy: How to Generate Millions of Jobs without Gaining any Productivity.
Expression Designer (Formerly Sparkle)
Tuesday, January 24 2006
They have a preview build out targeted towards .NET 2.0 and the January WinFX CTP.Found Another .NET 2.0 Bug Today
Friday, January 13 2006
Something that works perfectly in .NET 1.1 but once you make it run under .NET 2.0 it looks like the .NET framework pegs the processor.
For the artistically challenged web developer
Friday, December 23 2005
Microsoft has a number of website templates to give out on MSDN (ASP.NET specific templates). Pretty good for those of us without any sort of artistic ability.
Application Level Events (ALE) In A Nutshell
Thursday, December 15 2005
Posted on my other weblog today is more information about the Application Level Events (ALE) standard I discussed earlier . An excerpt: What is Application Level Events Overview Application Level Events (ALE) is a standard created by EPCGlobal, Inc., an organization of industry leaders devoted to the development of standards for the Electronic Product Code (EPC) and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies. The ALE specification is a software specification indicating required functionality and behavior, as well as a common API expressed through XML Schema Definition (XSD) and Web Services...
You just knew it had to be coming: ASP.NET project in VS2005 is back
Thursday, December 08 2005
Scott Guthrie is posting that they're developing a new project type for ASP.NET projects in Visual Studio 2005 . I still have no idea why that crackpot thought that removing the concept of a project from ASP.NET would sit well with people who had been creating ASP.NET applications for four or more years (with another year for betas). Enough people have complained publicly about it (I have, though not very vocally) that they're putting it back in. And I don't buy the crap that it's mostly for project upgrading from VS2003. It has nothing to do with upgrading projects. It has everything to do with...
RFID, Application Level Events (ALE) standards released publicly
Thursday, November 17 2005
I didn't even notice this, but the ALE standard has finally been released publicly by EPC Global For those not familiar with EPC Global, it's the standards organization devoted to providing standards and recommendations for Electronic Product Code (EPC) and RFID software. They have standards governing the use of EPC RFID tags (the current de facto standard encoding of the data contained on RFID tags), as well as standards governing over-the-air protocol for RFID readers and software/service specifications. The ALE standard is a language- and platform-agnostic software standard that details the...
The given assembly name or codebase was invalid
Wednesday, October 26 2005
Man, spent a few hours tracking down a doozy today. So we have this application that loads a new AppDomain, sets an explicit cache path and turns on shadow copying. This application originally didn't shadow copy, but we noticed file locking issues when people rebuilt their assemblies (it's an addin-like app) so we turned on shadow copying. Then we noticed that if you ran 'gacutil /ldl', the assemblies we load showed up in there hundreds of times after heavy usage (restarting the app multiple times a day for weeks). Turns out that using Assembly.Load and the file not in the GAC would cause the file...
VS 2005 Bug
Sunday, August 14 2005
I bothered to submit my first Visual Studio 2005 bug today. The error is so stupid, I can't believe that anyone even tested this feature (just went through that on one of the apps I work at today; "Did you even test this?"). Notice the DataSet designer loaded for my XSD file By far my favorite. After getting in a short loop of "Are you sure?" dialogs, get this one Alternate to the above, sometimes this comes up instead...
IServiceProvider
Friday, June 17 2005
Mostly for myself, but here is a great link to a description of the IServiceProvider type architecture used in design surfaces:Lightweight containers and Plugin Architectures: Dependency Injection and Dynamic Service Locators in .NET
The Khronos Projector
Thursday, May 05 2005
The Khronos Projector is an interactive-art installation allowing people to explore pre-recorded movie content in an entirely new way...The goal of the Khronos Projector is to go beyond these forms of exclusive temporal control, by giving the user an entirely new dimension to play with: by touching the projection screen, the user is able to send parts of the image forward or backwards in time.Watch the video, it's pretty interesting.
Star Wars 3 Spoof
Tuesday, May 03 2005
Hilarious.Slimserver
Sunday, May 01 2005
So there was a Slashdot article about building your own DVR with a spare PC and some new hardware components. I was skeptical since I'm sick of seeing these type of articles (and the end result is never actually worth doing since ultimately they all cost more for what 99% of all non-geeks want to do with a DVR). In the article was a mention of SlimServer by SlimDevices . The article mentioned using it to stream music from your home to elsewhere through the internet, which I wasn't all that excited about. Nevertheless, I went to check out the software and in about 3 minutes (including download time...
ASP.NET - Removing page from the cache
Monday, April 11 2005
So two-ish years ago when I tried to figure out how to programatically remove an individual page from the output cache (that was cached with an OutputCache directive) I simply could not figure it out. I was almost there and knew every bit of everything in the cache, but they keys didn't seem to make any sense to me (they weren't file paths or anything). So I just gave up on the idea and moved on to something else and quit caching entire pages and only cached the individual data items. Here is a link with a bit of info and links describing exactly how to remove pages from the cache. First you can...
Transaction Management in .NET 2.0
Saturday, April 09 2005
Here is a great whitepaper detailing the new transaction management capabilities in .NET 2.0 in the System.Transactions namespace. It's pretty long and the most useful parts are the first 20 pages (before it starts getting into some of the more complex details).Are there any GOOD .NET weblog engines out there?
Sunday, April 03 2005
So I've recently grown tired of working on my own code and I want to adopt somebody else's. I've been evaluating weblog engines for the past few days and I really am unimpressed with the state of what's out there. Unfortunately I am also unimpressed with my own, which was designed on .NET 1.0 Beta 2 and has suffered from serious rot and needs a serious redesign, which I simply do not feel like doing. I had looked at .Text a few months ago and I wasn't really impressed. It had most of the features I wanted, but the system as a whole was unimpressive as far as a customization effort is concerned...
2 Max connections ala HTTP
Saturday, March 05 2005
I noticed a long time ago that IE only allows 2 connections to any given server and that this is in some RFC somewhere. One solution is you can globally override this setting in the registry (and this is one of the many "optimizaitons" some people use to "make the internet faster"). Unfortunately for .NET programs, trying to connect to a webservice or similar webrequest to an HTTP endpoint also abides by this rule. So if you're trying to create many simultaneous requests to an HTTP endpoint you'll get caught up while you have more than two. Mike at AngryPets.com has found the solution and it's...
XBOX recall
Friday, February 25 2005
In case you haven't heard, Microsoft has voluntarily started a recall for XBOXes made before a specific date (I think 10/22/02). Apparently when left on for an extended period of time, roughly 1 in 10,000 power cords have caught fire. My XBOX meets the date qualification and I ordered a replacement power cord through the website (the day before a letter came letting me know that my XBOX might need the recall) and I got the cord about 3 days later (presumably because the recall just started, so they're not backed up yet). It's basically a hair dryer style cord, with the mini circuit breaker on the...
MCISendString
Tuesday, February 08 2005
For playing .wav files I've always pinvoked to sndPlaySoundA in the winmm.dll, and I just found today the function MCISendString that lets you play basically any MCI device (multimedia command interface). MSDN documentation here . Much more "cool" than sndPlaySoundA, however I've noticed threading problems when you start and stop playing sounds in different threads, it seems like if you stop on a different thread than the one you started, it can't find the device you opened. Possibly they store something in thread local storage about the device, so if you're going to use it with threading, either...
Gmail invitations
Thursday, February 03 2005
Here is a website you can get GMail invites from.Cell Architecture
Friday, January 21 2005
The new PS3 processor architecture is far too much for me to read now at work, however it looks like an awfully interesting read.Web services
Thursday, November 18 2004
I just finished creating an implementation of a standard called ALE (Application Level Events) created by EPCGlobal (an organization managing EPC standards for RFID). The ALE standard (it's actually still a proposed standard, up for minor review) is a way to retrieve data agnostically out of a number of various RFID devices. ALE provides a webservice interface and thus a WSDL and XSD representing the documents to be passed in and out of the service. This is the first time I've ever created a webservice from a WSDL. The process wasn't terribly difficult: * Use XSD.exe to create objects out of the...
Gamers are better employees
Thursday, November 11 2004
Here is an interesting interview with a man who wrote a book about the new gamer generation (post-1970s births). It's a pretty interesting read. If I wasn't so ADD from all my video games, I'd read it!I almost cried
Thursday, November 04 2004
I know it won't live anywhere up to my standards, but I really can't wait.More reason why Tivo is unbeatable
Saturday, October 09 2004
Natasha watched America's Next Top Model and I watch Enterprise (yeah, yeah, shut up). Neither of us had any idea that our shows were starting so neither of us had bothered to look at when they were on. Well, since we never deleted the season passes, Tivo kept silent watch for us and recorded our new shows for us. So for the past 3 months Tivo has been ignoring all episodes of these two shows because it knows they're not new, then once it detected a new one it records them for us. How many times have you missed the first episode of a show you wanted to watch? Or better yet, how much effort have...
I tried to break up with Tivo, I just couldn't do it.
Saturday, October 02 2004
So I've had Tivo for about 2.5 years now. I bought the first generation Series 2 DVR and it's been absolutely wonderful. Last year I bought a gigantic HDTV in hopes that some day I could watch HDTV. Well, my HDTV dreams came to fruition last week when I got Comcast's HDTV/DVR cable box. I decided that I would put my Tivo aside and deal with what I thought was a slightly worse DVR in order to watch and record HDTV recordings (since the Series 2 can't record HD signals). I got the Comcast HD/DVR home and hooked it up. After having the box pinged it was working and I switched to an HD channel and...
Microsoft to Gut Longhorn
Friday, August 27 2004
According to this article , Microsoft is planning on gutting Longhorn to make its 2006 delivery date. Halle-fucking-lujah! In addition to trimming down what comprises Longhorn, supposedly they are also going to rip out Indigo and make it available on other Windows versions, and rip out Avalon and make it available on other Windows versions. Halle-fucking-lujah! If this is the case, I will officially take back the expression of my opinion that Avalon will go nowhere because it will only be available on Longhorn. Although I will restate: if Avalon (and Indigo even) is targeted at a specific Windows...
Neverwinter Nights 2 Announced!
Wednesday, August 04 2004
Happy day to all NWN fans, Neverwinter Nights 2 is officially announced. Interesting that Bioware isn't making the actual game, but I guess their toolset was so good they can let someone else modify it and not have to rewrite everything.Performance Counter Funfact
Thursday, July 29 2004
If you're dealing with windows performance counters and you are using multiple instances per counter, if any of your instance names are more than 64 characters in length, the counter won't work. It won't report any error, but either Perfmon or the counter itself chokes and you won't see any data. You've been warned! PS - if you're wondering why we have this, we have a naming scheme for objects so a management application can sample counters, and one of our objects has a GUID as part of its name: RuntimeService.GroupService.Group.XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX And it turns out it's a bit too long...
Missing libraries? No problem!
Saturday, July 17 2004
We recently released version 4.2 of our product a short while ago that introduced some pretty cool (and powerful) functionality. Well, now we're releasing some add-ons that need to be backward compatible with 4.1 and 4.1.1 as well as 4.2, and we needed to be able to take advantage of the new features available in version 4.2 when they're available. So what happens when I have a class that has a reference to a Type that is not resolvable? Well, an exception is thrown of course! Just by having "MyClass o = new MyClass();" in a method will cause the .NET runtime to throw an exception if "MyClass"...
VB.NET, Generics, CLS
Tuesday, June 15 2004
Visual Basic.NET has, since its inception, been 100% adherent to the Common Language Specification (CLS). Basically this means that any VB.NET assembly can be used by any other language and no features of the assembly will be unavailable to any other language. This is a huge boon for VB.NET developers, since they can guarantee compatibility with any other .NET language. Contrast that to C#, which has access to some non-CLS compliant features: unsigned integers, signed bytes, pointers. If I expose a method with a pointer in it from a C# assembly, I am basically saying I don't care that VB.NET, JScript...
TiVo will (sadly) die
Friday, June 11 2004
TiVo is creating a new stream content from the internet service, but I don't think it's going to be very good. They want to let people download movies from the internet through their service and play the content back on their TV. While I think this is a great concept, I don't see it as being all that useful. Consider that even the fastest Cable service gives you 300KB/s download speeds (and that's a very high rate, and also consider that people have DSL which is going to top off at 150KB/s), downloading a decent-quality movie over the intarweb is going to take a long-ass time. This completely eliminates...
Microsoft Patents //TODO
Wednesday, June 09 2004
Patents have simply gone too far. Patent a battery recharger, patent a new type of plastic, but don't patent things that are hardly "technology". Microsoft has apparently patented turning a //TODO into a task list item. I wonder if they've patented the bug that they only show up when the file is open too?By far the coolest thing I have ever seen in my life.
Friday, June 04 2004
I can't even think a title for this link, it is that cool.Daily WTF
Wednesday, May 26 2004
My new favorite daily read: The Daily WTF. It's only been up for a couple of days, but so far it's been pretty good. Basically it's user-submitted code/technology/whatever that makes you think "what the fuck?".Transformers mini-review
Saturday, May 22 2004
I played and beat the first level today, and it was very good. The graphics are nice (and would be nicer if I spent $60-ish for the component video), the audio is good (and would be better if I spent $30-ish for the optical audio cable), and the controls weren't very hard for me to get used to even though I haven't touched a Playstation controller in 5 years (I'm used to the big XBOX controllers). The basic point of the game is that the Autobots and Decepticons are battling on Cybertron and they receive some sort of call from the Mini-cons on Earth. For those of you not familiar with Mini-cons...
Pinvoke.NET
Friday, May 07 2004
Adam Nathan has created a Visual Studio .NET AddIn for pinvoke.net. Very cool; my only suggestion would be to enhance the search to not only search function name but to search description, etc.Hard to believe
Wednesday, May 05 2004
One of the guys on my team was having trouble building a large solution and we tracked it down to a class being renamed from [Class] to [Class1] and it referencing a file that wasn't added to SourceSafe. We figured out who did it and went to the guy and explained that anything checked into SourceSafe MUST BUILD, and he just sort of stared at us and said "oh really?", as if he doesn't understand that other people work on the code too. I thought that was just common sense, but apparently it's not.squishySyntaxHighlighter
Tuesday, May 04 2004
squishyWARE's Syntax Highlighter has been used and mentioned in an MSDN article on creating custom HTTP Handlers in ASP.NET (using the syntax highlighter to highlight CS/VB code). Granted, it's only a half-page mention, but still cool!Serving Dynamic Content with HTTP Handlers
Another article on the blackout
Saturday, April 10 2004
Here is another article on the Northeast US blackout and some more info on what actually happened.Links
Tuesday, April 06 2004
The state I grew up in and town my college was in (Ohio and Akron, respectively) are responsible for last August's blackouts in the northeast US. Nice to know we're making headlines.I have yet to figure out what Channel 9 is, but apparently everyone's talking about it.
An updated roadmap for the new developer tools coming from Microsoft.
Any Akira fans? Real Kaneda motorcycle
Saturday, April 03 2004
(I tried to post just pictures, but their website wouldn't allow it. Sorry to the email subscribers as you're getting a duplicate.)WOW.
I've never wanted a motorcycle, but ever since I first saw Akira like 14 years ago I said that if anyone ever made Kaneda's motorcycle I would buy one. Well, someone is.
GSN: History of Video Games
Monday, March 22 2004
The Gameshow Network has a show titled "Video Game Invasion: The History of a Global Obsession" that I recommend to any video game buff such as myself to watch. I found myself continually predicting what the show was going to say next, it was really fun to watch because I lived most of the history they talked about. If you get GSN, definitely watch it. I learned a few things I hadn't known before, such as this tidbit: when Sega came out with their CD system, Nintendo partnered with Sony to create a Nintendo CD system (which I read about in a gaming magazine when I was a kid, but it never came out...
Links
Friday, February 20 2004
Interview with William Gibson (best sci-fi author in my opinion)Microsoft announces new XBOX features
Exploring New WinForms Controls in Whidbey
The death of arcades
Tuesday, February 17 2004
I read a really good article today called State of the Arcade Industry 2004 . This article hits close to home because of my love of going to arcades. I went to my first arcade when I was 1 or 2, my uncle letting me play pinball games (or so I've been told). I've had a loving relationship with them ever since I first went, and I am actually sad to see that they are slowly dying off. My dad used to take me to arcades all the time when I was a kid, and I could easily spend an entire day playing video games in one. By the time I was 16 and had my first job, a car, and my own money, I went to a local...
ProxyAttribute
Tuesday, February 17 2004
I found something very neat just now. I'm creating a custom RealProxy class to do some processing before a remoted object gets a method call (instead of using a channel sink, I'm using my own RealProxy). I just noticed there is a class called ProxyAttribute. If you put the ProxyAttribute on a ContextBoundObject subclass, you can intercept the new call and return your own object instance. I've seen all the method interception you can do using ContextBoundObject s and ContextAttribute s (and actually used that in one project, even though it's unsupported), however I never knew you could provide a...
More reasons why CodeProject is bad
Tuesday, February 10 2004
I've never really liked CodeProject in the first place, and now there's a funny spat going on between a couple of people on there. First you have Nine Reasons to Not Use Serialization . First off, the author of this article is making very broad arguments against "serialization", most of which are from knowing too little or by thinking that you are limited by XML serialization. I'm going to go ahead and comment on each of the 9 points: 1. It forces you to design your classes in a certain way Basically the author is saying that you need public classes and public default constructors. For the XmlSerializer...
Yet another stupid patent
Friday, January 16 2004
This has got to be the stupidest patent I've ever seen. Basically they've patented a naming convention for URLs (they don't provide any information on the "systems" mentioned repeatedly in the patent, just info on the naming scheme). This is like if AT&T patented 1800 numbers based on a certain numbering scheme: 1800-HOT-XXXX is patented by AT&T and they could sue tons of phone sex lines? I need to patent variables names such as i, j, k, x, y, z ( "A method for naming a simple iteration counter variable to be used in for loops where the value of the variable has little or no consequence...
Textboxes + Lots of Text = OutOfMemoryException
Friday, January 16 2004
I came into work this morning to a PC that just wouldn't respond. I tried to remember what applications I left running last night and I remembered that I had left one of our apps running. Inside of that app is a textbox that acts as a log of the application's execution. Well I had left the app on and throwing exceptions (which were displayed in the textbox, 1 per second, about 7 lines per exception) from 5:00PM last night until this morning at 9:30AM. When my computer finally started responding I saw that this app was eating up 1.5GB of virtual memory. Apparently we need to trim the contents of...
Object-Relational Persistence
Wednesday, December 31 2003
I've been working on a pet project lately and I came to the point of a project that has always annoyed me the most: converting my objects into database rows, and vice versa. I started to write the stored procedures, and I just set the project down and started playing video games. Later I looked up object-relational mapping tools; I found a number of them that I'd have to pay for, some that just generated code, some that required some really strange rules of how my code had to work. I finally settled on one called OJB.NET . The documentation is scarce and the example isn't quite worth going through...
Good article for you to read
Tuesday, December 16 2003
Joel Spoelsky has written a great article/book review titled "Biculturalism" and it focuses mainly on the cultural divide between the Windows/Apple and the Unix worlds of programming. It's definitely worth a read.Followup to "Terribly Slow VS.NET Compilation"
Monday, December 15 2003
A while back I made a post titled Terribly Slow VS.NET Compilation . In short the problem was Visual Studio taking an exorbitant amount of time to build my projects (like an extra minute or more for an entire solution) and the only solution I could find on the internet or come up with was to disable my network adapters; once I did that everything would build quickly. Well my solution only seemed to work on my machine -- everyone else at work that was experiencing the problem couldn't get the NIC disabling to actually work permanently like it seemed to on my box. So a coworker of mine found a post...
Scott Guthrie comments on new ASP.NET features
Monday, November 24 2003
I've been on the VS.NET Whidbey alpha for a while and I can honestly say I've hated my ASP.NET experiences with it. Many of my complaints are easily chalked up to "they rewrote [blah], and when it's done it'll be better", but I still have some issues with it in general that I can't fully put into words (it's just a feeling I get). On a mailing list I'm on, someone commented on how they disliked certain features of the new ASP.NET support in VS.NET, and Scott Guthrie posted a very well written reply that pretty much puts all of my concerns at rest. While I still feel that ASP.NET supports bad programming...
Burn CDs from .NET Code
Monday, November 17 2003
Just saw this - somebody's created a component usable from .NET that'll allow you to burn CDs directly from .NET code. I wish I actually had a use for that, I'd like to use it.Analysts are dumb
Wednesday, November 05 2003
Saw an article on SDTimes today, titled ".NET Progress Worries Java". In it the guy (some analyst of some sort) claims his failed prediction a while back that .NET would go nowhere, only get a tiny bit of adoption and then would slowly gain adoption as Microsoft pushed more marketing money at it. The reason I claim that analysts are dumb is that this guy is just like many other "analysts" who wrote articles two years ago about how ".NET will fail", but only saw .NET as the branded XML/Passport/Hailstorm initiative and didn't bother to actually examine the technology that was called the ".NET Framework...
Terribly slow VS.NET compilation?
Friday, October 24 2003
When I started at Globeranger some people were having problems with Visual Studio.NET compiling terribly slowly. And by terribly slowly I mean hanging/locking and taking over 20 seconds to compile a simple project that should only take 1 or 2 seconds to compile. At the time I didn't care so much, because it didn't happen to me. Then it started happening to me as well. Visual Studio would lock right after it output "Performing main compilation" in the output window. Nothing would respond then eventually it would slowly compile. It started happening only infrequently; I would restart Visual Studio...
C# 2.0 Features
Friday, October 24 2003
The C# 2.0 language features have been posted on the C# team site on MSDN . Generics are great, anonymous methods are great, however strangely enough, I think I like the "Method group conversions" feature the most: private void MyButtonClick(object sender, EventArgs e) { } Button b = new Button; b.Click += MyButtonClick; (no need to specify "new EventHandler()")...
iTunes for Windows
Sunday, October 19 2003
Ever since I've become a happy iPOD owner, I've been lamenting the fact that I've been forced to use that horrid program Musicmatch Jukebox to send files to my iPOD. The other day when I read that Apple had "announced" iTunes for Windows, I didn't exactly read it and thought they were announcing it to be available sometime in the future. Well when I took a look at Slashsdot today and found out that it really did exist, I downloaded it immediately. I was honestly surprised at how much I liked the interface . On setup iTunes immediately found my music drive (I'm not sure how, possibly from my iPOD...
802.11G, Whidbey
Monday, October 13 2003
Well I made the switch to 802.11G in my apartment yesterday. See, downstairs I have a TiVo, XBOX and server all connected to the main router, and upstairs I have my home PC and floating throughout the house I have my TabletPC. Everything downstairs is wired to the 100mbit router, except for the tablet which just has a built-in 802.11b card. Upstairs my PC had an 802.11b PCI card, and while that was good, it tended to be a little bit too slow to communicate with other computers in my apartment (what, with it only operating at 11mbit/s). So I made the switch and got the new-ish Linksys 802.11G router...
IEnumerable, IEnumerator and IDisposable
Wednesday, October 08 2003
Just saw this on a mailing list I'm in. If you do a foreach on an object that implements IEnumerable, the IEnumerator object used gets Disposed afterwards if it implements IDisposable. Seems a bit unusual to me, but if you take a look at it, it really does happen.I assume that the C# compiler assumes you will return a new object with every call to GetEnumerator (which I think you should do anyway), so if you reuse enumerators or just "return this;" to have the class implementing IEnumerable responsible for enumeration, your object might get disposed silently for you.
SPAM
Wednesday, October 01 2003
A while back (June 6th 2003 to be specific) I set up a SPAM filter in Outlook called SpamBayes . This thing has gotten so good at filtering my email it no longer requires constant supervision -- like some spam filters do -- that I no longer bother to check the emails it places in the spam folder. It occasionally gives me a "maybe spam" email or two per day (which are usually spam), but for the most part it has reduced my daily email intake from 200+ to 1 or 2, tops. I have Outlook checking three of my personal email accounts (one yahoo, one this site, and one from another site). Anyway, it's been...
New York area power outages
Tuesday, September 23 2003
Another day of being sick and not being able to sleep during the day because of medicines, I'm watching a whole lot of television. I just finished watching a show called Engineering Disasters on the History Channel. It was pretty interesting, but nothing great, until they mentioned the 1965 (I think that's the year) northeast US power outage ("The great blackout of '65"). Basically there was a single relay at a power relay station near Niagara/Ontario that was overlooked during an upgrade project. It was marked as upgraded, but in actuality it wasn't. If anyone has learned anything about the power...
IBM Linux Commercial
Tuesday, September 09 2003
Has anyone seen the new commercials on TV by IBM? It's a very interesting marketing campaign depicting a child soaking up knowledge from a variety of sources (including Penny Marshal from Laverne & Sherley). Eventually at the end it says something like "His name is Linux". It's a very interesting statement that says that Linux is young but growing rapidly in knowledge. I'd definitely agree with that statement in the context of servers, however I still can't see Linux growing on the desktop. The consumer-use office applications and usability of the OS as a whole still needs some work for your...
Interesting security change in .NET remoting
Wednesday, August 13 2003
A while back I made a simple remoting sample to showcase some of my code. This happened to be written in C# and targeting the 1.0 .NET Framework. It was a very simple example with a client, server, and a shared library between the two. The client would get an instance of an object on the server that is defined in the shared library. The client would then call a method on the remoted (MarshalByRef) object, passing in an instance of another object that is also defined in the shared library. This shared library happened to be strong named, whereas the client and server applications were not. I ran...
CORBA in .NET
Sunday, August 10 2003
I just came across this today. It's a CORBA remoting channel for .NET. Combine that with XML-RPC and we have ourselves a lot of cross-technology communication possibilities in the .NET world.A couple useful .NET Types
Friday, August 01 2003
I've come across some really useful things in the .NET framework lately and I thought I'd share a couple. ILogicalThreadAffinitive (System.Runtime.Remoting.Messaging) This is simply a marker interface, but it's one of the best marker interfaces in the framework I've seen yet. Basically if you have a remoting context and want to silently transfer data the separate AppDomains/computers/etc, any class that implements ILogicalThreadAffinitive that is put in the CallContext using CallContext.SetData to set and CallContext.GetData to get. I've been doing quite a bit of remoting lately and in order to...
DVD Burners
Friday, July 25 2003
I broke down and got a DVD burner tonight. I had a craving for a new gadget, and the only thing left on my immediate list was a DVD burner. So I consulted an article I saw on slashdot a while back and saw that it suggested the Plextor model as the best one, which also happens to be the one a friend of mine has. Off I went to Best Buy and CompUSA and looked around at what they had. Nobody had the Plextor model available. In fact, nobody had anything recognizable that seemed good. Then I noticed the one by Memorex. Not exactly the company I think of when I think of computer hardware, but I took a...
Compact Framework Class Library Comparison Tool
Friday, July 04 2003
Ala Early Adopter, there is a handy dandy comparison of the public and protected methods in the .NET Framework and the Compact Framework. For those of you with the VS 2003 MSDN Library, Here is a better link directly to the tool without having to search every time.Some Charles Carroll garbage
Tuesday, July 01 2003
I don't know if anyone out there knows who Charles Carroll is, however if you've ever been to learnasp.com or aspfriends.com, then you've likely seen his mug plastered at the top of nearly every page and banner ad on those sites (granted, I'm having trouble now finding a picture of his mug). Charles writes code and attempts to display best practices (I hate about 99% of his code, it's ugly, there's no consistence in naming, capitalization, etc). He also teaches ASP and ASP.NET to people willing to pay for his services. He has a wife in Japan (?) and a couple kids that come and see him a couple...
Strife in the unix camp
Monday, June 16 2003
I am totally amazed at all the goings on in the Unix camp, with SCO threatening to sue, suing, and finally now terminating IBM's rights to use Unix. A while back they filed a suit against Apple for misusing the Unix trademark in MacOS X. I'm really curious what SCO, who apparently just happened to fall into ownership of the Unix trademark, thinks is going to come out of all of this? What about SCO threatening to sue Linus Torvalds ? I am totally amazed. For anyone who doesn't read slashdot, here is the list of SCO stories on slashdot ....
VB.NET
Wednesday, June 11 2003
Wow, so four whole weeks of writing VB.NET. I still like the language as much as I like holes in my socks, however I'm getting re-used to the syntax and style, and finally learning how to do some of the things I do in C# all the time (create events, handle events, create delegates, attributes, etc). What's funny about the situation is that I almost feel like I'm not doing any real coding when I'm writing VB.NET code. It somehow feels wrong using all of the VB.NET constructs, almost like they have become unnatural to me. I think I need to go home and write some C# code to sooth my nerves....
AngryCoder article - Code Generation
Monday, June 09 2003
Jonathan Goodyear (ala AngryCoder) has an article about code generation and he bashes a couple of commercially available products (and rightfully so). I think he's missing one of the major points of code generation, though, and that is reducing the need to manually perform repetitive tasks and enforce patterns in certain parts of your code. Reading through some of the comments on the site, pretty much everyone has a lot of the same thoughts: "I hate code generation wizards" and "Code generation is for bad programmers". I don't know about other people, but I've noticed an incredible amount of redundancy...
Yukon
Wednesday, June 04 2003
Here is a short summary of some of the things that will be available in the next version of SQL Server (Yukon). It sounds very, very good..NET 1.1 Framework
Tuesday, June 03 2003
Wanting to use 1.1 and no longer have to have 1.0 installed on my computers at home I went to my website host and inquired about when and if they are moving to the 1.1 Framework. Their response to my question is genius: ME: What are your plans on supporting future versions of the .NET Framework? Specifically now I am interested in 1.1, however I am interested in knowing if you plan on supporting future versions in a timely manner. THEM: The 1.1 release of the NET framework is unstable and at this point a determination has been made to delay the upgrade until a more stable version is released. WOW...
Code Generation
Friday, May 30 2003
So I've been thinking about code generation lately in context with ideals such as extreme programming and agile methodologies. Reading the books I've read on agile modeling, xp, etc what I've taken from them is that all designs should be flexible and certain things you typically think are important (such as your database access) are nothing more than implementation details . In theory I can understand how your database choice in an implementation detail, however in my experience I can't totally see it. Take some of the things I did at Kemper while Kemper still did business. One of my own personal...
VB.NET
Wednesday, May 21 2003
So I've been writing VB.NET code for a few days now, and I can't believe how much I've grown to dislike the VB syntax in the time I've been using C# (Beta1 - I've actually forgotten when that was). The place I'm consulting at doesn't care what language I use, however for existing projects I have to use what they already have, so I'm stuck in a largely VB.NET world. So here I am, writing VB.NET code, longing for my curly braces and semi-colons and it finally came to me why I like C# so much more than VB.NET: I dislike the old VB6/ASP mentality of writing web applications. For instance, in ASP3 you...
Boredom
Wednesday, May 14 2003
So I've found myself in a state of complacency with my website and personal project situations. I've written what I've wanted to write, I have little desire to update/fix squishyFORUMS, squishyTREE or anything else I've started and not finished. So to help with my boredom, does anyone have any wonderful ideas of projects they don't have time to write but would love to use/work on? I'd be more than happy to give some of my spare time to work on a fun (and free, I'm not into doing things in my spare time for money) project?Http Handlers
Tuesday, May 13 2003
Okay, so I've definitely written my fair share of HTTP Handlers in ASP.NET (i.e., the classes that inherit from IHttpHandler), and when I found out that my website host doesn't support modifying the web.config to allow HttpHandlers made me very upset. Especially when I implemented the Blogger API on my website and wanted to use a free desktop publishing tool (that I'm using now). Anyway, I had given up on using an HttpHandler to implement the XMLRPC method calls the Blogger API uses. I was reading up on something and noticed an ASHX file extension. Did a quick google search and found out that's...
Tablet PC
Wednesday, May 07 2003
Okay, so here is my "I'm not good at writing reviews" review of my new Toshiba Tablet PC . First off, tablet PCs are just plain old cool. I get myself a tiny laptop, a screen and a pen to use as a mouse. Very star trek, I just need to train the voice recognition to work a bit better and it will be completely star trek. "Computer, fetch me a sandwich" The Toshiba Tablet PC (Portege 3500) is a relatively weak laptop for the price you pay for it. I'm a developer and I want a Pentium six hundred gigahertz processor and more RAM than can fit in my closet, and the tablet Pcs do NOT give it to you. What...
Poor kid
Tuesday, May 06 2003
How would you like to be this kid? The first video is bad enough - this kid waving a metal rod around as if he actually knew what he was doing, but to have someone put star wars effects to it makes it just that much worse. Absolutely hilarious. I would SO hate to be this kid.what do you do wren you get laid off?
Monday, May 05 2003
Well I don't know what you would do, but I go and spend money! I have been getting sick of my old laptop for quite a while now, so I decided to go out and buy a tablet PC. Right now I'm actually handwriting this entry and it's doing a very good job so far. More on the performance of the tablet PC later.Some things should be understood
Monday, April 28 2003
So I am writing my resume at work since there is aboslutely nothing else to do. I noticed I completely left off some keywords that I remember having on my resume a few years back. Namely it's COM and COM+. Not being a C++ developer, I don't truly understand COM. I mean, I know all the IUnknown/IDispatch crap and the basics of how it works, but most definitely not at the level a C++ ATL COM developer would know it at. So I left it out of my resume. Does that mean I don't know how to use COM or COM+? Definitely not, I've been writing VB6 and C# COM objects for nearly 4 years now (professionally,...
Time traveller busted by the SEC
Thursday, April 17 2003
Andrew Carlssin, a time traveller from over 200 years in the future, has been arrested for insider trading in January by the SEC. He started with $800 and ended up with $350,000,000 after a two week period. The SEC took note and busted him, getting a bit more than they bargained for when he claimed to be from the future and he just got "caught in the moment". Officials are quite confident the "time-traveler's" claims are bogus. Yet the SEC source admits, "No one can find any record of any Andrew Carlssin existing anywhere before December 2002."...
All your base are belong to us
Monday, April 07 2003
Haha, seven people arrested for putting up "All your base are belong to us" posters all over Sturgis (where the hell is Sturgis?). The police thought they were terrorists.S#
Thursday, April 03 2003
For all those seven faithful Smalltalk users, they are releasing a .NET version called S# that extends Smalltalk into the .NET world.Inherit sealed classes!
Don't strongly type your variables!
Use multiple inheritance!
Interesting. The article starts out saying Smalltalk has a number of advantages over other .NET Languages. I haven't seen one yet.
C# ISO Standardization
Wednesday, April 02 2003
Well it looks like Microsoft is shooting for ISO standardization for C#. While I think this is really cool, I find myself wondering exactly why Microsoft is doing the whole standardization thing? Having this standard is good for say Ximian who is implementing Mono, however only a small portion is standardized. Mono is implementing the entire .NET 1.0 Class Library. Standardization helps for maybe 10% of this? (anyone have a real number for me?) To me, it seems like Microsoft pushing for C# standardization is more of an attempt to make Sun look bad. Don't get me wrong, I love me some .NET, however...
Web services article.
Thursday, March 20 2003
Web services: All-from-one or one-for-all? In short this article is complaining about vendor lock-in of using web services created by Microsoft applications and how you're not locked into a specific vendor when using Java. All-from-one is the Microsoft vendor lock-in and how if you write it with a Microsoft application you're stuck with using Windows and IIS. One-for-all is how Java uses "open standards" and won't tie you to a specific platform. These arguments have ALWAYS bugged me. Take your typical large corporation, which are arguably the "most important" customers of companies like Microsoft...
Charles Manson Sings?
Wednesday, March 19 2003
Paul found the crazies thing today. And my girlfriend actually owns the CD.Charles Manson is a pop star!
Some "Does It All Humor"
Wednesday, March 19 2003
.NET Saves Boy Down in WellWeb Services Unable to Connect Legacy System with Spork
Wrox is closing
Monday, March 17 2003
Wrox is closing its doors. Not that I have a great affinity or loyalty for Wrox, it's just a shocker when one of the two companies who you buy the majority of your books from (with O'Reilly being the other for me) goes out of business.Sad day for Halo fans
Wednesday, March 12 2003
Halo is arguably the best game EVER (or at least on the XBOX).. And soon to be Halo2 (arguably the best game not yet released) has unfortunately just gotten delayed (yes this is a bit old, I've been out of town). Halo 2 was supposed to be released for the general Christmas-season buying extravaganza, and unfortunately a 2003 finish date isn't possible any more. Boo! I say.I'm Confused
Friday, March 07 2003
Okay so here is a ZDNet article mentioned on slashdot today. It starts out by explaining some new feature of Windows Server 2003 called "Strong Binding" and talks about the end of dll hell. Then it jumps into .NET and explains the assembly probing/binding feature of .NET and a simple blurb on how the Global Assembly Cache works. At first I thought this was something new with real dll's (read: C++, VB dlls, not assemblies), however they broke into an old feature of .NET so I'm a bit confused as to why ZDNet is actually considering this news of any sort....
Good C# Today Article
Monday, February 24 2003
I'm sure very few people who read this are subscribers to C# Today, however they have a good article on there today explaining some of the actual concepts and technologies behind the .NET Framework. When we hired people here at work I grilled them on as many TLA's as I could, most of the people had no idea what I was talking about (just the standard CTS, CLI of .NET). Most people knew the CLR, but couldn't explain the others in detail (thus helping us to determine their level of knowledge of .NET). Anyway, it's a good article to read if I ever interview you, since a lot of the answers to my typical...
my old website hacked
Monday, February 24 2003
I made this site around three years ago, maybe a bit more. It was a place to host my site for free until I paid for hosting. Well not only did I make the site but I also made a haxor translator. Well I haven't visited this site in a couple years and I went back today to check it out... Turns out my translator still exists but some "hackers" defaced my website! Apparently they didn't appreciate me making fun!Nintendo is the best thing in the world
Friday, February 21 2003
Well I got my 8 bit NES two days ago. I took it home and I couldn't get a single game to work. I took it back to Gamestop the next day and some guy I like to call the "Nintendo Genius" played with it, cleaned it and successfully got games to play on it. Not only that, but he imparted upon me his endless knowledge of getting a game to actually work in it. I've been playing Super Mario Brothers and 720 non stop ever since. As I said in a comment elsewhere, there are very few games nowadays that can keep my attention as much as the old NES games. Now all I need to do is get Paul's dad who is apparently...
Small brain teaser
Friday, February 14 2003
Anybody good at recognizing patterns should be able to figure this out pretty quickly.Basically take any two-digit number, add the digits together, subtract the result from your original number and consult the chart of symbols. Click the crystal ball and see how it comes up with the correct symbol?
I would give away the answer, but I'm sure you'd like to figure it out on your own.
squishyTREE
Friday, February 14 2003
Okay, many thanks goes to Brady Gaster for getting me motivated to make some changes to squishyTREE. Not only that, but now I have samples up here so you can see what it looks like. Plain Tree - Nothing special here really. Tree with checkboxes A Tabular display tree - Sort of like a DataGrid, except no template and editing capabilities. You give it extra data and it writes out columns for you. Another tabular display A windows-like Tree - folder images, lines between the nodes, etc. You can download squishyTREE here or you can get it on GotDotNet (it's currently the #1 most downloaded sample,...
Making your NES better
Thursday, February 13 2003
Having went on a short quest yesterday trying to find a GameStop that had an NES for sale (and finding one but I didn't feel like driving), I am most definitely going there tonight to see if they still have it. Today on Ars Technica there is an article on How to Resuscitate Your Old Friend explaining how to make some modifications to your NES to make it run better. Depending on the price of the NES at GameStop and depending on the kind of shape it's in, I might just have to test out my soldering skills I haven't used in six years....
I want one of these
Friday, February 07 2003
A Tokyo professor is creating a see-through shirt that projects the light that hits the back through to the front, so it looks like you're invisible.Just think of the possibilities...
Borland .NET Tools
Thursday, February 06 2003
Here's a short article on the upcoming Borland .NET tools. Since Borland bought Together, it would be nice to see more support in ControlCenter and possibly a big overhaul of that application in general. I'd also really like to know some more about what Borland is planning to do. The article mentions that Borland licensed the .NET Framework, so I guess that means they have the right to (if they want) build non-Windows implementations, etc also?Semi-poll
Thursday, January 30 2003
Okay, my ten faithful readers, if I (adam) were to write another article, what would you prefer it to be about and where would you like to see it? For the where option, you have 15seconds.com, aspalliance.com (my site on there), or right here! Obviously if it gets posted on dotnetwire.com and my article is hosted here you might see some outages as I can't guarantee how my host will handle the number of hits. Personally, I'd rather it be here, however anyone have any opinions? As far as the what portion, I have a few ideas and if anyone has anything .NET-related they'd like to see an article about...
Rant #2 for the day
Tuesday, January 28 2003
So, I think sysadmins have gotten a bit too paranoid. My last post contained the name of a certain file system active x component. I won't say it again, because the nice lrt.be SMTP server of someone who's on my mailing list (you know who you are!) decided to inform me that my email was bad and sent it back to me because of said word. So far I have three of these emails. I really hope I get more. List:VBSCode Found the expression "%%word exluded%%" 1 times, at 1 points each, for an expression score of 1 points. ============================================================= Total Message Score: 1...
Builder.com sucks
Tuesday, January 28 2003
Okay, not to perpetuate my apparently monthly bitchfest about how bad builder.com is, however here is one of there recent articles. Seriously, folks, how long has the FileSystemObject ActiveX dll been around for use? Why did builder.com accept an article about this horribly antiquated component when there are numerous articles abound on the internet about its use? I really don't understand. I think Jonathan Goodyear said it best in this article . Granted, it's about .NET, however the same basic point stands. All the "basic" stuff has mostly been done. Don't inundate us with buttloads of the same...
Help me, anyone!
Tuesday, January 28 2003
Okay, I'm desperately trying to remember the name of this really good horror film. The movies was made either in the 70s or early 80s, and had this basic plot: * Multiple people come to a large, scary mansion * Each of these people have some sort of scientific function * In the basement is a large container filled w/ pure evil (pure evil is greenish) * The pure evil in the basement brings to life zombies and similar monsters * People in the future (1999) are sending messages back in time through dreams to help these people stop the pure evil * The people who receive this future broadcasts think...
The Hulk
Monday, January 27 2003
Having not watched the Super Bowl (but I did record the Jimmy Kimmel show after it), I didn't get a chance to see The Hulk trailer. Well here is the Hulk Super Bowl trailer (and another one here ). Also, don't forget to check out the X-Men 2 trailer and the Matrix Reloaded trailer ....
Loud talkers
Friday, January 17 2003
I have a simple question. Why do some people feel the need to drastically raise their voice when talking on the telephone as if the fact that their voice is louder will help it travel better over the long distance from their phone to the other person's phone?That just really, really bugs me. It's even worse with people on the cell phone, as if since they don't have wires they have to scream into their phone to make sure it makes its way to the other person their talking to.
Googlewacks
Tuesday, January 14 2003
So quite a while ago (a year maybe?) I remember catching the " googlewack " craze and trying to find as many as I could. The rules are simple: using words that can be found in a dictionary (hence real words), combine two of them to return only a single result in google. It's harder than you'd think. So today while walking home from work (no need to drive when you literally live next door) and talking with Paul, I had the most amazing idea! Since a googlewack is no longer a googlewack if you publish it and google then indexes those words on your page, I decided it should be my personal goal to publish...
TiVo
Saturday, January 11 2003
I really couldn't live without my TiVo. Well I could live, however I could never be happy with watching television without it. I find myself hitting pause in the middle of a show and going to get something to drink many times during a show; without the TiVo I could never do that. Not to mention the fact that I don't like to tie myself to the exact time the networks play my shows, so I'm able to go and do other things and watch the show later (sans-commercials). So here are a few links to some new TiVo news. Some FCC guy loves his TiVo and TiVo is releasing a $99 software upgrade to make the TiVo...
At the Tomb of the IUnknown Interface
Thursday, January 02 2003
Here is a good article about someone's unhappiness with COM and happiness that COM is being replaced by a much better technology.Netflix and Gamefly
Saturday, December 28 2002
Being an avid Netflix member (consider that if you get a movie, watch it, return it you can average 8 movies a month for $19.99, much better than 3.50 a pop at blockbuster) and being horrible at returning things I've rented (a typical movie would cost me $10-15 since I continually forget to return them), I can't explain how happy I am that you can now do the same with video games online! Gamefly is similar to Netflix in that you pay about 20 bucks a month, can have two games out at any time, and if you really like the game you can buy it directly from them (paying a cheaper price if the game's...
ASP.NET Custom Controls XSD Generator
Monday, December 23 2002
Blue Vision Software has released a free tool and a bit of documentation on creating custom XSD files that Visual Studio.NET will pick up in an ASP.NET page, allowing your custom controls to have intellisense in the HTML view of the designer. Very nice, and it works pretty well.River City Hacky Sack
Saturday, December 21 2002
This is one of the most fun games I've played in a VERY long time...Mono
Friday, December 20 2002
Well, I got Mono installed and running on Redhat 8 today. Made a simple console application that created a couple threads, worked with XML documents, and wrote out to the console. Very cool. Unfortunately the novelty has worn off and I don't know what else to do with it. You can't do any Windows Forms yet, I'm not quite sure how to get ASP.NET to work, and I don't have a second box with SQL Server on it so I can't try to compile and run squishyFORUMS in a console app; so at the moment I'm pretty much done with Mono until they get some more done. But hey, I finally got Redhat almost fully working...
Mono
Tuesday, December 10 2002
Exciting news in the .NET world, Xiamian has released a new version of Mono. There is a post on slashdot submitted by Migual de Icaza detailing some of the new features and a (quickly) growing discussion on what is .NET, why Ximian is using it, etc.Professional ASP.NET Server Controls
Monday, December 09 2002
While Wrox .NET books haven't been very good and there has been a lot of complaining about them on a number of mailing lists in the past few months, I would suggest to anyone who is interested in building custom ASP.NET server controls to go buy Professional ASP.NET Server Controls . I've been reading ASPToday lately (I bought a subscription I figured I might as well use it) and there was an article on ASP.NET page templating techniques . I read it and while it did describe a valid templating technique, it was absolutely horrible. Who wants to build their ASP.NET pages purely through adding controls...
JNBridge
Sunday, November 24 2002
I'm going to have to say that JNBridge is the best thing available for .NET programmers who have to deal with Java code as well as .NET code. JNBridge basically creates a set of proxy classes (much like adding a reference to a web service) that forwards method calls to objects hosted in a JVM or a Java Application Server. So far I've only made the simplest of Java classes that takes a string and returns that string with another string appended to it, however it was incredibly simple to use and worked perfectly. It's a great product for people such as myself have to deal with already existing Java...
The Law of Leaky Abstractions
Saturday, November 16 2002
Joel Spolsky, of Joel on Software fame wrote a good article on how programming abstractions aren't necessarily making anything any easier, and are in fact making it so new programmers have to learn more to understand when abstractions leak. It's an interesting read.Side note
Wednesday, November 13 2002
Having used DOS in my youth, but not for much more than creating batch files to make it easier to start Mechwarrior from my default C:\ drive (for some reason I didn't just add the Mechwarrior folder to my PATH), it's been a long time since I've used DOS batch files. I realized tonight how much of a pain it is to create a surrealization build zip file to upload to the server. It involves a lot of backing up, copying, deleting and FTP'ing. So I got myself a licensed copy of WinZip, downloaded the WZZIP.exe addon to use WinZip from the command line, and wrote myself a batch file to do every part...
C# and the Future
Monday, November 11 2002
Gates To Lay Out the Future of C++, C#Here are some of the details for the future of C#. The PPT slide is decent, however you have to go over halfway through to get past old crap.
XML-RPC and .NET
Monday, November 11 2002
I would like to really give a "thank you" to Cook Computing for providing the XML-RPC.NET services code . Unfortunately my web host doesn't allow adding HTTP Handlers so I can't use it, however take a look here . I built GAZM and the owner of the site asked if I could make a way for him and his users to post to GAZM using a program such as w.bloggar , so they don't have to go to the site to post. I grabbed the XML-RPC.NET library (and source code, very handy), looked into the blogger API and within 2 hours had the basics of the blogger API implemented for GAZM. Users can authenticate, post and...
Custom configuration section handlers in .NET
Wednesday, October 30 2002
Every day of developing in C# brings me more and more amazement at what Microsoft created with the .NET Framework. Today's thing used: custom configuration section handlers. Configuration files in .NET are amazing just by themselves before you take into account creating your own section handlers. We're creating an application at work that will host multiple instances of itself in the same folders of ASP.NET. This is easy to do, just make sure you know what instance you're using when you execute a page, however it made an annoyance when you have configuration settings that can change per instance...
Any non-english speaking programmers out there?
Sunday, October 27 2002
While laying in my bed with bronchitis last night, my mind was wandering and preventing me from sleeping.. Anyway, I started thinking about programming language syntax and how it must be harder for non-native (or just non-) English speakers to program in the English-centric world of computer programming languages. I've gotten the pleasure of seeing acouple ASP scripts written by someone speaking a germanic language (I forget which), and while the variable names were very foreign to me, I could follow the actual flow of the code since the basic syntactical grammar was the same. I then started thinking...
Back to the future
Thursday, October 10 2002
Scientists in England have created a food scrap battery that can power small devices. When are the time travelling, garbage consuming Delorians coming out?I want one of these. Granted, I really wonder what the cost of refueling one is, especially if you have to use a service to come to your car and refuel it (no hydrogen stations) every coulpe of days.
Naming guidelines and unit testing
Wednesday, October 02 2002
Came across a couple good things tonight. First off is an article explaining why hungarian notation (or whatever it's called now) is bad in OO and .NET development. Having been forced to use a bastardized version of it for two years now, I can definitely say that I despise prefixes on variable/property/method/parameter names. Not only do they dirty up your public interfaces, but they just suck to type over and over. If you are having a battle over whether or not to use them, read this article and/or go to the class library developer guidelines in MSDN. Next off, unit testing. Maybe I'm not cool...
Part 3 to "Why .NET isn't horrible"
Monday, September 30 2002
Here is part 3 to the 3-part article I mentioned earlier. Again, none of this is terribly new information for people who have been keeping up with .NET related news, however it's nice to see it again where non-techie types of people will see it.A ZDNet article that isn't horrible
Monday, September 23 2002
Here are parts one and two from a 3 part article on ZDNet... The series is about why .NET isn't bad and/or will "conquer the world". While I won't go so far as to say it will conquer the world, I will definitely have to say (from experience in my company and seeing other companies) that it will be heavily adopted and used by nearly all existing windows developers (whether that is win32 or web or whatever). These two articles aren't saying anything new for the most part, however it is good to see this type of information all in one place. It would be nice, however, to see at least a few cons for...
ZDnet disappoints me every time I read one of their articles
Friday, September 20 2002
Got me a link from Paul today: Keep Your Beans Out of .NET In Paul's words: "This guy's an idiot" (Godfrey Baker, Builder.com) Let's take this guy's article and examine it! Prelude If you have an EJB implementation of your application, is it worth it to migrate it to .NET? Um, no. I think that is pretty obvious. First off, with such disparate technologies like .NET and Java, you don't just "migrate" things from one to the other. You completely rewrite or integrate the two technologies. There is definitely no possibility of migration. I think that's pretty obvious... Who migrated their Perl applications...
GM's AUTOnomy concept car
Monday, September 16 2002
http://gm.com/company/gmability/environment/products/adv_tech/autonomy1_010702.html Not only do I really like the idea, I would definitely have to get one of these when/if they're created. No gas/break pedals, a drive-by-wire system to eliminate the need for a good majority of the current mechanical components in an automobile. Plus the idea of it being powered by fuel cells is great. I just really wonder how it'll fly since the oil industry is so incredibly large and has a lot of sway with the automobile industry....
GNU/Linux worm
Saturday, September 14 2002
Apparently lazy Microsoft programmers aren't the only ones getting hit by buffer overruns.http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/linux.slapper.worm.html
This is my favorite part:
Systems Not Affected: Windows 3.x, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Me, Macintosh
A slight hiatus
Sunday, September 01 2002
I had a nearly 2 week vacation in california, a trip to Dallas where I am moving to in a month, and started to redo this entire site (with new features available in squishyFORUMS, rewriting the code for surrealization becuase I don't like it), and I will be back soon! Anyway, check out this image of a solar flare that apparently happened today..http://umbra.nascom.nasa.gov/eit/images/Sun_and_earth.jpg
(ala slashdot)
Anything you can do, I can do better.
Monday, August 05 2002
My thoughts on to http://java.sun.com/features/2002/07/rimapatel.html "My response is always: .NET is immature, very proprietary, and lacks community." True. .NET has only been around in release version for about a year now, only exists in its full form (ADO.NET, ASP.NET, etc) for Windows, and doesn't have the community process of new features exactly like Java does. "Nobody knows how it scales, or how it performs." True in one sense, very untrue in another. First off, there aren't any real published benchmarks saying "you can do [x] in [y] amount of milliseconds." There are, however, a huge number...
Interview with Miguel de Icaza
Tuesday, July 16 2002
I just love this guy and I don't even know him. Seriously, it's a good interview, talking about Mono, shortly talking about integration with GNOME and how they're supporting integration with older code (much like COM interop with the CLR), and an overall status report on Mono.http://www.fawcette.com/dotnetmag/2002_07/online/netalternatives/default_pf.asp
Stateful OO versus DNA-style approaches
Sunday, June 23 2002
I'm investigating common techniques used in web applications, and I'm currently debating various things. If you take the Windows DNA style approach, you have stateless objects, chunky method calls, object pooling, and possible distribution of physical locations of your code. While this sounds good (except for physical distribution, very slow), it seems very poor in the world of object orientation. When I think about OO, I think about an object, say a Dog. Your Dog is a stateful object: it has a hair color (and will always know what color when you ask), and it has certain states about it (hungry...
Joel on Software
Monday, June 17 2002
It bugged me when I read Moshe Bar say that standardizing some of the linux kernel isn't necessary, since rewriting drivers costs nothing. That just felt very awkward, as I thought that people updating those drivers would have to spend time and possibly money on updating these drivers. http://interviews.slashdot.org/interviews/02/06/07/1255227.shtml?tid=156 Well, Joel Spolsky has a nice article on how open source isn't free as everyone claims it is, as it costs other things such as time (TCO), and not just $$$. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html It's a good article explaining...
article published
Wednesday, June 12 2002
I've had an article published on 15seconds:http://www.15seconds.com/issue/020611.htm
It basically discusses the "Pluggable data layer" technique I used in squishyFORUMS, and walks through the steps to create one of your own.
In addition, I've been approved to be an aspalliance columnist. Look for some articles ala me there when I get the time to write them.
prizes
Tuesday, May 28 2002
Ahh, imagine going to an arcade and playing skeeball and other ticket-giving games for hours on end. After spending tens of dollars rolling balls down tracks or hitting plastic animals that pop out of holes, you collect your tickets and head to the prize booth to claim the magnificent prize that you earned over the past five hours. You hand over your wad of tickets, watch the person at the counter count them and then discover what kind of prizes you can receive: erasers, high bounce balls, gum, and some small device that makes noice. ... Yesterday I got my shipment from Microsoft from winning the...
Pluggable data access code
Wednesday, April 17 2002
I'm currently writing an article describing how I implemented the "pluggable data access" in squishyFORUMS. I've been thinking about it lately and I can't stop thinking about how cool it really is. Here's the basics: There are a standard set of interfaces for squishyFORUMS data access. The squishyFORUMS objects themselves don't even know what they are connecting to for their data, they only know what they expect to receive back from these interfaces. With this you can write any sort of data access code, to use Windows users, Passport users, file-based access instead of database access, etc. My...
Working from home.
Wednesday, April 03 2002
Working from home definitely has its benefits. First off, I don't have to drive. There's no 30 or 40 minute drive across town to get to my office. There is only a 15 second walk from one room to another. Next, there's no getting up at the butt crack of dawn to have enough time to get ready and then drive to work. There's only a need for about five minutes of wake-up time before I sit at my desk. Boy that's great! you say. And I reply, Nay! It is not great. Why not? Because a spider thinks my car is a permanent fixture on the parking lot and has taken up residence on the driver's door (there's a...
MMC Snapin .NET Code
Monday, April 01 2002
http://www.ironringsoftware.com/projects/MMCLibrary.aspxThis man is my hero. Granted, it's only Version 0.5 and it likely has some bugs and/or issues, but after an hour or so of working with it I have a functioning MMC snapin. I have a while to go before my snapin is created, but this library does all of the work for you. Very nice, I highly recommend it.
Book #2 published
Friday, March 08 2002
http://www.syngress.com/catalog/sg_main.cfm?pid=1550My second contribution to a book has been published. Mine is chapter 4, "Chapter 4 Using XML in the .NET Framework". This one is much shorter than the other , and I haven't gotten to read the book yet so I can't say whether it's good or not.