Hilton Giesenow's Jumbled Mind

The big move - my new blog location (last post on Blogger)

2005-01-20T10:00:00.000+02:00

Blogger has been giving me some trouble for a little while but finally it was something on our end that forced my hand. The WebMarshal filter that we sit behind has now decided that the Blogger login page is a porn site, so it won't let me log in (I'm accessing on dialup now).

What this means is that I've decided to move my blog over to http://dotnet.org.za/hiltong/. Armand has been great giving me a hand setting this up, so a big thanks to him. To all my local fans, this will be my last post on Blogger.

On a positive note my blog is now together with all my SADev friends and it is much faster too, so look forward to more posts in 2005!

HAPPY NEW YEARS!

2005-01-07T13:33:00.000+02:00

So after Ilo linked to me I decided to be a responsible blogger and post my first entry for 2005 :-). Thanks Ilo for the in-the-backside kick.

First of all, a big happy new years (!) to the blogosphere. 2004 ended with a bit of a downer, to say the least, for those caught in the tsunami. I spent the entire week glued to the tv in horror.

Last night we had an awesome SADev party to say goodbye to Tina. She's off to JHB, for those who don't know, to join Microsoft. I would prefer not to comment on this (jealousy, they say, makes you nasty) other than to wish her a HUUUUUUGE good luck. Ha ha, now I know someone on the "inside". She did let out that she has a bunch of goodies left over from her MVP stint, so I imagine we are all going to be fighting over prizes from something soon ;-)

Anyway, gotta go and fight with Sharepoint. Sharepoint (or at least its API) and me, we is not much good friendses right now...

btw, looks like we got another survey going around. Missed the last one, but I apparently did quite well this time around). I'm not sure whether to be happy or worried about this score...

Brilliant News Site

2004-12-23T19:07:00.000+02:00

Been swamped for waaaaayyyy to long. Finally getting through stuff and reading some old blogs. I found this awesome news site off of the Scobleizer.

Sharepoint Lists - Getting the Field Data via [SPList].Items.GetDataTable

2004-12-09T16:41:00.000+02:00

As part of our sharepoint image library project we've added some custom fields to the image lists. I accidently stumbled upon an interesting method today to get the data out, though. the Items collection of a list has a GetDataTable method that gets the entire field collection across each item in the list into - yes, you guessed it - a datatable.

hmmm, this opens some interesting possibilities for binding, etc...

A slow blog month...but loads of content to come

2004-12-02T17:10:00.000+02:00

Ok, I know I've been a bit lagging on the blog front this last few weeks. I've barely been reading, let alone posting. This seems to be a slow month for quite a few people blog-wise as the end of the year approaches. I've been seriously ducked under with work, but I'm hoping to be clear from about next week. In the meantime, I've also been working on other content. I'm just about done with an article on some of the real nitty-gritty bits of working with typed datasets. It's a sort of a follow up to a recent msdn article, but gets much into some of the difficulties and work arounds needed.

Also, I've finished the No Touch Deployment app to get images into Sharepoint. It's working well so far, but my tester will find out how stable it is ;-). I've got some Sharepoint articles brewing in the brain too... Watch this space.

Winforms App to put images into Sharepoint Image Library

2004-11-25T17:34:00.000+02:00

I'm just finishing a rough little winforms app that can be http-deployed. My first smart client app :-). If anyone is interested in it I might put some details together. It lets you open local images, resize them to standard sizes (640x480, 800x600, etc.) and set the quality. It also gives a final file size indication. Finally, it can (well, still working on this part but it's going well) upload the images to a Sharepoint image list.

MSN Web Messenger 1

2004-11-25T17:31:00.000+02:00

MSN Web Messenger is now available in version 1. I'm finally back on messenger! You can get it at http://webmessenger.msn.com and it is not as feature-rich as the windows app but it does the basics well.

You can contact me online hiltatwork[AT]giesenow[DOT]com

Edit and Continue vs Refactoring

2004-11-23T17:36:00.000+02:00

I had another wierd thought today (I tend to get these every now and then - see here). I was reading Paul Vick's blog (he's a member of the VB.Net team) and this entry is talking about how VB.Net is not going to get refactoring in Whidbey but both VB.Net and C# will get Edit and Continue (EnC).

First of all, let me explain that I am really upset about this. When I saw the refactoring abilities in whidbey I was seriously impressed. When I discovered they were not to appear in vb.net is was shocked to an equal degree. By and large the vb.net team has done absolutely brilliant work but I definitely agree with refactoring over EnC.

My wierd thought, without further ado, is this: EnC is for fixing your own code, Refactoring is for fixing someone else's ;-).

What I mean is that it is mostly when you are debugging and stepping through your own code that you need EnC but when you are reviewing other people's code to QA, etc. you want to refactor it. If you do it right the first time you should'nt need EnC. If the previous programmer... 'nuf said.

Seriously though, while I probably won't switch, this would be my first real impetus to move to C#. A major argument for VB is its RAD abilities. Refactoring is in some ways a big part of RAM (rapid application maintenace - did I just coin a term?) - the work we all really love! Any way to cut this down suits me perfectly.

Obviously these are generalised views but they explain why I feel so strongly about this.

More blog-marketing info

2004-11-19T01:04:00.000+02:00

Colin Coller from CopySourceAsHTML posted a response to my post with some great info and tips. Man, this guy is really impressing me. Once again, keep up the great work. He's also looking for feedback on how to organise your code which I will need to do next week, so I'll definitely send him some info.

MSDN Events today

2004-11-18T23:47:00.000+02:00

Today I had the day off to attend to MSDN events. The first one was on advanced ASP.NET tips and tricks. It was given by Peter Willmot, who I had not heard before. He is a great speaker though and really brought some of the points home. I have some arguments about some of his points though but will discuss these in a later post. Also, I won a t-shirt, which is always good. Yay for schwag!

The second session was on SQL Reporting Services by Ryan Jamieson from ispartners. We used RS in a recent project and I assisted with some classes, deployment, .configs, etc. but did not touch RS itself so it was nice to see the process in action. It was a bit of a slower session though. He definitely needed a code monkey ;-). However, in this session I won the C# Developer's Cookbook from Microsoft Press which looks great. I'm a VB.NET guy, and the funny thing is I took it up with Kaylash from Microsoft that there were no VB.NET books about 20 minutes before during the break. The book looks great though and I thought it might be a nice idea to study in one language and work in another so that I get more exposure to both.

I've been a bit slack with posting lately. Things have been absolutely crazy at work. Off to a long weekend though, hopefully to recover. I've got a new project starting on Monday that involves some complex Sharepointing and I've hardly even interacted with it, let along try to bend the object model to my will. Looks mad. I might get to finally build some smart client stuff for it which will be great. Any Sharepoint experts who can offer support??

CopySourceAsHTML - New Version

2004-11-12T14:59:00.000+02:00

Below is a paste from the new version. It has a bunch of new features, one of which is the ability to sort out line breaks in Blogger. When I pasted previously into Blogger it added BR tags into the code in place of actual line breaks. I mailed Colin about this and he responded within minutes with instructions on how to get around it - once more, great work!

    6     Private Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load
    7         ' This is a comment
    8         Dim strResponse As String = "Hello World"
    9 
   10         Response.Write("Hello World")
   11     End Sub

Some superb blog-related marketing

2004-11-12T11:02:00.000+02:00

A short while ago I posted about CopySourceAsHTML, a really nifty little VS.Net plugin that lets you highlight some code in the ide, right click and then copy everything (colours, indenting, etc.) as pre-formatted html code.

I mentioned on my post that I had got hold of it and was trying it out but that I was having a bit of trouble with it. This morning, having had no direct contact with the him, I got an email from Colin Coller, its creator, who let me know that a new version was out with some fixes and improvements. He had obviously been Googling for the program, found my posting, and decided to let me know.

Personally, I was really impressed by this little marketing excersise. Scoble had a post yesterday about a startup company getting and responding to client feedback instantly on his blog. In fact, he has spoken a few times about the customer-feedback possibilities available through blogging and I think this was another great example.

Colin, as I said in my email, keep up the great work both on the product and the service front!

ASP.NET Testing from Scott Guthrie

2004-11-08T11:08:00.000+02:00

I finally got around to reading Scott Guthrie's posting about Testing ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Web Developer. They have, according to the post, about 105,000 test cases and 505,000 test scenarios as well as 1200 servers that they test on. Wow!

In my opinion (which is admittedly very limited in this field) it is just another strong argument against open source. I'm probably setting myself up for some serious flaming, but I can't see that any open source product goes through so rigorous a process before release.

Combined Dance Show

2004-11-04T23:25:00.000+02:00

My girlfriend is a professional Spanish dancer and she took part in a combined show tonight together with the Jazzart company and a whole bunch of others. It was hectic. I'm not really a big dance fan and so I only really see Spanish dance (for obvious reasons :->) so it was really interesting to see modern, tap, African, Spanish, Indian and a few others all in the same show and with a couple in the same piece even.

One of the most amazing pieces, though, was definitely one from a company that apparently has a number of physically disabled dancers. The male dancer was wheelchair-bound! This was something I had never even conceptialized. I always enjoy experiencing these kind of things for two reasons. First of all, corny as it sounds, it really helps me to remember to be thankfully for what I have and secondly it is amazing to see people not let anything stand in their way, especially where most people would simply ive up.

Funerals for retired programs

2004-11-04T08:59:00.000+02:00

Slashdot has a link about holding funerals for old, retired programs and they comment that this is "TOO geeky".

In some ways I obviously agree, but in others I can understand the notion. Things have changed today where the turaround time of even a large project can be within 1 year for a small team. However, it was not that long ago that a similar system would require years of work for a much larger team.

In certain parts of the industry this still holds true. I got hold of the Finding Nemo DVD for my nieces and I watched some of the extra clips. The film took 3 years to complete and they had an interview with one of the developers on the project who is clearly in his early thirties. He was asked, now that the movie is complete, what it felt like having spent a tenth of his life working on this project now that it is over!

I really feel that, even if you are / were not particularly passionate about a specific project, the fact that you put so much energy into it has to make it part of your life. How much more so is this true for those who were particularly tied to it, like the architects and leads? Think about another aspect: The rollout of the system and the first time it goes live. This is definitely a little bit like the birth of child. It follows then that the "termination" of the same system in some ways does feel like the death of a small part of you.

Anyway, that was my ramble for the day. Thanks for reading this far down :-).

Elections & the Blogger site

2004-11-04T08:55:00.000+02:00

Wow, the blogger.com site was absolutely hammered last night after the elections. I tried for a while to get in with absolutely no success. Lol.

6:38 and all is quiet

2004-11-03T18:38:00.000+02:00

I generally try and do some serious blog / rss reading around 6:00 p.m. (at least that's my round 2 for the day) and I must say I've noticed things are a bit quite today. I'm wondering if BushVsKerry 1.0 has anything to do with it?

Scoble has a posting on how election comments in blogs apparently affected the stock market but I disagree. My comment to the posting:

I am hardly an expert on the markets but I would have definitely have anticipated uneasiness just because it was definitely going to be a close vote. Much as I am a blog fan (read: ADDICT) I need to question their data and analysis.

UPDATE: Robert agrees:

Blogs are just the tip of the iceberg. They can show you underlying trends, but they won't give you an always accurate view of what lies underneath.

Bush vs Kerry - an SOA Analysis

2004-11-03T09:36:00.000+02:00

Rockford Lhotka has a comparison of SOA vs election voting.

ViewState vs Session State vs...

2004-11-01T17:37:00.000+02:00

I was contributing to a discussion on sadeveloper.net a little while ago on storing information in viewstate versus session state. A user was asking about whether or not he should try and persist information between pages by using shared / static members within his page class.

First of all, as often occurs when one is stuck with an ASP.NET (or basically any server-side scripting model), the difficulty is in separating the paradigm between the stateful windows client and the disconnected, stateless web environment. As Carl Franklin regularly says - "by the time you see the page it is already forgotten about on the server". Yes, a shared / static member would persist the information between postbacks, but it would also store the same value for every user's visit to the page! What the person really wanted was to store the information just for that user on that page.

Now, another option in ASP classic days was to consider storing the data in a Session variable and to use some kind of key to specify that it was only for a specific page (e.g. "Index.asp:TransactionID"). This would work but the management is unneccesarily complex. If the user moves to another page the developer would either need to iterate through and clean every unneccesary session item or have memory bloat.

In ASP.NET we have another solution: Viewstate. For those very new to ASP.NET, viewstate is (at a simple level) the object / architecture that enables webcontrols to persist their value between postbacks. But, it offers quite a bit more. The Viewstate object is entirely accessible on the server and it works in a similar fashion to the Session object. It also operates as a Name-Value collection and it can also store any (serializable) object. The difference is that it is not stored on the server but rather streamed down to the client into a hidden form variable together with the various webcontrol properties (into that wierd long __VIEWSTATE field). As a result, it uses up more bandwidth but less memory. However, it exists within the page itself. If the user closes the window the Viewstate information is lost completely. This means that it does not hog server memory. Also, because it is independent of session, the user can leave a window open for a few hours (i.e. way past session timeout), post the form, and still receive the correct response!

Viewstate has some definitely benefits and disadvantages when compared to session variables and its use needs to be analysed carefully to suit the situation. Nonetheless, if used effectively, it can be another powerful tool in the asp.net developer's toolbox. One needs to be very careful of the total size of the page's viewstate, but the same is true for session information. In short - beware it exists and that it can be used for good but treat with thoughtfulness and understanding.

A visit from Vic Gundotra

2004-11-01T17:34:00.000+02:00

On Friday we were really privelaged to have Vic Gundotra, General Manager of the .NET Platform Strategy & Partner Group (see here for more) come and talk to us here in Cape Town. I missed the TechEd Webcast because we were busy with a major deployment so it was great to see him in person and hear what he had to say. He discussed some great topics and gave us an interesting view of the future of software development. He also fielded some pretty heavy questions around a wide variety of topics including open source, piracy, directx, whidbey, indigo, wse2 and some other great stuff.

An interesting coincidence is that I was exactly up to the show with Vic, Steve Cellini and Lenn Pryor and the Channel 9 guys earlier last week so I still got two doses of him during the week.

The future of blogging

2004-10-29T13:29:00.000+02:00

This may indeed be what we have to look forward to...

Copy Source As HTML

2004-10-29T11:28:00.000+02:00

I just got a new tool called CopySourceAsHTML. It is a plugin for VS.Net that allows you to select an code from within studio and, um, copy it as html. Test below:

6: Private Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load

     7:         ' This is a comment

     8:         Dim strMessage As String = "Hello World"

     9:         Response.Write(strMessage)

    10:     End Sub

Well, it looks like I might need to tweak it a bit...

Back to da blogosphere

2004-10-29T10:27:00.000+02:00

Things have been absolutely crazy at work the last few weeks. I ended up this last week in particular having to give 3 training sessions (which went very well :->), complete a section of the system, debug some sections, QA others, do as much testing as possible, plan the deployment and finally deploy the whole bang shoot. Talk about a long month!! Unfortunately, this means I haven't done too much blogging, but I have a couple of things to talk about so expect some new posts, o loyal reader(or - readerS hopefully).

Deployment gave some trouble the other night. The system was giving regular intermittent problems (does that make sense?). Eventually, I tracked the problem down using FileMon from SysInternals. Man do those guys rock! This little standalone exe lets you moniter absolutely every bit of file activity happening on the drive! This is exactly what you need when the cpu, network bandwidth and memory are almost idling at nothing but everything is creaking along. I used FileMon last deployment to figure out why Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services was running dog slow, only to discover that the antivirus was scanning ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING (and RS uses a truck-load of assemblies, config files, etc. Big shout out to Mark Russinovich at sysinternals for a brilliant piece of software.

Nerd Dinner

2004-10-21T17:45:00.000+02:00

Last night we finally had our very first Nerd Dinner. It was absolutely awesome! I had such fun geeking out completely. We chatted about a whole bunch of stuff and I got to finally see Whitehorse & Whidbey. They look amazing!! Talk about a productivity increase! Whidbey has some brilliant new functions, like you can highlight some text and move it all into a method, wrap it in an If, Try..Catch, or loads of other stuff.

Anyway, it was a total blast. Check the offical site for more feedback. I'm very much looking forward to the next one.

Also kewl was that I got an SA Dev calendar and Ruari has promised me a fleecy SA Dev jumper. Very kewl, in slick black too :-).

Pics coming soon. We must definitely do this regularly!

South African RSS News feeds - finally

2004-10-19T09:51:00.000+02:00

For those RSS-addicts amongst us (myself included), I just discovered that IOL (Independent OnLine) now has RSS feeds. Check them out here.

Still waiting for one from ITWeb though.

And the Google compaints come in...

2004-10-15T11:28:00.000+02:00

Dave Winer lists some of the issues with the Google Desktop Search on his blog. He discusses the fact that it only searches Microsoft content, i.e. not custom content such as his own databases etc. He also mentions that it searches spam as well as a few other points.

All of these are good points. However, as Scott Hanselman mentioned, this is a beta product:

"As most "alpha/beta" Google stuff, it's very polished. They've really raised the bar on what it means to pre-release software."

Google Desktop Bar

2004-10-15T10:53:00.000+02:00

Google have released a searching tool for your p.c.

It uses the Google engine against your local files, emails, recent web sites and more. Wow, the power of Google for all my stuff. Also, if you search on Google.com it can also find the results on your harddrive. Man this is kewl!

As Scott Hanselman says "Everyone will blog about it" but he seems to be the only one I've found. The US guys are obviously still waking up this morning to it :-).

Brain-Controlled Computer

2004-10-15T10:35:00.000+02:00

Scott Hanselman blogged recently about experiencing pain while typing and consequently experimenting with voice recognition technology. Apparently, they are actually realistically taking things further...

Yahoo news has an article on a Brain Machine Interface where "A 25-year-old quadriplegic sits in a wheelchair with wires coming out of a bottle-cap-size connector stuck in his skull".

Thinking straight into the machine! Talk about coding at the speed of thought! I dream about this stuff!

My only concern is what happens if it picks up all thoughts, e.g.:

Dim count As Integer

For count = 1 To Wow, that is a short skirt

Typo

2004-10-14T13:46:00.000+02:00

I was needling a friend of mine. In my opinion, there is a typo in the book:

"The [G]eek shall inherit the earth."

Dynamic Control Creation, Viewstate and Event Binding

2004-10-14T10:09:00.000+02:00

Scott Mitchell of 4GuysFromRolla fame has been posting some interesting entries about dynamic control creation in ASP.NET and how viewstate won't get saved correctly depending on the order in which the control is added to the controlscollection of the parent. I recently found that event binding has a similar issue with a dynamic control.

To bind to an event for a dynamic control (i.e. one you create in code) with the AddHandler (VB.NET) keyword you need to have added the control to the parent's controlcollection property first. The same is obviously true for the viewstate of the control.

OQO

2004-10-14T09:11:00.000+02:00

Ok, I have no idea how you pronounce the name of this thing, but it is one of the coolest devices I have ever seen!

Quick summary:
5" touch screen device
1ghz cpu
256 mb ram
20 gb hdd
wifi
firewire
800x480
usb
bluetooth

plus docking cable that has:
lan
additional video output to 1280x1024
usb
+++

What makes it so amazing is that (at least it appears so) you get virtually everything you need but it is easy to transport and use - almost a desktop replacement that fits into your pocket!

One comment I have heard so far against it is: it is unlike a normal tablet which is too big to fall into a toilet bowl. hmmm. I work with some disturbing people if these are their evualation criteria.

Our first Nerd Dinner next week

2004-10-13T14:36:00.000+02:00

Just booked some tables at Ferrymans, a local pub at the Waterfront mall. Based on some of the great tips I've gotten it should be a nice venue. Also, they've agreed to let us have some power.

I'm really looking forward to the dinner and hoping to have a fun evening with loads of techies. Going to go and get some multiplugs this weekend and try and scrounge around for some spare hardware (hubs, cables, etc.)

I'll definitely post some pics and feedback afterwards so watch this space.

More Big Walk pics

2004-10-11T11:14:00.000+02:00

Ilan put up his awesome Big Walk pics. Check them out here.

Big Walk

2004-10-10T16:43:00.000+02:00

So, we finally got a few of us together from SA Developer to join the Big Walk. There was an 80-km walk but, being computer geeks, we decided to do the 5 km one. Ruari and Rudolf brought the family along and I brought one of my housemates to talk techie with.

More pics will definitely be up soon, but in the meantime here are my super-high quality SonyEricsson t630 pics:

1: Ruari walking
2: Ilan - a housemate and my official photographer
3: The SA Dev team. Yes, that is correct, there is ABSOLUTELY NO ONE behind us. We were the absolute last people on our 5km walk.

Nonetheless, it was great fun. Thanks again to Rudolf for organising. Lets see more of us there next year!

BTW, I got a kewl SADev t-shirt as well so we could do the "team" thing. Pictures of my rippling muscles in my new shirt to come soon. Lol

UPDATE: there appears to be a problem with my (free) Brinkster hosting. You can browse directly to the pics but not link to them, apparently. Will be sorting out a permanent host this week though.

"Nerd" vs "Geek"

2004-09-29T14:10:00.001+02:00

So now there is a GeekDinner.com as well.

This reminded me of an argument I once had regarding "nerd" vs "geek" definitions. Dictionary.com actually seems to support part of the conclusion we arrived at. Nerd is more derogatory and relates to one who is "foolish, inept, or unattractive". More importantly, certainly with relation to our dinners, it adds "socially inept"!

The "geek" definition though, is quite off. Dictionary.com lists the same definitions as nerd, but adds "A carnival performer whose show consists of bizarre acts, such as biting the head off a live chicken." Definitely waaaay off (I'm sure ThinkGeek would agree). At least this one has something to do with food though...

What we came up with all those months ago was that a nerd is more "inept" whereas a geek is more of an aficionado, as in computer geek. Anyway, that's my humble opinion.

Whatever your view, come and join us for some dinner.

A Scoble mention...

2004-09-28T18:10:00.000+02:00

I saw that Robert Scoble is into the geek dinner thing as well, so I asked him if he had any tips to get us started. He most certainly did and I even got a personal mention!

Thanks again Robert for the great info and I extend an open invite any time for you to join us.

Broadband at last??

2004-09-27T18:04:00.000+02:00

I once had a colleague who had a t-shirt that read "Will work for Bandwidth". I think that sums up the South African I.T. industry!

Anyways, I may finally be getting ADSL, albeit a slow and cranky one. There are four desktops and I notebook with wireless that will want to share the connection though, so I was thinking of a wireless / 4 port ethernet ADSL router. That is, it is a 4-port ethernet hub / wireless access point / ADSL router. I can get hold of a D-Link or an SMC one. Has anyone tried these out? What have you found?

Top 10 Reasons .NET is better than COM

2004-09-27T17:30:00.000+02:00

Nick Landry has released a highly entertaining list of reasons why, well, .NET is better than COM.

Cape Town Nerd Dinner - Founding Meeting

2004-09-23T10:00:00.000+02:00

(Inspired by Rory Blyth and Scott Hanselman)

The Nerd Dinner is a dinner event where a bunch of I.T. nerds get together, um, over dinner, to chat and discuss all things IT-related.

This entry on Rory's blog pointed me to the right place, and I thought this would be a great idea for here in Cape Town. I visited the site only to discover that Jo'berg and Durban have one already! It is high time then that we had one in C.T.

I've registered the Cape Town one. I was provisionally thinking of putting one together for Wednesday, October 20 and have a few people interested. Anyone that would like to join the fun, reply to this post or email me directly at hiltatwork AT giesenow DOT com.

Arrgg, a JPEG! Run for your life!!

2004-09-15T09:38:00.002+02:00

So now they have discovered an exploit in JPEG files that can enable one of our happy hacking friends to create a new barrage of viruses.

This is not exactly unparalled though. Last year they found an exploit in bmp files in I.E., if I recall. There was another one for png's that I wasn't even aware of. It seems that even something as simple as an image can be exploited. Theoretically these exploits mean that soon what appears to be a very basic website could actually be a hacking platform. A hacker could post the nefarious image as a banner on a big site and cause havoc. Fun and games in I.T. security, as always.

Of course, a patch does exist (just visit WindowsUpdate, as usual). I have made it a habit of visiting the site about once a week or so, but I am interested how many tech-savvy people do / don't do this?

LEGO Mindstorm .NET project

2004-09-13T09:10:00.000+02:00

It appears some guys from Potsdam university are now working on bringing .NET to the LEGO Mindstorm project. That could be verrry interesting. I'm sure I can think of something for my old space LEGO guys to do automatically. They are a little small to vacuum even my place though :-). Check out this link for more.

Developer-Architect joint project

2004-09-10T17:40:00.000+02:00

I've been hanging out at our local corner INETA user group (SA Developer.net) quite a bit recently, and I recently joined SA Architect.net as well. To my great surprise and delight, they recently decided to do a joint venture to "bridge the gap" between these two great fields. Now, architecture is something I have been giving quite a bit of thought lately, especially after reading a great article on moving from developer to architect (still looking for the link, will post it soon) and this posting (My highfalutin career advice) on Rocky Lohtka's blog, so this idea was just up my bowling alley!

Well, last night was our first meeting, and I must admit I'm really excited about the idea. The plan is to get some sort of real-world project and then to get volunteers from the user groups to jointly develop it, but to continually publish all of our work related to it, ultimately with the goal of everyone learning from one another, improving all of our skills, and contributing significantly to the local brewery and the GDP of some small coffee-producing country.

We have so far decided on our Mission and are now looking for projects. Personally I am for doing something for a non-profit org who would struggle to purchase a solution of this kind, but there are some other really great suggestions coming in, and I think either way it will be reach its goals. I'm looking forward to learning some awesome stuff from some brilliant people!

To Tina and Ruari, if you're reading this, keep up the brilliant work!

"Where has all the [MEMORY] gone... long time paaaasssssing"

2004-09-09T08:51:00.000+02:00

Sorry, arbitrary songs are floating around in my "Jumbled Mind" as I wait for my p.c. to boot. Why does it take soooo long. Well, perhaps that has to do with my GripeForTheDay^TM.

WHERE DOES ALL MY RAM GO?!?!? Now, I know that people have been asking this question since Noah ran out of space on the ark, but seriously! My machine has been up for a few minutes now, and I have Outlook and a single browser window actually open, and I am using 274 mb. Of course, if I look in task manager, the running processes don't nearly add up to the total. I sometimes feel like an Enron employee! Was the guy who wrote this module from Arthur Andersen, perhaps?

One Cool Tool I did find though is Security Task Manager. It lets you get more detailed info about your running processes and "the price is right" with a free version.

(By the way, the reason I am upset about the memory is because my machine has only 512 mb, which I pass VERY quickly. VS, Outlook and the aspnet worker process basically push me over. Anyone who wants to donate some excess ram are more than welcome :-). Come to think of it, any donations will be more than welcome :->>)

Catastrophic Failure ... Not

2004-09-01T18:22:00.000+02:00

I've been quite busy lately as the end of our project approaches. Doing some code Q.A. and final bug fixes, etc. Anyway, I was updating a web reference earlier when I received the following error:

I was wondering if anyone had received the same. What is more curious is that everything was actually fine and I was able to continue quite happily. I re-tried the Update Web Reference and everything worked. It also go me thinking about error messages in general. Has anyone received anything interesting or humourous that they would care to share? I'd love to hear about them.

Boolean Operator Short-circuiting.

2004-08-12T17:02:00.001+02:00

I was showing someone a code snippet today that included an AndAlso statement and they were quite surprised to discover what it was. It got me thinking back to when I discovered AndAlso and OrElse short circuiting. I remember reading a posting at the time where someone asked why it wasn't the default behaviour and the more I think about it the more I agree.

They way these statements work, for example is as follows. If you have a string variable strName and you want to determine if it is (a) Not Null and (b) not = "Bob". The following statement will fail:

If Not IsDBNull(strName) And strName <> "Bob" Then

The reason for this is that BOTH checks are evaluated and if the variable is in fact null an exception will occur on the last part. What we really want is: Check if the variable is not null THEN ALSO (i.e. if the first part evaluates to True) check that it is not equal to "Bob". This would need two separate If statements to accomplish otherwise. The AndAlso statement accomplishes this and OrElse performs a similar operation versus the Else statement. However, I am hard-pressed to think of many common situations when you would definitely want to execute both statements. Perhaps if one is calling one's own Boolean function it would make sense. Otherwise, I definitely think these should be the defaults. First of all, if you think about it "AndALSO" makes more sense in english (as does OrELSE). In addition, the current behaviour is more likely to trip a beginner up and it leads to unneccesary code.

Any opinions on this? Anyone agree / disagree?

WebDeploy

2004-08-05T19:21:00.000+02:00

I stumbled upon this tool the other day, and it is fantastic. WebDeploy is a creation by Matt Hawley that allows you to quickly and easily deploy an ASP.NET web app. It has a bunch of kewl features, definitely check it out if you work in ASP.NET.

Wired Mag: Porn Blogs Manipulate Google

2004-08-03T14:17:00.000+02:00

And guess what just came in to my SharpReader feed? Apparently this porn-blog thing is quite common.

BTW, I recently installed SharpReader. It is an RSS/Atom Aggregator, which means that it pulls from multiple rss feeds, and it polls them every hour. Very kewl. I've now got loads of info coming in constantly 8-).

Paris Hilton Blog

2004-08-03T13:26:00.000+02:00

Har Har. Somebody just informed me that there is a site of some sort relating to Paris Hilton's infamous video, and that it is also a *.blogspot address (See Paris Hilton Video). Apparently, to find my blog, don't type Hilton and Blogspot into Google!

Followup: We have Mailmarshal filtering on, and it is blocking the site, so I can't even check it out!

Web Service Exception in Visual Studio 2003

2004-08-03T13:09:00.000+02:00

I've been working quite a bit with XML Web Services lately, and every now and then I get the following exception:

"Only one WebServiceBinding attribute may be specified on type..."

A search on Google returned few results, only one of which was helpful. It suggested restarting Visual Studio. This works, but I was curious as to what was happening. I discovered that Visual Studio.Net stores a cached version of whatever Web Application is currently open, and that this cache can become corrupted. The location of this cache can be found in Tools - Options - Projects - Web Settings, under the "Offline Projects" section. To fix this problem, browse to the folder and delete the specific cache for the web services project, then close and re-open the solution from within V.S. Alternatively, as the gotdotnet posting suggests, just close and re-open the entire IDE. I've also heard of other problems occurring from this cache becoming corrupted, but there does not seem to be an actual way to rebuild it directly from within Visual Studio.

Does anybody know of a way to do this?

Filling an ADO.NET DataTable from an ADO classic Recordset

2004-07-27T17:47:00.000+02:00

I heard today on an old DotNetRocks! episode (in the interview with Andrew Brust) that the OleDbDataAdapter's Fill overloads can fill an DataTable based on an ADO classic recordset. This sounds interesting. It should really help with integration for legacy apps. Has anyone tried it?

#Region Standards in Visual Studio.Net

2004-07-15T17:33:00.000+02:00

Today I had a few thoughts about regions in Visual Studio.Net. For those unprivileged few who have to code in the Web Matrix Project (which I did for a few months) or Visual Notepad ++ ;-) , Visual Studio.Net allows you to group sections of source code together so that they can be expanded and contracted when you want, kind of like folders in Windows Explorer. Also, what some people don't know is that you can nest regions inside of one another. With this in mind, I started thinking about what some standards might look like here.

Standards, as we all know, is often a hairy topic. We've seen Hungarian Notation cause its debates (See MSDN Naming Guidelines). BTW, Chris Sells joked (in his DotNet Rocks! interview) about case sensitivity in C# being the "new Hungarian Notation" - that might explain SOME purpose in it for us Visual Basic.Net guys.

Anyways, the following are recommendations for first- and second-level region regions. Additional regions can be added at any levels at the developer’s discretion if it is felt that these will be in keeping with the goals of enhanced readability and navigation. In addition, regions that are unused are simply left out. If a sub-level is presented (e.g. see Methods below), the regions appear in descending order of scope. These sub regions are indented according to level.

Normal classes
These are the base regions for each class and are adjusted for Web Forms, Web Services, etc. as discussed below.
  • Variable Declarations
  • Constants
  • Enums
  • Properties
  • Constructors
  • Methods
     o Public Methods
     o Protected Methods
     o Private Methods
  • Code To Store

Web Forms / User Controls
As before, but with additions as follows:
  • Methods
     o Page Control Events
     o Lookup Methods (many of which may be public, e.g. for grid binding lookups)
     o …

Web Services
As before, but with additions as follows:
  • Methods
     o Public Methods
          Data Retrieval Methods
          Data Updating Methods

I'd love to hear anybody's thoughts on this.

DotNetRocks!

2004-07-14T14:58:00.000+02:00

I just recently discovered DotNetRocks! Its an online .NET radio show with interviews with some interesting and influential guys. Very much worth listening to. The show covers abosolutely everything and I'm enjoying listening to Dan Appleman, Pat Hinds, Mark Anders, and loads of others. They cover DotNet Remoting, serialization, reflection, obfuscation - you name it. It is hosted by franklins.net and also on MSDN at .NET Rocks! One thing that is particularly nice about the msdn files is that they are wrapped in an .exe, cos we are blocked from getting media files at my current client site (very frustrating!)

Some gripes about Typed Datasets and sqlDataAdapters

2004-07-07T16:45:00.000+02:00

I am currently working on quite an interesting project. We have put out business and data layers a bit closer than usual, and are making use of typed datasets passed via Web to the presentation layer. I've touched on aspects of this type of Service Architecture approach before, but not quite in this way. We have encountered particularly irritating points so far. One is that the ADO.NET dataadapters are not able to deal with parent-child updating properly, and the other relates to annotating typed datasets.

The XML schemas for an ADO.NET typed dataset allows you to specify relationships between its tables. However, when you try and Update the changes using a DataAdapter it does not handle the changes correctly. The Update method iterates through the items sequentially, as one might expect. This causes problems though depending on the type of transaction. If the update method attacks the parent table first, and it processes a Delete, the children become orphaned. On the other hand, if you update the children first on an Insert, they become marked as Unchanged, and will not be updated when the parent is Inserted into the database and receives its proper real primary key. What we had to do was similar to the solution found in KB 310350 - How to update parent-child data with an Identity column from a Windows Forms application by using a Web Service in Visual Basic .NET. However, even this did not quite work. If anyone is interested in the solution, let me know and I'll provide more info.

The second problem related, as I mentioned, to annotating typed datasets (e.g. see Using Annotations with a Typed and also Using Annotations with a Typed DataSet). This concept allows the auto-generated objects to have proper names. For example, we have a convention of prefixing our lookup tables with "tlkp". Using these annotations, we can create a Audit type, and the table is called Audits, as opposed to the auto-"tlkpAudit" and "tlkpAuditTable". Much nicer :-). In addition, annotations let you specify defaults, etc. Now, using a typed dataset is fine with a Web Service. Adding the reference in Visual Studio.NET 2003 automatically pulls the schema across to the client application. HOWEVER (!!!) it does NOT pull the annotations! Nobody has yet been able to explain this one to me, and it is quite frustrating! Any comments would be appreciated!

Anyways, that's it for today. Back to the grind...

Hello World (sic)

2004-07-07T09:44:00.000+02:00

Hello all, welcome to my new blog. I've been meaning to do this for a while, so here we go with the blogging...