January 11, 2007
LOL just got sent a Geek Viral email and actually laughed at it...does that make me a geek too?
Top
10 things likely to be overheard from a Klingon
Programmer
10. Specifications are
for the weak and timid! 9. You question the worthiness of my code? I should
kill you where you stand! 8. Indentation?! - I will show you how to indent
when I indent your skull! 7. What is this talk of 'release
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October 29, 2006
A very good book that is now freely available to read...you should check it out.http://gettingreal.37signals.com/toc.phpHas some interesting theories in there.
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September 19, 2006
Just came across the Microsoft Forums on their web site via the WSSv3 FAQ site, I use Firefox as it's quicker at Tabbed browsing than Internet Explorer and displays mosts sites better than IE except for Microsoft ones! I can't believe they haven't got these forums working other browsers and also most of their own sites also! Atleast the Sharepoint team took the time to make it work in Firefox! It
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September 19, 2006
I've been using Windows Media Player 11 beta 2 for a while now, mainly to synchronise my music from my laptop to my miniSD card to listen to on my O2 XDA Atom. The only thing that really bugs me is that it's not true synchronisation, for example, it doesn't on sync pass back to the Media Player the play count or date last played. I use a set of Jabra BT620s bluetooth headphones which have volume,
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September 18, 2006
I've been reading about the Microsoft Windows Workflow Platform with some interest for a while now and it's use in Sharepoint 2007 and Team Foundation System. The MSDN site has plenty of information on it, but I found this great article introducing it all. Still, what completely amazes me is the Microsoft.com search engine...I use Google full time now with the "site:microsoft.com" tag t
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September 14, 2006
M$ are making their big play by announcing the Zune media device. They'll be plenty of coverage over the next few weeks on this Toshiba built device that M$ hopes stomps on the iPod. First impressions are that the community side of device being able to send photos, videos and music between devices is a great idea. Especially even DRM music which allows 3 plays of a song with a feature to flag thi
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September 14, 2006
Nintendo really did miss the boat in the console war with regards to the PS One and M$ Xbox wars. They are now playing catch up with the Wii (pronounced Wee). I always prefered Nintendo games becuase of the simple gameplay and multiplayer options over the PS/Xbox type eye candy graphics with terrible gameplay or slow to pick up game learning curves.It'll be great to see Mario on the screens again
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September 14, 2006
I've just rebuilt my laptop and was worknig through the usual suspects to reinstall. One thing that I wasn't even sure I'd use anymore is outlook. I totally use GMail at work and at home now. I have all my contacts, tasks, and notes in my Windows Mobile device. I was simply using it as a backup copy.I found the CompanionLink for Google Calendar that syncs my windows mobile with Google Calendar wh
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September 10, 2006
I've done a DotNetNuke 4.0.2 install for a friend a while ago for his http://www.jiggyjigs.com/ site. He uses the DNN Store project module which has quite a few bugs in it. He's having trouble upgrading from v1 to v2 and I've noticed in the forums that a guy has taken the code and is selling it for £50 with a few add-ons for multiple shipping costs, tax etc.. The issue is that if DNN store upgrad
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September 6, 2006
I'm currently doing some project work with Microsoft Word 2003 using VBA to populate a Document template. It uses an Access database to dynamically load certain tabs in the form etc.I had a problem yesterday which I think I've resolved thanks to the microsoft.public.word.vba.general group. You can actually compile your VBA code by gettnig into the editor (ALT-F11) and then selecting Debug | Compi
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August 30, 2006
Someone asked what resources I use for design and standards, here's a quick dump of the regulars I check.Design:
http://www.digitalthread.com/
http://www.bornmagazine.org/
http://www.core77.com/
http://www.shift.jp.org/
http://www.creativebehavior.com/
http://www.designtaxi.com/
http://9rules.com/http://www.csszengarden.com/
Standards:
http://www.alistapart.com/
Show off sites:
http://ww
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August 22, 2006
Great article on someone who took all that AOL user data that leaked out and profiling them...extemely funny stuff...I wonder what profile I would fit? Sadly heads got chopped also from AOL for the leak also.
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August 22, 2006
Graeme must be bored today...he found this neat google map javascript mash up that shows what's the other side of the world.
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August 13, 2006
Found this online...don't usually like The Office dry humour, but this is funny as it's related to IT also.
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August 7, 2006
Been searching for a good screen recorder for a while now and finally came across an amazing open source one called CamStudio! Thoroughly recommend it to record direct to AVI with sound. It also can convert to swf file too.
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June 8, 2006
Had to add this link...it's extremely clever:http://www.devilducky.com/media/46686/
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June 7, 2006
I have just been sent a scanned copy of a Flight confirmation for my holiday as a PDF. Within GMail I viewed the attachment as HTML and it actually did a damn good job of recognising the text rather than show me the attachment! It's the little things that make GMail and Google in general so cool.
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May 25, 2006
Well I downloaded Vista beta 2 iso and installed it on a VM...I'm not crazy enough to put it on my laptop just yet! First impressions were...who kidnapped the Apple OSX designer!?! When M$ do things, they don't do them by halves...the Aqua interface is extremely over the top! I'd much prefer it to be completely clean cut as before than flashy and just have the thing run faster!IE 7.0 didn't look
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May 25, 2006
With Apples campaign hitting the screens via news on Lance Armstrong and Internet technology in shoes has gone crazy. Adidas have computers to control shoe comfort! I wonder what Reebok will follow suite with?
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April 19, 2006
Well, I finally made it to the top spot on Google, although it appears to fluctuate from 13th to 1st a lot! Hopefully once people start linking to the site internationally the rank will go up some more and stay there! I'm still appearing 5th on Yahoo and 15th on MSN Search.
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April 11, 2006
Found this great article that discusses where web 2.0 really is going with some practical examples of it.It's very true and the message about collecting more data on the user before pushing content or search results is very true. My web site has all my starred internet pages I have enjoyed reading, plus a lot of information about myself. Default ProfileIf there was a default format profile for a
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April 4, 2006
I've just been investigating the Oracle ADO.NET drivers for Visual Studio 2005. The download is 213Mb and contains an add-in for VS2005. You get an 'Oracle Explorer' which allows you to see all the tables, views, procedures, functions, packages etc. within a database. It's pretty slick with a query analyser and wizards to create new procedures and tables etc.Found a really good tutorial on the Or
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March 28, 2006
I'm going to sell my FujiFilm S2 Pro [1] camera as I don't use it anymore and hardly have since moving to Australia because I haven't been running my photo booths at sports events etc.On Ebay they are maknig about AUD $750 for the body. I've got 2 1Gb Microdrives, a 70-200mm Nikon lens and a 20-70mm Sigma lens, it's all in a nice backpack specialist bag with 3 sets of rechargeable batteries.If
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March 28, 2006
I've also got a Apple 17" Powerbook which I haven't used in about a year since getting a Windows machine primarily for development work and moving over to all Internet based applications for calendaring, email etc. and not relying on the OS for anything but Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Visual Studio for development purposes.This machine is very very sexy and has a great slim case witha
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March 27, 2006
Saw this link and couldn't resist it...this is amazing!http://everyonehasavice.com/?p=803 These guys deserve some serious tippage!
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March 27, 2006
Well, the ads out with Ben Afflick 1. Firebox has the 'clicker' for sale. The Flash game isn't that special and clicking isn't that responsive on the Girls in the game.Talk is suprisingly quiet online about it being as it was released on March 1st. Google has hardly anything on this.It's a shame when marketing back fires like that...although maybe they are holding off a bit...usually Lynx are eve
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March 27, 2006
This link is so funny...translations of Chinese restaurant menus gone wrong!
On this note too...check out the "Best fight scene of all time" on YouTube...watch it to the end too! Imagine paying to see this at the cinema...do you think they'd be anyone left after this scene?!?Graeme pointed me to engrish.com too.
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March 22, 2006
Okay, I shouldn't really have a new post for every new feature that Google comes up with...but I've been using the Google Reader for a while now and use it to surf the web every day. They've now made a new way to virally market this product with the ability to share your feeds you have and also starred items with the public! Either by a link or by putting a code snippet on your web site!The code
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March 21, 2006
As mentioned yesterday, M$ was really pushing WMC at MIX06. This blog discusses the amount of sales they've pulled through the door in the last year and it's quite amazing. The Xbox 360 has the ability to run as a WMC aswell and the roll out of that is going to push this technology through the roof.Apple have got their own version of this software, FrontRow, which they are pushing with their mac
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March 20, 2006
Great summary of Mix06 from Robert Burke's blog. The MySpace stats are incredible, I didn't realise it was the 2nd biggest visited web site on the Internet...above Google etc.! This shows how community sites can dominate the Internet! The .Net 2.0 conversion stats are also quite impressive with regards to performance increases etc.
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March 20, 2006
There is a good web cast here which outlines what they are covering, after 20 minutes it goes into
migration details. In summary, they claim: Document Management, Records
Management, Web Content Management and Forms Management with regards to
Workflow, Metadata, Policy, Search, Security, Collaboration, Deployment etc.
I’ve
put my name down for the beta 2 program. Be interesting to see if they
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March 16, 2006
I've been looking for references on web site response times with reference to pshychological studies etc. but everything seems to be locked behind user names and passwords. Here's what I've found so far:http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html
http://lef.csc.com/foundation/library/mni/rp05.asp
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/1/
http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/1S/tim
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March 16, 2006
The $13,854USD bounty has been paid to Colin Nederkoorn by the community who put out a request as soon as the Intel Mac's were announced. It's taken a while, but it was inevitable. Nothing is hack proof!I can see some potential in this with regards to using both OS on one machine...especially if you are mobile. Although I currently have a Mac Powerbook and a Asus PC laptop. The Mac laptop sits in
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March 12, 2006
Found some interesting links related to the internal views of ex-Google people. Obviously the grass isn't always greener. If this is true, and they are bringing back pop-ups etc., then this could be an interesting turn to see how loyal Googlers are and whether or not they stick with them or whether they move onto something new...I mean, I believe it was their main differential and MSN Search sea
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March 9, 2006
I have been doing some research into the new release of Sharepoint again after inital readings yesterday. I found Dustin Miller's (Dean of sharepoint universtiy) blog article where he basically lists the best places to look for information on the release.Interestingly Arpan Shah was discussing how he know has Sharepoint 2007 running on his production laptop without many glitches and lists some of
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March 9, 2006
Ever wanted to sync your PDA/mobile phone with iTunes, check this iTune Agent out! Now...just got to wait to get my new PDA after the last one getting stolen!
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March 9, 2006
I've been trying to watch the Microsoft PDC web casts, but on our corporate network it is very very painful! I found this neat link to software that will grab the stream and save it as something to watch once it's all done...gee...Microsoft could learn some lessons from Apple's Quicktime technology heh! I downloaded one called HiNet Recorder and saved the asx file and opened in the program and cl
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March 9, 2006
So Microsoft two years ago was hyping up Tablet PCs that seem to have been pushed to the side to promote the new UMPC! Personally, I don't think they'll take off either if PDAs haven't due to the price being the major factor. I mean, what can this thing do that a iPod and a mobile can't?Does your average consumer have access to the internet via WiFi or through 3G and want to pay for this subscrip
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March 9, 2006
Well, the M$ .Net 2.0 and SQL 2005 exams are finally officially released. So now I really have to start to settle into this and get the books and cram for these once they are available in Perth, Australia! Probably not for a while!
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March 9, 2006
Well, had time to go back to Team Foundation Server RC. Got it all up and running fine now but still got issues...I can't access the web pages, comes up with HTTP Error 403 - Forbidden!Found some useful links in my travels:MSDN2 Help TeamSystem RocksThere doesn't seem much doco in the way of administrating it and using it etc. Haven't been able to find any basic tutorials or anything! I'll keep h
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March 7, 2006
After the last CMS Microsoft released I was really hoping they'd sort something nice out to match Visual Studio 2005 and Office 2007 product sets. It turns out they are rolling it out with Sharepoint 2007.
From reading
around the web, there’s been a lot of activity in February this year with beta
of Sharepoint 2007 which is going to be released with Microsoft Office 2007 to
encourage sales.
S
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March 6, 2006
Just got my new machine at work...2 19" flat screen monitors and a beefy 2Gb Ram, 200Gb HDD machine! VM heaven!Anyways, I pulled a solution down from Visual Source Safe and got a non-friendly .Net error ("Requested registry access is not allowed")..found the solution here at Marshall Jones blog. It basically points to Tom Hollander's blog where it shows that you need to install Ent
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February 23, 2006
Okay, think of a 'buzz-word' and Google have a workforce of minions going at it to come up with the next thing to take over the Internet...GMail, GTalk, Google Reader, GMail and Gtalk...and now Google Pages! A AJAX Content Management Editor.I had a home page going in about 5 seconds clicking on the editable areas required...you can have links to other pages, urls, emails, contacts. They're even u
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February 22, 2006
As you may or may not have noticed, this site is now running off of Community Server v2.0 Express. I did try and do an upgrade but had some teething problems so I installed a new instance and then migrated over the Blog entries.I did try and also migrate over the gallery but with no luck :-( I will try again when I get time. The script was nearly there but I couldn't get any images to actually sh
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February 22, 2006
Well no luck with installing a single server instance of Team Foundation...got as far through the help file instructions as installing Team Foundation from a clean Windows Server 2003 VM and it came up with an error at the end! Hopefully I'll get an answer out of the MSDN forums!Also found this interesting post by TFS God Rob Caron about how TFS will integrate with Project Server. Microsoft have
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February 22, 2006
Nauman Leghari's has listed 3 great apps that come in very useful on his blog...I've already used the HTTPDebugger to troubleshoot this web sites CommunityServer.org install and also used the encryption and password generator in the OMziff app! Always great where people share their finds!
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February 21, 2006
Going to install Team Foundation Server RC and have a look at it now. Will post my findings.
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February 20, 2006
Found this great article on using Nant's <solution> tag to compile a VS.Net solution. Has some great advice on creating a deploy folder and copying necessary files into it to then manually deploy them - currently I use UnLeashIT to get the files I need for a live or test environment. This way you get an automated hit at it.I'm going to start investigating Team Foundation Server and MSBuild
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February 20, 2006
Microsoft have released their first batch of exams for .Net 2.0 Framework. 70-528 Preparation page points you to their line of books that will aid you in passing that exam for .Net Framework 2.0 Web Applications. Not too sure if the core Visual C# book is necessary if you already know 1.1.I do find the Microsoft web site so hard to navigate! It's still easier to use Google to find anything on it!
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February 19, 2006
This is a very good article on where Sony went wrong and missed the boat with UMD and PSP marketing etc. I believe they could have forged ahead and beaten Apple iTunes online store with regards to selling video and music (and both) with Sony's large user base.It'll be interesting to see whether they make the same mistakes with the PS3 too. I mean the Xbox 360 is out now and I'm sure they'll be bi
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February 18, 2006
This article discusses Blockbusters issues with Netflix and how Apple could breathe life back into it by it's all powerful iPod Video. Walking into a Blockbuster stay and transferring the latest film, TV epsiode and some trailers over a USB connection may be the way forward. Saving on download times of broadband etc.
Sounds like a good idea, be nice once Apple release the video iPort like the
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February 18, 2006
iSkoot could be the buzz word of the year if everything goes to plan. Their service currently connects Cingular customers in the US to Skypes network through their standard service connection. This basically would cut the cost of international calls to Skype rates. The service is going to be extended to other networks and other VOIP services such as Google Talk etc.
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February 16, 2006
I've been following with interest the path Microsoft are making with Windows Mobile 5.0 and after owning a 02 XDA IIs and now waiting for my 02 XDA Atom to arrive...I wanted to see what they see in the future for these devices.This article on Pocket PC Thoughts is a good overview of Steve 'crazy' Ballmers keynote.They used the Atom to demo Microsoft Powerpoint Mobile connected to a projector via
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February 16, 2006
Selenium is a Firefox extension that basically allows you to record some actions in Firefox and then Assert some things. You can add breakpoints and save the tests and edit them using any HTML editor because it is all XML.I can see it being really handy for testing long forms even across multiple pages etc.There's a great video demo which quickly shows you what it does and it's only a light downl
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February 15, 2006
Just been playing some with the Enterprise Library Security Application Block. I was very interested in the Roles based Rule checking which allowed you to select a RuleProvider and authorize a principle against a paticular rule. These rules are based on expressions which can contain Role-based and Username-based rules.These things come in very handy when you want to check to see whether the user
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February 15, 2006
I've been using my hockey community site to test new things in .Net that I can't play with at work because we don't get time or we're extending old code that would take too long to update.The hockey site is structured to allow people to register and submit content of various types (News, Events, FAQs, Articles, Links). A forum is also used.The structure for the different types of content inherits
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February 15, 2006
Found this article whilst surfing around this morning...I'm also doing a quickwatch and digging through the Items element etc. to find out what it's brought back...now you can use this extra to view the dataset like you're in a datagrid.
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February 14, 2006
Found this interesting article on MSDN about migrating Petshop web application from 1.1 to 2.0. I'm impressed with the generics and System.Transaction extensions in .net 2.0 from reading this.I'm still very dubious about the Master Page template paradigm from Microsofts useability concerns with it's own browser support and also with how Visual Studio 2003 worked with code before.It appears to hea
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February 14, 2006
As I mentioned before, I'm looking to replace my phone again after being mugged and I have my heart set on the 02 XDA Atom, which currently isn't on the list of available products through my insurance company as yet...patience, be patient!Was reading this article with great interest on where Apple may be going. There is some serious discussion about this going on.I for one would buy an Apple PDA
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February 14, 2006
Just installed and got running a web application in .net 2.0 using Ent Lib 2.0 Logging. Was trying to move on to get logging configuration for different environments. This used to be done in Ent Lib 1.0 using Olaf Conijn's Application Block. I guess we'll have to wait until he's written that unless there's an easier way of doing it. Tom Hollander mentions the same path...The documentation for eac
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February 13, 2006
Found some interesting articles on DevX which has some right and wrong virtual machine uses and also pros and cons of them aswell. For me, the ability to be able to recreate the same environment on my local machine is second to none but also being able to drop these and start from certain base points very easily.
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February 13, 2006
On MSDN they start to sell the idea of using MSBuild and Team Foundation Server. It would basically replace any need for Draco.NET or CruiseControl.NET and also NANT.I totally agree with using Continuous Integration purely because it encourages developers to write their code so that:it can be automatically deployed and works on a build serverit therefore can be pulled up on a developer machine ve
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February 13, 2006
I'm jumping at the bit to start incorporating TFS features into my development practices to try and encourage others to use it too. One big draw back to the whole TFS .Net 2.0 platform is backwards compatibility with .Net 1.1 framework which you can't compile to in Visual Studio 2005 - a mistake i think Microsoft will regret as this will be the major hold-back for upgrading to the VS2005 platform
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February 13, 2006
I've just been modifying an existing Coding Standards document at work and found some good links to other example documents:MSDNPhilips Medical SystemsIridiumLance HuntI really don't like the idea of having a huge document to maintain. I like the idea of using FXCop to create rules and from the rules created in XML somehow generate a report that is readable upfront for the programmers. They can t
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February 13, 2006
Yahoo have gone and published their UI Design Pattern Library online to developers. It can all be downloaded as a series of .js files similar to how AJAX libraries are being distributed here. One of their Senior Web Developers discusses what how they grade the browsers that are supported and then the table to illustrate this grading. It's quite an interesting way to approach browser support and a
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February 12, 2006
My laptop at home is running particularly slow and I've ran some adaware programs to see if it can find anything with no luck. Got pointed in the direction of SysInternals web site which has a Process monitor program which is like Task Manager on Steriods...has helped to find out what my PC is actually doing and what files it has locked etc.
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February 8, 2006
Me and Cojo have been working on his site today and have installed the DNN Store Module. It's an awesome first cut and the feature requests for the next version look exciting.
Interestingly I found a very good comment from an obvious experienced developer who basically stated "Please do not implement every possible enhancement request for the module.". Have a read, it's very true.
We've
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February 8, 2006
Came across PageFlakes today which continues along the AJAX bandwagon but interestingly for me continues down the personalisation and customisation route like www.google.com/ig and www.live.com.I personally I think this is better than live.com for sure and has more features than google.com/ig. Will follow this one with interest as my final year thesis at university was on this using my inline hoc
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February 7, 2006
I'm just downloading Team Foundation Server RC from MSDN as I'm writing this and will hopefully have it up and running in our corporate environment and start getting some of our newer .Net 2.0 projects into it very shortly.
I can see the main advantages at first to continue my longing quest to get everyone using Continuous Integration, better source control and also all of the Testing that can be
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February 6, 2006
I downloaded DotNetNuke 4.0.2 because I want to use this product for replacing a friends commerce site JiggyJigs.com. He's currently using a static site which he now wants to make dynamic.There is the DNN store which has just been released in Beta. It's very impressive for a first cut and a lot better than the Kentico Commerce Module we've been using for a client at work.I'll probably have some b
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February 6, 2006
After mass broadcasting by my mother...who showed her how to e-mail! Everyone and their dog knows that I was mugged and assualted on Australia Day on a main road (Canninghighway) full of traffic waiting to go home. No-one jumped out to help (thanks guys) when 5 skin head australian's, more than likely on something, decided to start pushing and punching everyone in their path as they walked up the
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January 13, 2006
Had to do some screen scraping...
string url = Request.Form["formaction"].ToString();
string result;
UTF8Encoding en = new UTF8Encoding();
HttpWebRequest req = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);
req.Headers.Add("name", "\"blah\"");
req.ContentType = "text/html";
req.Accept = "text/html";
req.ContentLength = 0;
req.Method = "PO
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January 13, 2006
Found a great site a few months back and had to rehunt for it...but here it is!
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December 18, 2005
I've been setting up some instances of Team Foundation Server Beta 3 Release and found it quicker to create an ISO image of the SQL 2005 cd's etc. for installing it all. I found the CD Burner XP Pro Software which is really neat for creating them and best of all it's free!
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December 14, 2005
We've been using CruiseControl at my workplace now for a month and have had no problems apart from this sneaky one...it only happens once in a while and I've not really found anything on the web regarding the error apart from Jerry's similar issue. It's a bit of a pain, because you get a status of Exception and although immediately you just guess that it's this error...you then have to force rest
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December 1, 2005
Ever found that Windows XP never finds what you want in your file structure using their standard search contains function in Explorer? ...me too! I found this program called WinGrep which is similar to the GREP function in UNIX. It is very powerful and pretty quick and has been a saviour so far!
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November 29, 2005
I've been using VSS6.0 at my new workplace for the last month and a bit now and at first was very impressed with the integration with Visual Studio with regards to Open from source control for a project which automatically pulled down the files in the solution (and child projects) and created IIS applications for all the web projects and placed everything in the same place as was originally set u
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November 28, 2005
I'm trying to compile a 'ye old VB6 COM Object in a Nant Task in CruiseControl.NET and for some reason I get this error:
ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.Core.Tasks.BuilderException: NAnt process
timed out (after 600 seconds) at
ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.Core.Tasks.NAntTask.Run(IIntegrationResult
result) at
ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.Core.Project.Run(IIntegrationResult result)
at
ThoughtWorks.Cruise
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November 28, 2005
I've been investigating a few .NET CMS applications and Ant dropped me a line about Kentico . I had already had a look at DotNetNuke which is probably the largest open source community development out there in .Net.
Background
Kentico provides an API to work with and two ASP.NET 1.1 (or 2.0) IIS
sites with VS2003 (or VS2005) projects (you can choose either C# or
VB.NET). The developer reference
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November 27, 2005
I was just testing all my build scripts on our build server and hit the IIS app (created using NantContrib - very handy) and got a Registry Security Error on the web site. I found this solution
which means modifying the InstallServices.bat so that Visual Studio is
not required to be installed for the Enterprise Libraries to log
properly. The .bat file can be found in the src directory and when ru
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November 27, 2005
I bought a book a while ago on Regular Expressions and just haven't got
round to sitting down and reading it. I just came across this article which has a great introduction to pattern matching and also recommends using Expresso
which is a great bit of software to show matches on sample text. Great
for building up patterns without having to recompile code etc.
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November 24, 2005
After setting this up with a few projects now I do feel that there is
some overhead with the Configuration Application Block ie. having to setup a class to define the
configuration information (e.g. EditorFontData in the QuickStart) and then having to use the WriteConfiguration()
method to create your first instance of the config setting file mainly
because the XML is not something you can type
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November 23, 2005
MS SQL 2000 doesn't allow you to have declared variables in the TOP x statement. Found this nice little way around this, you basically use SET ROWCOUNT command:
declare @v1 intset @v1 = 25set rowcount @v1select * from MyTable Order by DateColumnset rowcount 0
MS SQL 2005 actually allows you to do this directly and I remember
being at the product demo and all the 'ohhhs' and 'ahhhs' came out for
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November 22, 2005
Congratulations to Shano for coming 3rd in his weight at the 4th Karate-Do Goju-Kai World Championships in Rotterdam this month!
Found some cool pictures of him.
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November 22, 2005
I've got Enterprise Library all wired up now in my Windows Service LDAPContacts Project I've created and also in the UnitTests project. I use a pre-build event found in the 'Project properties | Common Properties | Build Events' section. So when I rebuild my solution it automatically fires off and copies the main configuration file to my Unit Tests project rather than me keeping two copies. It's
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November 21, 2005
From reading into the documentation
for Enterprise Library v1.0 I can't see anyway of having custom
settings like you would do for different enironment instances in one
config file e.g.
System.Configuration.ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings["DebugFlagDev"]
System.Configuration.ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings["DebugFlagLive"]
I'd like to be able to just grab
"DebugFlag
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November 21, 2005
Found this site
and thought it was worth a link to make sure tables do die! It's a
great example of how CSS layouts actually encourage clean layouts and
fast loading pages.
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November 21, 2005
I've been using log4net for the last year but thought it would be worth
trialing the Logging Application block that comes with Enterprise
Library. I found this article which basically trashes it compared to log4net...but we'll see.
As usual, found a nice article
by David Hayden (again) which emulates log4net's Debug, Info, Fatal
type approach. He's wrapped up the types of LogEntry for each Catego
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November 20, 2005
I couldn't believe how hard it was to find the download for the
Enterprise Library on the Microsoft web site! I ended up using Google
to search for it. The Microsoft site is all over the place it's crazy!
Anyway, the Enterprise Library project can be found on the GotDotNet.com portal.
Also found this great Wiki that lists all of the tutorials out there for it.
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November 17, 2005
I'm now running Community Server v2.0 beta on this web site. So far so good. Had to upgrade my hosting to .Net Framework 2.0 as this is a major upgrade and also my new GlobalInlineHockey.com web site is coming this weekend too.
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November 17, 2005
Had a nasty problem yesterday with my debugger. The error I was getting was:
Auto-attach to process '[3172] aspnet_wp.exe' on machine 'JTHAKE' failed. Error code 0x8013134b
I was looking at permissions, restarting IIS changing the user in the
machine.config with no joy. Then by off chance looking at a blog post
I found out that for some reason my app had changed from running 1.1 to
2.0! I wasn'
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November 17, 2005
Microsoft have released a WIKI project which is to "show off" the
features of Atlas. I've downloaded the .vsi project which "should"
automatically get me setup in the new Visual Studio 2005 IDE. I'll
report back with my findings soon...
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November 16, 2005
I was having a problem deleting rows from a DataSet and calling the Update() method because although the Rows.Count was saying that there was less after a RemoveRow() when it called the Update() HasChanges() was false.
A little bit of reading on the web and I found that you have to use the Delete() function in the Rows[x] object. To find the index of the row you have found (using FindById() etc.)
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November 16, 2005
I bought a book a while ago on Regular Expressions but haven't got around to reading it. Graeme at work gave me this nice little expression to grab the file name from a http path.
string path = “http://www.google.com/test.asp“;
Regex regex = new Regex(@"[^/]*?/([^/]*?\.\w+)$");
Match fileNameMatch = regex.Match(path);
string fileName = fileNameMatch.Result("$1");
I really need
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November 16, 2005
A great article explaining how to use dynamic loading of controls. I found it helped to run in debug mode to see what code was fired first etc. too.
http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/092904-1.aspx
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November 16, 2005
I downloaded the basic install of DotNetNuke to see what it was like in .Net Framework 2.0.
I had to fiddle a bit and the documentation is only for the previous version.
A few things were a problem:
1. I needed to copy the SiteUrls.config file from the /config/ directory to the root.
I need to rename release.config to web.config
I needed to edit the web.config to use SQL Server 2000- I had to
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November 16, 2005
I've just downloaded and installed CommunityServer.org 1.1 . There was a simple readme file with a few simple steps and then you hit a web page and a install wizard walks you through the rest which is very impressive.
CommunityServer allows you to have Blogs, Galleries, Forums and will soon have v2.0 out which will start to incorporate a new CMS which the organisation has purchased.
I'm going to
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November 15, 2005
I've been doing some work using the xsd's and Xml just recently. I've just been populating the Strongly Typed DataSet's created from the xsd generated by my sample Xml with database content.
Found a nice link (http://www.xamlon.com/kb/Article.aspx?id=10180) which shows you how simple it is to populate it from the database. The MSDN link is: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/libra
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November 14, 2005
I found myself needing a way to read Session State from ASP to ASP.Net (1.1) to save writing some new components in Classic ASP and without migrating all the outstanding code to ASP.Net. Not sure if this is the most efficient way, but works fine some I'm running with it:
http://www.eggheadcafe.com/articles/20021207.asp
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November 7, 2005
Got recommened a great SQL database comparison tool by a friend of my (Antony Day). It's called SQL Delta and a demo can be found at http://sqldelta.com/index.html. It's a very powerful DIFF app that compares every single difference you could think of! As always, thanks Ant!
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