March 2005 Entries

Alternative Platform Users Reflect On .NET

Nick sent me a link to Michael Swanson's blog, and I happen to bump into this post that spoke about the experience that developers from different platforms (Linux, Java, Flash, etc.) had to say about .NET. A summary of their insights can be found here. Kudos MS!

posted @ Wednesday, March 30, 2005 10:41 PM | Feedback (611)

C#: Developer's Choice On Survey

A recent Computerworld survey has placed C# as the top of the Top 5 programming languages reported in use by respondents list. Here's a list of the results for languages: C# - 72% Java - 66% Visual Basic - 62% C++ - 54% JavaScript/ECMAScript - 50% If you have the time, I suggest you read it. It's worth the time!

posted @ Wednesday, March 30, 2005 10:26 PM | Feedback (611)

Don't Click Delete Until You Do Impact Analysis

I just need to vent a little bit...For the project I'm currently working on, one of the developers was told to 'clean up' some of the fields that are no longer in use for the windows client. Well, since the ASP.NET client and windows client touch the same data...hmmm, I wonder, will that affect the ASP.NET application? Anyone, anyone? For the past hour and half I've been doing impact analysis on our application finding every dropped field and make sure that they are correct mapped back to our business objects. Some of you might say, that's easy just go...

posted @ Wednesday, March 30, 2005 4:11 PM | Feedback (587)

VS.NET Beta 2 & Avalon/Indigo CTP

Well, it took a whole hour, but I finally installed VS.NET 2005 Beta2 along with the Avalon/Indigo CTP! Now, if I could only find time to play with it...I just can't wait to play with Indigo!

posted @ Tuesday, March 29, 2005 11:12 PM | Feedback (611)

Paul Sheriff on .NET Rocks

Paul Sheriff, MS Regional Director, is the latest interviewee of the .NET Rocks! radio show. Some of you might remember Paul from our past IADNUG meeting. On this installment of .NET Rocks! Paul talks about software architecture. Check it out!

posted @ Saturday, March 26, 2005 11:12 AM | Feedback (611)

Avalon & Indigo March CTP

For those interested geeks out there (without MSDN Universal...like me), the Avalon and Indigo Community Technology Preview - March 2005 is out...go download it!

posted @ Friday, March 25, 2005 10:01 AM | Feedback (556)

Asynchronous Web Requests with XMLHTTP

I'm in the process of coming up with a little example that shows you how you can use the XMLHTTP ActiveX Object and ASP.NET to process long running tasks. I will post the code tomorrow.

posted @ Thursday, March 24, 2005 11:28 PM | Feedback (611)

AJAX

It's scary how some of us geeks tend to think on the same wave length... <rant> Earlier today, Nick and I were talking about AJAX and how it's now supported by most browsers. In particular, how Google Maps have managed to use this browser feature to make their application run smoothly. Some of you out there might be saying, "Yeah, google maps, it's soo cool! Look how it uses AJAX!"...well, what about OWA or even so Web MSN Messenger? I'm not sure how many of you know this, but all of these async http request functionally was added to IE with the...

posted @ Wednesday, March 23, 2005 11:08 PM | Feedback (611)

Avalon Talk

Tonite Nick, Ryan, Seth and I attended a talk by an old acquaintance of mine, Kevin Moore, an Avalon PM. His Avalon presentation was "no fluff" and packed with tons of examples. I've seen what Avalon can in regards with basic UI layout, but after this meeting, I've gained more respect for it. There's definitely a lot of neat things one could do with the Avalon framework, the hard part for me is finding the time do play with it...specially if I want to play with Indigo. Thanks for the talk Kevin!

posted @ Wednesday, March 23, 2005 10:40 PM | Feedback (613)

New Router

I finally broke down and decided to purchase a new router for my home network. Why? Well, the linksys one I had kept losing connection, thus the reason why my email/web was down sporatically. I went with the Netgear VPN Firewall Router (Model FVS318). Why? We have it at work and it works pretty good, so go with what you know.

posted @ Tuesday, March 22, 2005 5:58 PM | Feedback (611)

ASP.NET Loggin And VS.NET 2003

Now, I'm not sure how many of you log your exceptions (caught/un-caught) within your ASP.NET web application. If you don't, get a little closer so I can smack you! ;-) <designRant> Logging your exceptions gives you the advantage of having more information related to the inconsistancy in a common place, ie. flat file, db, etc. </designRant> Ok, for those of you that DO log, I'm not sure if you are aware of this interesting feature of VS.NET 2003. If you...

posted @ Tuesday, March 22, 2005 12:09 PM | Feedback (613)

My Lack Of Bloggin

Well, I would like to apologize for my lack of bloggin the past couple of days, but I was out of the country on vacation. Christa and I went on a 7 day Mexican Riviera Carnival Cruise with Ryan, his fiance and parents. We all had a great time lounging around the ship and I managed to get a lot of reading done (.NET centric of course!). I promise that from now on, I will keep up on the bloggin.

posted @ Tuesday, March 22, 2005 9:35 AM | Feedback (589)

New Toy

I got my new laptop yesterday, it's the Dell Inspiron 6000 with these specs: Intel Pentium M Processor 730 (1.60GHz/2MBEA Cache/533MHz FSB) 15.4 inch WSXGA+ LCD Panel 1GB, Shared DDR2,400MHz 2 Dimm Integrated Intel Media Accelerator 9000 Graphics 80GB Ultra ATA Hard Drive Intel PRO/Wireless 2915 Internal Wireless (802.11a/b/g) Dell Wireless 350 Bluetooth Now the fun job of moving everything from my old laptop to my new one is at hand! You can check out more info on the Dell website.

posted @ Wednesday, March 9, 2005 5:19 PM | Feedback (607)

If I Could Only Live There...

Yet another useless online quiz, but yet so true! Take the quiz: "Which American City Are You?"OrlandoYou are sunshine and playtime. You just wanna have fun and nobody can drag you down.

posted @ Wednesday, March 9, 2005 5:19 PM | Feedback (611)

Debugging ASP.NET The Cheap Way

For those of you that were unable to attend the MSDN event a couple of weeks ago, I've found this quick article showing you how you can use CLR Debugger, the debugger that comes with the SDK, to debug your ASP.NET applications! This is a great article for those of you that are hard-core developers (using a command-line compiler and gvim (or notepad))!

posted @ Tuesday, March 8, 2005 11:40 AM | Feedback (611)

What Is An A-no-ny-mous Class?

Good question! Anonymous classes in Java allow you to implement adapter classes within your code. Huh? Pretty simple, if you have a class that returns an Enumeration interface (like a custom list, stack, etc.), you can define the implementation of the code right on the method declaration. To get a better grasp of it, check this example from the Java tutorial, also please note the last sentence regarding their usage in code. Ok, how does this tie to .NET? Well, for some time I've been talking with Nick about this feature of the Java language and how sweet it will be...

posted @ Thursday, March 3, 2005 9:24 PM | Feedback (614)

The Speed of VB.NET Is Directionally Proportional...

... to the C# developer that's coding it. Nick and I have been quite busy working on a VB.NET web project for Sprint. As some of you know, Nick and I are pretty fleunt in C# (the fact that Nick is an MVP for the language proves that at least he is!), so our VB.NET code doesn't flow as smoothly as our C#-syntax does. It took Nick 5 minutes to write a simple handler (.ashx) in C# and an additional 20 minutes to make it work in VB.NET...that's just a poor use of a resource's abilities! It's like me asking...

posted @ Tuesday, March 1, 2005 3:25 PM | Feedback (611)