April 2005 Entries

Lunch With Timmah...

Today Nick and I had the pleasure of having lunch with Tim, of Gifford Consulting fame. The lunch was packed with .NET and talks about world domination... <sinester_laugh>HAHAHAHAHAHA</sinester_laugh> It's always fun talking to Timmy.

posted @ Friday, April 29, 2005 3:00 PM | Feedback (667)

CodeMonkey Revisited...

Well, I just ran a report on the total lines of code, thus far, for the Sprint Experience project.  The numbers turned out as follows: Lines Code Comments Mixed Blank 18,532 13,799 1,395 235 3,573 Oh yeah, changes are still on the way!! So these numbers will increase as the pay decreases.

posted @ Thursday, April 28, 2005 4:42 PM | Feedback (611)

Too Much VB.NET Makes Javier Go ...

... Freaking CRA-ZY!! I've been missing from the bloggin' scene all of this week cause I've been swamped at work trying to crank out this bad boy. Hopefully, next week I can work my regular 50 hrs. Does anybody know of any big .NET (C# ONLY) projects going on in Des Moines? ... Any one? ... yeah, I thought so...

posted @ Thursday, April 28, 2005 4:34 PM | Feedback (613)

Loop Optimizations

Brad Abrams, .NET Framework PM, posted this interesting tidbit about using the Length property of an array directly in a loop as supposed to assigning it to a local variable. For example: int length = myArray.Length; for (int i=0; i<length; i++) for(int i=0; i<myArray.Length; i++) If you have time, I suggest you read it. You'll be surprised on how the framework handles this issue.

posted @ Monday, April 25, 2005 3:29 PM | Feedback (611)

What's The Deletability Of Your Data?

Or is it deleteability? Yesterday while meeting with one of our customers, the word deletability|deleteablity came up in regards to having editable fields in a web form. As soon as I heard the word, I started to think...is that English? Or is it just another crazy English contraction to add to the lexicon? Is it a numeric metric for data? I tried to look up both of the words in dictionary.com and, as suspected, they don't exist! It's amazing what one can come up with in the spur of the moment. Anyway, at the end of the meeting...

posted @ Thursday, April 21, 2005 9:31 AM | Feedback (614)

I Speak It The English

Nick posted his Linguistic Profile quiz results from a quiz he found online.  I having nothing else to do, decided to take it. My results are not that bad...granted, I've only been speaking English for the past 13 years.Your Linguistic Profile: 75% General American English 10% Upper Midwestern 5% Dixie 5% Midwestern 5% Yankee What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

posted @ Sunday, April 17, 2005 3:48 PM | Feedback (611)

Wrong Number...?

Something funny happened to me today around 3 PM. Christa and I were sitting talking with our realtor and the phone rings. I get up and answer the phone and this is how the conversation turned out: Me: Hello? Woman: Hello, can you hear me? Me: Yes, who are you looking for? Woman: Don't me that shit. Me: Excuse me?! Woman: You heard me. You *ucking suck! Me: I think you got the wrong number. Woman: Don't *ucking lie...

posted @ Saturday, April 16, 2005 11:46 PM | Feedback (611)

VB.NET, The Suck Of My Desire

Is it just me or don't you hate the fact that when you are working on a project in VB.NET, that from time to time you get a race condition from a manual build? (The message in the Task list that says "Unable to write file ... to ..."). The reason I think this happens is cause of the fact that VB.NET compiles the code for you in the background and that at times it keeps holding onto the assembly when you force a manual rebuild. How do you fix this? Kill the IDE...yeah, it sucks! Have...

posted @ Friday, April 15, 2005 4:01 PM | Feedback (611)

South Park

Thanks to Ryan's little find, this is what I look like as a South Park character. Yep, even as a cartoon I'm still geeky.

posted @ Thursday, April 14, 2005 10:19 PM | Feedback (612)

MCAD .NET

I just passed my third exam on my conquest for MCSD .NET. Having passed the Windows, ASP.NET and Web Services exams makes me a MCAD .NET developer. What does that mean? Well, nothing. I'm still the same geeky looser I was before the exams. What test is next? I got my eyes on the Implementing Security for Applications with C#...man, I start tasting the declarative permissions attributes right about now...

posted @ Thursday, April 14, 2005 11:50 AM | Feedback (611)

Dev Con Is Almost Here

That's right folks, the Visual Studio 2005 Developer Conference is just around the corner! Nick, Tim and I will be presenting in Minneapolis and Omaha to any of you that are interested in joinin us! That's right, there's still time to register! I will be presenting an overview of ASP.NET 2.0, giving you a feel for the new features the platform has to offer. The conference offers three tracks, Smart Clients, ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio Team Systems. So if you are hungering for some show and tell from local developers, sign-up! The registration is only...

posted @ Wednesday, April 13, 2005 9:55 PM | Feedback (611)

First CodeProject Article

I finally wrote my first Code Project article! The article is called Extending ASP.NET Web Controls With Custom HTML Attributes, if you have the time check it out and tell me what you think! Also, I will like to extend my deepest thanks to Nick for pushing to write an article.

posted @ Wednesday, April 13, 2005 9:54 AM | Feedback (613)

VS 2005 Class Designer

If you got the time, there's a good article on MSDN that steps you throught the process of creating a simple API with the new class designer in VS.NET 2005. This is time well spent...

posted @ Monday, April 11, 2005 10:36 PM | Feedback (617)

I Need A Side Project

For those of you that know me, I like to work on random skunk works from time to time. Some of these works have allowed me to explore different software design methodologies. Or as Nick will call it, the coding of "factories that create factories that create factories". So I'm asking you, my three readers, what do you think should be my side project? Here are a few of the ideas that I've been kicking around my head: Web Application Framework in .NET 2.0 - I've always talked about building a web/windows application that uses a custom framework to create web/windows...

posted @ Sunday, April 10, 2005 9:21 PM | Feedback (612)

Analysis Services, Steaks and A Red Sweater

I know a couple days have passed since Wednesday's IADNUG meeting, but I've been quite busy at work so my bloging time has been somewhat limited. First, I will like to extend out my thank you to Mike Benkovich for coming down to speak at our user group. For those of you that don't know Mike, he's our Developer Community Champion which in Microsoft's terms, he's the guy that does the MSDN presentation for our region. Thanks Mike for taking the time to come down and speak to our group about data warehousing and their uses! Also, Jeff Brand, our Community's only...

posted @ Sunday, April 10, 2005 9:18 PM | Feedback (612)

Happy Birthday, Jon!

My little brother, Jon, turns 19 today. Yeah, I guess that at 19, he's no longer little...specially since he's getting to be my height. In my eyes, he's still the scrawny 5 year old that followed me everywhere (I'm glad he didn't follow on my footsteps). Anyway, if anyone of you know him, post a comment to wish him a happy birthday. On his spare time, Jon works on this little side project. Check it out!

posted @ Monday, April 4, 2005 10:17 PM | Feedback (612)

Whitehorse Is Sweet

I had a couple of minutes to kill this evening, so I decided to spend it playing around with VS.NET 2005. A while back I wrote a simple web framework based on xml for this site. Well, I wanted to see how some of the base classes would look like on the new class designer in VS. All I did was add the .cs files to the project, added a new class diagram and dragged three classes from the Class View window. This is what the diagram, after exporting it to a gif, looks like. The code has been modified...

posted @ Monday, April 4, 2005 10:10 PM | Feedback (612)

Me.IsCodeMonkey = True

Nick showed me this cool VS.NET add-in that totals up the lines of pure code (no comments, they are counted seperately). Currently, the project that Nick is working on totals at about 2,200 lines of pure C# code! For my Sprint project, written in VB.NET, comes at 11,700 lines (around 2,200+ lines of comments!)!! That's a lot of VB.NET code...specially from the guy that doesn't do that much VB.NET. If it were only C#...oh, it's good to dream.

posted @ Friday, April 1, 2005 10:43 PM | Feedback (611)