August 2005 Entries

WinFS Released On MSDN

If you have an MSDN subscription, you can download WinFS to play with.  If you would like to meet some of the members of the WinFS team, you can check out this video on Channel9.

posted @ Monday, August 29, 2005 9:24 PM | Feedback (615)

GooglePark

This is hilarious!  I about died laughing with the picture used for the “Meanwhile…in Redmon…” square!  I also like the “bunnies are fluffy… ” square. All I can think of was F*cking Windows 98! Get Bill Gates in here! You promised Windows 98 would be better!

posted @ Sunday, August 28, 2005 10:31 PM | Feedback (612)

Reusable ASP.NET UserControls with VS2005

ScottGu doesn’t stop!  Here are the juicy details of how to share user controls and web pages (.ascx and .aspx) files across multiple web project projects! Thanks Scott for the post!!

posted @ Sunday, August 28, 2005 10:20 PM | Feedback (611)

Generic Code

What does this code output? .csharpcode { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: Courier New , Courier, Monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } 1: namespace GenericsExample 2: { 3: using System; ...

posted @ Thursday, August 25, 2005 10:10 PM | Feedback (612)

GAC in CLR 2.0 Series

I don’t know how I could have missed this yesterday!  Brad Abrams posted the series of posts that Richard Lander had on the implementation of the GAC in the .NET Framework 2.0.  It’s pretty sweet to look at the behind details for a very important feature we take for granted. Read on!

posted @ Wednesday, August 24, 2005 9:54 PM | Feedback (611)

VS2005 Web Project System: Using IIS With Web Projects

Lucky for us ScottGu is pumping out tons of content for web development under VS2005!  This new blog post covers good info on how the IDE maps with IIS.

posted @ Tuesday, August 23, 2005 9:01 PM | Feedback (611)

Dependency Injection (DI) ... Inversion of Control (IoC) ....

Question, is it just me or is this pattern like a declarative abstract abstract-factory (GoF)?  I just got done looking at the MovieFinder example for Spring.NET and that’s what it seemed to me. Any thoughts?

posted @ Monday, August 22, 2005 10:19 PM | Feedback (611)

Article On Performance For ASMX, ES and .NET Remoting

While doing some of my ES research, I bumped into this article by Richard Turner, PM for Distributed Systems Group, and Ingo Rammer from thinktecture.  This is a great read for those of you that are evaluating which technologies to use for their enterprise.  They also compare the passing of [Serializable] objects and DataSet objects across your services. Ok, on a side note why would you want to pass a DataSet across your layers?  Let me see…Oh yeah! I want my performance to suffer due to the extra work serializing all of the internal objects!!

posted @ Monday, August 22, 2005 9:38 PM | Feedback (611)

Principles Of Service Design Articles On MSDN

John Evdemon has posted a series of articles covering different aspects of Service Design.  The first article entitled, Service Patterns and Anti-Patterns covers the basic SO tenants and patterns and anti-patterns for effective web service design.  The  second article, Service Versioning talks about versioning schemas for your web services.  Good reads all around!

posted @ Monday, August 22, 2005 9:18 PM | Feedback (614)

VS2005 Web Project System

Scott Guthrie (ScottGu) goes into great detail about the web project system in VS2005.  This entry is a breakfast and lunch read… My two favorite features about the new project system: Fast loading times for large projects Build Automation (aspnet_compiler.exe, oh yeah!)

posted @ Sunday, August 21, 2005 9:59 PM | Feedback (611)

Changes from Beta 2 to RTM for ASP.NET 2.0

I am not sure how many of you might know about this link that lists the major changes for ASP.NET 2.0 as it goes from Beta 2 to RTM.  The changes are not anything big but they will make an impact on your future development of ASP.NET.  It’s kinda nice to see they are documenting these changes so your expression is “Oh yeah, they changed that feature for production!” rather than “WTF? Why doesn’t my code compile?”

posted @ Sunday, August 21, 2005 4:46 PM | Feedback (611)

MBA: Missing Bloggin Action

Yet another week that has gone by with me not bloggin.  Man, I miss being back at the main office!  On the upside, I’m doing a lot of research with Enterprise Services (ES) for one of main customers.  They are currently moving their application from being mainframe based to a .NET n-tier framework.  So, I’m kept pretty busy most of the day reading articles and writing proof-of-concepts.  The kicker about this part of the architecture is not just the get us something to make it all work, but it is also position us so when something new comes out (Indigo/WCF) we...

posted @ Sunday, August 21, 2005 12:14 PM | Feedback (611)

Virtual Earth Fun - Part I

I came up with this map page after working with the Virtual Earth (VE) API for about an hour.  I still need to add more things to it to make it cooler.  Let me know what you guys think about it!

posted @ Tuesday, August 16, 2005 11:56 PM | Feedback (611)

COM Interop Nice To Knows

On Friday, I was assisting one of our client’s developers in building and deploying their first COM interop application.  It has been a while (early 2002 to be exact) since I’ve done any COM interop.  So, needless to say, I had to catch up rather quickly. The application we are deploying is launched from a legacy VB6 application that launches other VB6 applications.  The .NET application connects to DB2 running on an AS400 through OLEDB.  After of a couple of hours of trial and error, we got the application up and running.  So, I’m giving you, my three readers, a list of things to...

posted @ Monday, August 15, 2005 6:56 AM | Feedback (611)

Probing Around

Nick and I had a heck of a time today trying to load an assembly into an application.  Sounds pretty straight forward, don’t it?  Well, it’s harder than you might think.  We took two approaches to the problem: use a new AppDomain and load from it or load using the Assembly class. The first approach was pretty straight forward.  Create an AppDomainSetup object and set it’s ApplicationBase, ApplicationName, PrivateBinPath and PrivateBinPathProbe properties to the directory path where your desired assembly lives.  Next using the CreateDomain method from the AppDomain class, give the new domain a name and pass it the newly...

posted @ Wednesday, August 10, 2005 10:42 PM | Feedback (611)

Windows Vista Fun

Well, I've been out of the bloggin scene for the past week due for many reasons.  The most important one is that I've been down at a customer site and it's hard to blog when they monitor your internet access.  I make a note to blog about my finding and run-arounds with technology when I get home, but I always forgot or get sidetracked.  On 7/30, I installed Vista as my base OS.  Why did I do that?  Well, the VPC ran like sh*t!  It was soo slow that was a complete waste of time to do anything on it.  Vista...

posted @ Monday, August 8, 2005 11:05 PM | Feedback (611)

JavaScript Utilities

While reading Nikhil's blog, I bumped into this post on his JavaScript Utilities project.  This like a pretty cool add-on to your bag of development tricks!  Currently this project is on the works, so there's room for growth. The thing I like about Nikhil is that he tends to think outside the box a lot when it comes to ways of improving web development.  Keep it up!

posted @ Friday, August 5, 2005 9:22 AM | Feedback (611)

ASP.NET 2.0 Provider Toolkit

I know the news is old, but for those of you that don't know, MS has released an ASP.NET Provider Toolkit.  For those of you that are not familiar with the Provider pattern, it allows you to abstract the “where” and “how” questions for your data layer.  The Provider pattern tackles the “where does the data live?” question by allowing you to implement your own retrieval mechanism.  In other words, you can have an SQL Server, Access, AD, DB2, etc. providers.   The way you connect to these sources, it's totally up to you.  For those of you familiar with J2EE, it...

posted @ Wednesday, August 3, 2005 1:24 PM | Feedback (611)

PowerCollections Released

I know I'm a little behind on the news, but just wanted to mention it.  Wintellect has released the code for their PowerCollections (PC) project.  Peter Golde, former Lead Designer for the C# language, was heading this community project.  If you're interested you can dowload the code from here.  Also, please note that PC requires .NET 2.0.

posted @ Monday, August 1, 2005 11:54 AM | Feedback (613)

Virtual Earth Development

Earlier today, I read Nikhil's post on putting images on a map using the Virtual Earth programming model.  Like usual, curiosity got the best of me and decided to look at around VE's site to find the developer section.  Alas, I was able to find something. Remember that the programming model is javascript based, so brush up on your scripting!

posted @ Monday, August 1, 2005 11:37 AM | Feedback (611)