October 2006 Entries

Heartland Developer Conference

First and foremost, thanks to all of you that attended my presentation!  We had a great crowd that was eagered to learn more about the inner workings of ASP.NET.  Second, I would like to apologize for my buggy demo.  Like I mentioned during the error, I moved the database file containing the content from my desktop to a folder under the C-drive so my connection string got hosed.  I didn't take the time to check the demo to its entirety before showing it.  My apologies. If you would like to get the demo code for the presentation, you can do...

posted @ Monday, October 30, 2006 11:45 AM | Feedback (606)

Pragmatic Architecture

Ted Neward is creating a new colun on MSDN that outlines the content of his presentation on Pragmatic Architecture.  You can check out an intro for the series, here. I was able to see this presentation at TechEd this past summer and it was pretty good.  If you would like to see the webcast, you can do so here.

posted @ Thursday, October 26, 2006 9:01 PM | Feedback (614)

Oracle OpenWorld: Oracle Develop

Oracle Develop is the "developer"part for the OpenWorld conference.  Remember, when I blogged about it couple of days ago?  Yeah, I was pretty much in the same room for hours listening on how I can use their .NET tools to make things easier for developers.  Verdict?  Un-impressed.  Why?  Well, most of their content was the same content you can find on their website.  The only things that made it ok was that I was able to talk with the developers of the product and discuss some of the issues/enhances with the product.  I was also pleased to find out that they're planning...

posted @ Thursday, October 26, 2006 9:00 PM | Feedback (611)

Oracle OpenWorld: A Stranger In A Strange Land

So, I'm at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco this week to learn more about how we can leaverage our Oracle backend through .NET.  As some of you might now, MS provides a "built-in" Oracle ADO.NET provider within the .NET Framework.  If you didn't know, Oracle also provides their own managed ADO.NET provider that communicates natively with your Oracle db resources.  They also provide something called Oracle Tools for VS.NET (OTDN), that is a series of add-ins for VS2005|2003 that allow you to connect, modify, debug and query your Oracle database.  The ADO.NET provider and OTDN are free for download. So,...

posted @ Tuesday, October 24, 2006 11:59 AM | Feedback (611)

.NET Developer

I'm sure that I'm going to get a lot of crap from this, but here it goes... <RANT> While talking with a potential candidate today about what .NET language we were using on building our business layer & common library with, I mentioned that we will use C# for the common library and VB.NET for the business layer.  He asked, "Why?  You're current staff is mostly VB developers, wouldn't you just use VB.NET for all?".  That's when I re-iterated that we're planning on using VB.NET for some of our business layer development.  Since there's a small team (2 people) right now that...

posted @ Thursday, October 19, 2006 6:24 PM | Feedback (611)

The Onion

So yestereday I'm reading my daily RSS feeds when I encounter Ted Neward's post on a comment that Scott Hanselman made during the p&p Summit in Redmond.  After reading this post, I shot Nick a message asking him to read it and see what his toughts were on this...you can find his response here. I couldn't agree more with Scott, Ted and Nick.  Here's why ... In my old Java dev days, we utilized a lot of open source technologies (Http Commons, log4j, Bouncy Castle, etc.) to help speed up our writing of code (just as Scott did with log4net).  The company I...

posted @ Wednesday, October 18, 2006 1:28 PM | Feedback (611)

Tulsa TechFest Day 2:A very long day...

Ok, so you know it's kinda scary when you get and leave a conference when it's dark (7 AM - 8 PM).  But overall, Tulsa TechFest was a huge success.  My ASP.NET presentation was well received (I would like to apologize for taking too long on the earlier topics and cutting ExpressionBuilders).  I was glad that people found the information useful and relavent. After attending several of the other presentations, I was ready to hangout and have some relaxation.  The fun part of the evening was hanging out with Tim, Shaun and the rest of the gang and just kick...

posted @ Sunday, October 15, 2006 2:02 AM | Feedback (611)

Tulsa TechFest Day 1: Airport Fun

That's right, Tim and I had a lot of fun today getting down here to Tulsa.  We left Des Moines with no problem and had a pretty easy time finding our terminal in Dallas...only to find out that our flight was cancelled. After talking with the guy behind the ticket counter, he told us that the next available for me flight was at 7:25 PM and that for Tim it was 10:25 PM. Yeah, that news did not settled too well with either of us. Once the time approached for us to board, Tim was lucky enough to get into...

posted @ Friday, October 13, 2006 10:50 PM | Feedback (611)

Tomorrow: Tulsa TechFest

Tim and I will are heading to Tulsa TechFest tomorrow so if you would like to get together and hang out, let us (or me) know.  Really looking forward to speaking and meeting lots of new people!

posted @ Thursday, October 12, 2006 2:14 PM | Feedback (541)

.NET Excitement!

At my new job, we're in the process of moving some legacy applications to .NET.  With this conversion/re-write, comes a layer designed and re-usable components (both in classes and productivity enhancements to VS2005) that developers can benefit from. Today, some one sent out this link to the entire IS department expressing their enthusiam for the dawn of .NET. Things like that (to me at least) make it worth while to come to work every morning.

posted @ Tuesday, October 10, 2006 9:21 PM | Feedback (612)

Types, Generics and Enums

Mike Stall has a really sweet post in he discusses some differences between conventional calls using the Object type and generics to casting for you within factory methods (Type CreateType() ).  Worth the read if you're using generics beyond the traditional collection samples.

posted @ Tuesday, October 10, 2006 9:14 PM | Feedback (611)

VS 2005 SP1 Issues

My good friend (and former manager) Heath Stewart has a couple of great posts covering different issues (multiple installs, high disk space and long install time) customers have encountered while installing VS 2005 SP1.  This is great stuff, way to go Heath!

posted @ Friday, October 6, 2006 10:12 PM | Feedback (612)

Fresh Logic Studios Scripts

That's right, the folks at Fresh Logic Studios (check out this sweetness), are giving away some great goodies...their JavaScript Framework! All I can say is that you need to check it out, pretty sweet stuff...I'm speechless.

posted @ Thursday, October 5, 2006 9:26 PM | Feedback (612)

LightBox.NET on CodePlex

Finally got around to create a CodePlex project for LightBox.NET!  (Yes, this LightBox.NET)  No more file system versioning for me!  (I know I could've used Subversion for my repository, but since I'm the only working on it, it was a bit of an overkill.)  This is where I plan on storing all documentation, source code and requests for LightBox.NET, so if you're interested on the project, add this link to your favorites! A while back, I posted the release of version 0.1.2006.0726 on my blog, so to make things more formal I created a release candidate (RC) for ver0.1.2006.0726. Hope...

posted @ Tuesday, October 3, 2006 8:47 PM | Feedback (611)