November 2006 Entries

Vista Experience

A couple of days ago, I finally installed Vista Ultimate on my laptop!  What can I say?  ... it's not too bad.  After getting pretty tired of all the security prompts, I disabled the User Account Control (UAC).  From there, it was off to get my Windows Experience Index! Needless to say, the laptop didn't do too well.  This is due to the fact that my graphics card is the standard Intel embedded chipset. Hopefully tomorrow, I will have a chance to install Vista Business on my work laptop so I can see how well it performs.  For now,...

posted @ Wednesday, November 29, 2006 9:33 PM | Feedback (613)

IList<T> or Collection<T>?

Not sure how many of you guys have experienced FxCop Rule# CA1002 : Do Not Expose Generic Lists through out your coding ventures.  I'm not sure what to think of it... In one hand, I see the flexiblity of returning the IList<T> type since there could be x-number of things that could implemented.  Thus not tying me up with a specific implementation such as List<T> or Collection<T>.  On the other, Collection<T> does allow you to override functionality and also implements IList<T>. The rule does mention that List<T> (IList<T>) is designed for performance and Collection<T> is designed for inheritance... What are your thoughts on...

posted @ Wednesday, November 29, 2006 1:09 PM | Feedback (611)

PDD: Procedure Driven Design

<sarcasm:MyReality> This is the lesser known of the *DD approaches for design and development.  Essentially, all logic lives within your stored procedures (sprocs) within your database.  And by "all logic", I mean, ALL LOGIC. That's right, ALL validation, business rules, persistence, workflow, etc. resides within sprocs that interact against your database. What makes it challenging is when you try to implement some object oriented techniques with a strictly procedural language.  That's what I call, "exercising your tech-muscle." </sarcasm:MyReality>

posted @ Tuesday, November 21, 2006 8:25 AM | Feedback (611)

Vista and Office 2007 Downloads

If you have the time, check out these great downloads add-ons for VS2005. I already have .NET 3.0 framework installed on my laptop and ready to play with WF and WCF...this is just sweet!

posted @ Monday, November 20, 2006 2:13 PM | Feedback (611)

Design By Committee

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_committee What's your take on it?

posted @ Monday, November 20, 2006 2:05 PM | Feedback (611)

Currently Reading

Essential Windows Workflow Foundation This is book is a really, really, really good read.  The authors (both architects of WF) do a really great job of breaking down the concepts of what "makes up" a program...a basic approach they took into consideration when designing WF.  If you're planning on using .NET 3.0, this is a worthy investment.

posted @ Tuesday, November 14, 2006 9:30 PM | Feedback (611)

Oracle Database Provider & NUnit

While trying to get our ci build to work, we ran into problems with the Oracle .NET Provider and NUnit.  For some reason, there seems to be a threading issue with the provider and the way TestDriven .NET and UnitRun execute unit tests. In particular, the OracleConnection object, when you specify the string to be null or empty, an InvalidOperationException should be thrown.  However, this is not the case...the exception is never thrown!  If you run the unit test by it self, then the exception is thrown as expected.  Weird. Have any of you run into this issue with the Oracle...

posted @ Tuesday, November 7, 2006 10:34 PM | Feedback (611)

.NET Framework 3.0 RTM

That's right, if you're planning on doing some development with the .NET Framework 3.0, you don't have to use CTPs, any more!  They've shipped the product!  This is the beginning of a brand new approach of application development for the Windows platform.  Great job, teams!

posted @ Tuesday, November 7, 2006 9:39 PM | Feedback (618)

IADNUG: Extending ASP.NET 2.0

Thanks to those of you that attended the meeting this evening!  We had 29 people that made for a pretty good crowd.  Please note that we WILL take into consideration the moving of the meeting place to West Des Moines.  Like I mentioned several times, we just need a home that is not willing to charge us for the room. To get the slides and demos for the meeting, go here.  Some one after the meeting asked, Why would I store my pages in the database?  Well, all I can say is that it depends.  If you need to interact with...

posted @ Wednesday, November 1, 2006 10:14 PM | Feedback (611)