David Findley's Blog

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I recently bought a Mac Book Pro since I can now dual boot OS X and Windows XP. The only real issue that I've had is that OS X, like most Unices likes to set the hardware clock to UTC time. This causes the clock in Windows XP to be off by 5 hours (I'm in the central US timezone).

Just ran across this on my daily news rounds:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1978917,00.asp

I think Lance and I saw some of this stuff at PDC. I dont think they had all the tooling around it but this def sounds pretty darn cool.

I cant wait to start programming some lego robots with my son!


Doh! Erik beat me to it: http://weblogs.asp.net/eporter/archive/2006/06/20/Building-Robot-Software-Using-Microsoft-Robotics-Studio.aspx

He's even got links to channel 9 videos.

Resources:

Tech Preview

Channel9 Video

Similar:
RobotC

Andrew makes some obversations about MVC in the .NET world.

I too have been delving into OO principles and patterns over the last couple of years. I'm still getting my head around the ups and downs of page vs front controller. ASP.NET uses a page controller pattern and frameworks such as Struts, Rails, and several PHP frameworks use the front controller pattern.

There's some really good reading on these patterns in Fowler's Pattern of Enterprise Application Architecture. Also read everything you can on www.martinfowler.com.

You can still implement front controllers in ASP.NET using an HttpModule or .ashx. The thing that turns people off to this is you ditch most of the IDE support for designers and most of the features that webforms give you (viewstate, postback etc). This is where you have to look around at some other frameworks that implement a front controller. Castle MonoRail and Spring.NET are two major ones that I have found.

MS also seems to be getting more an more on the OO/Patterns bandwagon ever since .NET was introduced (Or maybe this is just when I started the transition). For example, the provider model in ASP.NET 2.0 is really awesome. You should def be using it to decouple your web tier from your biz/data tier. Check out this MSDN article on the provider pattern.

If you want to go swimming in an ocean of patterns take a look at Enterprise Library 2.0. Lots and lots of good stuff in there.

Another great book on practical application of patterns and refactoring to existing code is Feather's Working Effectively with Legacy Code.

Thanks to some great suggestions by Scott and others I have put aside any fears/laziness of delving into the msbuild script and managed to come up with an alternate way of changing web.config settings as part of the build process. While the web.config replacement stuff works for me at the moment, I like having this method around since it can be used to vary any kind of output as part of the build.

Web deployment projects are an elegant way of integrating the compilation of an asp.net web site into a build process. I was initially really impressed with the msbuild task that replaces sections of your web.config at build time. Unfortunately  this feature is starting to dissapoint. As this forum post points out it is fairly limited in scope as to what sections it can modify. I recently tried getting the deployment project to update the system.net/mailSettings section. I have yet to get it to modify this section. The build will just fail saying that it cant find system.net/mailSettings. This shouldnt be this hard. I hope I'm totally missing something and the rest of this post can just be ignored.


Ok, Im the moron on this one. under is a group not a config section as I orginally thought. Once I changed the deployment project to this:

system.net/mailSettings/smtp=mailSettings.config;

It worked like a champ.

So the moral of this story is check, double check and triple check what type of node you are trying to replace in the deplyment project.

I'm still not sure why it matters what type of node you are replacing.

Update: Some good ideas here for more advanced scenarios.

http://www.google.com/googlespreadsheets/tour1.html

Here's some videos: http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-06-06-n86.html

Google is about to heat things up again it looks like. Are we ready for the web application wars?

Lance and I were puzzling over the magic that happens when you configure the profile provider in asp.net 2.0. As you may or may not know it codegens a strongly typed class called "ProfileCommon" when  you set up the properties in the web.config. Our question was how is this codegen happening and how is it that I'm getting intellisense at design time.

We both immediatly thought of the build providers. Those are plugins to asp.net that are used to generate code and compile specific file types. (e.g. web references, resxs etc.). You can write your own as well which is very cool. Anyhow this made the most sense but upon inspecting the main web.config there was no such build provider configured:

   1:  <buildProviders>

   2:      <add extension=".aspx" type="System.Web.Compilation.PageBuildProvider" />

   3:      <add extension=".ascx" type="System.Web.Compilation.UserControlBuildProvider" />

   4:      <add extension=".master" type="System.Web.Compilation.MasterPageBuildProvider" />

   5:      <add extension=".asmx" type="System.Web.Compilation.WebServiceBuildProvider" />

   6:      <add extension=".ashx" type="System.Web.Compilation.WebHandlerBuildProvider" />

   7:      <add extension=".soap" type="System.Web.Compilation.WebServiceBuildProvider" />

   8:      <add extension=".resx" type="System.Web.Compilation.ResXBuildProvider" />

   9:      <add extension=".resources" type="System.Web.Compilation.ResourcesBuildProvider" />

  10:      <add extension=".wsdl" type="System.Web.Compilation.WsdlBuildProvider" />

  11:      <add extension=".xsd" type="System.Web.Compilation.XsdBuildProvider" />

  12:      <add extension=".js" type="System.Web.Compilation.ForceCopyBuildProvider" />

  13:      <add extension=".lic" type="System.Web.Compilation.IgnoreFileBuildProvider" />

  14:      <add extension=".licx" type="System.Web.Compilation.IgnoreFileBuildProvider" />

  15:      <add extension=".exclude" type="System.Web.Compilation.IgnoreFileBuildProvider" />

  16:      <add extension=".refresh" type="System.Web.Compilation.IgnoreFileBuildProvider" />

  17:  </buildProviders>

   1:  internal class CodeDirectoryCompiler

   2:  {

   3:      private void FindBuildProviders()

   4:      {

   5:            if ((this._dirType == CodeDirectoryType.MainCode) && ProfileBuildProvider.HasCompilableProfile)

   6:            {

   7:                  this._buildProviders.Add(ProfileBuildProvider.Create());

   8:            }

   9:            VirtualDirectory directory1 = HostingEnvironment.VirtualPathProvider.GetDirectory(this._virtualDir);

  10:            this.ProcessDirectoryRecursive(directory1, true);

  11:      }

  12:  }