Jeff Makes Software

As much as I love me some ORM's (I've used LINQ to SQL quite a bit, and for the MSDN/TechNet Profile and Forums we're using NHibernate more and more), there are times when it's appropriate, and in some ways more simple, to just throw up so old school ADO.NET connections, commands, readers and such. It still feels like a pain though to new up all the stuff, make sure it's closed, blah blah blah. It's pretty much the least favorite task of writing data access code. To minimize the pain, I have a set of extension methods that I like to use that drastically reduce the code you have to write. Here they are...

There has been a great deal of noise in the techie community about standards, and a sudden and unexplainable hate for Flash. This noise isn't coming from consumers... the countless soccer moms, teens and your weird uncle Bob, it's coming from the people who build (or at least claim to build) the stuff those consumers consume. If you could survey the position of consumers on the topic, they'd likely tell you that they just want stuff on the Web to work.

Sadly, I'm not at Mix this year, for the first time in a few years. It's a little harder to go if you work for Microsoft, oddly enough. And then there's this little guy next to me, who at ten days old really needs his daddy to be around! But oh, the excitement of what Microsoft has in store!

My favorite dependency injector, Ninject, has ascended to v2! I like this framework because it's small and doesn't have a bunch of external dependencies. It does take a little extra work to get it rolling with ASP.NET MVC 2, however.

If you're like me and you were trying to update your ASP.NET MVC 2 RC2 project with the latest and greatest, and couldn't figure out where the new scripts are, they're here:

There are times where I've decided that I didn't want to get too deep into a mess of markup in my views, which drives me to writing a simple HtmlHelper extension method. It's a convenient and quick way to introduce slightly more robust display logic into the view.

Every once in awhile, I feel like I've changed enough stuff around the technology that I'm using to take a sort of inventory. Mostly I just want to be able to refer back to it the next time I feel compelled to do so.

Wow, so I keep talking about how I want to write more, particularly now that I'm an "insider" working in Redmond, and yet it has been a month since my last post. But hey, I've been here two months and I just finally spent some time in downtown Seattle for the first time last weekend, so get off my case. :)