Archives
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Developer snobbery is bad for everyone
Inspired by a comment left by Jerry Pisk, I find it disturbing that people can get all worked up over the fact that Microsoft is releasing tools (or I should say, has released tools for years) that cater to less skilled developers. Jerry's comments about "programmer wannabes" reek of developer snobbery.
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Would you like to save a dump?
One of the things I do “on the side” is compress video for delivery on the Web. Given my television background B.P. (before programming), it seemed like a natural fit to get into it.
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Are Slashdotters really 99% ignorant?
Every once in awhile I'll pop over to Slashdot to see what the peeps have to say about something newsworthy. At the very least you can find some Gates-hating to laugh at. I can't for the life of me figure out the structure of their comment system (I am, after all, a mindless drone .NET developer), but I found some choice comments.
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The good and slightly not good about Visual Web Developer Express
Let me start by saying it's great to see the excitement bubbling out of Microsoft from the various teams involved with the new Express products. As a customer, I think you can only feel good about the pride that 'Softies are putting into these new bits. After using the pre-beta builds of VS 2005 now for about three or four months, I was already impressed.
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Viewstate of the day: GDN
Here's today's crazy viewstate, brought to you by the GotDotNet.com home page!
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It's fun to be a .NET developer
It sure is fun to be a .NET developer. It's fun to be right from time to time as well.
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Invented word of the day: Performant
I love how someone in the programming community comes up with a word, then before you know it, the word is used more frequently than “the.”
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I bought the wrong chipset
I bought the wrong chipset last night... a poker chipset. I'm fascinated by the game and would like to start playing, so I bought a $150 set of chips and a case. They're the good stuff, the heavy clay chips that make the cool noise, with an indestructible metal case.
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Browser-based HTML editing still in the dark ages
I was considering using FreeTextBox for POP Forums because my implementation is mediocre at best. Actually, it gets the job done, but it's an IE-only implementation.
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Self-employment: One month later
It has been a month almost to the day that I declared my independence from The Man. So far, this is how it's going.
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Quoting the previous post in a Web forum is annoying
You've seen people do it. If you run a forum and try to keep a tight ship, you hate it. People that quote the entire previous post in their own. It makes no sense.
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Working where ever on the laptop
In early 2003, I bought a custom HP laptop online. It has a better mix of what I wanted than the retail versions available at the time. It's a 2 GHz Celeron with a half-gig of RAM, 15” 1400x1050 screen and 60 gig hard drive. It replaced my aging Sony (P3/450) which had a hard time running Visual Studio.
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Oreo cookies and my tax dollars
This sure puts things in perspective. It's a damn shame when you look at what your tax dollars in the US go toward.
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Your free service got shut down. Cry me a river!
It irritates me when people get all pissy that something they used on the Web for free gets turned off. See: 3,000 blogs lose their voice.
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New Beastie Boys today after six years
The new Beastie Boys album was released today, their first in six years. Scary that the kid in front of me buying the CD at Best Buy wasn't even born in the Licensed to Ill days. They're still the best thing in rap today.
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Finally finished writing a MembershipProvider
I mentioned awhile ago that I was planning to write an ASP.NET MembershipProvider for POP Forums. I finally got around to it the last day or two and finished it, along with a RoleProvider. Dare I say that it was really pretty easy, there are just a lot of methods to implement. What a great feature this will be for people that want to integrate Membership into their existing apps.
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The users online collection: in memory or from the database?
In the last version of POP Forums, I stored the users online in an Application variable. Surprisingly enough, the performance wasn't bad, even though I suspected it might be once you had a thousand users or so. I opted to do it that way instead of hitting the database to see when the last “hit” by a user was, because I wasn't that into updating that field on every page request. I know the www.asp.net forums does it that way, and periodically caches.
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Broadcast to Web: A journey in media
Every once in awhile I run across a blog entry from Jason Salas, a code monkey apparently working in a broadcast environment. Sounds a little bit like hell, but interesting work to say the least.
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Off-shoring not such a big deal
I can't say that I'm even the least bit surprised by this.
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When Visual Studio 2005 attacks!
I'm absolutely thrilled with the way Visual Studio 2005 leaves my HTML the way I want it. It's a fabulous tool and it's about damn time that someone in Redmond realized that we know better than the machine how to write and format our code!
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HttpContext.Items... didn't even know it was there
You learn something every day...
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G4-TechTV merger is really backward
If you're a TechTV fan you know that Comcast bought the network to combine it with their own G4 network, creating the combined G4-TechTV. In the process, they cut a lot of the TechTV shows and laid-off a ton of people at the San Francisco location. Those that survived have to move to L.A.
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You've heard of Google, right?
I need to vent. I participate in a couple of forums where I'm glad to help people out to solve their coding problems. However, it annoys the crap out of me that people will ask “how do you” or “do you know of any code that does” whatever. Honestly, the first thing I do when I see a question like that is hit Google, and more often than not, I find something right away.
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Using parameterized SQL queries
Now that I'm working for me (have I mentioned that lately? ;)), I'm going to try and devote more attention to uber:ASP.Net. I had such good intentions for that site before I went back to work for The Man in January, but quickly slacked off due to a lack of time.
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AirPort Express with AirTunes... coooooool...
Yeah, Mac fan in the body of a .NET developer, sure, but Apple keeps making some really cool stuff.
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Interfaces to abstract classes
I cracked open the First Look book for the first time since I actually had the bits (three builds later, actually). I was surprised to see that the MembershipProvider was an interface at press time, and not an abstract class as it is now. I wonder what the reason for this is?
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Two weeks on my own
Well, I'm wrapping up two weeks on my own after quitting my job to write my book, and take in the concept of independence while I wonder how I might work for myself permanently. I've got about four months before I evaluate if I'll keep this up, and so far, so good.
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Going back to 2003: Not as fun
I had to take a break from writing and playing with Visual Studio 2005 to work on “real” work back in VS 2003. Wow, what a drag that is. Beyond that crappy HTML designer, it's not nearly as fast to type code without the Intellisense on steroids and the better color coding.
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ObjectSpaces delay: No worries here!
Some people are a little disappointed that ObjectSpaces won't make the Whidbey release. I'm not one of them. It just reduced the chapter count of my book by one and that's a good thing!
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Can't get config settings... Argh!
I'm having such a grand old time with all this new junk that it's a real buzz kill to hit a roadblock. I'm trying to run some unit tests against some DAL classes and they aren't seeing the appSettings keys in my config file at all. As far as I can tell, everything is as it should be. The config file is the same name as the assembly with .config on the end, and it's in the same directory. Do you think NUnit is doing something odd? Is it some weird symptom of using this alpha software?