February 2004 Entries
Here are some links that I have found in my investigations on .Net remoting. .Net Remoting FAQ Glacial Component's Remoting Articles A newsgroup thread on how to connect a GUI to a windows service. More to follow.
It seems like MS is planning a new visual design system (Whitehorse) into Whidbey. Sounds good. I've been occasionally using Rational's XDE for the past year and found it useful for the most part. I still think XDE is too complex to use for everyday development. Maybe MS will get it right in Whitehorse
MS has made Visual Studio posters available. Kewl.
Here is another interesting post from Jim Fawcette. He says that improving software tools are partially to blame for the eroding IT programming market. I think that we are still feeling the effects from the dot-bomb and from our recent economic downturn. I also think that we'll see that the offshoring of programming duties will, in the end, raise costs. Software maintenance/enhancement costs will skyrocket due to the inability of the offshore programmer to understand the full impact of the code they are writing. Developers that read a spec and understand the way it affect...
Recently, we decided that we need to build a better server control for our navigation buckets. (We refer to our side navigation as buckets.) Building this control from scratch allowed me to better understand the way ASP.Net creates the page from controls. It also helped me to realize that I shouldn't have to write all of this plumbing code to get one stupid control to work. Although the control is now working, we did run into a few problems. Remember, if you ever need to keep data do not replace it with Nothing. This is a bad thing is difficult to debug. ...
Duncan Mackenzie has posted a code snippet of VB code showing the use of generics. Now if you're like me and can read code better than a white paper about code check it out. It's very cool.
Here's a cool site: SharpToolbox. Its a site that keeps a list of .Net components. I've also found a cool article on Whidbey and its new controls.
No matter how many years I've been coding I always learn something new. A few days ago I need to take the opposite value of a boolean variable. Normally I would use an Inline If statement (I've also heard it called Immediate If). I don't know why I do this, probably because of my beginnings in Access 2.0. Button.Enabled = IIF(bValue, False, True) After looking at the code and realizing something wasn't right I thought about the problem. How do I take the inverse of a boolean value? Duh use Not! So here is what I came up with: Button.Enabled = Not...
I've encountered an excellent article on MSDN today dealing with Web Control Templates. If you are creating a web control that needs to use templates this is a good primer.
Chris Kinsman lets us know that MS has posted the official .Net Compact Framework FAQ.
Last night, I decided to work on my bowling score tracking app for the compact framework. In my quest for information about graphics handling and control creation for the CF I ran across these two excellent articles on MSDN. This article, Creating Custom Controls for the .NET Compact Framework, Chris Kinsman discusses the intricacies of creating a custom charting control with the compact framework. And in this article, Writing Mobile Games Using the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework, Ravi Krishnaswamy lays out the basics of using graphics in a gaming application. I highly recommend these articles to anyone interested in creating...
I love the MSDN blog feed. Frank Prengel writes about a study between .Net and Websphere where .Net comes out on top. My only question is who paid for the study? Robert Green shared about the navigator control that will a part of Whidbey. "...navigator, a new WinForm control. It understands the data binding and has buttons for next, previous, add, delete, save, etc." Sounds interesting. Is Microsoft finally nearing a PowerBuilder DataWindow? I just found Bryan Keller's blog. Bryan is a programmer writer at MS for the Reporting Services team. He has written an article on Printing Reports and Reporting Services. Worth...
Frank Arrigo of MS lets us know that VS will get a plug-in for refactoring. Hallelujah! It can't come soon enough. (As you can tell I'm a big fan of refactoring.)
Here is an e-mail that I sent to our development team today regarding blogs. It seems that Microsoft has jumped on the blogging bandwagon and attempting to drive it. Recently, I discovered the world of blogs. For those of you who don't know a blog is "A frequent, chronological publication of personal thoughts and Web links." In short, a journal. Normally, I wouldn't even mention this in a formal e-mail to the team but I think that the information that Microsoft is releasing is quite valuable. It seems like everyone at Microsoft is blogging. The...
Chris Sells has written a great introdution into Longhorn programming using our old friend Solitare (or sol.exe). Hmm I might need to install Longhorn sometime in the near future.
Brad Abrams of Microsoft writes of a web site (www.techsoup.com) where non-profit orgs can order software for "free". So if you non-profit org needs software give this a look.
I got two major things accomplished tonight. The first: I now have .Text running on the DV server. For those of you who don't know what .Text is it basically blogging software. I have decided to remove my blog from erablog.net after using it for a day. The reason? I didn't like the way they encoded the rss feed. So I spent a few hours setting up .Text. Not the easiest thing that I've ever done but it works. The funny thing is that I've got it working on the DV server and not on my local machine. I think...
And with that I'm going home. I have verified that my form is now working. I think that this little form does just about anything. I implemented an interface, a class factory, six controller classes , numerous business objects, a bazillion (read 25) stored procs and five custom controls on one stupid little form. I'm off now to see my wife who just flew in from Atlanta tonight. But before that its off to Subway!
BTW - the song in the background is Red Hill Mining Town by U2. I'll give 50 cents to anyone who tells me what album...
Currently, I am working on a file brokering system here at work. Unfortunately, the coder who originally coded it did not use OO concepts. This has made the last week a nightmare. I have already created a plan to completely re-work the system in a OO fashion but of course I don't have time to implement it. So going forward I am using the CSLA framework. The CSLA framework was created by Rocky Lhotka and is available at his site www.lhotka.net for free!! I have used a variation of this framework for the last year on our web portal project and...