December 2003 - Posts

30 December 2003
Fundamental Types of Programmers

Dino Esposito posted this blog that reminded me of something that Shannon blogged about here . Dino received a great (albeit short) response that i 100% agree with. there is also another comment that brings up a great point: how to debug declarative code statements? it's a very valid point, and one that i am interested in seeing implementation of. xaml to me seems like nothing more than a hopped up scripting language, and i thought one of the initial points of asp.net was to move web development into a first class OOP design? i do see the benifits of xaml, but i know personally i will continue to use code behind for the meat and potatos of my web applications. xaml does seem quite useful for building mockups/prototypes quickly, but i would be reticent to put any real code into the UI via xaml code. there is a really great article here that breaks down some of the different types of programmers out there, i believe xaml will be more suited for the opportunistic programmer, and i am sure... Read More...

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Filed under: Technology and Internet, Opinions, .Net

30 December 2003
Whoa...Brain@#$%

Check out this little dandy ...i've been staring at it for about 20 minutes trying to figure out how it works. Read More...

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Filed under: General

29 December 2003
First Takes on System.Xml v 2.0

i recently purchased “A First Look at ADO.NET and System.Xml v2.0” and have finally had some time to start wading through it. it would appear that finally something i have wanted to happen with XML and .Net is going to be implemented in this release, namely that XML will be a fully supported relational data store (in the same ranks as any other RDBMS), and the way that XML data is handled will be almost completely transparent to both the application and the programmer. a little background on my love/hate relationship with XML. i picked up XML pretty early on, long before the .Net betas came out, long before XML's true potential was even dreamed about. this was back when i was living in an ASP/HTML/VB 6 world. i immediately realized the importance of the language, however finding practical applications of it back then was rare, so it kind of fell by the wayside. here we are 4 years later and look at what it has become...in a word, it's THE answer to so many things. i love XML... Read More...

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Filed under: Technology and Internet, Tools and Resources, .Net

28 December 2003
.Net String Stuff

this article is a continuation of an earlier post after gorging myself over the holidays, i got to thinking about the .Net framework handles string types (what goes better w/ turkey than thinking about code?). there is a tool located here that i sometimes use to profile libraries i write/hijack for performance and just to see what's going on under the hood. it's the .Net equivalent to SQL Server's query analyzer execution plan, though in my opinion much more powerful. the 2 biggest performance mongers in .Net (expectedly) are boxing/unboxing, and string concat'ing. i will save boxing/unboxing for another post, wanted to touch on how .Net handles strings. all primitives in .Net are stack based value types except for the primitive type 'string'...despite the value type syntax for instantiation/assignation, it is in fact a heap based reference type. the fact that .Net has a built in type for strings comes as a great relief for C/C++ guys as strings in those languages were nothing more than... Read More...

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Filed under: Technology and Internet, Tools and Resources, .Net

22 December 2003
MS Request from Linux Users

Now this is certainly an interesting article . I will refrain from commenting until i can formulate somewhat of an unbiased opinion. Read More...

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Filed under: Technology and Internet, Opinions

21 December 2003
VS.NET Project File Tips and Tricks

This post reminded me of a system i came up w/ a while back to make managing vs.net projects a bit simpler from an administrative standpoint (indeed, exactly what is mentioned in the post). when you add projects to a .net solution, the path to that project (if it's non FPSE web apps and all others) is hardcoded into the .sln file as an absolute value, so if you were to change a drive letter, or decide you wanted to move all your projects to a shared drive, etc vs.net would have no idea where to look for those projects, and as shannon mentions you are not given a browse option when it can't find the project, so you would have to remove/re-add each project individually...a royal pain by any standard and certainly not very condusive to productivity. it's actually a pretty easy workaround, and if implemented early on, it can be a real timesaver down the line. map a virtual drive to your VS projects folder, then in VS props change your Environment/Projects and Solutions location to this virtual... Read More...

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Filed under: Technology and Internet, Tools and Resources, .Net

19 December 2003
Letter to the CEO of Lindows

i wrote this letter to the CEO of Lindows back when the idea was first incepted as a Windows desktop replacement (this letter is circa april of 2002). while i applauded what they were trying to accomplish at the time (completely erradicating MS from the desktop...or perhaps providing some true competition), the developer in me wanted details as i have made my living using tried and somewhat true MS tools. at the time, they were claiming that 90% of native Windows apps would run on Lindows out of the box, which seemed a bit far fetched as one of the things MS is best at is being proprietary. not that my letter had anything to do with Lindows reversing their initial claims of a true Windows replacement (they now claim nothing more than being an uber user-friendly distro of Linux), but shortly thereafter i guess they realized that there is more to a desktop/[platform] than a purdy pricetag and a friendly GUI. besides Office sales, MS indirectly makes the majority of the rest of their money... Read More...

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Filed under: Technology and Internet, Opinions

18 December 2003
It was Only a Matter of Time

I am sure we all saw it coming ...Real has finally decided to take on uncle bill and the boys in redmond. while i may not agree with microsoft's alleged actions, history may bear repeating itself (ala netscape, sun, etc). i will be following this with a sharp eye. Read More...

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Filed under: Technology and Internet, Opinions

16 December 2003
Great Article About the .NET GC (Garbage Collector)

have a look at this article for more than you ever wanted to know about .NET GC. Read More...

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Filed under: Technology and Internet, Tools and Resources, .Net

16 December 2003
.Text - take two

i have been wrestling with trying to get the source version of .Text to run for the last 2 hours and have hit a roadblock. here is a description of what i am running into, basically that no content was showing up when i compile and run from VS.NET, even though it's pointed to the same DB that my production blog uses. so i decided to get under the hood to try and figure out what is going on and this is what i discovered. basically, the way that the DB is designed is that the blog_Content table keeps track of the content according to the BlogID field in blog_Config which in itself is fine. however, the BlogID is unique per host name, in this case i have the hostname 'zerotrilogy.gotdns.com' mapped up to BlogID field '0', ... {rows of other hostnames} ... all the way to localhost (as when you compile and run, this is the hostname), which is mapped to BlogID field of 0 + n (where n is the number of rows from zerotrilogy.gotdns.com). the issue is that since there is a different BlogID associated... Read More...

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Filed under: Technology and Internet, Tools and Resources, Community Server