March 2006 - Posts

30 March 2006
ManagedSpy Released From MSDN Magazine
I just finished reading a great article in this month’s MSDN magazine about a new tool they’ve released called ManagedSpy , which brings the power of Spy++ to the realm of managed applications. My toolbox will definitely be getting some use out of this tool; this looks like a must have for any .Net developer. I’ll post more as I get some heavy lifting done with it. Read More...
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30 March 2006
Sara Smith Dishes With Dino Esposito
Sara Smith (creator/owner of SitePoint.com ) recently had a high level chat with Dino Esposito about migrating to asp.net 2.0, his thoughts on Ajax, and some other interesting topics. Nothing technical, just a nice talk…it’s always nice when interviews touch on some of the more personal aspects of the person being interviewed. Esposito is one of my favorite authors (I see at least 3 books by him on my shelves), and I can always tell when I’m reading an article by him in MSDN magazine because it’s usually way over my head. He’s definitely a .Net rock star. Great job Sara! Read More...
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27 March 2006
Ever Wonder What Happened To All Of Your Disk Space?
My main drive is a screaming fast 10,000 RPM SATA disk (and it’s fairly quiet as well), but it has the caveat of being fairly small at only 74 gigs so space is at a premium. I regularly run disk cleanups, poke around my temp files folders, etc to delete stuff that I no longer need…but this method is tedious at best. Enter WinDirStat . It’s a fantastic little utility that will give you a visual representation of all the files on your machine (big blocks = big files). The GUI is pretty slick; when you click on a block it will give you tons of information about the file it represents, along with a plethora of options concerning what you want to do with the file (such as delete it permanently). In my case I was able to delete almost 8 gigs worth of files that A) I no longer needed and B) I had no idea even existed on my machine (one example was a “cached” Virtual Machine for VMWare which was taking up 3 gigs of disk space; I wouldn’t have found it without this utility). I’ve tried several utilities... Read More...
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27 March 2006
CoComment Conversations Tab Added To JK.com
I’m still really digging this CoComment thing (I wish more blogs were coco enabled! Patience…). One of the tools they offer is the ability to embed your coco conversations on your own site via a chunk of HTML (if you’re logged into your coco account, navigate here to get your code), so I decided to build a new tab on JK.com to put this on: Jayson’s coco conversations are located here (and if for some crazy reason you’d like to subscribe to an RSS feed of my coco comments, it supports that as well ). Adding a new tab in Community Server is ridiculously easy, it was tweaking the CSS (like always) that was the finicky part. The code that coco provides for embedding this in your site doesn’t expose all of the CSS elements it supports (most, but not all), but that’s where the web developer extension for Firefox really shine. Total implementation time was around 2 hours. I’ll hammer out the exact steps of adding a new CS tab in a future post. Read More...
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26 March 2006
Sometimes I Really Should RTFM
I’m in the process of building my first .Net 2.0 WinForms application (I absolutely love the new designer), nothing too major. Of course it’s multithreaded, and I’m going about doing this via events/delegates/threads…the usual way. Make that the usual .Net 1.1 way. I was browsing around the web earlier and stumbled across a new class in .Net 2.0: System.ComponentModel.BackgroundWorker . So now the question is do I rewrite the app using this new class, or do I leave it as is. But the bigger point is this: I really need to pick up some books on .Net 2.0…piecemealing it together from articles on the web obviously isn’t cutting it. My friends and family always wonder why I have my nose buried in technical journals/books. The answer is obvious to us (especially as of late what with all the new technologies coming down the pipe from Microsoft), but they still think it’s odd that I (in their eyes at least) devote as much time as I do to my field. I will... Read More...
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26 March 2006
Michael Robertson Is Up To His Shenanigans Again
Bob just sent me a link to a really cool demo of an Ajax site in action: ajaxWrite.com . At first glance, this is a really cool demo of the power of Ajax (VERY cool actually) . But the plot thickens. It turns out the man behind all this is none other than Michael Robertson (if you view source from Firefox, you’ll see that link is hosting this in a frame that goes back to the www.michaelrobertson.com TLD). Great, there’s an agenda behind what would otherwise be a really cool Ajax enabled app. I am pretty sure Robertson is a complete idiot . I also found this link where Robertson explains his ideas surrounding ajaxWriter, which I will promptly dissect here (at a very high level, I’ll leave the rest of it as an exercise for the reader…it’s almost comical actually). And oh yeah, it was FREE so consumers didn't have to pay $499 for Microsoft Office. Word costs $229 USD , and the Word Viewer is free. Anytime you need a word processor, need to open a .doc file or... Read More...
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22 March 2006
Is It One Space Or Two These Days?
Back when I learned how to type 15 years ago, we were taught to use 2 spaces between sentences like so. This is a new sentence (2 spaces, see?). I read a lot of blogs, and something I’ve noticed is that a lot of folks are using only 1 space between sentences. I’m not saying I’ll change either way (and after 15 years of doing it I don’t even know if I could), but did I miss that memo? I certainly don’t want to have the netiquette police coming after me. There are three other typing rules I violate 100% of the time: I use my left index finger for the letter C (should be left middle). My right shift key never gets any airtime, I always use the left one (you’re supposed to alternate depending on which finger is striking the letter to be capped). I always use my right thumb for spaces (this one is fuzzy, but again I think you’re supposed to alternate). Thanks to programming, I also no longer have to cheat when typing symbols (this happened during the... Read More...
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20 March 2006
New IE7 Build Available from MIX06
Fresh from the IEBlog ( full post here ): One of the other items on the CD is an updated build of IE7 for MIX06. This is build 5335 of IE7. In order to give something to those of you who didn't attend the conference and to address concerns or bugs that have been reported, we've made an updated IE7 build available to the public. This is actually an update from the build we put on the CD for the conference so it is the most up to date build available anywhere. It is build 5335.5 and it is now available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie7/ . This build is for Windows XP Service Pack 2 and shows the current state of IE7. It’s worth mentioning that you’ll need to reboot your machine twice (once after uninstalling any previous versions, and once again after installing the new build). Casual glances don’t reveal much new GUI wise, but it feels snappier and renders some previous broken pages just fine this go round. The integrated feed reader is quite nice... Read More...
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20 March 2006
Bill Gates' Mix '06 Keynote Is Up
Since not all of us could be there live, at least we can watch the webcast of the Mix ‘06 keynote speech (it’s almost 3 hours long, and to be honest I would fast forward to about the 1:30 mark unless you really enjoy hearing BillG drone on about “innovation” and whatnot, though the BBC demos about 40 minutes into it are pretty cool). Notables from the keynote: MySpace.com runs (and has been running) on asp.net 2.0 x64/SQL Server 2005 x64 (which is something I’ve suspected for a while via their Netcraft site report . Apparently they started off with Coldfusion and ditched it for asp.net early on, they remap the old .cfm links to .aspx pages). They have 65 million users and serve up 1.5 billion page views of just user home pages daily. It takes 150 servers just to accomplish this task (who knows how many servers they have total), but this is down by almost 50% compared to their pre-asp.net 2.0 solution. Also by moving to asp.net 2.0, they saw processor utilization... Read More...
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16 March 2006
Music To Code By Vols 4-5 Released
DJ Boliva has been kind enough to release volumes 4 and 5 of his “music to code by” series: Partisan Scream Fest and Hunt the Wumpus (great titles…lovin’ it!). The previous 3 releases were fantastic, as are these. Track 7 on Partisan Scream Fest (~40:00) is absolutely slammin’. Thanks Bolivia, and here’s hoping for an equally impressive volume 6 (which unfortunately will be the final installment). Read More...
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