Tuesday, January 20, 2004

DevDays 2004

It appears that I will be speaking at the Seattle DevDays 2004 on March 28, 2004.  Should be fun.

Tuesday, January 20, 2004 10:17:05 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)   #      Comments [0]  
 

  Friday, January 16, 2004

How Dumb Is That

We have been using quite a number of the blocks that the PAG team is putting out and while on the whole we like them quite well they definitely have some rough edges.   Minimal documentation, messy code that looks like it was done in an incredible rush, etc...

Today however I ran across something that drives me nuts.  We are using the Asynchronous Invocation Block to push web service requests off our web servers.  To make async requests we are required to place a value in the web.config that the Request object provided by the block uses.  This is a connection string to the service database.

Did they create their own section handler and put it in there?  No.

Did they create at least a name that indicated this was a connection string for the Async block?  No.

They called it, TADA, “ConnectionString”!  Are these guys insane?  How many applications do you suppose already have a setting called ConnectionString that doesn't point at the service agent database that this block needs?

Have these guys written any applications before?  Did they integrate this into any of their applications?

Friday, January 16, 2004 10:28:32 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)   #      Comments [0]  
 

  Tuesday, January 13, 2004

Calculating Load

Interesting article from www.theserverside.net on calculating load: Calculating Load.

Tuesday, January 13, 2004 8:15:10 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)   #      Comments [0]  
 

  Monday, January 12, 2004

EventLog Limitations

Found a little gotcha today.  Didn't realize that the message of an event log entry was limited.  Looked at the docs and of course it mentions a 16K limit.  Odd thing is that I found the limit really appears to be ~32K not 16K.  I say approximately because I found that 32767 fails but 32700 works. Very, very odd.

Monday, January 12, 2004 10:56:04 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)   #      Comments [0]  
 

  Thursday, January 08, 2004

Command Line Arguments in No-Touch Deployment

I frequently get the question, “How can I retrieve arguments from the URL that was used to launch my no-touch deployment application?” 

This has been hashed around several times but I finally found a great summary of all the things you need to do to make it work.

Read On: Parsing Web Command Line Args Example

Thursday, January 08, 2004 9:02:48 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)   #      Comments [0]  
 

  Friday, January 02, 2004

.NET Compact Framework FAQ

Microsoft has posted an official .NET Compact Framework FAQ.

Friday, January 02, 2004 11:55:26 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)   #      Comments [0]  
 

  Tuesday, December 30, 2003

I Donrsquot Typically Post Items From Other WebLogs But Several Of These Hit Quite Close To Homenb

I don’t typically post items from other WebLogs but several of these hit quite close to home.  I have lived #10… 

10. After your application starts failing everywhere, you talk to the DBA and he says, “I had to change the names on all the columns because I didn’t follow the company standard.  You can still make Friday’s deadline right?”

9. New requirements are added by the business manager so that the application works on his machine.

8. The current application is evolving faster than you can develop the replacement application.

7. Four hours in a requirements meeting were spent debating “extends” versus “includes” for part of a use case.

6. Requirements consist of an Access or Excel application with tons of VBA code.  Oh, and you need to fix the bugs while you are at it (we don’t know what they are, but fix them before delivery).

5. “Give us honest estimates for how long the work is going to take.  But make sure you finish in 2 months.”

4. Project Management = Microsoft Project

3. When hiring two contract programmers, management asks “We don’t need two computers do we?  They can just share one right?”

2. The “Senior Technical Architect” on your web application project, assigned because he has 23 years with the company, has never done web development ever.

And the number one sign your project is doomed…

1. All requirements are critical, ultra-high, or high importance.


[WebLogs @ DotNetJunkies.com]

Tuesday, December 30, 2003 10:50:30 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)   #      Comments [2]  
 

  Friday, December 19, 2003

ComponentOne WebChart Blows!!!

ComponentOne WebChart Blows!!!

I didn't realize how badly it blew until I attempted to do something for a client with it.  They own the product and asked me to work on a few charts for them.  The documentation is non-existent.  Their product pages on the web site claims it does things that the object model clearly doesn't support.  I wasted three hours of my life attempting to create a simple column chart that could be done in 2 minutes in Excel.  I still don't have a column chart!

I could have written the C# code to draw the image using GDI+ faster than trying to figure out how to use this piece of junk!

Friday, December 19, 2003 5:37:11 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)   #      Comments [0]  
 

  Friday, December 05, 2003

Shadowfax Is Outnbsp Shadowfax Is An End To End Service Oriented Reference Architecture Implemented In Code That The Platf

Shadowfax is out!  Shadowfax is an end to end service oriented reference architecture implemented in code that the Platform Architecture Guidance team has been working on for awhile now. They have recently released an alpha of their progress to date that you can get at: http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/shadowfx.

Friday, December 05, 2003 2:27:31 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)   #      Comments [0]   .NET Architecture
 

  Tuesday, December 02, 2003

Anakrino and Windows Server 2003

I have finally started using Windows Server 2003 as my primary operating system.  I tried to stick with XP for the longest time but found myself wanting several features in the new OS.  i.e. IIS6, TSC allowing access to desktop 0, etc.

I have been running fine for a couple of months until I tried to start my old friend Anakrino.  Blam!  It crashes on startup every single time.  It amazes me since most other applications I have tried on Server 2003 work great.  I have switched to using Reflector but I have found that each of them occasionally have a different spin on the decompiled code.  Especially code that is somewhat twisted by the optimizer.

Anyone have any ideas on how to get Anakrino running in this configuration again?

Woohoo!  As soon as I post this of course I find Neil Cowburns post containing the file to fix this.  You can also grab it here.

Anakrino.xml (2.53 KB) Tuesday, December 02, 2003 8:23:21 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)   #      Comments [1]  
 


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