August 2005 Entries

Unlike the many million posts, comments and mindless shouting matches preceeding this date, I will not delve into a discussion that one is better than the other.  Instead I'd like to talk about a situation that I ran into today at work. Although I'd known for some time that you could do this using Microsoft.VisualBasic; in your C# code, I never believed it to be a good idea. Today I ran into a situation where I was debugging some code and sure enough I found that code existing for the purpose of implementing the Visual Basic IsNumeric() function. When I tried to explain to the developer responsible for it's...

Yesterday I attended a meeting that was to determine where in the corporate environment we were going to locate our MSMQ.  This was the first time that I'd been involved in this type of conversations with the client and it was an adventure in patience.  The meeting was different for me, not because Gollum was chairing it, but due to the fact that the client had us and another service provider (who's implementing a MSMQ solution too) in it.  I've determined, in my two meetings with him, that Gollum is most comfortable standing in front of a white board with a marker in hand.  He's just at ease in...

Today I figured out why I was successful at failing yesterday.  Actually, all I figured out was why I was failing.  Why I was succeeding at it still eludes me.  The configuration that I was implementing was a Queue that had a Trigger that had a Rule that invoked a COM component.  The Rule was configured to call the COM component and pass into it a couple of parameters.  The parameters that I had chosen were Message Body (as variant) and Message ID (as variant).  The method on the Com component was defined as: public void DoStuff(object objMsgBody, object objMessageID) {...} So both the variant Invocation Parameters were COM parameters...

I got to hear a great statement from a co-worker a few days back.  He was telling a story about a friend, named Bob, who had changed his name.  The reason?  "Every Tom, Dick and Harry is a Bob".

Today I was back at building the structure and logic code for the MSMQ message sending, COM component that the MSMQ Trigger fires and the web service that the COM component calls.  It was pretty easy to get the code all written, the work started when I began to walk through the code and test it.  First I ran into problems with Public Transactional Queues.  To keep the momentum moving I got rid of the Transactional part of that configuration and messages began arriving in the queue.  The next problem that I ran into was that the triggers were not calling the COM component without first thowing an error. ...

I haven't been posting much about the technical aspects of the work that I've been doing.  The primary reason is that all I've been working on is data modelling and writing the data layer for the app.  Last week I started working more exciting things.  One of the things that this application needs to do is asynchronously run a couple of different processes.  To accomplish this we are going to use MSMQ.  According to our architect (Aragorn, to whom I am ever grateful) we should really be using BizTalk, but, alas, it would take most of next year to get the application approved and installed into the client's environment,...

I really haven't posted all that much recently.  Mostly its due to the fact that I've been stressed at work and probably wouldn't have posted anything constructive. The short of the past weeks is that I've been stuggling with completing the Data Model to Bind Them All.  Finally the battle has started to slow.  Sadly this is mostly due to the fact that Grima has gone on holidays.  I've been trying to figure out why the process of getting the models approved has been such an epic struggle.  I've only thought of a few things. One of them is that I did not produce the quality of deliverable that...

Today I had a nice long wait in the grocery store to buy my 7 items.  While waiting for hte 10 people in front of me (express lane my ass) I began to wonder what I could figure out about the people around me by looking at the contents of their baskets. The lady in front of me -- blue berries, yoghurt, peaches (amongst other things)  Combine that with her hippy style clothing and bicycle I would say it's not a stretch to say she's a tree hugger at present or was one in the past.  Possibly all it amounts to is a healthy person who can't be...

Welcome to the new block of ice.  As you can see, the style of the site doesn't really speak to an igloo, but rather the home of Ronald McDonald.  Over the next little while I'm going to get this looking chilly and I'm going to be working on some new stuff for the Community Server platform.