September 2005 Entries

For the last month I've been working on a little side project using Visual Studio and SQL Server 2005.  So far I've been quite pleased and for Beta software it is amazingly stable.  One of the nicest things is to have your unit test shells autmagically created for you by simply right clicking and selecting Create Test.  On top of that it is so much nicer to be able to run or debug the tests without having to attach to the NUnit process. The project is a WinForms systems and previous Visual Studio implementation have made using a grid difficult unless you wanted to use data binding.  I was...

As you may have read, I've been working on some MSMQ configuration and coding for the last little while.  In the past I had always heard "Asynchronous System" and hid under my desk where the left over Skittles, M&Ms and Smarties are kept.  Looking back on the code that I've written thus far, and forward to the code I know I'm writing this week, I have to say that the MSMQ technology is not that difficult to work with.  The .NET namespace nicely encapsulates all that is needed (Queue and Message) and the amount of code required to actually send, retrieve or peek a message is minimal. Where the...

Yes folks, my normally stable life has had one rather short on-again-off-again relationship with MSMQ.  A while back I posted that I was starting to do some work with MSMQ, but it ran into one rather bizzare week.  The queue must have been to obvious of a solution to...well.....queue messages for processing, so a week was spent going back and forth with the client about implementing our own "queuing" solution.  They proposed that we shouldn't use MSMQ (the IT department didn't want to have to support it), but rather we should build a queuing solution using .NET and a DB2 database.  Reflecting on my trials with the Data Model...

Sounds like a quaint little bistro or pub a small town doesn't it?  No?  Perhaps it sounds like two things you'd do with that special someone (although I'm not exactly sure what a fork is)?  No? The fork and the spoon is the tale of two eating utensils found in a bizzare location.  Yesterday I went to the washroom at work to....ummmm.....go.  We consultants (aka service intergrators to the pompus few who need oral validation) are billeted on the same floor as the mechanicals in our building.  Because of this the washroom is not spacious.  It's a one person locale for a one person event.  Light on == occupied.  Light...

Ok.  I don't usually make political statement.  My societal statement are usually limited to rants about life in IT.  Today I'm going to veer from the norm (like any of you think I'm normal anyways). Unless you've been all caught up in your LISP programming lately, I'm sure that you know something about the state of the US Gulf Coast.  Katrina has laid a kickin' to one of the poorer parts of North America.  So I have two statements that I'm going to make.  First, I understand that there are people who were financially, medically and transportationally challenged.  Those folks ended up in a couple of hell holes (the convention...

    The first was the centennial b-day for the two land locked provinces in the confederation.  Thursday saw a big party throughout the province including concerts and fireworks.  Here are a couple of vids (first half, second half) of the fireworks.

Friday saw the peace, which had endured for three weeks in Middle Earth, shattered by the return of Grima.  The rumble of the coming doom could be felt the day before (it's the only reason I can think of explaining why I joked with our project manager that I needed to take stress leave that day).  Friday morning the clouds of evil slowly rolled forward, enveloping those that could not escape its path.  By eight Friday morning the clouds advance on my desk and then I opened my email.  Grima had rejected the Data Model to Bind Them All.  My will to live was absorbed by the darkness...