March 2006 Entries

I've been setting up my new laptop with all the requisite software for me to blog while on the road and today I decided to install w.bloggar v4.00 as my posting tool. Setting it up is to post to a Community Server 2.0 site is not as intuitive as one might think. When you open the w.bloggar setup wizard you're greeted with a dropdown list holding a schwack of different blogging server softwares. Community Server doesn't appear in the list though. I was lucky enough to find this article by Scott Watermasysk which will walk you...

Three of us made the journey down the QE2 today to watch the Alberta .Net User Group's guest speaker Scott Hanselman.  The presentation was great and, although advertised as a talk on dasBlog, it covered a wide variety of coding subjects which were displayed using the dasBlog source code.  The new, and continuing development of my most recent project (www.bloggingonit.com) was starting to pose some questions to me and lucky for me Scott covered a number of the subjects today.  Probably the two most interesting for me were the elegant caching pattern and the use of IHttpHandler and response.Redirect combined...

Dmitry has upgraded his RSS Toolkit (download here).  I'm currently using the tool to run my newest site www.bloggingonit.com.  Great work Dmitry, and thanks a bunch.

I watched Jean Paul Boodhoo's DNR TV segments today (download Part 1, Part 2) and they were great!  Jean Paul did a fabulous job of showing (sometimes I learn better seeing something done) how to do Test Driven Design/Development.  At one point he says that it might take some time for the light to go on when you first are learning TDD practices, but when it does it will shine ever so brightly.  I think that watching his demos was the last step before that light shines for me.  It's so informative just sitting and watching how someone writes their...

From what I've seen of the Integration Pack for MS EL so far it's pretty darn sweet.colinco - Avanade Integration Pack for Microsoft Enterprise Library ReleasedAvanade.IntegrationPack.EnterpriseLibrary.NOSOURCE.msi (1.08 MB download) I'm the Igloo Coder and I have to go configure my way into some better caches.

I stumbled on this site today (www.400plusdifferences.com).  It's nothing more than a marketing campaign for Visual Studio, but some of the clips are pretty damn funny (I can relate to #308 & #172 alot).

If you're anything like me you tend to open a lot of different projects of solutions over a period of time.  The first thing that you'll notice is that the Most Recent Projects menu item and Start Page section get plugged up and, especially if you're opening projects with the same names, it gets confusing and potentially dangerous.  Well, today I found a way to fix this problem.  Bobby DeRosa has created the MRU Cleaner Add-In.  Another must add to the developer toolkit.I'm the Igloo Coder and I'm going to delete something else while I'm on a roll.

I'm currently working on my first web project in Visual Studio 2005 and .Net 2.0.  Right now I'm trying to figure out how to properly, and easily, deploy the beta version of my site.  While I've been searching around I dug up Rick Strahl's blog and this post on deployment specifically.  It's a good article and I'll be making a beta anouncement soon.

Via Rob CaronIn his keynote today [Thursday March 16th, 2006] at SDWest 2006, Rick LaPlante announced that we’re releasing Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server tomorrow. Last year we took the tough decision to disconnect Team Foundation Server from the rest of Team System, but promised that Team Foundation Server would ship in the first quarter of this year, and we’re delivering on that promise.

I'm working on some code to consolidate the feeds of all the Edmonton .Net bloggers that I can find.  I think we developers in the City of Champions need a better and bigger community to be involved with.  This is the first project that I'm going to take on in an attempt to help with the better and bigger stuff.  Others are in the works and will follow I'm sure.  This is also a great excuse for me to explore the ASP .Net RSS Toolkit made by Dmitryr.I'm the Igloo Coder and I've got one hand on the keyboard.

Last night's presentation, by John Bristowe, on WinFX and it's components was very well done and the information was great.  I have to admit I did get a little geeked about the Windows Workflow Foundation stuff.  It was great to see and hear about a product that will be able to increase the productivity of developers and also deliver big benefits to our clients.  Be on the lookout here for a sample project in the next few months.I'm the Igloo Coder and I'm going to start doing some work on the ice flows outside.

Call me a prude, but this is one of those images that I just didn't need to see.  It could only be worse if someone had photoshopped Mike's face onto this body.  Hang on....it could be worse than that.  It could be this guys face on Mike's body.  <shudder>I'm the Igloo Coder and I'm having PM Boy flashbacks.  Someone pour me a drink.

I got word today that my training request for VSLive Toronto has been approved.  I will be going!  I've never done any formal training with any employer I've ever had (software industry or not) so this is a big treat for me.I'm the Igloo Coder and I'm wondering if they'll charge more to let my dog team stay in the room?

I spent part of the weekend working on upgrading the blog to Community Server 2.0 for .Net 2.0.  I didn't have any problems performing the upgrade (other than the fact the upload of the new application took hours).The only problem that I ran into during the process was getting the blog reconfigured to run from the root of my server.  There is a helpful blog posting by Dan Bartels that got me started but a few things were still non-functional when I completed.When I tried to open archived month folders, specific posts and the comments sections, among others, I would...

I got an invite to Windows Live Messenger beta today.  I’ve installed it and started to play tonight.  I got all excited and spread around the invites.  Once I had some people online I started to say how I really like the animated backgrounds, the offline messaging and the VoIP stuff.  My bubble was burst when I was told these things all have existed in the current version of different messenger products.  I was so happy crawling out from under my rock and then all of a sudden….Wham!…the damn rock falls on me. I’m the Igloo Coder and I think I’m...

John Bristowe is coming to Edmonton on the 14th of March.  He is doing a presentation on WinFX for the Edmonton .Net Wizards User Group.  Here are the instructions on where to find the meeting.  Hopefully this is a trend to the good for the user group as things have yet to really gotten off the mark for it. I’m the Igloo Coder and I’m why the fuck is it called an Eskimo Pie when it has nothing to do with the eskimos?

Seems that Mike over at Fire in the Hole has decided to blog about developer management.  His first series (Lazy managers are good, Don’t panic, delegate, Two more stories on lazy managers) discusses how to be a lazy manager.  Is it odd that I see him as being an expert already just due to the fact that 2 of his first 4 posts were posted either during the work day or suspiciously close to the end of it?  Regardless, good stuff to read through if you have to, or could be doing, delegation. I’m the Igloo Coder and if I catch Sir Paul...

I’ve been working on this side project using .NET 2.0 for the last 6 months and some of the features are really starting to grow on me.  The project is a WinForms application which provides a nice contrast to my day-to-day web development.  Most of my previous forms development was done in VB6 which, although a decent tool, did leave a lot of things up to the developer. In the last few months I’ve really started to like the new WinForm controls that are bundled with Visual Studio 2005.  If you use Panels, Splitters and Flow & Table layouts in combination with...

In the past I’ve worked on a lot of reporting solutions.  My most recent work project has no reporting component which is contrary to what I think software needs.  If your system is collecting and storing data, your users will most likely want to get that data back out in some meaningful way.  I’ve seen reporting solutions be as simple as a grid listing in the software itself that can double as a report when printed (i.e. a Customer Listing report).  I’ve also built a couple of systems that were database driven solutions which could dynamically create a selection criteria...

There is an INETA webcast coming up on Wednesday March 22, 2006 between 1:30 and 2:30 MST that will discuss the ins and outs of setting up a Code Camp.  Via Thom Robbins.

For about 11 months now I’ve been at my current employer.  One of the things that has been different in that time is that the development team has had, and been able to request clarification on, software specifications.  In tribute to my experience with specs, I’ve decided to blog about my thoughts on them.  By no means is this intended to be a comprehensive review of software specs.  If you want that, read Software Requirements 2 by Karl Wiegers.  Specs are so much more than documentation on how the system should work.  In addition to providing a strong foundation for...