archive: 2006

2006

Best Edmonton Tech Posts in 2006

Inspired by this post by Des Traynor, I’m compiling the top posts for the local community in 2006.  Here they are in no specific order. Steven Rockarts on the Decompose Conditional Pattern Thi

Roy Osherove on Continuous Integration and Agile

The more I see of Roy Osherove presenting, the more I like his style.  It’s understated, but he doesn’t miss covering and emphasizing the important points.  Maybe one day we will get him up

I tried to be EViL today

I know what all of you are thinking  “Oooohhh, this is going to be good.  I better pick up tomorrows Frostbitten Times to see what carnage appears on the front page.”  Sorry to disappoi

Rob Windsor @ Edmug

Last night my old buddy (he claims the Leafs have won the cup in his life time….musta been programming on papyrus back then Rob!) Rob Windsor presented to Edmug on An Introduction to WCF.  He did

Tweaking Cyclomatic Complexity Calculations

I’ve been looking at a number of different tools and techniques that I can implement at work to help us figure out where this pile of code that our team has inherited is in the most trouble.  One

.NET training in Edmonton

When you live out here in the hinterland, good software development training is hard to come by.  When it does roll around it’s usually not for the technology or tools that you’re using.  Ti

Unique values for surrogate keys

Don’t you hate those days when you think you’ve seen and heard it all only to find out that there is one more thing that is going to make you want to poke your eyes out?  Well, today I went past

Customizing Visual Studio 2005 SmartTag key strokes

One of the great additions in Visual Studio 2005 are SmartTags.  These are the little drop down menus that appear in the IDE when you’re writing code.  The one I use the most is ‘Add Using’

Practicing

Athletes do it.  Musicians do it.  Artists do it.  How may developers do it?  The skills that we use everyday don’t just magically appear.  Lots of developers learn and hone t

The druthers of work

I haven’t been posting a whole lot lately and I figured I should write out the reasons why.  Not so much because I think you guys give two shits (you might, who knows), but more because I wa

Portable Apps

The place I’m working right now doesn’t allow me to install software, no matter what it is, onto my development desktop.  I can understand their concerns with licensing, viruses and the such, but

TestDriven.NET 2.0 RTMs

I just noticed that Jamie Cansdale has released v2.0 of TestDriven.NET.  The screenshot are of the new functionality are looking pretty damn cool.  I’m downloading as we speak.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 IDE Enhancements

Today I found this new set of addins for VS 2k5 thanks to a post by Greg Duncan.  According to the official Microsoft download page, these “…are a set of Visual Studio extensions provides tools t

Drinking and Posting

Sometimes I get scared of myself when I start drinking and posting.  Today I felt a little better when I saw that Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble did the same thing.  Even better is that

When have you tested enough?

First let me say that I am not a tester, let alone a test manager or a testing guru.   What I’m writing here is the out-of-scope ramblings of a developer. I’ve been on my new project for abo

Tree Surgeon

I have no idea where I managed to find this tool.  Regardless, I finally got around to having a go with it. Tree Surgeon is a .NET development tree generator.  Just give it the name of your

End of an era

Here in Alberta (and one could also say all of Canada) there has been one amazing constant in the MS developer world, Dan Sellers.  I have never had the privilege to have met or be taught by Dan,

Enforcing Coding Standards

One of the things that I’m working on as part of my new job is the creation of a Coding Standards document.  This is an interesting prospect as the software has already been developed for a signi

Writing Gadgets with The Pimp

All I have to say is, damn Justice’s head is freaking huge!  I can only see about 1/3 of the screen around it.  I can’t imagine what the line of sight would be like if he still had that damn

MSMQ at Edmonton Code Camp

I just wrapped up my presentation on MSMQ at Edmonton Code Camp.  I actually thought that I was going to finish pretty early, but in the end I filled most of the time slot.  The group wasn’t

Edmonton Code Camp has started

We’re off and rolling today here at the Edmonton Code Camp.  Right now the first block of speakers, Steven & Justice and Dan, are wowing the early morning attendees.  Feel free to drop b

Edmonton Code Camp registration is closed

Steven Rockarts just told me that registration has closed for Edmonton Code Camp.  We have 102 people officially registered (plus one wait-listed…sometimes it pays to just ask people!) for tomorr

JP Boodhoo at Edmug

Tonight we (Edmug) hosted JP Boodhoo at our monthly gathering.  JP was, well, JP.  Great content.  Great knowledge transfer.  Great all around.  He talked about having an ‘Ah-

'Tis the season for change

I’m sitting here in my pod looking out the window at the river valley here in Edmonton.  The trees are changing colour and the sight is beautiful.  Along with those trees, I’m changing jobs

Busy, but great, week for Edmonton geeks

This week is going to be out-freakin’-standing for geeks in Edmonton.  On Thursday the 28th Edmug is holding its monthly meeting and we have brought back Jean-Paul Boodhoo for your 500 level pre

Shit samples == shit coders

I read The Daily WTF.  I read Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horror.  Tonight I read IBM’s sample document for How to use a DB2DataAdapter with the DB2 .NET Data Provider.  All three are essentia

DbType and other provider specific types

At work I’ve been working with a couple of my very skilled co-workers (on who is a DB2/Cobol programmer, but I don’t hold that against him) to try to solve a problem in our data access layer.  Re

Future Desktop Replacement

I’m not usually that big on new fangled gidgets and widgets, but I saw this out on the web today and I’m stoked at the possibility that this desktop replacement may actually get built. Watch the video

User Group Podcast

I stumbled on this podcast from Australia tonight that discusses the state of User Groups there and in New Zealand.  It’s a pretty good podcast, but it’s a shame that the audio for Adam Coga

I'm turning into a boolean bigot

I’m going to the top of the mountain (cause there’s so many here in Edmonton) and I’m going to shout it loud.  In my little programming world I’m turning into a boolean bigot.  So many

Property Event Pattern

I know someone else smarter than me has probably written a post, an article or a book on this, but I’m going to put it up here anyways. Tonight I was screwing around with some code for a small side

New Blog

Instead of cluttering up this blog with information about my favourite recipes I’ve decided to create a new blog dedicated to food called Geek Tukka.  I’m hoping to keep this up to date with reci

Edmug Event Feeds

At one of our Edmug board meetings recently we discussed making announcements for our events available in a syndicated format.  Prior to the DNIC tour event with John Bristowe on September 7th, J

Chicken Enchiladas

Another recipe that I absolutely love.  This one is a little better suited to cooler days than a hot summer afternoon, but I’ve had it in both and it’s very, very good in either. Ingredients1 lb

Called out by Mrs. L.

So I got called out by Mrs. Loquacious last week.  Apparently I don’t write enough human interest pieces on this blog for her liking.  Well, maybe after this post she’ll regret the fact

Multiple Daily Scrums in Edmonton

I know that there are a number of different teams here in Edmonton using SCRUM to one degree or another.  Starting today things get different here.  Tell me your team could survive this dail

Cruise Control .NET 'Ticks' error

For the first time in a long time today I had a build fail on our automated build machine.  So to start investigating the error I fired up the Cruise Control .NET Dashboard and found this lovely

Edmug Code Generation Presentation

Last night I presented at Edmug on Code Generation using myGeneration.  We covered off a basic Business/Domain object creation script and then added some inheritance, interfaces and code retentio

Finally, a post from Live Writer

After some trials and tribulations I have managed to get a post written from Windows Live Writer.  Kudos to the MS folks who have worked on this because, for a beta product, the install/uninstall

Separation of Generated Code from Custom Code

I’ve been working with myGeneration quite a bit lately as I prepare for my presentation at Edmug on the 24th of August. As part of the research I’ve been doing while creating the presentation materia

September 7th Edmug/DNIC extravaganza!

On Thursday, September 7th Edmug and MSDN Canada will be holding an evening of fun, laughter and Atlas with John ‘The Pimp‘ Bristowe. Registration for the event is required and can be done here. S

Summer Meals

Anyone who knows me well understands that I have a passion for both eating and cooking food. Yesterday I made up a great summer dinner that I thought I’d share it here. Corn on the Cob:  I

New Microsoft Canada Developer Evangelist

For all you folks that attended Jean-Luc David‘s presentation on Atlas at Edmug in June, join me in congratulating JLD on his recent appointment to Microsoft Canada as it’s newest Developer Evangelist

Environmental Repeatability

Right now at work I’m fighting with a situation where I have to rebuild a testing environment consisting of 6 servers, a complete Active Directory installation (one of the servers is a domain controll

Edmonton Code Camp Registration

All right folks. You’ve heard the rumours. You’ve seen the East Block and Sesame Street versions of the posters (and the mockings from people who feel left out). People are massing in the streets i

Beating Comment Spammers

A couple of weeks ago I started getting a number of comments per day as spam. For some reason Community Server wasn’t trapping them as spam so I was manually deleting every one of them. Thankfully t

Alt-Tab replacement

I’ve been looking for an Alt-Tab replacement for some time. There are a number of them out there, but I’ve never heard multiple people give glowing recommendations to one item. Between that and the

Requirements from a Code Generation tool

So it’s 5am on a Friday morning and I’ve been unable to sleep, so rather than lying in bed and thinking about code generation I figured I should get up and write about it. I know what your thinking,

Code Generation with myGeneration

I’ve been working quite a bit in the last week with some code generation tools as I prepare to do a presentation for Edmug. I think that I’ve finally settled on using myGeneration for the presentatio

The hair is the man

You don’t have to truly know Justice to understand that the title of this post is not some kind of fantasy statement. The amazing thing is that the picture of Justice (see below) for Edmonton Code Ca

Free Visual Studio Tips and Tricks ebook

I can’t remember how I found this on the web (update:  This was found in the July 31st MSDN Flash newsletter written by John Bristowe), so if it was your site that pointed me to it, thanks. Infoq

Poker Night

Last night I was out playing some poker with friends (both new and old) at Justice’s place. Although I’ve played a fair bit of poker online, this was my first attempt at playing live. This certainly

Richard Campbell at Edmug Tonight

Tonight Edmug is having it’s July event. Richard Campbell is in town and talking about SQL Querying Tips and Tricks along with some SQL 2k5 stuff. Drop by and watch his presentation. We will be han

NDoc 2 is dead

The fact that NDoc 2 will no longer be pursued by Kevin Downs is a drag. NDoc has been on my list of things to integrate into my build process for quite some time and losing it means that the Sandcas

Code Monkey

Ah yes….finally an anthem we can all sing proudly. I’ve really been getting tired of Kumbaya in our cubicle. I’m especially happy about the section where “…manager can go and write logon page himsel

BSG Season 3 trailer

Season 3 of Battlestar Galactica is looking good. Gotta love the tune they picked for this trailer too. A little Hanna Alberta blue collar rock from Nickleback. Gotta love the Alberta boys. Battles

INETA Live Presentation on User Group Best Practices

I noticed to day that the Best Practices for Running a User Group webcast has been put up on the INETA Live site. Have a listen to Chris Williams, D’Arcy Lussier, Robin Edwards, Doug Ware and myself

Why I'm pushing for code coverage

Right now I’m make a push at work to increase the percentage code coverage by our unit tests. Let’s just say that the numbers are very very low. But they are increasing. This morning as I was lying

Naming SQL Server Objects

In the final post of my series on naming conventions, I’m going to discuss some different ways to name some of the objects in your SQL Server databases. This topic alone could turn into it’s own seri

Naming Conventions for UI Controls

Moving from backend code that I’ve concentrated on in the rest of this series to the UI, today I’m going to discuss some of the naming conventions available for controls that are used on the user inte

Naming Interfaces and Super (Base) Classes

The number of options when choosing conventions for the naming of interfaces and super classes is fairly limited. Like so many other things in programming, naming of these two things is most effectiv

When are scheduled code drops not enough?

In the past week and a half I’ve had some great conversations with one of my coworkers about the scheduling of our code drops. As background to those of you who don’t work with me (which is darn near

Class Naming Conventions

I’m over half done my Naming Conventions series and I’m starting to notice that my posts are getting shorter and shorter. Again, this post will not be large, but there are a few important points I wa

User Group Leadership Taskings and Meeting Locations

Marcia McLean from the Cape Cod .NET User Group left a couple of great comments for me today. First, thanks Marcia for pointing out two things that I should have further discussed in my User Group ser

Property Naming

Once again I’m writing on naming conventions. This time I’m sure will be a short post to talk about conventions for publicly exposed properties. Like variables, functions, methods, classes, etc. pro

Function and Method Naming Standards

After a brief pause, I’m all liquored up and ready to continue with the next post in the Naming Conventions Series. Today I’ll discuss name standards that are used with functions, methods and overload

Women in IT

I’ve been in the not so standard situation to have worked with a number of females during my IT career. One place I worked at even had a 50-50 ratio of men to women (no it wasn’t a two person shop).

Module Variable Naming

As part of my Naming Conventions series I’m going to discuss the naming of module level variables. Naming conventions for module level variables are quite similar to those you might use for naming lo

Local Variable Naming

In the second post of my Code Naming Conventions series I’m going to explore how we could name our local variables. One of the nicest things about local variables is that their scope is quite limited

Consistency through Convention

Code naming conventions are a very touchy subject. Many developers will get very defensive about ‘their way’ and will be quite offensive, or offended, by ‘your way’. In these posts I’m not going to

Code Naming Conventions, The Series

While I was writing my last series (User Group Startup Stories I noticed that the series idea helped to focus my attention, consolidate my ideas and forced me to put the digital pen to the digital pap

Edmug is North

Edmug is north (notice the little ‘n’ not the big ‘N’ like Ollie North). Edmonton is the most northerly provincial (not including the territories) capital in Canada. We’re 53°34’ north. We just

User Group Startup -- Extending Your Reach

In this, the final post in the User Group Startup series, I’m going to explore some of the ideas that we at Edmug have batted around. The ideas I’ll present here are ones that, while possibly benefit

User Group Startup -- Keeping the Ball Rolling

In this installment of the second to last installment of this series I’ll discuss one of the most difficult tasks you face while running a user group. Once you have a group started, meetings and even

User Group Startup -- Content, Content, Content

In the sixth installment of this series we’ll discuss meeting and event content and how important it is to creating a great community. Developers, by our nature, are an inquisitive group of individua

User Group Startup -- Location

It’s so darn beautiful outside today that I thought I’d sit on my deck and add another entry to my series on User Group Startups. This time around I’ll write about meeting and event locations. If yo

User Group Startup -- Having the Right Setup

In this installment of my Startup Stories I’m going to talk about the hardware and setup you’ll need for your meetings. When you attend events, whether they are company meetings, user groups or confe

Edmug gets plugged on DNIC

John Bristowe‘s Developer Night In Canada just released its latest episode featuring a talk with D’Arcy Lussier. Mister Lussier talks about how INETA helps with user group operations, support and kno

Cruise Control .NET in a multi domain environment

Yesterday and today I spent the better part of the day setting up a Cruise Control server for my dev team to use. This is my second attempt at this task. On the first attempt I made the mistake of t

User Group Startup -- Running with the Right Crowd

Once you’ve decided that you are going to start a user group and you’re going about it with passion and conviction it’s time to get together a leadership team. I want to emphasis the word team here.

User Group Startup -- The Inspiration

If you came to me and said that you were thinking about starting a User Group I’d ask you one question: Why? The reasons for wanting to start a User Group vary. Perhaps the city/town that you live i

My Start Up Stories

I’m going to start a series of posts on what I’ve experience while Brad, Justice, Stevie Y and Steven R have started and been running the Edmonton .NET User Group. This series will not even be compar

Late June in Edmonton

Who would ever have thought that that a post titled like this one would have the possibility of evoking thoughts of hockey? If this is what you thought, then shame on you! Why wouldn’t you think of

Hacknot's handbook on Technical Leads

Hacknot posted a comprehensive writeup on the traits, skills and requirements of a Technical Lead. As a Technical Lead the 19 items listed all hit home. Some are things that I consciously have thoug

TechEd 2006...pffftt....

According to Rob, if I’m not posting about my schedule for TechEd I’m a nobody. I’ll have you know Rob that my mommy says I’m a somebody! And if you don’t believe that I’ll make you sit on the floor

Team Foundation Sidekicks

Although I’m not using TFS (I hope to be very soon), these Sidekick products (Version Control and MS Build) by Attrice look very interesting. From what I can tell on the website both products appear

Blogging from Word 2007

So I wanted to be one of the cool people who posted to their blog from Word 2007. Yah, wanted to be. I’m not going to be tonight. I have the product installed and it seems to run just fine…..with o

My Tool List

Over the last number of months I’ve been working on building up the toolkit that I use for software development. By no means is it going to be like Scott Hanselman’s list, but it is something that a f

Quotes from Calgary Code Camp

Like DevTeach, there were some memorable quotes from the trip to Calgary. Here we go It’s like sex in my mouth. – said when describing the Ahi Tuna Tacos at Joey Tomato’s. I don’t know if I can sit h

Calgary Code Camp Review

I have to admit that I went to the Calgary Code Camp to attend the talks as well as see how the event was run. Overall the talks were great and the event ran quite smoothly. Two big thumbs up to the

Complaints about Edmug's Last Presentation

There have been a number of people who have complained about Rod‘s presentation at Edmug’s May meeting. The most scathing complaint comes from Mike over at sideline.ca and I’d like to address his comp

The .NET Language Integrated Query Project (LINQ)

To start the Calgary Code Camp 2006 I’m sitting in on Daniel Carbajal‘s presentation on LINQ. I’ve seen a bit on this before, but I’m interested in what new things I’m going to be able to pick up. Th

Calgary Code Camp

Calgary Code Camp is tomorrow. For all you geeks, Steven Rockarts will be there. For all you metrosexuals, Justice Gray will be there. For all you ladies, I’ll be there. For all you taco lovers,

Edmug Presentation Changes

The feedback for Rod Paddock‘s talk last night at Edmug is starting to trickle in this morning and one thing is becoming clear. Some of the attendees were expecting an advanced talk and Rod’s talk di

Edmonton .NET User Group's May Meeting

The Edmonton .NET User Group held it’s May meeting tonight. Rod Paddock presented on Creating Custom Visual Studio 2005 Project Templates. I learned a ton of stuff and had some great discussions wit

WineLog.net

Any of you that know me well understand that I have a weakness for the elixir of life. Today Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch posted on the new Web 2.0 (my thoughts on that are starting to change

Script#...WTF?

Really, this is a great extension (watch the screencast too) of the .NET platform. Having data typing “capabilities” when creating a set javascript routines is invaluable. I’m all for this type of t

Caching patterns

Here’s a great article by Gavin Joyce on the Reluctant Cache Pattern. I like it’s simplicity and the way that won’t bloat the memory usage on the server. The project that I’m working on is by no mea

Why can't more of us be like this?

I’ve worked some crap jobs. I’ve worked some great jobs. The one thing that carries through all these is that at some point I always hated them. I’m not talking about feeling like the morning sucks

Okay, I'm a homer, but....

Have you ever seen any event, sporting, cultural (is there a difference when you talk hockey?) or emotional where the guy who is paid to sing the national anthem, just stops. This was a good kind of

EnergizeIT 2006

Microsoft Canada is trying out a new style of event in June. EnergizeIT will be a live, day long event in Toronto. The difference with this event is that everyone who isn’t part of the center of the

More free tools

I’ve just added another piece of software to my toolkit. RedGate‘s SQL Prompt is now available for free download until September 1 2006. I’m the Igloo Coder and I’m of to get some more intelli in my

Edmonton Blogging Community

Hey all. If you have a blog with some technical content and you’re from Edmonton, leave me a comment and I’ll see about adding your blog’s RSS feed to the consolidator on BloggingOnIT.com. All the s

Edmonton Code Camp

Steven Rockarts has committed to putting on a Code Camp here in Edmonton. I know some of the speakers that Steven is trying to get lined up and if he can do it, this will be a top notch event. I’m g

Back in '92

Oil Country is pumping out the black gold! Tonight the Oilers advanced to round 3 (the semi finals) of the NHL playoffs. According to history buffs this is the first time that the Oil have been this

Abstracting the Developer

Joel Spolsky posted about the concept of abstracting the developer to insulate them and make them more effective at the time.  I read this article and thought “This is great” and then “Damn my la

Agile Development

What is it about Agile methodologies causes them to be “Old Boys Clubs”. I can dig around the internet and find all the information I want on Scrum, Agile or TDD, but all of it is from the developer

Unable to create offline cache location at.....

Today I got back to work for the first time in a week and the weather outside is not helping my ability to concentrate or be productive.  As is my luck, I get back to work and try to fire up Visu

Hockey in Canada in the Spring

I live in the northern most city that is the home to an NHL team, the Oilers. Sure it’s spring, but it is early spring here in the City of Champions. That said the weather is awesome. The Oilers ar

Canadian Online Census 2006

Tonight I filled out the Canadian Census 2006 using their online form. The idea of having the census information gathered online makes complete sense to me. Unfortunately this implementation is a di

Lessons Learned -- Conference Prep

DevTeach 2006 was my first conference and like anything you do for the first time you make a few mistakes. Jason Row has a good post showing a list of things that you should do when going to a confer

Quotes from DevTeach 2006

This week was a blast. Although the User Group leaders are a bunch of pretentious uppety-ups, I did manage to have a good time hanging out with them. We had a great time exploring the city in the ev

Johnny "The Pimp" Bristowe and the Mad Mexican

Johnny “The Pimp” Bristowe was presenting on Applications with Windows Presentation Foundation this morning when he was visited by The Mad Mexican. Apparentally these two were tag team partners back

Designing Applications for Mulitple UIs Part 1

Beth Massi is a great and knowledgeable presenter. This talk wasn’t quite what I expected (I admit, I didn’t really read the description before hand), but it had a lot of information tat was very use

Creating Custom Setup Applications

I’ve posted before about the fact that Reporting and Installation Packages are forgotten arts. Dan Jurden’s talk this morning is about the latter. Good presentations are tough to do. People in the a

Click Once Deployment

This is a very interesting session. The different ways to release the app into the wild and the fact that the application, when installed locally, allows for a version rollback on uninstall are very

Sustainability and Inverson of Control #2

Finally after 1 1/2 days I finally attended a dud. There’s no question in my mind that Scott Bellware is a smart cookie, but this was a pretty bad session. First I’ll qualify my situation by saying

Clarification on the VSTS checkin/out process

I spoke with Barry Gervin after the presentation to clarify the concerns that I had during the session this morning. When you are working in any environment and you are starting a new work (coding) ta

Lunch Time at DevTeach 2006

It’s darn near lunch time and there’s this dude running around with a quesadilla screaming something about Mexico. I’m starting to wonder if the guy is all there or not. Seems other people have seen

Advanced Version Control with Team Systems

One of the interesting concepts that came up in this talk was the idea that VSTS has you working off of a known working version of the source code. I see a problem with this. Working off a known wor

Extending Visual Studio 2005

To ensure your code has all the XML comments in it go to the project, right click and select Properties. On the Build tab and check the XML documentation file item. This will verify that the signatu

Simplifying Code Generation in a Generic World

Microsoft has released a code generator called Domain Specific Languages. Domain in this case is relating to the IT domain (i.e. forms over data or web app) not business domain. Five principles of co

What constitutes community?

Since I’ve been here in Montreal I’ve had the opportunity to interact with the leaders of the other User Groups in Canada. Without exception they are saying that my description of the Edmonton .NET U

Montreal by night

I was out with the Canada Clan tonight (D’Arcy from Winnipeg, Jennifer from Saskatoon, Nolan from Victoria, Rob from Toronto, Chris from East of Toronto, and Jason from Fredrickton). Things didn’t ge

Defining and Enforcing Good Code

This is one of my babies and I’m really stoked to hear this presentation by Kathleen Dollard. Even better, this is going to be a show on FxCop, something that I’ve always wanted to use, but have neve

How the core ASP.NET Engine Works

Rick Strahl is presenting on the way that the ASP.NET Engine Works. He started by saying that this was a “higher level talk” to start with. Right. He immediately dove into the operational structure

Debugging Smart Client Apps

Cathi Gero is giving a great presentation with all the gory details about debugging. One of the great points was how to get symbol files (*.pdb) to load when the application is being debugged. She’s

DataBinding with Beth Massi

As we all know Microsoft has a passion for drag and drop data binding. We also all know that the standard Microsoft demo is to build an “Enterprise” solution using the drag and drop data binding. Wh

D'Arcy's woes with wireless

So it’s becoming apparent that people from Winnipeg can’t make wireless work. Maybe it’s the early onset West Nile that this year’s mosquitos are spreading. We’ve tried everything to help him. The

DevTeach 06 Keynote

Yair Alan Griver is currently showing some pretty damn cool stuff around the LINQ, DLINQ and XLINQ projects. One of the cool ones is that the VB compiler will allow you to Dim an object equal to a li

User Group Summit

Just got in from finishing off the evening with a few of the UG leaders from around Canada. The summit today was great (pics courtesy of Guy Barette). For a new User Group, my idea was to get in and

What to do when they screw up your drink

We were just out to lunch at a great place. The weather is fabulous and we sat on the deck. It was very difficult to leave and come back here. I ordered a double scotch and the waiter brought me tw

John is getting Flamed

John Bristowe just showed up to the User Group conference and the poor boy is getting Flamed.

Getting to Montreal

Yesterday was travel day. As our plane pushed back from the jetway they tried to fire up the engines (some say this is required, I’m still unconvinced) and all we got was the sound of a 1983 Ford pic

Updates from DevTeach

I’m planning on posting updates on the content and atmosphere from DevTeach each day. Watch for it info here and I’ll do my best to keep you up to date.

edmug.net May Speaker -- Rod Paddock

The announcement that everyone has been waiting for is now being made (okay, Steve said it earlier than me). The may speaker for the Edmonton .NET User Group is going to be Rod Paddock (bio). LIke t

Spring has sprung

I heard a great joke the other day. How do you know when spring has come? The Leafs are out. Today was absolutely amazing. The sun was out all day. It warmed up to the point that my light jacket w

Scott Bellware tees off on the Fr-agilist

Today Scott Bellware let loose with a response to Sahil Malik‘s recent post on Bad Programmer Diseases. I’m sorry to say this, but I’m going to do it straight off and not touch it again. Scott, the

Maintenance Programming

Every application goes through the full SDLC unless the project gets cancelled. No matter what the methodology implemented to manage the SDLC there is one consistent fact: All software must be maint

Software Development Metaphors

Jeffrey Palmero recently had a great post where defends his belief that software development is not too hard, but instead it’s far to easy. While the post is great, covers a wide variety of opposing

Launch Day

Tomorrow marks the day that the Edmonton .NET User Group will truly come to life. For the six of you that read this blog, drop by the Milner Library in downtown Edmonton. Come for the swag and stay

The power of marketing

I’ve had the chance to work at a few different companies, small and large, and see both the differences in marketing and it’s effectiveness. No matter what anyone tells you, marketing is what makes s

Economics

Economics….like I know shite about this. I hardly passed my first year micro and macro courses, but I think I’ve gained a greater appreciation of these subject as I’ve become more aged. Mostly I hav

DevTeach 2006

It’s been confirmed. I am going to DevTeach in Montreal in a couple of weeks and I’m really looking forward to this for a number of reasons. I’m really geeked up about the knowledge I’m going to abso

Hardware Nirvana

David Weiss blogs here about an impressive stack of hardware that he supports for use in a test lab at Microsoft. Yep they’re all Macs…and yes you did read that right. They’re all at Microsoft. The

User Group Meeting Content

One of the big reasons that Steven R, Steve Y, Brad, Mike M and I originally picked up the idea of starting the Edmonton .NET User Group was because we wanted better meeting content quality. Steven R

Community Server 2.0 "Skin Not Found"

So I upgraded to Community Server 2.0 RTM back about a month ago and since then I’ve been fighting to get my favourite skin (Foggy Valley) to run on my site. Every time I’d switch the skin from one t

RDD - Report Driven Design

It seems that everyone has their own methodology now. It may be TDD, XP, Agile, RUP or some other flavour of the month. Last night, while I was less than sober, I had a conversation with Mike about

Methodologies

I was out at a local establishment indulging in a few sinful liquids when the conversation turned to the fact that neither myself or my companion could identify with the new wave of methodologies. We

www.geekswithblogs.com got spammed hard!

I went to www.geekswithblogs.com tonight and found that they’d been spammed hard. Someone had setup a blog and was posting to the main feed abot cialis and other such “inflamitory” drugs. Pretty fun

Page not found (404) error on a new IIS6 server

Today I have been fighting with a problem on our new IIS6 testing environments. I’ve installed all the software onto the servers and then opened IIS and browsed to one of the .aspx pages in the newly

The New Edmonton .NET User Group

You can say you heard it here first. The new Edmonton .NET User Group has formed. The user group was created with the primary goal of providing powerful speaker content, learning opportunities and t

nAnt builds

Jean-Paul Boodhoo is posting a great series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) on using nAnt to perform the builds for you applications. Since starting my last project I’ve become a huge proponent of nAnt, but

VS 2005 Security articles

I found a page on MSDN that has a listing of VS 2005 Security articles and webcasts. The selection inclueds everything from Design and Deploying Secure Web Apps to VSTS: Building Robust and Reliable

Community Server and Medium Trust environments

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 Co

Hanselman in Cow Town

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

RSS Toolkit Upgrade

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.

Jean Paul Boodhoo on DNR TV

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

400+ Differences

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 &

Most Recent Projects Clutter

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 Star

Web Deployment in .Net 2.0

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

Team Foundation Server Ships Today

Via Rob Caron In his keynote today [Thursday March 16th, 2006] at SDWest 2006, Rick LaPlante announced thatwe’re releasing Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server tomorrow.Last year we took the toug

Edmonton .Net bloggers

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 invol

John Bristowe's WinFX Presentation in Edmonton

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 F

Some images just shouldn't be seen

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 t

Look out TO

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 n

CS Upgrade

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 appli

Windows Live Messenger beta

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 onl

John Bristowe in Edmonton

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 meeti

The Lazy Manager

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)

.NET 2.0 WinForms Controls

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

More reporting

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 co

INETA Code Camp Info

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.

Isn't it Spec-ial

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 clarificatio

Continuous Integration

I received news this week that I was going to be starting a new project (well, just another release of my last project) so I started to prepare my build and source control environments in earnest

The Great Adventures of PM Boy

Recently the project I was assigned to came to a rather graceful, and most certainly successful end.  As it ended the subsequent system maintenance contract began and I moved on to it along with

Server Virtualization

Channel9 has a great video on the way MS Virtual Server is architected and a lot of discussion on how you may use it.  Like any geek, I regularly get the question “What computer should I b

Cassini's Random Ports

Ran into a bit of a problem on a side project recently.  Not all the members of the team had IIS on their machines so some were using ASP.NET Development Server (Cassini) to serve up the web serv

My Inbox

I read this morning that Yahoo and AOL have announced that they will offer a pay-for-delivery, guarantee it makes it to the Inbox, email service.  Will it work?  Who knows.  Will people

The Software Development Life Cycle

We all have some knowledge of the SDLC (aka “The cluster-fuck I call work”) but many of us work within the process (Design, Code, Test, Build, Test, Release, Repeat).  What we don&rsq

RSS Reader Woes

In the past I’ve been a proponent of Attensa add-in for Outlook mostly because I really like to have my email and RSS in one convenient location.  Unfortunately, Attensa brought my machine

The IT Crowd

This weekend I found a blog post that led me to Channel 4 and the new British sitcom The IT Crowd.  Not having read any reviews of the show, I started watching it with a clear mind (okay, yo

More Installation Goodness

This is a follow up post to this one where I mention that a certain individual felt in was okay not to be diligent and as a result uninstalled the production servers.  One week after finishing u

.Net Training Material

There are many vendors of training material out there today.  Equally as voluminous are the ways that people learn effectively.  Today I found the LearnVisualStudio.net site, and a

Freebies

Apress is offering free books for download.  They want you to subscribe to an Apress newsletter, but all you have to do is uncheck the box and click the “Download the book” button.&nb

FireFox acting like a memory sucking pig

FireFox is great.  Tabbed browsing rocks.  Extensions make me giggle with glee.  Like Raymond Lewallen states in his post here, FireFox (v1.0.7) is really starting to piss me off.&

Would you like to Super Size that?

I’m pawing through the internet tonight and I found this article on the New Zealand Herald reporting an incident of the New Zealand Labour Department’s web site being hacked.  The thing that is m

Banned XBOX 360 Ad

This is a great ad for the XBOX 360.  Sure maybe not for TV, but, like the posting says, it should be in every movie theatre.

Regex Info

I was reading my feeds tonight when I saw this posting on Regex Performance by Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror. I haven’t used regex a lot, but I’m very certain that I would not hav

And the light shineth on him.....

My belief that this whole Web 2.0 thing is nothing but a giant crock of marketing hooey has been proven by the venerated site TechCrunch.   Web 2.0 is nothing but a giant ploy by our four le

And I thought Waltzing Matilda was good

Got this through Steve Rockarts today.  The Unit Test song by Tim O’Day.  Waltzing Matilda will always hold a special spot with me, but this will be what I think of when I’m sitt

How USB and Web 2.0 are alike

Back in the day…okay, it was 2000….I scoffed at the idea that people would use this USB thing that everyone was talking about.  What good would it do?  How much easier would it be than plugg

The last thing today

So through my whole Community Server upgrade I had forgotten to figure out how to get BlogJet working.  It’s pretty easy (thanks to this post from Tiernans Comms Closet). Originally this wa

Taking the Dive

I took the dive today.  No, not an Ilya Kovalchuk swan dive atcenter ice when the backup goalie sneezes.  Instead I installedCommunity Server 2.0.  Was it fun you ask? Well…….no.&n

Web 2.0 and Good Web Design

Once again I’m going to comment on Web 2.0.  Ever since I made my first post (Web 2.0?)I’ve been finding more and more people writing with similar disdain forWeb 2.0.  This has been somewhat

New McConnel Book

I saw this post on .Net Delirium today saying that Steve McConnell has a new book, called Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art, coming out towards the end of Q1.  For those of you who

More on Web 2.0

Why won’t these thoughts on Web 2.0 just escape my poor little head?  Don’t they know that there’s limited real-estate up there and that most of it has been allocated to remembering the locations

A little more on Web 2.0

Well I see today that a couple of people actually have commented on my alcohol induced (that is a fact, not an excuse) rant on Web 2.0.  Steve Rockarts responded in support on my stance whil

Windows Security Video

Just saw this post, with a link to a video of a Jesper Johannson Window’s Security presentation, linked on Steve Rockart’s blog.  The videography pretty much sucks, but the