December 2004 Blog Posts
I like to keep up with my referrals. It's always fun to see where people are finding my blog. Here's my most popular topics from the last year.
SQL Reporting Services vs Active Reports- Huge number of hits because Data Dynamics actually featured my post on their homepage. I really felt famous!
Gripes about MVC Pattern with ASP .NET - I'd love to see Sahil Malik weigh in on this one.
Creating Outlook Appointments in ASP .NET - Apparently this is a common need. Do I smell someone creating a component?
Overall I would say this has been a fantastic year for me. Looking back I've accomplished so much both in my personal life and in my developer skills. I'll highlite my developer life first since that's why you're all here.
Developer Life
Prior to this year nearly all of my .NET experience was in VB .NET. I spent significant hours this year learning the ins and outs of C#
IIS 6.0 / Windows Server 2003 freaking rocks. It's secure, powerful, scalable and I've enjoyed working with it. In short, this year I learned a lot about the server administration side of IT. I...
Paint .NET 2.0 very neat, very free photo editor coded in .NET 1.1
I am not graphically inclined in the slightest but I found it fun to play with and for those of you who aren't so artistically challenged there is a source included download available. I'll probably dig into the source sometime in the year 2035 when I have free time again just out of curiousity.
I've always used ms-paint to quick and dirty editing, I think I'm going to try to use this application instead.
So here's some fun stuff we can do with inheritance, custom collections, and domain managers. The purpose of a domain manager is to be a central object to handle the I/O of your classes in a multi-tiered application. To meet these needs we will want a class that will take any object in our program and allow us to perform basic CRUD (Create Retrieve Update Delete) on the object (or collections of the object).
For the purposes of this sample I am going to create a domain manager that contains logic for a contact record. A contact can be any person...
Ok, it's the last day before xmas vacation, so I'll bite.
Three names you go by:
Eric
Wise
Aneki (my MUD name, yes when meeting in real life mud people call me by my screen name)
Three screennames you have:
bandit0013
eswise
Aneki
Three things you like about yourself:
My versatility
My easy-going attitude
My aptitude for learning things quickly
Three things you hate/dislike about yourself:
My debt (damn credit cards)
My stomach, which has gone from flat to slightly chubby with the desk-job
My inability to get out of bed on time when it's cold
Three parts of your heritage:
Norweigan
German
That's it folks, I'm close to pure-bred
Three things that scare you:
Extremists (Liberal or Conservative)
Microsoft Access projects developed...
Here's a fun one. I'm working on a scheduling system for a fortune 500 company. I'm having a very interesting issue here.
First, I have a datagrid control. It has a variable number of columns which can change depending on whoever the logged in user's settings are. In this case let's imagine the header is like this:
Truck Name | Slot 1 | Slot 2 | Slot 3
Now in the data if a truck is already scheduled for a slot, a code shows up. If the slot is available, I create a link button called Add. So here's what my grid looks...
I was reading a few posts here and here about developer burnout and I've decided to throw my hat into the ring with some general observations. I do have a degree in business and I've been working on my MBA so I've done a lot of thinking about project management, employee relations, etc. lately.
Too much work can cause burnout
If you have an extremely full plate and you're hopping from task to task without any downtime to relax during a workday, your productivity will begin to drop over time.
Managers need to be aware that developer jobs are very demanding on the mind. ...
I have heard of a senior developer who had a rule that no method may exceed one “page” of screen scroll. If it does it has to be broken into smaller methods.
Genius or Idiocy?
This coding style would help clean up code by forcing you to break everything into managable small pieces.
Small reusable pieces
It might complicate things by causing “cursor jump” in debugging.
I was contacted recently by Jon Chandler who is looking to fill a position at Blackbaud in Charleston, SC
If you have the skills specified, I'm sure he'd appreciate your resume.
Was having a security problem with an XML file tonight. Worked fine on my Win XP box but not on my 2003 server.
Did you know that where on IIS 5.0 you would give additional permissions to the ASPNET account that in IIS 6.0 you give the additional permissions to the NETWORK SERVICE account?
Now you do!
Excellent article, courtesy of MSDN Magazine.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/05/01/ASPNETPerformance/