July 2004 Blog Posts
an interesting essay on programmers and psychology brought to my attention by Grant Killian. I agreed with the majority of the article, in spite of a bit of anti microsoft sentiment (seems to be saying open source coders ala python are more elite than java/microsoft).
I particularily liked the productivity comments where the more elite coders pound out many times the volume of work that other coders do. I experienced this recently when working on a government project. I was told by some of the other developers to “pace myself” so as not to make them look bad. By the end of the project I...
What a waste of my time.
It's all sorts of messed up just because I don't run my IIS development on port 80.
It tells me I don't have permission to build reports when I'm logged in as administrator.
There's no apparent way to change the datasource on the fly.
I guess it would be a great thing if I was serving these reports on a LAN and everything ran on port 80 and only windows authentication was used.
Fed up with it now though, I'll just dispay report data in the damn datagrid.
Much credit to Sjoerd Verweij
Setting Objects to NothingSet X = Nothing does not destroy the object, it destroys the reference to it. This holds true for VB6 and VB.NET. Understanding the difference in how Garbage collection works in VB6 and VB.NET is a good thing to know.
VB6
In VB6 it's a variable going out of scope does the same thing. There is a reference counter for the variable, which gets set to 1 when the object is created, and incremented every time something starts pointing to it. Conversely, whenever something stops pointing to it, or that something gets destroyed (for...
It's my understanding that because the .NET Garbage collector looks at the heap, and checks to see if any variables on the heap are in scope that setting an object to nothing at the end of a function in VB .NET really doesn't gain you anything yet I see code like this often:
Try
'Do Stuff
Catch
Finally
'Set a bunch of objects = Nothing
End Try
Is there a valid reason to do this in your methods that I'm missing? Or is this just a habitual holdover from VB 6.0 programmers?
$400, I have MSDN Universal, I received the media after a week, had access to subscriber downloads in 3 days, and a free MSDN Magazine subscription to boot.
If you have the means, don't pass up the Empower ISV Program, it's been nothing but joy.
If you don't run your IIS on the default port 80 you should switch it to port 80 before installing reporting services else the install program gets very confused. (It ended up creating a second default website in XP for me which wouldn't start, I had to copy the two virtual directories from that space to the actual running space my other sites are on)
I have it working now though in the VS IDE, my only disappointment is I haven't figured out how to switch the connection string for a report at runtime. Each of my customers has their own...
Can I install visual studio enterprise architect over VS professional or do I have to uninstall VS pro first then install EA?
Same question for SQL Server personal edition, I'd like to move to developer edition so I can start playing with SQL Reporting services.
If no one knows for sure I'll just try it later today and post on the results.
I need to send this link to the programmers I've mentored.
Check out yesterday's slashdot article about PHP5 vs ASP .NET. The article and the comments are both appalling. If you're going to slam a product, at least have the decency to know facts about it first.
Some of my favorites:
- The licensing costs for .NET are too high. (Cause you all know the .net framework costs so much to download, and webmatrix costs an arm and a leg)
- A comparison between php code and .net code doing some oracle stuff in the article. The sample code for the two examples doesn't do the same task yet the author construes it as...
Anyone have any experience with licensing/selling the rights to software they've written?
I have two scenarios developing for my business as follows:
Company A may be interested in reselling my product to their customers. Not a typical reseller though as they would want to integrate my product into their business and use it as a tool to give them a competitive advantage over other companies in their geographic location. Company A is not a software company.
Company B is a software company. They may be interested in either reselling my product or integrating it into their suite of products. I'm assuming if they...
Passed it this morning in spite of lack of sleep from stress about my contract position being off-shored. They ask some weird trivial questions on these things for sure!
So once again I'll post that if anyone has any .NET developer openings for someone with 2 yrs .NET experience and is *almost* a MCAD feel free to contact me. =)
eswise@yahoo.com
Lovely, *walks into meeting*.
Manager: You contractors have been doing a fine job, yadda yadda yadda. However to cut costs we've decided to offshore contracting positions to russia. If you have any personal belongings at your desks, you will be escorted there and then out of the building.
So yeah, I guess I'm available now if anyone out there has a need for a VB .NET / C# developer specializing in ASP .NET (2 yrs total .NET exp).
I'm happy to report that the 2005 beta 1 install went off without a hitch! I started off by creating a new web project to do a sort of "hello world" advanced version which involved me connecting a datagrid... excuse me... dataVIEW control to the authors table of the pubs database.
** Cool thing #1- when I created the connection using the smart tag (each control seems to have a smart tag menu that pops open to the side which lists common tasks) a message popped up that said "Hey, you created a new connection, you want to add this...
Woo, got my MSDN Universal subscription activated tonight. Downloading VS 2005 beta 1... 3588.1 MB though. =(
I guess I'll have to install and play with it tomorrow, it's not going to finish before bed.
*sigh*
Seems that my good friend over at Caustic Tech agrees with me on the Express Tools Concern
Take that Jon! (J/K)
I just filled out the application for my home business. $400 for a MSDN Universal subscription? I'm there.
http://members.microsoft.com/partner/competency/isvcomp/empower/default.aspx
I want my VS 2005 Beta! For the benefit of blogging about it only... of course... riiiiiight. =)
Ok, here's an alternative approach to persisting data without a dataset in cache for ASP .NET:
Save the dataset schema information to the viewstate and populate it from the grid items. Just FYI I'm manually building a dataset in this example. In the real environment I'll be calling a webservice to get it. I hope no one else ever has requirements like mine
Dim ds As DataSet
Private Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load
ds = New DataSet
If Not IsPostBack Then
ds.Tables.Add(New DataTable)
ds.Tables(0).Columns.Add("ID")
ds.Tables(0).Columns.Add("Text")
Dim dr As DataRow = ds.Tables(0).NewRow()
dr.Item(0) = "1"
dr.Item(1) = "SomeText"
ds.Tables(0).Rows.Add(dr)
dr = ds.Tables(0).NewRow()
dr.Item(0) = "2"
dr.Item(1) = "MoreText"
ds.Tables(0).Rows.Add(dr)
grid1.DataSource =...
Ok here's an odd one. The client has a popup screen that has a grid on it. Under the grid is a Add/Edit/Delete collapsable control that has three buttons in it labeled 'Ok', 'Cancel', 'Delete'. At the bottom of the screen are three more buttons labeled 'Save', 'Apply', 'Reset'.
The idea here is that users can drop open the edit control, and fill out the fields to add a row to the grid. They can also click a row, which would load the contents of that row into the edit area, which can be modified and then update the grid with an...
I hope to God that Microsoft puts a big pop-up when the “hobbyist” opens express tools.
“You are NOT a real programmer, please don't put your code in a production environment”
I don't know how many times I've been called into a business where a non-programmer has taken a 2 day access class and developed an “Application” with VBA that needs fixed and I have to wade through terrible design and code.
Pays the same I suppose, but it's damn annoying!