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DataSet discussion revisited...
I want to revisit a discussion that I had early on in my blog - Datasets.
After several months of heavy development (actually a conversion of some ASP code that I have been maintaining), I have found that I don't use the dataset.
Maybe it's the advice that I've been getting or maybe it's the result of my design. FWIW, here's what my stuff looks like (in VB):
' The following class will handle all the SQL Calls for an area of the siteClass sqlPortionOfSiteinherits sqlBaseClassPublic Function GetData() as CollectionOfMyData Dim __dr as sqlDataReader Dim __Rtn as CollectionOfMyData __Rtn = New CollectionOfMyData() Try __dr = sqlHelper.ExecuteDataReader(ConnString,...
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OpenVPN... a cool open source tool
I just discovered a pretty cool open source product last night -- OpenVPN. Here's my question (up front). Does anyone know of any security holes in it (I couldn't find any, but it may be too new)? I know that it relies on OpenSSL (I think mainly for key generation, but I'm not sure)
If you don't know, it is a pretty easy to setup VPN software (I know that there are MS Networking Gurus out there saying “What's wrong with you man? Just create a windows VPN. It's all simply a matter of going into Routing applet in the control...
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Rory - An Apology!
Ok, I just saw some comments over in Rory's blog that bugs me (and so I have to blog about it). So on that note:
Rory, I want to apologize for every callous idiotic attempt that every Christian has ever made at trying to “reach“ you; I want to apologize for all the stupid arguments/attacks that many Christians think will cause you to move to our point of view; I also want to apologize for our lack of an attempt to know you and love you where you are at (and not try to change where you're at; but let you make...
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Roy Oshoreve...
is an OK guy. I guess I never realized that Roy had different original date in mind... I was only paying attention to the due date.
Roy changed the deadline back (ok, it was never meant to be June in Roy's mind), to June 30th! Woohoo! Thank you... Sorry for creating the fuss... I had simply slowed down development a little when I thought the deadline was in June (instead of May).
Anyway, (as they used to say on the playground) no harm no foul...
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Mike Schinkel is a credit to the community...
As some of you may be aware, Mike Schinkel (Of Xtras.Net), have been (fumbling for the proper word... acquaintances is too weak... we know each other... friends is a little strong... hmmm)... Ok, we've known each other for a little bit. For awhile we were fierce competitors, the company I worked for came into the VB market. I've always been interested in components and their development, so someone like Mike has always been a contact I could never let get too far out of reach.
Mike posted over on his blog the history of his company (you can read my part...
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Annoyed...
Part of being in a community is that you get annoyed with people (OK, I think I have a rare talent for getting annoyed at weird things... blame, it on my parents... they're far worse than me).
I think my current annoyance is justified though.
Justified Annoyance Roy Osherove announced his add-in contest here. I was excited because this gave me an excuse to do some things with Visual Studio that I've been wanting it to do. I wasn't sure if I had enough time, but I began to diligently work in what little spare time that I have.
Along the way numerous...
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The dangers of futuritis!
First of all before I head off in my direction, I want everyone to know that I am definitely interested in VS 2005 (Whidbey). I really am. I have been reading (with a grain of salt) much of the stuff that is coming out. I'd rather not have the deluge yet, but I really do understand why it's happening (we developers seem to show in droves to see the new features of the next version, so they are giving us our taste now).
The DangerThat said there is a danger here. One that I think bears mentioning. Right now, I'm using...
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An interesting day...
Well, today has been an interesting day. I didn't get set up for some of the things I want to do here. I have some cool tools that I've written that I'll be releasing shortly (one is a wrapper Web Custom Control for OWC Charting that is very helpful). Another is that I have a base Asp.Net page that works in conjunction with iText-sharp to automatically generate PDFs from your web forms.
I will be releasing this stuff shortly... please bear with me.
Also, I'll be doing a follow up post to my review (I'm probably going to do a few others...
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A cool tool...
Ok, (as I warned earlier) I'm going to do a “product review“ of sorts. In the XDN subscription this month there are a couple free tools (well free to XDN subscribers)... one of which is brand new -- Dynamic AutoComplete (By LaMarvin, s.r.o.). Since this seemed to be fairly unique I thought I would take a look at it and see if it is worth the $49 that the manufacturer is asking.
A few bumps but no bruisesHaving done this kind of thing in the past I have to say that the number 1 thing that bugs me is when there is...
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Mac OS X on Windows... well sort of...
This past weekend has been devoted to one task, to get Mac OS X running under the pearpc emulator. I know this seems totally .Net unrelated (but I think with what I'm trying to do I think you'll see a point buried).
The reason for all this is that I really want to use Mono on one of my clients mac projects (I really, really want to get away from JSP... because I know so little about Java). By having a way to run Mac OS X software at home, it will make it easier for me to develop and test...
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Real programmers... don't use comments??!!
(I know this may cause some alarm for some people... please understand this is all in fun).
Yesterday I was talking with some the DBAs here at my job. One of which has been doing this awhile and the others are still fairly young in their careers. The more senior person stated that “comments are useless; if you can't read my code and understand it, you shouldn't be in it.” The reason given was that “how many times has an old comment mislead you??” Which I have to say that personally this has happened a number of times in my career......
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Past jobs...
I've been thinking a lot about past jobs today. I had a former colleague discover my blog (Hi, Ken), and it brought back thoughts of a couple jobs that went bust before I was ready to leave.
The truth about HMI (Hydrogen Media)If you live in the Tampa Bay Area within the last 5 years you probably have heard of the name (we had billboards all over town). HMI was a really cool place to work (unfortunately, it was a DotCom). Our CEO (who was a former used-car salesman) liked to try to make it seem like we were the workplace...
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Quick Shout out...
Hey, I just wanted to mention that my once protege' (“now, who is the master” -- sorry the Star Wars reference was too hard to resist) Dave is blogging here.
He had a really cool post back on April 28th regarding customer service. Basically, he sees that we as an industry should do a better job of treating clients with respect (and only make fun of them when they are not around <grin>).
Dave mentions an actual situation where a client got turned off by the former consulting firm because the programmer started ridiculing them during the project planning. Needless to say...
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A slight monkey bite...
I have been planning this post all weekend. What I desperately wanted to name it was “Enter the Monkey!” Unfortunately, things did not go as planned.
For those who don't know, I have been swimming for a little over 2 years with a site on a Mac OS X machine running Apache Tomcat (JSP... not servlets). This has been a major learning experience for me, but there are still things that I don't quite have running the way I want (and every time I ask a Unix geek for help... they run screaming from the room as soon as I mention...
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.Net 1.x is old technology??!!!?
.Net 1.x is dead! I'm the first to announce this in case you missed it. So if you are using old ASP.Net 1.x then you should be thinking about upgrading your environments because that is outdated technology, my friend. I want all readers of this blog to approach their immediate supervisor and demand that “we load the latest technology on our production servers. It's not fair that we have to use this outdated technology.“ Why? Because all the headline information that we get today is for ASP 2.0; it's the big story! So, it must be released right?
Check this out...
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The sins of my youth...
I just recently happened upon the way out of date (and dusty looking) site set up by Karl Peterson that dishonors VB.Net. The interesting thing for me was that I was once a student of the site and an evangelist that “VB.Net should be called VB.Not.” This site gave me all the reasons why... No Ptr functions, and the msgbox function is not supported (just to name a few); this is not VB! I remember thinking that they were being a little petty mentioning Gosub, Goto, and Null, but dang it! MS broke everything!
I remember that I vowed never to use the...
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Take your passwords to the next level
Ok, gang,
I've decided to pass Henry on the side of http://DotNetJunkies.com/weblog by discussing a little trick I was given by one of my security gurus (here at my job).
With this one trick you can make your passwords really secure in light of brute force password cracking technologies (I haven't checked recently, but my suspicion is that the info I'm about to give you is still holds true).
I use “extended” ASCII characters. Which means that I add a character that I type by holding alt and then typing a number on the number pad that is above 128 but less than 256 (high ASCII) to...
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Mono Beta 1
I meant to mention this earlier...
WooHoo! Mono 1.0 Beta 1 is now available!!! Hopefully, I can get this version on my client's Mac OS X 10.2 machine so I can work on converting my crummy JSP code to C# (and Asp.Net)! I'll post my adventures...
BTW, with this post I have finally caught Henry Erich III on the dotnetjunkies blog page... I've been chasing him for a month, and I may actually surpass him in number of posts (as if that is a big deal)... the big deal for me is that I'll be moving up one more spot in the...
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Diabolical reason that I started blogging...
Since all supervillains must reveal their plans before executing them, I have decided to come clean on my REAL reason for posting (now that I'm almost 2 months into it).
My real reason was that I have wanted to get close enough to someone to acquire a gmail account (and get a decent email address (short name), and one on a visible email server. After reading Henry's post here on this very server. Yes, ladies and gentleman, I'm about to announce my plot to take over Henry Erich III's Gmail account... Especially considering that I can't sign up for one myself
I...
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An Open Letter to publishers of Technical Books...
Dear publishers,
I went to Amazon to browse for ebooks (I need to pick up a few more technical books). I'm in search of a couple books to make my library a little fatter. When I went to amazon this is what I found when I searched the ebook section :
“vb.net” turned up a measly 6 books“Visual Basic .Net” turned up 19 books“C#” I got 12 books“.Net” I got 299 books but some of these were not books about MS' .Net, but books with “net” in the name... I didn't go through the full listing, but my guess is that the bulk...
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Option Fast On
The title of this entry references an article in Dan Appleman's “Exploring .Net Vol. 1” which is a set of articles that he originally published in another newsletter.
This particular article discusses the benefits of “Option Strict On.” I almost always turn this on in my projects with the exception of those places where I have to be late bound to something; BTW, in those cases I turn “Option Strict” off just for a class that I write that wraps the functionality up into .Net code.
The reason for having “Option Strct” on most of the time is that it forces...
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Community....
I've been thinking today about something that we “VB'ers” and “C#'ers” lack that people in many other languages have.
Obviously my title gives it away. While driving to workout today (a new phenomenon for me), I was reflecting back to when I worked for Zac Catalogs. We had 2 successful component catalogs -- for Clpper and one for Delphi. Both of these languages had a much smaller number of programmers using the languages (we tried to kill Clipper many.any times, btw, t kept making us money). Just to give you some perspective this was right in the time frame of...