February 2006 Entries

Microsoft Marketing At Its Best

Ryan sent me this funny video link showing you how MS would design the iPod package.  I about died laughing when I saw the "This is an empty box" red circle sticker appear on the box!  The “We should clarify 5GB“ section was pretty good too. Check it out!

posted @ Monday, February 27, 2006 9:45 PM | Feedback (612)

IADNUG: Enterprise Services Presentation

Just got thinking about this…How many of you out there in the DSM area would like to see a presentation about .NET Enterprise Services for one of our meetings?  I can cover some of the features about the technology and the reason why you should and shouldn’t use it in your application. If you have an opinion/suggestion on this, leave a comment!

posted @ Friday, February 24, 2006 10:14 PM | Feedback (611)

Drinking Prayer

Just received this old driking prayer from Ryan on response for a small change of plans for his bachelor party this Saturday: Our lager,Which art in barrels,Hallowed be thy drink,Thy will be drunk,At home as I am in the tavern.Give us this day our foamy head,And forgive us our spillages,As we forgive those who spill against us,and lead us not to  incarceration,But deliver us from hangovers,For thine is the beer,The bitter and the lager,Forever and ever, Barmen.

posted @ Thursday, February 23, 2006 10:31 PM | Feedback (613)

Vista Feb CTP Released

Not sure how many of you know this, but there’s a new Vista CTP for download if you have an MSDN account.  What’s different from the other CTPs?  It’s feature complete and is in-sync with the just released WinFX CTP!

posted @ Thursday, February 23, 2006 10:22 PM | Feedback (640)

Blog Update: Content Compression

WOW!  I just read this really great post showing you to enable HTTP Compression on IIS 6.0.  I must say, the decrease in documentation by compression is huge (~80% change!).  If you host your own blog and can enable this on your IIS server, DO IT!  Also, if you’re wondering the size of your web content, you can use PipeBoost to find out.

posted @ Thursday, February 23, 2006 10:07 PM | Feedback (611)

WinFX February CTP Changes

Forgot to post a list that Ed Pinto created that tells the changes of the new CTP.  You can check out the list here.

posted @ Wednesday, February 22, 2006 8:57 PM | Feedback (611)

WinFX February CTP

The WinFX Runtime Components Feb CTP is ready for download!  The nice thing about this is that there will be a a Vista build (5308.17) that will be in-sych with the WinFX Runtime Components (by way of Shy Cohen).  Check out the links below for more information: WinFX Runtime Components Windows SDK Microsoft Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas” Community Technology Preview - Development Tools for WinFX VS Extensions for Workflow WinFX RC February CTP “Readme”  

posted @ Wednesday, February 22, 2006 8:46 PM | Feedback (611)

BaseAddress Sample for WCF

Good friend, Matt Milner, has posted a good example for working around the requirement of creating a metadata access point through a service host.  I specially like his use of the System.Configuration classes.

posted @ Tuesday, February 21, 2006 9:40 PM | Feedback (611)

Intro to ASP.NET 2.0 Webcast Series

Fritz Onion has announced that he’ll be doing a four-part introduction to ASP.NET 2.0 (in VB.NET and C#) for developers using Cold Fusion, JSP or PHP.  The cool part about it is that if you attend three of the webcasts, you get VS 2005 Standard Edition for F-REE.

posted @ Tuesday, February 21, 2006 8:45 PM | Feedback (611)

ASP.NET 2.0 "How Do I?" Series

Brian Goldfarb posts links to great videos that focus on common questions developers have when working with ASP.NET 2.0.  Check them out!

posted @ Tuesday, February 21, 2006 8:42 PM | Feedback (611)

Hosting WCF Services In COM+

Excellent sample by Andy on how to host WCF services in COM+.  Also glad to see that they’ve changed the ComSvcConfing tool to not need the COM+ GUIDs.  Check it out!

posted @ Thursday, February 16, 2006 7:50 PM | Feedback (611)

Development Blog

The development blog for Ablogin.NET is up!  Running .Text under ASP.NET 2.0, I should be able to post information on my development efforts for Ablogin.NET.  Keep tuned in!!

posted @ Tuesday, February 14, 2006 10:20 PM | Feedback (176)

.NET Pet Shop v4: ASP.NET 1.1 to 2.0 Migration

The new version of the .NET Pet Shop shows you how to migrate a v1.1 application to v2.0 of ASP.NET.  Cool conversion features are the use of System.Transactions instead of Serviced Components, strongly typed collections to generic collections and extending the new membership modules. You can dowload an MSI to install the source and the related databases. Pretty good stuff!

posted @ Tuesday, February 14, 2006 9:26 PM | Feedback (611)

Design Patterns: Yahoo! Style

To me (the web developer) this is pretty sweet.  I like how they apply a design name for features found accross websites.  For those web developers out there, what do you guys think? They should submit these to PatternShare!

posted @ Tuesday, February 14, 2006 8:14 PM | Feedback (611)

Managed Stack Explorer (MSE) Tool

Just downloaded the Managed Stack Explorer (MSE) PowerToy for .NET  Pretty sweet for checking out the execution stacks for your applications.  You can download it from GotDotNET.

posted @ Tuesday, February 14, 2006 8:07 PM | Feedback (611)

baa, baa...moo, moo...oink, oink

Finished painting the nursery yesterday and today my wife and I put the crib together.  The only thing it needs it’s the baby!  Here’s a sample of the border around the room

posted @ Sunday, February 12, 2006 4:34 PM | Feedback (611)

TestDriven.NET with NCover

This is freakin’ sweet!  Being used to work at a client’s site with VSTS and having Code Coverage tied with our unit tests, I’ve gotten a little spoiled.  Well, the latest version of TestDriven.NET uses NCover and NCoverExplorer to provide similar function through it’s “Test with…Coverage” option. AWESOME!! If you’re used to working with TestDriven and NCover as separate apps…STOP!  Go get the latest version of the mentioned apps and enjoy the goodness!

posted @ Saturday, February 11, 2006 11:28 PM | Feedback (611)

Released: ASP.NET 2.0 Web Application & Web Deployment Projects for VS2005

For those of you doing ASP.NET 2.0 development and miss the web project feature of VS.NET 2003, you can now download the Web Application project .  Also, for making deployment easier (if you don’t want to publish your website) you can also download the Web Deployment project and try it out. To find out more about the Web Application Project add-on, check out this post by ScottGu.

posted @ Saturday, February 11, 2006 1:44 PM | Feedback (612)

ASP.NET 2.0 Assembly Load Error

A couple of days ago while playing with an ASP.NET project, I encountered an assembly load error.  The exact error was, Could not load file or assembly 'App_Web_msnjmvbf, Version=0.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' or one of its dependencies.Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code. For those of you new to ASP.NET 2.0, the App_Web_msnjmvbf assembly is auto-generated by ASP.NET to contain the compiled UI for your web pages.  For some reason, my virtual directory in IIS got off-sync from the code and things went...

posted @ Thursday, February 9, 2006 8:01 PM | Feedback (611)

Blog Modification: About Section

I decided to add a new About section to my blog.  I also got a little more creative and started playing around with CSS to add a cool drop shadow to my pic.

posted @ Thursday, February 9, 2006 5:49 PM | Feedback (611)

WCF and WS-ReliableMessaging

This is a pretty good read from the WCF Forums.  Check it out.

posted @ Wednesday, February 8, 2006 9:18 PM | Feedback (612)

Intellisense for SQL Files in Visual Studio

SqlAssist is pretty sweet.  Just installed it and works pretty good with the SQL file editor in VS2005 (there’s also a plug-in for VS.NET 2003).  It’s a little slow at first, but it gets better after a couple uses.  Thanks to Roy Osherove for posting it.

posted @ Monday, February 6, 2006 9:33 PM | Feedback (611)

Super Bowl Commercials

For those of you that missed the Super Bowl commercials, you can go check them out on Google Video. To stream them all at once, click here.

posted @ Monday, February 6, 2006 3:46 PM | Feedback (611)

Kevin Moore Featured on MSDNTV

A friend of mine from ISU, Kevin Moore, is now a PM for Avalon (WPF).  He’s been recently featured on a MSDN TV episode where he and Robert Ingebretsen talk about templates in Windows Presentation Foundation. Checkt it out!  It's good stuff!

posted @ Friday, February 3, 2006 10:18 PM | Feedback (611)

GacUtil MSBuild Task

Have you guys noticed that ther'es no MSBuild task for installing assemblies into the GAC? Well, a while back, I wrote a task class to use for adding assemblies into the GAC. You can check out what I did by downloading the project file. Hope this help you guys out!

posted @ Thursday, February 2, 2006 9:01 PM | Feedback (611)

Do you use a framework?

How many of you out there (in the Des Moines area) use a framework/architecture to simplify your development efforts? Just trying to do a quick poll.

posted @ Thursday, February 2, 2006 8:28 PM | Feedback (611)