July 2006 Entries
Months, that is! It’s hard to believe that Dominic is now four months old…where has the time gone? Has the lack of sleep skewed my reception of time and space? Maybe I’m just going insane…oh well, such is life.
The one thing about him turning 4 months is that he now sleeps through the night. YES!! OURN PRAYERS HAVE FINALLY BEEN ANSWERED. The funny thing about it is that we still get up and check on him…I guess, it’s our turn to get used to start sleeping through the night.
Here’s a list of the books I’m currently reading:
Technical – Developer
Professional .NET Framework 2.0, Joe Duffy, WROX Press
I previously posted about this book...yeah, I'm still reading it. Been busy with the baby.
Technical – Architect
Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns: With Examples in C# and .NET, Jimmy Nilsson, Addison-Wesley
I really enjoy reading Jimmy's blog and knew about the book for quite some time. While at BN, I saw it and started reading it. After a while, I realized that I was already halfway done with chapter one. I just had to have it. Pretty great read specially if you're read the PoEAA...
Here’s a really good post (with a flow chart!) in which Craig McMurty describes the steps and scenarios you should consider when making changes to your WCF contracts (service, message or data).
A couple of days ago at work, Fred found this great tool for editing MSBuild project files, it’s called MSBuild Sidekick from Attrice Corporation. It works pretty good, although there are some quirky things with the UI (mostly with the way the treeview behaves).
The tool does make it a lot easier to change a project file because it gives a graphical representation of the MSBuild tasks (the less you have to remember the schema, the better).
If you’re doing some work with MSBuild, you should check out the tool. It will be worth your time.
Interested in learning the different disciplines of system architecture as well as perspectives on building successful systems? Check out Skycrapr.net! Ron Jacobs has created an excellent resource to help aspiring architects get training and good reading.
I first found out about Skyscrapr while attending Ron’s presentation at TechEd this year. Check it out!
Life hacks are becoming pretty typical these days. I decided to jump on the bandwagon by becoming more organized with my thoughts (Yes, those of you that know me, know there are other things I should be focusing on, but that’s besides the point). To achieve my quest, I’ve requested the help of the Moleskine notebook to collect simple thoughts (wait, aren’t all of my thoughts simple?) and the Miquelrius notebook to collect the full detail of the thought. Since I don’t carry my Miquelrius notebook with me all the time (it’s a little big to fit in the pocket), I use...
Tonight we had our first Post-It discussing meeting. Here’s the jist of it from our member’s email
We're trying something a little different for this month's meeting. At the beginning of the meeting, you will be given a post-it note and asked to write down 3 topics that you're currently interested in and would like to discusss.
We'll collect the post-it notes and form discussion groups based on their content. Anybody interested in the related content is encouraged to discuss/learn/share within the group. Also, each discussion group will have a recorder that will write the ideas discussed within the group. These ideas will...
Roy Osherove posted some great info on how you can tweak your current IE and FireFox installation to make them “faster.” I will have to say that after trying these teaks I’m quite impressed. Specially with the FireFox one.
Please note that this will make your browsers un-compatible with standards.
Check it out!
Our dear friend from the north and favorite DCC, Jeff Brand, posted some pretty good tips about managing/monitoring WCF applications he heard from Craig McMurtry (yes, this Craig McMurtry), Longhorn Server App Platform Evangelist. If you got the time, check them out.
I will have to say that if you’re not following tip #1, you’re a masochist; large XML config files != love. (FYI on tip #1, this is installed as a default tool in VS2005 when you install Beta2 of WinFX (sorry, .NET Framework 3.0)).
Well, I managed to install a new instance of SQL Server 2005 in my old Exchange Server box. I removed Exchange since I no longer host my own email. That’s right, my @lozanotek.com email accounts are hosted through Google. It’s nice to get both my Gmail and lozanotek emails through one interface. Why did I switch? Since my IP address is dymanic, at times my email got rejected from a reciepient’s mail server (such case is with Microsoft’s mail servers). After a while, I got pretty tired of it.
Anywho, I now have two SQL Servers running, one to host the blog...
You learn something new everyday…
I was working on a simple demo application and had a method with a void signature:
static void Test() { … }
Messing around with the code, I decided to return System.Void at the end of my method instead of leaving the method without a return type or the return statement. To my surprise, these are the errors that I received from the compiler:
System.Void cannot be used from C# -- use typeof(void) to get the void type object.
Pretty interesting, huh? I should have guessed that there was an issue with this type in the IDE when I didn’t...
Kenny Wolf has a very good post on which he describes the reasons for setting the IsOneWay property of your OperationContract attribute to true.
If your operation has void return type, mark it with IsOneWay so …
The service will release the connection (or complete the HTTP request/response by replying with null, etc) before dispatching to user code. If the operation is not marked with IsOneWay then our Dispatcher won’t reply until the Operation has completed
An important thing to know if you’re want to your application to perform well by using the old “fire and forget” idiom.
I’ve been running Vista Beta 2 as my main OS for about a week now and things are going pretty smoothly. The first thing you need to do to make things easier for you is to turn-off the User Account Control (UAC) to prevent Windows from asking for permission to execute simple operations such as a file copy. Trust me, it gets pretty annoying…Why did I turn it off? Well, since my laptop is a development machine, I don’t want to keep clicking the “Allow” button whenever I make an intended change.
Currently, I’m running SQL Server 2005 Dev Edition, IIS7, VS...
That’s right, another year, another birthday. What have I learned in my 25 years? Well, not much, actually. Just do what you really want to do and make sure you surround yourself with people that support that cause.
It’s as simple as that…