Visual ActiveKent Sharkey .NET SE 3.11

This blog moved

KSharkey — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 07:06:00 GMT

Trying to let everyone know again. I've shut down this blog, and it's only here on my complaint. Please see my new home if you're at all interested.

Part 2 of the test

KSharkey — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 21:55:00 GMT

I've now posted the API by API changes documents for ASP.NET 2.0 as a download. (Note this is a bunch of Excel files)

NOTE If you're reading this hear, you shouldn't -- I haven't updated this blog for at least 5 months, and am only posting this hear to get your attention. My blog has moved to here. Please update yourself.

Moving this blog -- need opinions

KSharkey — Fri, 25 Mar 2005 03:23:00 GMT

To move the comments, or not to move the comments?
Whether tis nobler to leave every URL intact
or by moving them break them?

I'm pretty certain I can move all the posts without egregious problems, but the comments may be another matter. Would anyone care if they stayed here? Would anyone care and/or notice if I did nothing and just started blogging in "the new place"? As is often the case, I need your opinions to help my brain decide.

Browser Security Test

KSharkey — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 03:41:00 GMT

Run 37 tests to make certain your browser isn't letting anything in you don't want. [via ACMEbinary]

SQL Web Administrator

KSharkey — Tue, 22 Mar 2005 03:54:00 GMT

Even with all of the many powerful resources at my demand to install, I still tend to install SQL Server Developer Edition. I guess it's just that I'm so used to just having that around for testing (and not wasting valuable CALs for testing purposes) that I just don't feel like installing Enterprise on my dev box. (I do install it for dev that needs big box features, of course -- what am I an idiot? Oh, right, I am)

Installing Dev Edition does mean that I'm usually left with osql for my database work. I know, a lot of you will say, "Hey, Moron (people are usually polite enough to use a capital 'M' on that). Download SQL Web Data Administrator. It r0xx0rs!" Of course I downloaded it, but I had a problem with the download -- I would try to login, and the hourglass would spin, and spin and nothing would happen. No SQL joy in my heart, so I'd go back to osql while waiting for something exciting to happen. Same with IIS and Cassini. Finally, I did a bit of searching, and we come to the reason for this post. If rather than run the binaries they gave you, you run the solution, it works! Apparently some code was changed to fix the login, but this wasn't reflected in the shipped binary. Build it yourself, or get a friend with VS .NET 2003 to build it, and you will have a lovely, web-based administrative package and enough joy, you'll forget you ever wrote sp_dropdevice main.

Meet the new boss, (not the) same as the old boss...

KSharkey — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 18:26:00 GMT

In an attempt at our ongoing efforts to ~~confuse everyone coming to MSDN~~ balance the knowledge and workload at MSDN, we have shuffled a few of the Developer Centers around. While I will still be working on the ASP.NET Developer Center, I am reliquishing my duties on the Visual Studio Developer Center. The good news for all of you is that this means that Brian Johnson, one of the authors of "Inside Visual Studio" will be moving in. As you can probably guess, he knows far more about Visual Studio than I ever will, and I'm certain he will take excellent care of you.

Already he has made the announcement public that current MSDN subscribers will get VS Team System:

"MSDN Universal and MSDN Enterprise subscribers with valid subscriptions will be upgraded, at no additional cost, to one of the higher value MSDN Premium Subscriptions for the Visual Studio Team System. "

A modest proposal: Date/Time considered evil

KSharkey — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 23:38:00 GMT

After documenting some of the problems I had with Date/Time when creating my RSS Aggregator, and reading a Google presentation at ETech, I came up with a noble idea. We all use the same date and time. Whereever we are in the world, whatever time of day. So, timezones, Daylight Savings Time, Julian/Gregorian/etc. calendars, RFC 822, RFC 1123 and everything else goes away. Think of how easy life would be -- "I'll you at 5". 5:00 PST? 5:00 EST? 5:00 Arizona whacky Time? GMT? 5:30 in Newfoundland? (Canadians only will likely get that one). As was asked in the Google PPT, "What day is 2005-03-09T00:00:00Z"? (Depends on where you are in the world)

OK, now that we've decided that dates and times are evil, how can we pick one? Who gets elevated to the new GMT? Well, I propose we take a page from Zoology, where extinct languages such as Latin and Old Greek are used. More than a little Western Centric, but there you go. I suggest we use an ancient, extinct calendar, such as from the Mayans and define a day using Toronto (known center of the universe) as hour 0. Feel free to burn your calendars and start the migration of your apps now. Note that this decision could lead to a Y2K problem of Biblical proportions on 23 Dec, 2012. However, I think that the savings in confusion on my part and the luxury of demand for programmers leading up to this more than outweigh these minor problems.

TTFN - Kent
PS: For those who can't parse my "sense of humour", yes, this was a joke.
PPS: But dates still bum me out, I can't figure out timezones to save my life, and I wish that RSS defined RSS 1123, not 822 for its date format.

Ambient dashboard

KSharkey — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 21:17:00 GMT

Pretty cool -- I used to want an Ambient Orb, but I like the retro/analog feel of these gauges better. I just hope they will also allow your own data channels.

TechEd, will I be there?

KSharkey — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 23:16:00 GMT

I haven't a clue. Last I heard I'd be able to go if I ride my bike there.

Still, Scott & Rory will be there (along with a lot of other Really Smart Folk), and you'll even be able to get them to explain this in person...

aspnetPRO Readers' Choice Awards

KSharkey — Fri, 11 Mar 2005 05:11:00 GMT

aspnetPRO magazine is now accepting votes for the products of the year in a number of categories. While I'm a little saddened that the ASP.NET Developer Center wasn't nominated as an Online Resource, I'll move on.

Remember, if you don't vote, they win.

Tracing in 2.0, soon.... soon....

KSharkey — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 18:03:00 GMT

I try not to push 2.0 information too much, as there are many others out there with far more knowledge on it than me.

Having said that, I saw this new setting this morning.

<trace enabled="true|false" localOnly="true|false" pageOutput="true|false" requestLimit="integer" mostRecent="true|false" writeToDiagnosticsTrace="true|false" traceMode="SortByTime|SortByCategory"/>

I'll be the first to admit, I go crazy with _context.Trace.Write and _context.Trace.Warn in my code. However, then you either get into the situation of having to look at your trace.axd file a lot, or even worse, leave the trace info in the page, and show people your underwear (or worse, server names and IPs). Now, with writeToDiagnosticsTrace, it goes to System.Diagnostics.Trace, so any listener you have for that (such as the VS debug window, or the excellent SysInternal's DebugView will pick it up.

Custom Entity Classes

KSharkey — Tue, 08 Mar 2005 23:20:00 GMT

It's been a while since I mentioned any new content on the ASP.NET Developer Center, and there's a reason -- I've been remiss, and haven't scratched any out lately. Well, I think the drought is over, I hope (I passed two more articles on to the editors yesterday -- although one you might not see for a while).

Today's morsel is from a new author I'm hoping to get much more from -- Karl Seguin arrives with an informative, and possibly controversial article: On the way to mastering ASP.NET – Introducing Custom Entity Classes. In it, Karl argues that a good custom object may be better for some scenarios than a DataSet. Enjoy, and as always, comments gratefully accepted here or in our forum.

Querying RSS

KSharkey — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 20:54:00 GMT

During my early (OK, post 8am) reading this morning I saw this on Jon Udell's blog. Like much of Jon's writing and "little apps", it blew me away, and got me thinking of how I could use it for myself. Maybe not using XQuery (likely too much for my head), but having a nice DB of posts, normalized to RSS 2.0 + XHTML and a full-text query syntax. Then, you start fishing; something like http://server/query.aspx?itemcontains=ASP.NET&itemcontains=DataGrid&authorlike=Walther I think that would provide a nice scheme for gathering up wisdom on not just ASP.NET, but across as much of a knowledge domain as people blog about (find out just who Gina is dating this week or the secret aspirations of Paris Hilton to become President of the US)

... but who will manage the Managers?

KSharkey — Thu, 03 Mar 2005 23:40:00 GMT

I know my blog is in serious danger of turning into a recruiting site or even (heaven forbid) a recruiters' blog, but I have another job offer for you. Our Site Management team (the good folk who keep MSDN and TechNet running tickety-boo to the tune of about 100MM page views (MSDN) and 19MM (TechNet) page views a month is seeking a manager. Help plan, build and run two of the larger sites on the Internet. For more details, see the job posting. For those too lazy to click, here's an excerpt:

The Site Manager is responsible for understanding the business and marketing strategies, 
representing the technologies of a specific product or program, and directing the ongoing 
development of sites that help customers to find the information they need. 
They direct development through project management of content deliverables and relationships 
with product and marketing groups, third-party vendors, and other functional teams. 
The challenge is to maintain a strategic Web presence and also to manage 
the ongoing publishing efforts for the site.

UPDATE: forgot to tell you, if you're interested, send resume etc. to Katherine Lagana

February CTP now available

KSharkey — Thu, 03 Mar 2005 16:59:00 GMT

In honour of March 2, we now present {insert ta da here} The February Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Visual Studio 2005. This month, we have new versions of Visual Studio 2005 Professional (for MSDN Subscribers) and the fabulous Express products:

Get them while the bits are still hot -- overwhelm our download servers. Taste, build, enjoy (note: these are still not *quite* Beta 2).
Finer print:
The new Community Technology Preview releases of the Express products now require registration and activation within 30 days of first use. This process is simple, free, and it allows us to personalize your experience on MSDN. If the products are not registered and activated within 30 days of first use, they will cease operating.
UPDATE: fixed the links

Second Edition, now with more brain-thumping goodness

KSharkey — Thu, 24 Feb 2005 18:37:00 GMT

Just got a copy of the second edition of Advanced .NET Remoting by Ingo (and now also Mario Szpuszta). I had the good fortune of squeezing my brain through it a while back (and lived!). While the talk continues, you really need to read as much of this book as you can. It's not only THE best book on Remoting (even better than the first edition), it's also a great reference on how to build scalable, loosely coupled distributed applications; information that is useful if you're building Remoting, Web Services, Indigo or even COM/COM+ apps.

The continuing adventures of "How did they?"

KSharkey — Thu, 24 Feb 2005 02:14:00 GMT

Google has now added "Movie Search" to their already massive list of ways you can search for things. Just start a search with "movie:" and some criteria, and there you go. For example: movie:"King arthur" rabbit finds the best movie of all time (OK, the ending was a little lame), while movie:car chase can find something to entertain you on a lonely Friday night. Fun beast to play with at the very least.
TTFN - Kent

Kicking tires, sniffing hydrants

KSharkey — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 06:31:00 GMT

As many of you know, I'm often looking around at how "others" write their code. As such, this site is a candy store. OpenSourceCMS gathers together a large number of CMS-ish apps (classic CMS, Wikis, Blogs, Forums and more) into one testable site. The server gets rebuilt every two hours, but in that time, you can try out a number of apps, including such fan favourites as phpBB, WordPress, php-Nuke and many others. Neat to explore to see what you feel works, and doesn't work in an app. Then (hopefully) you can take the best and leave out the worst when you go to create your masterwork.

TTFN - Kent

Learn ASP.NET 2.0 with Jeff Prosise

KSharkey — Tue, 15 Feb 2005 03:19:00 GMT

Wintellect has some of the smartest .NET people on the planet these days, and Jeff Prosise is definitely one of them. Thomas (yes, the Spider King) has sent me a set of training videos featuring Jeff Prosise, showing you the ins and outs (and betweens) of many of the new ASP.NET 2.0 features. Check them out on this page (110KB and 300KB streams only right now, I'm working on getting 500KB downloads for those who'd rather watch them that way).

Torremolinos!

KSharkey — Sat, 05 Feb 2005 06:48:00 GMT

I didn't mention it a while back, but I recently changed Site Managers (from Christina to Chris -- we're not that imaginative when it comes to names around MSDN). Now, Chris brings our first communal effort to bear (OK, he did it all, but I'll share some of the credit)

Presenting -- our new ToC. We've tried to organize things, especially the technical articles in a more task-oriented way. Gone is the "Using-Understanding-Building-Web Applications" that used to irk me. Now, I hope it's easier for you to find content. Need to know about creating controls for ASP.NET? Try "Technical Articles-Creating Controls". Looking for Training? ("Support - Training")

We hope it helps.

Migrating AnandTech to ASP.NET

KSharkey — Thu, 03 Feb 2005 19:49:00 GMT

If you don't recognize the name AnandTech, you're not a true "hardware geek". Anandtech is jam-packed full of übergeeks who live and breathe perf for their systems. They're overclocking, water-cooling, machine-modding sources of deep wisdom into these boxes we play with all day. So, what happens when they decided to migrate off their old web technology (not named here as people may think I'm taking a shot) to ASP.NET? A learning curve, sure, but more concurrent users, more req/s and more headroom to expand. Perf is a good thing in software as well...

Whatever happened to SNOBOL?

KSharkey — Thu, 03 Feb 2005 05:50:00 GMT

I remember it was going to revolutionize text parsing, or something. I love this history, it just feels so relaxing looking at it.

Shooting trouble

KSharkey — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 00:45:00 GMT

I was lazy today, and decided not to walk in during a beautiful sunny Redmond day, instead allowing the decongestants to soak through my head.
However, I had one conference call I wanted to attend on upcoming changes to some site. While I was listening to the cool jazz while I was on hold, I scanned the presentation that was being given (vague guilt trip attempt on Xina). One slide jumped at me - actually one number. The DSAT (dissatifaction index) value for "Troubleshooting" was huge compared to some of the other tasks (browsing, reference, learning). This of course got me thinking, "How can the ASP.NET Developer Center help you troubleshoot?" The koan of this, mixed with far too many bronze age ("non-drowsy, feh!") cold medication, Buckley's mixture (actual marketing slogan: "It tastes awful. And it works.") and tea, rattled around in my head for most of the afternoon. Without result.
I remembered back in my dev teaching days trying to teach people how to debug. Debugging is an artform -- it's part of the reason why I admire good coders and testers so much. Like any artform, you can't really teach it, you must feel it. I feel the same way about troubleshooting. Let's say I have a problem in my web app, perhaps my session variables are disappearing periodically, but at strange intervals throughout the day. How can a website help you solve that? Is it a decent searchable FAQ? Online forums with helpful people? IRC chat? Me, answering all your support mails (seems to be the case some days)? Something else?
So, as a lazy designer, I turn it back to you -- how can the ASP.NET Developer Center help you troubleshoot and solve your ASP.NET problems?

PS: Just like science class, make your own Buckley's mixture:

Active Ingredients:
Each teaspoonful (5 mL) contains: 153 mg Ammonium Carbonate, 267 mg Potassium Bicarbonate, 22 mg Menthol, and 2.2 mg Camphor.

Non-Medicinal Ingredients:
Canada Balsam, Carrageenan, Glycerin, Pine Needle Oil, Sodium Butylparaben, Sodium Cyclamate, Sodium Propylparaben, Tincture of Capsicum and Water.

Why it's good to keep management around

KSharkey — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 22:06:00 GMT

In our industry, we tend to mock management, calling them PHBs or worse. However, I enjoy my management chain (I pretty much have my whole time at the fish shoppe). Good management provides air support, direction without dictating, and access to great quotes:

"Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few other close friends, and then for money." — Moliere. (by way of http://ginasmith.typepad.com/gina_on_gina/2005/01/why_writers_can.html)

The Outlook Web Access team is looking for web developers

KSharkey — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 19:25:00 GMT

Web-based mail is hot. Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook Web Access... They're all making headlines and showing off the richness of the web. The Outlook Web Access team is looking for solid ASP.NET developers to help build our next version. We're looking for people with top-notch development skills, who have worked with C# and ASP.NET in the past and have a solid understanding of HTML, CSS and script. We're looking for people who want to take web applications to the next level of richness while also offering a blazing fast client.

OWA uses a wide variety of technologies. Candidates must have experience with C#, C++, JavaScript, DHTML, XML and ActiveX.

Right now we are looking for both full-time and contract team members so if you are interested, email your resume to owajobs AT microsoft DOT com, or submit your resume for here. We want to hear from you.