Code/Tea/Etc... : Personal Musings

This blog has moved... notice #2...

Duncanma — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 05:17:00 GMT

For various reasons, the biggest being my desire to play around with .Text, I've moved my blog to my own server at http://blogs.duncanmackenzie.net/duncanma

following the 3 leaf model when they moved, I thought I should post this notice a couple of times...

This blog has moved...

Duncanma — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 17:11:00 GMT

For various reasons, the biggest being my desire to play around with .Text, I've moved my blog to my own server at http://blogs.duncanmackenzie.net

The first post over there shows the app that I wrote last night and then used to copy all of my posts and categories over from this blog to the new location... I'll post the code for that app at some point, as boring as it is...

Has anyone tried migrating posts from weblogs.asp.net to another .Text installation?

Duncanma — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 00:29:00 GMT

I've set up my own little .Text installation and I'm considering copying (not removing the existing versions) posts to my installation so that I still have a visible archive... has anyone done this before?

Happen to have created a tool or script to help the process?

Removing Word's Formatting from text before pasting into .Text or other apps...

Duncanma — Thu, 12 Aug 2004 07:59:00 GMT

The age-old question of 'how do I avoid putting funky Office HTML into my blog postings' came up on an internal email list today, and one of the answers was a pointer to http://stevemiller.net/PureText/, which I had never heard of... but it looks cool!

"Have you ever copied some text from a web page, a word document, help, etc., and wanted to paste it as simple text into another application without getting all the formatting from the original source? PureText makes this simple. Just copy/cut whatever you want to the clipboard, click on the PureText tray icon, and then paste to any application. Better yet, you can configure a Hot-Key to convert and paste the text for you. The pasted text will be pure and free from all formatting."

(Listening To: Simple Lies [Endo / Daredevil])

I'm thinking about installing .Text into my own web-site...

Duncanma — Thu, 12 Aug 2004 04:22:00 GMT

And maybe the Forums code too... Nothing against www.asp.net, but I'm just thinking it might be interesting to host my own blog... moving seems disruptive though, leaving a large number of my posts here, new ones there.... what do you folks think? Have you thought about hosting your own blog... are you already doing it .... would you never leave the collective?

Ok... I can finally read my comments again...

Duncanma — Sun, 08 Aug 2004 09:54:00 GMT

I'm sure I'll be one of many commenting on this, but the recent updates to .Text on this site are a wonderful improvement. For the past while I had been unable to really sift out the good comments from the bad, so real (non-spam) comments to the VB or C# FAQ sites, and to this blog... were all being drowned out by all of the spam. Keeping up with it (to delete the spam) was almost impossible and I gave up some time ago ...

We'll see how it goes, but I'm hoping these changes make these blogs sites a less attractive target for spam.

Previews of articles...

Duncanma — Fri, 06 Aug 2004 06:23:00 GMT

A couple of weeks ago I posted my "Quick Poll" Coding 4 Fun column in its unedited form... was that useful?

If it was, I can continue to do that with my articles ... basically posting my version of them up in advance onto www.duncanmackenzie.net and then redirecting that to the real article once it ends up on MSDN.

New Coding 4 Fun Article up...

Duncanma — Wed, 28 Jul 2004 22:20:00 GMT

Add a Quick Poll to Your Web Site
Summary: Duncan Mackenzie describes his process to build a "Quick Poll" using Visual Basic and ASP.NET.

Recent discussions have motivated me to add some 'anti-repeat-voting' code to this sample... I've finished up most of the changes, so grab the sample from the article if you are interested and then watch this space for more information on the additions!

With things like AOL and other proxies... how useful is IP Address in figuring out duplicate votes/comments/etc... ?

Duncanma — Wed, 28 Jul 2004 00:38:00 GMT

I'm playing around with my voting control and I was thinking of (in addition to a cookie based check) querying to see how recently this IP address had tried voting and if it was within 'x' seconds, rejecting the vote...

Something more extreme, like rejecting any second vote from the same IP seems wrong, since multiple people could be coming in through the same IP.. in fact, you have to assume that is likely over time...

What do you folks think? Is a time-limit per IP address reasonable, or will that produce 'odd' behaviour for corporate and large ISP users?

I'm thinking of adding login/registration to my personal site...

Duncanma — Mon, 26 Jul 2004 23:54:00 GMT

Not sure what scenarios this will be used to enable in the long run, but I might play around with some web services (with authentication) and a few 'prototypes' for articles and MSDN features that I've been musing about...

Do you run a personal site?
Do you have any form of authentication?
What do you use to handle it (I'm planning Forms Authentication against SQL Server)?
What do you use it for?

this is for http://www.duncanmackenzie.net ... which is quickly becoming my little sandbox for asp.net code :)

Don't ask me why, but I've become the official forum for Spiderman 2

Duncanma — Wed, 21 Jul 2004 18:43:00 GMT

I blame google.

(250 + comments so far, not counting the ones I've had to remove)

Default Values, Triggers, and Code supplied values ... oh my!

Duncanma — Wed, 14 Jul 2004 18:20:00 GMT

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I use a trigger to update a "DateCreated" field in one of my tables... and various people commented on this... asking "why not pass in a value in your Insert?" or "why not use a default value?"

Since I feel that replying to comments in the comments section is generally just a black hole, I thought I'd raise this discussion up to a proper blog entry of its own :)

I tend to have audit information on my tables, and that often includes 4 columns; DateCreated, CreatedBy and DateModified, LastModifiedBy

I use two triggers, an INSERT trigger that sets all of these fields to the current date and current user (as appropriate, and using Windows Authentication), and an UPDATE trigger that sets only the two modified columns.

Why not just pass the value? Well, two reasons...

sometimes data gets entered in through a different code path than mine... or through something like SQL Enterprise Manager (for lookup tables especially)...

I just don't like relying on code external to the database to put the right value in for audit information. This is true for both the modified and the created situations...
Why not just use a default? Well, that is a better solution than passing the value in, except it doesn't prevent the user from passing in (or setting) whatever value they want. If they pass in a value for DateCreated in their INSERT now, it will get overwritten with the 'real value'. And, even if they do an UPDATE later to change the DateCreated (which is a real flaw in this method), at least the 'last modified by' will be accurate.

Of course, this is just my 'simple' auditing method... for any situation where I really care about the audit information (this example was from my little polling system... auditing info is just a 'nice to have') then I would need to actually restrict access to those fields completely so that they can only be set through my triggers or stored procs. There are well documented ways to do this, so I won't go into them here... (restrict all access to the table, only allow INSERTs and UPDATEs through your chosen Stored Procs... Stored Procs set those audit fields exactly as you specify, etc...).

It is worth noting that in a more complex auditing solution tracking only the last modification probably wouldn't be sufficient anyway.

I'm sure there will be people, many of which know more about this problem space than me, that can chime in with dissenting or agreeing opinions... I'm looking forward to the discussion :)

New Poll is up and a silly mistake...

Duncanma — Sat, 10 Jul 2004 21:50:00 GMT

One of the big reasons I redesigned the poll component, was so that I could track votes over time... I did this by adding a 'dateVoted' column to my vote table, and then using an “On Insert” trigger to set that column to the current date/time.... peachy keen, except when I exported the tables and stored procs to my live SQL box, I forgot to include my triggers... so all the votes on my previous poll have no date/time info. Yeesh. Oh well, not a big deal since I'm still in the testing/building stage, but still a very silly mistake.

I've put up a new poll though... I have a lot of article ideas for my Coding 4 Fun columns and I thought I'd ask people what topic they would like to see sooner rather than later...

My new Coding 4 Fun Column is up on MSDN...

Duncanma — Wed, 30 Jun 2004 22:16:00 GMT

How Long Now?
Summary: Duncan Mackenzie describes how to calculate the difference between two dates in Visual Basic .NET, and builds an application that counts down to the release of Halo 2.

Spiderman 2... the game, not the movie...

Duncanma — Wed, 30 Jun 2004 17:00:00 GMT

I had been planning to go to Spiderman 2 last night at 12:01 am... but I decided to skip it instead... so I went out during the day and spent my Father's Day gift (a gift certificate for Best Buy... my wife made a great choice) on a wireless xbox controller from Logitech and the new Spiderman 2 game.

Now, I loved the first game... so my opinion should be considered in that light, but I really enjoyed playing this game. The 'manual' style of swinging is more difficult but seems so much more realistic and leads to more realistic movement patterns as you need to use buildings on either side of the street to lock your webline to... and when you swing out over a park you have that sudden realization that there is nothing out there for you to swing from ... and then you fall into the trees :)

I think the best part of the game is the idea of random crimes... super heroes are always supposed to be stopping crime all night/day, with the cool stories happening outside of their normal 'job'... but this game starts to give you a sense of the pressure of being a hero. You can't help everyone, and just when you are a deadline, rushing across town to stop a bad guy or you are chasing a getaway car after a bank heist, you'll hear/see a mugging going on down a side street... and you have to decide what to do... who do you help? Of course, some missions/goals are required for the plot, so if you decide not to do those you 'lose'. I don't know if I like that, but I understand the limitation and the need to keep the plot moving forward, so I'll keep my vision of a totally open-ended game in the closet for now.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun... the new controller worked perfectly and felt great to use (people have commented that it is bigger than the S controller and it might be, but I didn't notice which is all that matters to me).

Update: While I don't mind the discussion in the comments at all, people might find the XBox forums at http://forums.xbox.com/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=28 to be a more enjoyable place to talk about this game... I'm afraid I don't know enough about it to help with very many of the questions, but I'm sure there are a lot of people who would be able to help over on those forums. Thanks!