Visual ActiveKent Sharkey .NET SE 3.11 : Assorted

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.

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.

... 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

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

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)

Ruby on Rails: neatesque

ksharkey — Sun, 23 Jan 2005 07:11:00 GMT

Spending Saturday night like the true loser I am -- reading articles on Ruby on Rails. This is a framework/app/whatnot for building database-driven web apps for Ruby. If you haven't heard of it yet, you're pretty much in the same boat I was before reading the article. Obviously, people have done a huge amount of work on this one. It seems quite simple to build basic CRUD functionality. However (I have to wear that other hat), I'm wondering about perf, security and just how much it takes to get beyond "basic CRUD functionality". Still, fascinating, and it's always good to watch what others are building and to learn from them.

PS: I should add, it does look very much like ASP/PHP/JSP and other items I feel like we/I have moved beyond. ASP.NET is still the cat's etc. to me.

The InfoPath less travelled

ksharkey — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 00:07:00 GMT

I've been meaning to learn InfoPath for a while, and the new(ish) Toolkit for Visual Studio .NET, plus Christmas downtime gave me a chance. See the babbling in the full post. You've been warned -- I know, hard to believe I'm supposed to write for a living....(read more)

Still time for one more headache in 2004

ksharkey — Tue, 21 Dec 2004 23:21:00 GMT

I know I've promised to be good, and I've sucked the life out of any possible controversial topic off of this blog. So, to finish up the year, it's time to get myself in trouble again.

The MSDN stats report came out for November, and I noticed a few tasty tidbits in there:

Approximately 48% of people search when they come to the home page
Top 25 MSDN Viewed Pages are approx 33% of the total traffic to MSDN
From 2003 – 2004, Downloads, Subscription Downloads and the Visual Studio Developer Center continue to be major drivers.
Customer VSAT (very satisfied) and DSAT (disatisfied) numbers are flat (same as last year)

What does this tell me? Rather, what should I learn from this? Here's what I think:

Almost half of you search as soon as you get to MSDN. This implies that our "Information Architecture" — aka the ToC, and the Dev Centers aren't really doing it for you. Or is it just that people have become programmed by Google to "Just search it"? The Dev Center project has been a fairly large (in effort, if not also budget) undertaking by MSDN. I know I'm here only because of this project. Still, do they make sense? Does creating organized sections of content mean anything to you, or help you find information you need? Do you even know what a Dev Center is? Should we move to a new UI?

25 pages are a third of our traffic. Wow. Looking at them, they're almost all download pages. Should we try to improve the ability to find and get your downloads? Does the newly redesigned Downloads page help? Do the articles help, or should we just be providing downloads and documentation?
Help me out here — I need ideas to help MSDN help you. And so I stop feeling like I'm collecting a salary for unjust reasons.

TTFN - Kent (aka Eeyore)
Currently: Scanning for polymorphic spyware files, listening to "Who's Laughing Now?" by Skinny Puppy

In Remembrance

ksharkey — Thu, 11 Nov 2004 19:43:00 GMT

I'm not usually known for "pro patria mortis" feelings, but thank a veteran today.

IN FLANDERS FIELDS

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

John McCrae

Jobs @ MSDN

ksharkey — Thu, 14 Oct 2004 00:27:00 GMT

Shawn and Matt posting about some of the many jobs available at MSDN, in case you know of anyone interested.

Also hidden (mostly) in Matt's posting -- the Mighty D is moving from "Content Strategy" to fulltime dev again. He'll be building the infrastructure for MSDN going forward.

Hopefully he'll still recognize me in the hallways.

How to catch a Roadrunner.

ksharkey — Tue, 12 Oct 2004 16:29:00 GMT

The scene: Cafe 36
Dramatis personae: D, B and K

I can't remember how the discussion turned to the greatest mind that ever came out of the Southwestern US desert, but it was D that began the rant, "You know how the coyote would strap on rocket skates, and he'd almost catch the Road Runner? Then a train would hit him. What did he do? He threw away the skates and started again. That always bugged me as a kid."

Of course discussion meandered to software development. B related this to the Mozilla story. Starting over left them having to recreate a great deal of functionality, including an FTP stack that had been tuned for all of the various (and slightly compatible stacks). It's only in the last year or so that Gecko derived browsers like Firefox et al have really started to shine. Had they real competition, people may have dropped off, losing interest. Were they a 'real company', they likely would have run out of VC cash without a product. In short, there is a large inherent risk in "starting over clean".

I am also reminded of a discussion I had once with a VP from here and another from an external company (one of my few discussions like this, as I tend to avoid VPs). Our VP was asked by the external, "When are you going to convert Excel to .NET?" His reply, "Why? We have that nice working code base? Why re-write the calc engine? Just expose it to .NET." Scott Hanselman wrote a similar editorial in his, "The Myth of .NET Purity." I'm sure there is still code in Word 2003 that existed in Word 1.0, or perhaps even Word/DOS (that's stretching it, though).

Yes, I admit that there are times when it is best, or perhaps easiest, to just start over from scratch. Reading someone else's code can be difficult. Code gets fragile over time. You move to a new platform. etc. However, why start from scratch when you're close to finish? Add a shim component to connect the old code with new. Wrap the old code in a Web Service. Create a managed wrapper. There are so many alternatives that provide a boost.

You can almost touch the roadrunner. Don't give up now.

Blogjutsu vs. spam

ksharkey — Fri, 24 Sep 2004 22:33:00 GMT

In between my other e-mails, I get a fair bit of spam (as I'm sure all of you do as well). Every once & a while, I get one that I feel like researching a little. (DNSStuff rocks for this) While spending a few moments tracking down the source of one, I came across a website with a *fabulous* idea -- why fight spammers, when you can use their actual tools against them? So, I'm tossed my little dram of Google juice at the spam problem (without requiring any patents)

"Here's the bait...
For some people that have spammed me, I've tracked them down and found their e-mail addresses, which are listed below for the benefit of spambots everywhere. I've also added 12,960 fake addresses on my other pages, which will help to make sure that spambots are less successful. "

RSS aggregators as a DoS

ksharkey — Sun, 01 Aug 2004 17:50:00 GMT

NetCraft has an amusing news item this week talking about how RSS aggregators cause traffic on sites to essentially pulse:

Infoworld.com experiences a "massive surge of RSS newsreader activity at the top of every hour," according to Chad Dickerson, the CTO of Infoworld. "If I didn’t know how RSS worked, I would think we were being slammed by a bunch of zombies sitting on compromised home PCs," Dickerson writes. "Our hourly RSS surge has all the characteristics of a distributed DoS attack, and although the requests are legitimate and small, the sheer number of requests in that short time period creates some aggravating scaling issues."

Wonder if it's worth 'randomizing' the update time on the feeds I subscribe to -- or even better, if the aggregators themselves had an option to “Download every 60 minutes +/- 20”.

TTFN - Kent

Attack of the mini-meme

ksharkey — Tue, 27 Jul 2004 15:13:00 GMT

meme: /meem/ [coined on analogy with `gene' by Richard Dawkins] n. An idea considered as a {replicator}, esp. with the connotation that memes parasitize people into propagating them much as viruses do.

More colloquilally: a way to store/share a moment in time by a number of people.

Today's meme: “What did you listen to on the way in to work?”

me:
Gangster Tripping - Fatboy Slim
Have you met her thunder - Age of Mythology soundtrack
Sucks - KMFDM
360 Degrees - PropellerHeads and De La Soul

TTFN - Kent
PS: Yesterday I realized that the second half of my resolution ended last Friday, meaning it lasted a bit more than three months. Not quite a record, but surely longer than many.

Hunting grounds

ksharkey — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 18:31:00 GMT

In my ongoing attempt to fix my “work/life” balance [1], I decided to start playing City of Heroes [2]. Like many MMORPGs (non-RPG geeks: stay tuned, there will be a code reference later) there are 'hunting grounds' in CoH. Hunting grounds are places rich in relatively easy to acquire experience, perfect for power leveling.

OK, Kent, get to a point.

For developers, the equivalent to hunting grounds are places that can provide rich areas to find help. They may be obvious, or not. So, how do you find these hunting grounds? I decided to leverage the Google API to find a clue. I wrote a quick app (will be shared later once I clean up the code) to find the first 10 links for a search. Then it calls each of those with the same critera, adding a “site:“ restriction to it, retrieving the estimated hit count for that site. The result is 1-10 sites (Google may return multiple pages from the same site in the first request), with the hit count for the search on that site. Theoretically, the sites with the most hits should be good hunting.

Results for “DataGrid ASP.NET“:

weblogs.asp.net	3690
msdn.microsoft.com	597
www.codeproject.com	583
aspalliance.com	460
www.411asp.net	444
www.codeguru.com	194
aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com	177
samples.gotdotnet.com	14

DetailsView ASP.NET:

www.ipona.com	114
msdn.microsoft.com	25
www.ondotnet.com	5
www.ftponline.com	5
www.c-sharpcorner.com	3
www.411asp.net	3
beta.asp.net	1
www.oreillynet.com	1

Many of the top hits are common sites you should expect to see. However, there are a few tasty seemingly random items in the mix. For example, the big hit for DetailsView is a site I (deplorably) hadn't known about -- it's actually David Sussman's (of Dave & Al fame) website. Chock full of tasty ASP.NET 2.0 goodness.

Back to hunting until I hit my 1000 query limit for the day.

TTFN - Kent

[1] Read that as, “Add something, anything to the life side of the balance.”
[2] Read that as, “Waving a k in front of Robert Downey Jr.”. I tend to have a history of an addictive personality where things like this are concerned.