Visual ActiveKent Sharkey .NET SE 3.11 : Like you care

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.

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.

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

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.

I admit it, I peeked

ksharkey — Fri, 14 Jan 2005 16:36:00 GMT

While looking at the Human Clock, I decided (seemingly like a lot of people, including the author) to look at the filenames of the graphics, with the thought of perhaps "leveraging" them. He knew we were coming. This is in the source of the page:

  Welcome to the source code for this page. Not much here.
 The picture filenames all took a one-way trip to MD5 city to mask their true identity
 (if that is what you were looking for).

 Since you are here though, we might as well tell you a joke since you
 took the time to look at the source code and you shouldn't have to close this
 window empty-handed.

 q: Why did the turkey cross the road?
 a: It was the chickens day off.

Correctly named config value

ksharkey — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 16:11:00 GMT

One feature of Firefox I find amusing/neat is the about:config URL. It opens a window letting you change the values for any setting for Firefox itself, or your installed extensions. While I had it open for some general spelunking and changing of network settings (sorry, HTTP 1.1 is correct, but sometimes a guy has to have more open connections) I came across this aptly named config setting:

general.config.obscure_value integer 13

UPDATED: Oh

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)

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

Debugging MUIDs

ksharkey — Thu, 28 Oct 2004 18:12:00 GMT

Wednesday started out fairly normal -- look through all my "ContactUS", "VS2005 You wanted to know" and other support-related emails.

One was from one of my Product Managers, though. In one sense, that means higher priority (he knows how to find my office), and another it means lower priority (customer stuff comes first). However, as it was just a forward from a customer, it jumped to the top of my todo list. It seemed that I had a page on the Dev Center with this added text:

THIS IS THE ITEM

That was obviously not meant to be there. No problem, I say, it must have been added when I built that page by accident. I look in out page building tool. Nope, it's not there. Weird. Rebuild the page, the text is still there. Look at the files on disc (we build out an aspx and xml file for each page, but I neither told you that, nor understand fully why -- "It was like that when I got here."), none of them have the text in it, in fact a quick "ffind" ffinds nothing. Repeat for far too long. Finally, open the source for one of the controls on the page. Search.

if(Items[i].Attributes.GetNamedItem("itemid").Value == "41ABB38E-3DBB-4C98-BCF7-9B22E3985D8F"){
Response.Write("<br>THIS IS THE ITEM<BR><BR>");
}

Which (as I'm sure you've already figured out) is the exact GUID used by my page. Somehow, the GUID selected at random by the dev two or more years ago was the same GUID selected at random by our page building tool when I built that page. So much for 16^^32 possible GUID values (thus MUID -- Mostly Unique IDentifier), guess I should buy a lottery ticket.

Mostly non-technical

ksharkey — Sun, 17 Oct 2004 21:42:00 GMT

... I just needed a rant space. I've just spent 10-20 minutes trying to track down a bug in some code in a Windows Service I was writing, "Cannot close stream until all bytes are written."

Get stream length. Yup, right size
Get ContentLength property. Same
Write both values side by side to EventLog. Values are identical.
repeat 'n' times
Remove ContentEncoding header, assuming it's UTF8. No effect.
Remove ContentLength header. Works. Autocalculated value is what I was looking for... plus two.
AAAAAAAAUGH! Change responseWriter.WriteLine to responseWriter.Write. .... grrrr

Sometimes, even .NET easy isn't easy enough for some people.

Buying Visual Studio

ksharkey — Wed, 13 Oct 2004 23:44:00 GMT

We've launched a new section on MSDN today - "How to Buy". Possibly not a major need for all of you, but I think it's a great improvement over the previous random pages people had to meander over, credit card in hand, desperately trying to find a link to let them spend their hard earned cash on Visual Studio, MSDN or Visual Foxpro (Hi Ken!).

In the words of Sir John Serna, Site Manager of Site Managers:

"This new section of content on MSDN contains over 100 pages dedicated to providing a clear, clean purchasing path for MSDN subscriptions and the Visual Tools products.

As part of this effort all of the former "How to Buy" content that was formerly located in the MSDN developer centers has been removed and redirected to this one center location."

Special note for the >50% of customers who live outside of the US, we haven't (completely) forgotten about you. We'll soon add the ability to find your prices in local currency, and let you buy it as well. Honest, we want your Euros, Yen, etc....

4 Nov 2004: Updated to actually link to the site.

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.

Can ASP.NET Scale?

ksharkey — Thu, 30 Sep 2004 22:59:00 GMT

From Rob (comments and formatting mine):
"The bandwidth usage (for http://weblogs.asp.net) alone jumped from about 300GB to 1.3TB (a month) in the past 6 months. Considering that www.asp.net, blogs.msdn.com, weblogs.asp.net, www.dotnetnuke.com (and about 5 other sites) all run on 2 web servers and 1 db server I think it held up pretty good :)"

Definitely a good commercial for the pipes and infrastructure team over at OrcsWeb as well.

OK, we really need to get a fund going to get more servers in place for everyone. I volunteer my Paypal account for donations.

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. "