Saturday, January 27, 2007

Conversion Confusion Made Clear As it turns out the difference between a Web SITE Application and a Web PROJECT Application is rather significant.  But unless you read up before you convert your web project you might just miss this little detail.  After a couple of days of converting the old .Net 1.1 site to 2.0 I find out that if I had just conveteded to a web project all would be well in web land.  Only minor tweaks were need to to convert.  At least I learned about Master Pages and how they suck.  You gain some consistancy but loose the ability to view a page in Visual Studio Designer.  For my money Projects are the way to go. 10:31:14 PM    comment []

	Sunday, January 14, 2007

New Site New .NET 2.0 Site was just published 4:43:38 PM    comment []

	Thursday, January 26, 2006

The Upgrade Treadmill Visual Studio 2005 is a major upgrade from the previous version. But all those new features do come with an unexpected consequence.  Hardware requirements.  The box says a 600 MHz machine with 192 MB of RAM is the base config.  But in reality a fairly new machine with 2.4 GHz / 768 MB with virtually nothing else installed works... works that is as long as you are not in any hurry. A simple action like hitting F1 induces a pause of 10-20 seconds before you see anything.  This might see like no big deal but multiply this sort of thing buy dozens or hundreds of such pauses and it feels like you’re running a race in a pair of lead shoes.  Anyway I've talked myself into looking for a new machine. I wonder if MS gets a kickback from Dell or something?  The other thing that made me feel underpowered is after installing VS and the MSDN library disks (all five of them) I found that the SQL Server 2005 disk was bad.  Drive didn't see it at all.  A call the vendor brought a brand new box, and then comes disk 6 - still nothing there.  Check a second drive same result.  Next step is spending over an hour telling 6 different people at MS my problem finally getting a supervisor's attention and then finally I look at the disk and see the letters DVD. Oh. Yeah. Duh.  But then in an effort to save my ego I remind myself no one on the phone ever mentioned this either. Five CD ROMs and one DVD - the first one ever with software I might add. 5:06:25 PM    comment []

	Saturday, December 03, 2005

Today's Rant In the following line of code what do you think the word "Appointment" is a reference to?  A table style map maybe? this.dGridAppointments.TableStyles[0].MappingName = "Appointments"; Guess again. It's the name of a table in the dataset.  This has to be the strangest object syntax I have encountered in .Net to date. And every time I set one up I have to relearn a whole bunch of little rules about this.  Hey here a radical idea: how about if I just tell the grid how each column should be formatted?  And later if I want to load something else in there I'll handle it myself?  Ok bring on VS 2005, I'm ready. There has to be a better way. Done ranting now. 1:48:10 PM    comment []

	Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Visual Basic 2005 has its "mojo" back. This is a good article on the new release of VS and Ver 2.0 of the framework. I think he is right when he said that MS focused on power over productivity in earlier versions.  Setting up a simple win form and data binding takes way too long compared to Access and VB 6.  The other thing seems to be that in this release of VS (even thought it is always denied by MS and their minions) is that VB is the favorite child.  Now C# will play catch-up.  He concluded by saying that conversion from VB is still a roadblock and the next release may be the one to win over hearts and minds to the .Net way of life.  It's always evolution over revolution in the computer world. 2:00:16 PM    comment []

	Saturday, November 12, 2005

Politics Test You are a Social Liberal (68% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (31% permissive) You are best described as a: Democrat Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test 1:14:07 AM    comment []

You can quote me on that After a considerable amount of work, I'm finally happy with the new quote web service.  So what's so great about web services?  After all the site has been reading from the quote db for some time.  The big deal is open standards and security.  Since SOAP is based on the web's hypertext transfer protocol, you can safely expose and consume data without a secured connection.  For example a vendor could supply the lastest price list directly to a customer's application making real-time quotes possible without the phone call.  Web services are one of the big selling points of the .Net strategy.  The apps I write now can be fully distributed. with  the local or web data located wherever it makes sense.  The ever popular adjective 'seamless' comes to mind.  Anyway now I feel well grounded in this technology so I can check it off the to-do list. Oh yeah my hunch about using a single array to hold the data was correct. One call gets all three, (actually 4 now) pieces of data.  I also learned that tables and two dimensional arrays work great locally but somehow don't work so well when called across the web.  So guess backing up a 4 gig db via SOAP will have to wait for the next version of the protocol. 12:50:54 AM    comment []

	Saturday, November 05, 2005

Fun with Web Services The web service project moved forward last night with actual results retrieved from my web site. It’s always a minor thrill when something works for the first time. However a few issues remain. The project is simple, allowing quotations from writers and other historical figures along with their name and life span to be retrieved across the ‘Net.  The problem is one of synchronization. After the object is instantiated the text is retrieved as follows:     com.quixor.www.Quote Q = new com.quixor.www.Quote();   this.lblQuote.Text = Q.QuoteBody();   this.lblAuthor.Text = Q.Author();   this.lblLifespan.Text = Q.AuthorLifespan();   This works great, except that the quotes are not in sync with the correct person.  Inside the service all properties are set at the same time after being read from a database, but something must be happening with the three separate method calls to retrieve the text.  My thinking at this point is to use an array to retrieve all the data with a single call.  Unless someone clues me in to a better way this is the next step. 12:06:22 PM    comment []

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