Archives / 2003 / November

11-20 of 21

  • ConnectionStrings in Whidbey

    Monday, November 17, 2003
    Started playing around with a little test app with ObjectSpaces and ran across something unrelated, but neato... System.Configuration.ConfigurationSettings.ConnectionStrings Intrigued, I whipped out the help, but so far they don't have jack in there about it.  I threw in a connectionStrings section in my config file, figuring that would be right and it was, but the nodes inside use different attributes than the appSettings seciton.  Instead you use “name” and “connectionString”.  Not sure why...thought the old way was fine, but hey, whatever, I can adjust.  Changing the names of the attributes made it work.  Now that alone was handy just to
    Filed under | 2 comments »

  • LongHorn SDK and Whidbey

    Saturday, November 15, 2003
    I got the LongHorn SDK installed after Whidbey and tried playing around with a Tile project (in VB.NET). First off, I hope this is just a bug and not the way it will be in the final version, but VB.NET Whidbey reverts back to the VB6 way of “making an executable” instead of the previous way of building a solution.  So now you actually go under the file menu (where it used to be in VB6) and click “Make ProjectName”.  This all happens because I chose the VB settings during the install.  That would be fine, if I could still
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  • How do you code?

    Friday, November 14, 2003
    I'm sure everyone reading my blog is getting sick of reading all this conceptual, psychological, programming logistics nonsense, but I really like it and it's my blog!  ;) Talking with my co-worker yesterday we had an interesting realization...we code backwards from each other.  Here are a couple examples... Private m_Name As String = ““ Public Property Name() As String     Get          Return m_Name     End Get     Set(ByVal Value As String)          m_Name = Value     End SetEnd Property Now in what order would you code that?  I would first type out “public property Name as string“ and hit enter, then in the get, type
    Filed under | 10 comments »

  • Everybody loves Naming Conventions

    Friday, November 14, 2003
    Ok, I love this topic the most...maybe since everybody usually seems to disagree with me...conflict is fun!  :) Paul has an interesting post (and comments) so I thought I'd chime in (too long for a just a comment) I still use hungarian for control names and that's it.  no hungarian anywhere else.  i've found that not using hungarian for control names just runs into too many complications and naming conflicts, so that's why I still use it there, but otherwise, hungarian is out the door  ;)  FYI though...here's how I do properties... VB Private m_Name As String = "" Public
    Filed under | 7 comments »

  • DataTable.Compute

    Tuesday, November 11, 2003
    A co-worker asked me today if I knew of way to total up the values of a column in a DataTable, other than looping through the rows and adding them into a variable.  I thought I remembered off the top of my head that the Select Method could do what he wanted.  Another co-worker looked it up and found it's actually the Compute Method. The Compute Method takes an expression and a filter (both strings) and lets you do common things like SUM and COUNT that you're used to in SQL and returns an Object (the result).  Very handy for
    Filed under | 7 comments »

  • Adding NULL to a Number

    Wednesday, November 05, 2003
    I'm not exactly a SQL expert.  I'm just a typical developer who uses it a lot. I have a bunch of nullable fields that are decimals and i need to add up a few columns and return an average.  Problem is, when you add NULL to a number it returns NULL.  When concatinating strings, you can actually use SET ANSI_NULL_DFLT_ON ON and NULL fields will act like they are empty set and just get ignored, but with numbers, there doesn't seem to be a way around it. SELECT 5 + NULL + 2 Returns NULL Instead, i found the ISNULL
    Filed under | 17 comments »

  • LongHorn Identity

    Tuesday, November 04, 2003
    I was lead to an article on how Microsoft is going to take a second stab at universal identity.  I may not have been dead on (especially in where the “identity” is stored) but a lot of the concepts that I've talked about before seem to be in there.  I think the new way they're working on is much better than Passport.  Can't wait to see if there's anything in the LongHorn SDK on this.  Personally, I think the idea of identity is one of the most exciting and opens up the most possibilities of anything (that I can think
    Filed under | 3 comments »

  • Vault

    Tuesday, November 04, 2003
    After reading all over the place about the new $49 single user vault license I decided to go for it.  So far I really like it (all of 25 minutes I've used it).  Can't wait to try it out on the internet, etc. You're a smart cookie, Eric, I'll tell you that!  :P  If I like it, I'm sure I'll talk the small business I work for into using it (VSS is ok, but it's not enough for us) so you'll get another sale.  Nice agenda!  ;)  It must be because your name is Eric.  Now, if you only knew
    Filed under | 2 comments »

  • LongHorn

    Sunday, November 02, 2003
    I got LongHorn installed today...very cool stuff.  Initial thoughts... Install looked great and flowed great Was not at all impressed with “Click here to decide where to install Windows“.  Very unintuitive and IMHO would confuse the hell out of a typical user. Love the clock on the side bar! Graphics are really smooth and nice (nVidia GeForce 4 MX440 - 64 MB - Dual - 1600x1200) OS in general, pretty slow (P4-1.5 Ghz - 512 MB RAM - dual 18 GB (15,000) RPM SCSI drives on 160 controller) Very excited to NOT see “Microsoft Internet Explorer“ in the title when
    Filed under | 4 comments »

  • Dynamic Content Filename

    Sunday, November 02, 2003
    If you've ever created an Http Handler to send down files dynamically say, for a document manager or maybe just an ASPX that returns a dynamic image, you've probably noticed that when the page or handler opens up something that doesn't have recognizable file extension that it doesn't know how to open it and you have to tell it how to open it.  A big pain for the end user for sure. A collegue of mine sent me some code he found today or streaming a dynamic PDF generated from CrystalReports to the client, I noticed a piece of code.
    Filed under | 8 comments »

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