Posts

For the second 2009 Philly Code Camp, it will be held at the DeVry University campus in Fort Washington, PA on Saturday, October 17 from 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM. If you haven’t signed up please register on the Philly.NET web site. Detailed directions are on the DeVry web site. Check here and here for the latest printable agenda, there will be: Lots of code, just say no to slides! 8 hours of presentations 60 sessions (8:30, 10:00, 12:30, 2:00, 3:30) 12 tracks including two hands-on Beginner rooms and the Bonus Track 600 seats with tables (laptops welcome) Free breakfast, lunch, and afternoon snack (expanded menu!) Raffles and prizes at 5:00 Convenient parking After hours party in Ambler (network with speakers and attendees) All of this is made possible by the Gold partners (Component One, Hosting.com, TEK Systems), Silver partners (Pearson, Redgate, Telerik) and the Platinum site sponsors (DeVry University, Microsoft). ...

As promised to the people of my last post for CodeRush Xpress 9.1, here is the updated scripts for CodeRush Xpress 9.2, which was released last week. The Keyboard Command Way Shift+Ctrl+Alt+O The Registry Hack Way Show Menu for CodeRush Xpress (x86) Show Menu for CodeRush Xpress (x64) I really wish DevExpress would stop treating the registry as a dumping ground and creating a new parallel registry path with each new install, it makes customizing the registry settings very difficult to keep up with. I could see it for each major version, but common is a new registry path really needed for each minor version?

Recently at the Philly.NET User Group, Kathleen Dollard gave a great presentation on the use of generics and rethinking object orientation. Both topics were very engaging. But the part of the night that I found most intriguing was a conversation, that I had in a Ruby Tuesdays after the presentation, about the useage of static constructors and if they are still a bad thing to use in your code. Many years ago, I had read the articles by K. Scott Allen and Brad Abrams, explaining why the original FxCop rule, “Do not declare explicit static constructors”, existed and the IL command beforefieldinit, that caused the FxCop rule to trigger and cause performance issues. Jon Skeet explained it best in a recent Stack Overflow post. ...

I just wanted to share a really well written article on how to setup a Reverse Proxy, by John Gully, using the Url Rewriter that I have been working on for the past 2 years. Here is an excerpt from his article. I recently came to realize that our website situation was growing out of hand. We had a corporate website, an intranet site, and even a site for web access to email. All of these sites were scattered across multiple servers and each was on a unique port. While this worked, it was not simple. Each new site had to have a new rule configured in the firewall, and who wants the hassle of putting port number at the end of a url? The solution to this mess turned out to be adding a reverse proxy to our network. By simply providing different urls (www.example.com, mail.example.com) the incomming traffic can be anlayzed by the proxy server and routed to the appropriate internal web server. All the incomming traffic is sent over the default port 80 so the end user never sees any difference. That’s exactly what I wanted, great! Since our sites are all built upon ASP.NET and hosted on IIS6 the natural option for this was Microsoft ISA Server. Unfortunately, the $1500 cost was way beyond our small company’s internal IT budget. So it was off to Google for me, and after some searching, it appeared that the open source project Url Rewriter by ManagedFusion [sic] seemed to fit the bill. ...

Today I received the following error while getting ready to do some new development for my URL Rewriter. TF53002: Unable to obtain registration data for application VersionControl. TF30040: The database is not correctly configured. Contact your Team Foundation Server administrator. TF30059: Fatal error while initializing web service TF30063: You are not authorized to access myserver.443. (type TeamFoundationServerUnauthorizedException) This is very weird because I was just working on it earlier this week, without any issues. So I go in to check the recent update history of Windows Update and to my surprise I see 13 new updates, mostly security related. And since TF30063 is a security related exception, I think I found the culprit. Here are the KB articles of the updates that were done for reference: ...

I recently had a conversation with Scoot Koon (LazyCoder) over Twitter about the wacky JavaScript type comparisons that are allowed. I was interested to see what weird oddities would come out if I compared the whole type system against it self. So I sat down and wrote a simple JavaScript routine to do just that, and the below reference table is the output of that routine. null undefined true false -1 0 1 NaN Infinity "" " " “null” “undefined” “true” “false” “-1” “0” “1” “NaN” “Infinity” null null null – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – undefined undefined undefined – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – true – – true – – – true – – – – – – – – – – true – – false – – – false – false – – – false false – – – – – false – – – -1 – – – – -1 – – – – – – – – – – -1 – – – – 0 – – – 0 – 0 – – – 0 0 – – – – – 0 – – – 1 – – 1 – – – 1 – – – – – – – – – – 1 – – NaN – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Infinity – – – – – – – – Infinity – – – – – – – – – – Infinity "" – – – "" – "" – – – "" – – – – – – – – – – " " – – – " " – " " – – – – " " – – – – – – – – – “null” – – – – – – – – – – – “null” – – – – – – – – “undefined” – – – – – – – – – – – – “undefined” – – – – – – – “true” – – – – – – – – – – – – – “true” – – – – – – “false” – – – – – – – – – – – – – – “false” – – – – – “-1” – – – – “-1” – – – – – – – – – – “-1” – – – – “0” – – – “0” – “0” – – – – – – – – – – “0” – – – “1” – – “1” – – – “1” – – – – – – – – – – “1” – – “NaN” – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – “NaN” – “Infinity” – – – – – – – – “Infinity” – – – – – – – – – – “Infinity” So some of the oddities that emerged to me are: ...

Found this great new, well new to me, service on Amazon called Listmania. It allows you to bundle Amazon products in to a list for easy consumption. So the first list of Amazon items I thought of trying out as a Listmania list was a post a I did a while ago titled “Recession Proof Your Programming Skills” In this economy you have to do everything to keep your skills fresh and current so that employers find you a desirable hire. I really though the tips provided in 8 Ways to Recession-Proof Your Programming Career where spot on when this article came out last year. And now that the TechRepublic has released 10 kills developers will need in the next 5 years. I have decided to give you some of my favorite Wrox books that align very well to this TechRepublic article. ...

Recently I have been going back and forth between R# and CodeRush. Right now I am in my CodeRush phase trying out the functionality with CodeRush Xpress, however I found it lacking in the way that you couldn’t actually change the options that were setup for you by default. This happens in CodeRush Xpress probably out of an attempt to make the use of CodeRush more simplistic to the Xpress users, or maybe they don’t want to give all the tweaking options in the free version. Either way it was annoying because I like some of the features but others just slow me down when I am working through a Remote Desktop connection by constantly tiggering redraws of the Visual Studio interface code window. ...

I was bitten by a weird Windows Update problem where update KB971092 would continually install and then keep trying to install even though it successfully completes. Some or most of you that have Visual Studio 2008 SP1 installed will probably have a similar problem. So I though I would pass on this information from Neno Loje about how to fix it. Applies to: Security Update for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (KB971092) ...

I am not going to comment too much on Linus Torvald’s comments in this Linux Magazine article, because I feel they are very transparent and they mirror my own. I’m a big believer in “technology over politics”. I don’t care who it comes from, as long as there are solid reasons for the code, and as long as we don’t have to worry about licensing etc issues. I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease. I believe in open development, and that very much involves not just making the source open, but also not shutting other people and companies out. There are ’extremists’ in the free software world, but that’s one major reason why I don’t call what I do ‘free software’ any more. I don’t want to be associated with the people for whom it’s about exclusion and hatred." ...