Daily Archives: January 20, 2004

I know lots of Gurus for hire

Community Cheerleading

This keeps coming back to me. These bright stars in our industry. But everyone is afraid to ask them if they are available, affordable or interested. In fact, people probably assume that they are none of the above. I am going to figure out a way to make a bridge. Oh, another pet project, JUST what I need. (Not me by the way, INETA and blogging keep me way too busy :-))

From Coder to Developer

Tools

James Avery points out Mike Gunderloy’s upcoming book which I have had in the back of my head from some conversations with Mike. I’m glad James brought it up to the part of my brain that is closer to the keyboard. Mike writes the most wonderfully practical and educational books (much like is no nonsense Daily Grind!). I checked the description of the book on Amazon. It sounds like it is going to speak to MANY MANY people out there. I know from my user group. It’s the people who don’t want to show you their code. They know that they want to get to the next level and not just write programs that work, but write well-architected applications that really leverage the development tools.

So here is the description of the book:

Are you ready to take the leap from programmer to proficient developer? Based on the assumption that programmers need to grasp a broad set of core skills in order to develop high-quality software, “From Coder to Developer” teaches you these critical ground rules. Topics covered include project planning, source code control, error handling strategies, working with and managing teams, documenting the application, developing a build process, and delivering the product. All of the techniques taught in this unique book are language and platform neutral, and were selected to help you effectively design and develop complex applications.

So if James’ post has a link to my blog and then this post points back to that post is that going to create some cyclical blog thing that brings down the internet or something? (kidding)

okay back to my deployment…

When the dataset class of your XSD disappears

dotNET

It took me some time to figure this out and now I feel like a dope, but I figure I would stick this in here for the next poor sot who has a similar brain …ummm.. gap.

I added some fields to a typed dataset. Since my brain was in sql data mode, I tagged one of the fields as a char rather than a string. No error message. Except the class file disappeared, my application wouldn’t compile because the class no longer existed.

I toggled the “Generate Dataset” option on and off and on and off to no avail. I viewed the xml. I closed and opened the project. Finally I tried “Preview Dataset” and it gave me a wierd looking error message but luckily the word “char” caught my eye and I saw the light.

Hope this helps someone googling for the same problem someday.

Do as I say, not as I do

Tools

I had a visit today from Ron Lewis from my user group who was helping my neighbor with a computer hardware emergency. Ron is a regular at the user group and he has been soaking up knowledge about .NET for over a year. But his real expertise is as a hardware guy. This is the same guy who brought Stephen Forte’s laptop back to life at our March 2003 meeting after repeated blue screen’s of death had Stephen relegating the box to the garbage can.

So Ron looked around my office and the quiz began. He asked a few questions about my UPS’s (yes I passed), was astonished at my 8 year old humongous HP LaserJet IVSI that still is in perfect working condition and impressed with the number and variety of p.c.s. He was a little curious about the Apple sticker on my monitor. It’s just a sticker though. My husband put it there to be funny and I left it, trying to be funnier. But then he asked me about my backup habits. This is like when the dental hygienist asks if you’ve been flossing regularly. Skip to after that conversation. We have a deal. He is going to call me in two weeks. If I am not backing up regularly (DAILY as I can’t really afford to lose more than a day’s work) by then, he is going to set me up on remote automated backup to his servers, which is a service he offers. That sounds cool to me!! I know there are gigantic companies who do this kind of thing with offsite data centers and offsite networks but this is just my size.

Common Problem Deploying WSE dependent Client Applications

dotNET

Well, I bet it’s common though I only found ONE post on the whole internet about it so I better add a little noise here, too. This is for WSE1.0. I will ahve to look into this in WSE2.0! I installed my client app onto another machine. It’s not on my domain so was synching against the internet time (a setting in Adjust Time/Date). My dev machine was synching against my own server which was +6 minutes.

(I’m starting to think of some UTC posts Clemens Vasters wrote a while aback that mystified me at the time…I’ll have to look )

Anyway, I was very quickly getting a Microsoft.Web.Services.Timestamp.TimestampFault error with teh message “Message Expired”. And the reason for this was that they tiem on my client app’s box was probably very different than the webservdr it was going out to (different also than my own domain). The easy solution is to set the timeout to “0”  (i.e. no time-out) on waiting for a response from the web services, but that’s not good to me, because I don’t want to make the user sit around all day waiting.

For now, I will just have to control this by controlling the installs (still not released yet) but eventually I will want a tighter solution. Thanks to Peter Bromberg of Egghead Cafe who answered the original question in the above referenced thread. That’s my kinda egghead!