Daily Archives: March 4, 2005

Raj Das from Magenic has a blog

Community Cheerleading

I spent a lot of time chatting with Raj about many common topics while at Web Services Edge East earlier this month. We have both been working on Tablet PC apps. But the thing that was really engaging was to find out that he was also having an awful time with leveraging the application deployment block. I finally got past the “i guess I’m just too stupid to use this” phase to “my needs are too complex for this”. With help from Chris Kinsman, I finally deployed a solution, but apparently it’s broken again (I mucked a LOT with what Chris gave me…so I know I messed it up) and we are back to thumbdrive updates until I can focus on it again. So it was nice to know that it’s not just me who has been battling with web server based updates for over two years now!

Oh and Happy Birthday Raj!

http://www.AcehAid.org

Kathleen Dollard on why tracing won’t suck anymore in .NET 2.0

dotNET

Kathleen says:

Let’s take a trip down memory lane to look at how you’re using tracing today. That’s easy – you aren’t using it. You aren’t using it because even though you can’t articulate what’s wrong (and maybe can’t articulate what tracing is) you’re primordial self still recoils in revulsion at the ugly 1.0 implementation. Let me force you to face the ugliness and remind you what tracing looks like today.

She’s so right. If you looked at the charts from my certification tests they are way to the right for everything except for tracing. It’s a wonder that I even passed the test because my tracing knowledge is so poor. It’s embarrassing.

So since I will be (speaking) at DevConnections, I am going to absolutely attend kathleen’s sessions on this topic where she will drill in to it.

I’m also considering attending Devscovery so I can sit in on many debugging sessions  by John Robbins and of course learn about some ASP.NET internals from Jeff Prosise and some .NET internals from Jeff Richter.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Another vermont blogger, tablet pc user and artrage artist!

Tablet

Rob Rohr,  who is lucky enough to work for a big Tablet PC Enthusiast has a tablet pc. He is also fortunate enough to go to events like TechEd where I’m always trying to introduce him to people. Well I just discovered that he’s been blogging for about a year (yippee) and I see he has been doing some amazing things with ArtRage.

Hey Rob, there are two more Vermont bloggers that you can add to your list. Dave Burke,  Roman Rehak (both geeks) and Andrea Learned (not a geek). We lost Joy to law school in Pennsylvania last year, boo hoo.



http://www.AcehAid.org

Comment Tasks in Visual Studio

dotNET

I learned about Comment Tasks during Deborah Kuratas eye-opening “Best Kept Secrets” talk at VSLive last month. She also has a whole book filled with these goodies. It was really funny to hear people keep going “what? I didn’t know you could do that!”. I also did this a number of times.

One of the things I liked a lot was comment tasks. But the reason I liked them was because I am now using them to make sure I can quickly get to code during demos. Deborah used the feature that way also.

http://www.AcehAid.org

C# / VB Syntax

Just Rambling

As I’m working on my presentation on C# for VB(6) programmers for DevConnections (which is not aimed at converting people, but assisting them to be fluent in C# when they need to) I enjoy finding the perspective of C# developers going to VB. In Sahil Malek’s blog post about this, I loved seeing  the comment that it is confusing to use parens for so many purposes – such as indices or passing parameters – whereas C# uses [] for indices. I am just so used to that from years of working with VB! But it makes sense that it might be confusing. It’s a fun thread to read if you do find yourself swinging both ways with your code.

But my two faves in the thread are:

…if you are on my project team and you name variables in c# as follows:
foo
Foo
FOO
I’m going to kick your ass because it’s a pain in the ass to read.

and

I have the best VB.NET to C# converter on the Market and it’s only one line:
MessageBox.Show(“LearnC#Goddamit!”)

I hope that Bill appreciates my talk!

 

http://www.AcehAid.org

The latest Hullabaloo

Just Rambling

I have in the past stood in front of a room filled with mensa society big brain programmers and thinkers who had been laid off from IBM who wanted to learn how to have their own successful consulting practices like li’l ol me. I was forced to tell them that some of them just aren’t going to have the people skills necessary to start their own consulting businesses and should find a partner with those skills. Well, I didn’t put it quite that way. Maybe it was more explaining what skills are necessary and saying “ask yourself if you think you could pull this off, if you think it would be enjoyable.“

I suppose this concept needs to be transferred to who should and should not be able to blog on behalf of their companies, especially when an enormous amount of weight is going to be put on every one of their words.

I’m just taking a wild guess here since I have never met the hullabaloo-ee, who could very well be one of the most personable people on the planet. Chris Sells is a good example of a pretty well rounded (slimmed down, of course) mensa brainy guy.

It just made me think of those poor few mensa-ites that really didn’t happen to have those skills.

http://www.AcehAid.org