Monthly Archives: March 2005

Aceh Aid is now Aceh Recovery

Asia

It’s been nearly 3 months since the disasterous tsunamis destroyed many countries, killed nearly 200,000 people and displaced millions. In the weeks after this happened I was very involved with an organization in Bali, Indonesia that was doing amazing relief work in Aceh Province. They continue to go strong but have shifted their efforts to Recovery. I was their "website medic" for the first month and was doing what I could in Frontpage to be posted to their Linux server, basically taking little pleas for this getting this and that information quickly onto the site. Now they have a real web designer on board, Sylvia Tu, as well as some breathing room to think the content through rather than just be doing crisis management on the site. The website is looking fantastic and there is all kinds of excellent information and stories about what they are accomplishing. I know most of the world has gone on with their lives and forgotten the millions still in need. Keep track. Pay attention. Maybe they’ll again need something that you can help with.

www.AcehAid.org

http://www.AcehAid.org

Cory Smith publishes VB.NET Coding Guidelines

Community Cheerleading

Thanks Mike G for pointing this out.

With verification/validation from Brad Abrams (Microsoft), Paul Vick (Microsoft), Tyler Whitney (Microsoft) and Erik Porter (MVP), Cory Smith has put together an excellent document on VB.NET Coding Guidelines. We all tend to get lazy and should probably take a look at this monthly!

Why this is on his blog and not on the VB Developer Center, I’m not sure. Yo, Brad!!! Lookee here…

http://www.AcehAid.org

How to tick off the VS2005 IDE

dotNET

I don’t remember seeing this in the past, but the Feb CTP bits have a hissy fit if you change the name of a control on a web form or windows form. Web Forms want to refactor your code behind for you. Sometiems it hangs. WinForms throws a whole lot of compile time errors to the Error reporting system, but then gives control back with nothing lost. Beware… 🙂



http://www.AcehAid.org

Well I’ll be!! [a nod to DataRow.IsNull]

dotNET

I’m fiddling around with nullable types in Whidbey and just discovered a DataRow property that is not even new, but I had never known was there (or maybe it flew by me once but it didn’t stick in my brain):

DataRow.IsNull(“mycolumnname”)

Obviously invaluable when dealing with value types.

I guess in the 3 years I have been doing .NET, I just hadn’t needed it. My main production app has a sql server database that started out being used by VB5 then VB6, so I was used to not creating DateTime columns as nullable, or dealing with nulls directly in the stored procedures. Well, I’ll be!



http://www.AcehAid.org

Got Indigo Day at MS Waltham (Boston) with David Chappell

dotNET

So I popped over to blog feed reader and I see “Got Indigo Day” in Boston. I can’t see the whole post and I can’t help thinking “who the heck is gonna do that?”. Who in Boston knows Indigo well enough already to present on it on behalf of Microsoft? Will they just be reading a script or something? Then I scroll down and get a big aha! moment — it’s David Chappell. Okay, I’m conviced!  ðŸ™‚

http://www.AcehAid.org

DevConnections and C# for VB programmers talk

Just Rambling

I want to keep reminding folks attending DevConnections that my talk titled “C# for VB6 Programmers” will be just as useful for VB.NET programmers (who likely came from VB6 anyway).

I got more confirmation of this when doing it to a packed room at Code Camp III which chose to stay an extra 45 minutes during lunch just so we could experiment some more.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Tossing memory chips?

Tools

I just bought more memory for both of my laptops.

I removed 256 chips from each of them. I can’t think of anything to do but throw them in the garbage except that I see crucial sells the one I just took out of my Toshiba M200 for $43.00 and the ones I took out of my compaq are also $43 each. So that adds up to $129 and suddenly maybe I don’t know if I should just chuck ’em. Perhaps I’ll give  them a try on ebay…

Posted from BLInk!