Whidbey Console

yes COLOR in the Console!! and beeping and more…

However, if you are playing with the Console Demo App from the BCL teams’ website, be sure that your console windows settings in WinXP (other versions?) is set to  open to a Window rather than full-screen.

I have no idea how this works in .NET 1.0 or 1.1, but it’s obviously an issue with Whidbey alpha bits as I get an error any time I try to do something with Console like set the size or title.

It’s fixed in the beta from what I’ve been told.

Type of type

<procrastinating>

In talking about extensions to datatypes, I keep finding my self saying “type of type” as in “any type of type, a datetime, a string…” I am trying to train my brain to say “variety of type” instead.

</procrastinating>

Shoving circles of thought into a sentence or two

Uggh – I hate this part of preparing a presentation. Sitting alone in my office talking out loud to myself, attempting to put all of the thoughts swirling around in your head into words and trying to make them efficient and effective as the clock keeps ticking away.

Why is it that if I were just sitting in a bar talking about this technical stuff with people, I don’t need to practice, I’m just having a conversation and it’s fun. If I was on the phone with a friend who asked me to explain something, it’s not a problem. I think the brevity of the presentation combined with the scope of the content makes it hard. I really have to fly through the information, but still want to share what I have learned.

I think it’s time to go back to all of those blogs of how to do a good presentation.

I actually have a (not quite scheduled yet) LiveMeeting date with Scott Watermasysk and Scott Cate to practice.

Note to self – see if thinkGeek sells a shock device that hits you every time you say “SO” or “umm” in a presentation

What’s with this women over 40 gaming study?

I have seen mention of it in a few places. Here is the article on msnbc. Having been involved in market research in a past life, first thing I looked for was how many people were in the study: 3600. Decent number. But still, as a woman over 40 (barely, mind you… :-)) I just find this so incredibly hard to believe. I have a lot of women friends my age (early 40’s) and couldn’t imagine any of them doing it. In fact,I bet if I did my own poll of women in say the 38-45 bracket (seem to have a lot of friends in there), I bet I would come up with a big fat zero for on-line gaming.

Here is AOL’s more detailed press release.

The only thing I cna think of is that Match.com is considered online gaming. But that wouldn’t account for teh part of the study that talks about how women made friendships with each other.

So you wanna be a plumber

John Bristowe explains (from personal experience) what it takes to really learn and understand all that goes on through the pipe in .NET – WSE, Web Services, etc etc. I have always been impressed with John’s scope of knowledge on this topic and having only scratched the surface of some of that stuff myself, have always wondered how he does it. He claims it’s lots of hard works. That I agree with, however, I think his brain has something to do with it, too!

Getting Directory names from your web applications

I had a problem today with some suddenly altered write permissions on my client’s webserver. So I needed to create a new directory that I had total ownership of to work with. That meant trying once again to remember how to use the darned MapPath, etc. It’s one of those things you use once a year or so…

I wrote a little web service utility that I can now shove into any web application (or web service application) on my webserver which returns

   System.IO.Directory.GetCurrentDirectory
   System.IO.Directory.GetDirectoryRoot(GetCurrentDirectory)
   System.IO.Directory.Directory.GetParent(Directory.GetCurrentDirectory).FullName
   Web.Services.WebService.Server.MapPath(“”)
   Web.Services.WebServiceServer.MapPath(“\”)

From the Application Directory and the BIN folder.

It returns a string that has line returns in it (though if you just run this directly in i.e. you’ll only get one long string).

I packaged these up into a zip file here if anyone wants to use it.

Note – I would not recommend LEAVING them on your webserver after you get the needed info, since they are not at all secure and expose a little more info than you might want to!!

Of course the most fun is giving something a name. I called it What’s My Dir?.

The zip has the tiny source code (an asmx file and a vb file) as well as the compiled dll if you just want to use it, plus a little readme.txt file to be sure you copy the files in the right place (for those unsure)

If you are using .NET 1.1 be sure that this is in your web.config:

<webServices>
<protocols
>
<add name=”HttpGet”
/>
<add name=”HttpPost”
/>
protocols>
webServices>

inside of the tags.

I just whipped this together for myself and it does the trick, so you know … no warranties, guarantees, etc.

Ted Neward, Christian Weyer, Scott Guthrie, Rob Howard, Don Kiely, Markus Egger and MORE

Sounds like TechEd, but it’s not! It’s DevTeach, Montreal, Quebec in June. I am a huge fan of this conference for a number of reasons. 1) It’s less than 2 hours from my house  2) it’s very inexpensive  3) the canadian exchange makes it even LESS expensive  4) awesome speakers 5) gobs of great .NET content (and SQL and FoxPro)  6) FUN event – not too huge so it’s very rub your elbows -y.

With Early Bird special before March 31, registration ends up being only $570 US for the 3 days. If you live in the northeast, you should definitely check this out.