Section: Blogs

TechEd Slides working their way online…

Jun 16, 2004 1 min.

I’m slowly getting the TechEd slides up and onto MSDN… the first few for VB are up here, SQL’s are here… and more are coming very soon now for C#, C++, ASP.NET and others… ([Listening To](http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dncodefun/html/code4fun04252003.asp): The Darkest One [[The Tragically Hip](http://www.windowsmedia.com/mg/search.asp?srch=The+Tragically+Hip) / In Violet Light])

I just like to make things complicated…

Jun 16, 2004 2 min.

When I started out to build a voting control, I drew up a set of requirements that led to a 5+ table system… some form of UI for creating/editing polls… plus the control itself. Then, when I had SQL running behind my web site, I wanted something up fast…. so I just grabbed a simple voting control from www.asp.net (by Rob Howard). The simplicity of this control (and its database structure) is a big plus, especially for me … it is a great place to start to play around with ASP.

‘Using’ statement added to VB in Whidbey release…

Jun 13, 2004 2 min.

Scott Watermasysk blogs about the new ‘Using’ statement in VB.NET 2005… Using in VB.NET I have not touched VB.NET since early in .NET Beta 1, so I am a bit rusty. One thing I was happy to find is support for using statements in VB.NET 2005. It took me a try or two to figure out the syntax, so I figured I would post it here for future reference.

If you write RFPs to get work…

Jun 12, 2004 1 min.

Then, first let me say you have my pity, and then let me direct you to this nice piece by my old business partner (we started our first consulting business together out of our house)… [Responding to RFP's](http://weblogs.asp.net/jsemeniuk/archive/2004/06/09/152066.aspx) _Many of you who are also consultants know that one of the realities of life is to write sales proposals. When working for large companies or governments you typically submit a proposal in response to a RFP – a request for proposal.

More playing with ASP.NET

Jun 12, 2004 3 min.

As with my earlier messing around with a poll, I took a concept from the www.asp.net site today and made my own “CheckDotNet.aspx” page. The one on www.asp.net only checks for the .NET Framework 1.0 or better, so I modified the logic to detect 1.1 and 1.0 as two distinct cases… recommending an upgrade for no framework or 1.0, and returning “Framework Found” if you have 1.1 already. http://www.duncanmackenzie.net/tools/checkdotnet.aspx Difficult? Nope… nothing too impressive…

Very Very Cool… 3D Pie Chart in C#

Jun 11, 2004 1 min.

In yet another great article from CodeProject, Julijan Sribar describes the details of drawing out a 3D Pie Chart, and not only does it work, but his explanation is exteremely clear, detailed and includes lots of diagrams that really add to the explanation. [ ](http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/JulijanPieChart.asp)

A love little samples like this…

Jun 10, 2004 1 min.

From Justin Rogers A conversion from integer to long form english... I could write that 😉 ** _[Editorial note: A more complete sample is available through article: _ [ _http://weblogs.asp.net/justin_rogers/articles/151757.aspx_ ](http://weblogs.asp.net/justin_rogers/articles/151757.aspx) _]_ ** _I find little conversion functions to be the most interesting type of programming you can spend your time on. You wind up exercising so many areas of programming expertise to make the algorithms short, complete, bug free, and as fast as possible.

Celebrities in the locker room… career opportunity or creepy awkwardness?

Jun 9, 2004 4 min.

As other people have probably mentioned here and there, there is a very nice health club near Microsoft and a membership to that club is one of the options in our benefits plan. Therefore, it isn’t all that surprising that most of the folks in the gym at any particular time are Microsoft employees. This can lead to an interesting occurance that has left me wondering (on more than one occasion), what is the ‘right’ thing to do in this situation?

I added the “no vote, just show me the results” feature to that polling component…

Jun 9, 2004 1 min.

It appears to work fine… assuming you haven’t voted from the machine you are currently on, you should be able to see the new button (and try it out) at http://www.duncanmackenzie.net Currently, Halo 2 appears to be behind VS 2005… which was not what I expected 🙂 Let me know if you have any problems, I’m planning a larger series of updates to the control, but that won’t be for a couple of days…