Section: Blogs
Oct 6, 2003 2 min.
I’ve been working on the business and data layers for a web system and, as you might expect, I’ve been making quite a bit of use of ASP.NET’s caching system. Now, to test the business layer, I had gone ahead and set up a non-ASP.NET caching system as well using my standard method for caching in Windows applications, a static hashtable with strongly typed string keys (works well, fairly compatible with the ASP.
I am definitely going to need more HD inputs on my TV
Oct 5, 2003 1 min.
I have been drooling over this for that last few weeks… inner monologue: it doesn’t do anything that I really need, and if I ever get around to hooking my current music system up with something better than S-Video, I could probably replicate its functionality in a pretty short period of time…. but, it sure looks cool, and that has added it to an overly long list of ‘things I would buy if I had the $$ to order them and the time to use them’.
URLScan and the VB Resource Kit
Oct 4, 2003 1 min.
I haven’t tried this out myself, but Mark Hurd posted a useful comment to my VB Resource Kit post… re: Visual Basic Resource Kit Download Available 10/3/2003 6:45 PM Mark Hurd Downloaded and installed the RK on a machine with enough free disk and .NET 1.1. No errors were displayed by the installer, but there was a “page not found” IE Window showing… To save everyone else’s time: URLScan, as installed by W2k SP4, has a default setting that bars URLs with dots in the path (except for the extension)!
Wonders of Windows Forms, and headshots of Chris Sells
Oct 4, 2003 1 min.
I put Chris Sells‘s most recent article onto the C# home page today, which meant we needed a ‘feature’ graphic… luckily we have another Chris on staff who handles our graphic needs (Chris Mowrer) and he whipped something up. Check it out at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vcsharp
Oct 3, 2003 1 min.
When you are creating a SQL script to deploy your system, Enterprise Manager does a good job with all of the schema (creating the tables, views, etc…) but doesn’t handle creating INSERTS for any of your lookup tables. I used to generate SQL INSERT statements for my data using a SELECT (SELECT ‘INSERT …”‘ + [Col1] +‘“…), but looking around on the web tonight, I found a cool stored proc that does all the work for you.
Visual Basic Resource Kit Download Available
Oct 2, 2003 1 min.
We’ve updated the page with the download URL already (some fast work on the part of our site team there), so you might want to go back and check it out… http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/vbrkit/ If you aren’t already using some form of download manager, I’d like to humbly suggest you try out my app from http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/using/columns/code4fun/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dncodefun/html/code4fun02282003.asp It won’t pull it down amazingly fast (it tries to avoid using up a lot of your CPU and bandwidth if you are using the machine) but it will retry and retry even across restarts… just fire up the app again to check status.
Oct 2, 2003 1 min.
The download isn’t up yet, it takes some time to sign and virus scan an entire CD packaged up as a zip, but the site that details what is included is there! Check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/vbrkit for all the details, and you can even order yourself a copy of the CD if you want to avoid the downloading hassles… Quick highlights; a ton of free controls (not just trial editions) from Component One, Dundas, Infragistics, and Sax (Sax has provided a serial communication control!
Sep 30, 2003 2 min.
Was it fate, or mere coincidence? Today, I checked out a little online message board where MSFT employees sell/trade various used items (computers, appliances, furniture, baby clothes… whatever) and someone was selling one of those new Samsung DVD players with DVI out… yep, the very same one that I decided to buy, and then changed my mind after seeing the price of the DVI cables… It was around a month old and $100 off retail price… so I bought it.
Sep 29, 2003 1 min.
Wow! Thanks for all the comments (you can stop now), I think I have a pretty good idea what you folks think. Just FYI, disk space is not an issue at all… it is testing that is the issue, we are going to sign this download and put it up in 2 days… our test team would need to do another complete test pass on a multi-file download (it is one now) since it truly is different bits… and we don’t have enough time for that!
Anyone have time for a quick poll?
Sep 29, 2003 1 min.
If you found a (really) cool download on MSDN, but it was 200+ mb, would you want it packaged for download as a single file, or as multiple .cabs (maybe 10-20 mb each?) Of course, this isn’t just hypothetical, but details on what the download is will follow in a few days! Post comments if you have the time! Thanks!