March 2006 - Posts
Recently I've discovered there are two kinds of technical books: Big honkin' tech books that I start reading with the best of intentions, get two chapters into and wind up as part of the psuedo-furniture pile of books beside my chair for long periods of time. Professional C# is one that currently fits that bill. Don't get me wrong, it is a great book, but not something I can get psyched about and knock out in a weekend. Smaller, more specific tech books that tackle a certain topic that I am looking...
No, I'm not going to discuss buying your next home (well, maybe a little bit), but instead I want to write a bit about selecting a spot for your home office. While your home office space is not technically a tool, it might be considered the best (or weakest) tool in your bag. You might not have put any thought into it yet, but the location (or lack of location) of your home office can have a considerable effect on your productivity. When planning for the location of your home office here are several...
Once again - mostly just useful notes to myself, but hey - It's my blog - I can post what I want: 1. Essential tools for Geographically dispersed dev teams - article #1 - choosing the right spot for your home office. 2. Essential tools for Geographically dispersed dev teams - article #2 - communications: email, messaging, and telephone 3. Review Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# with NUnit - read it Thursday evening. 4. Review Expert .NET Delivery Using NAnt and CruiseControl.NET - started reading this...
Check out the pics. Yes, I have other interests other than computers, technology, and the web. I've been lucky enough to spend some quality time in the garage the last couple of weeks. Of course more time spent on one hobby means less time spent on others (kids: that's called opportunity costs) so I haven't been writing as much as I would like. I've always had an interest in amateur gunsmithing, especially bolt-action rifles and building custom rifles from military surplus rifles. I've always had...
I just got home from the Dayton .NET Developer's Group March meeting. Jim Holmes gave a great presentation on Open Source Test Tools including NUnit, MBUnit, Fitnesse, Rhino.Mock, ZaneBug and Watir. It was a great presentation and if you get a chance to see it at some other venue, I highly recommend you do so. I was also pleased to finally meet Jim. I had seen him at the code camp in January and have read his blog since then, but hadn't had the pleasure of meeting and talking to him. He is a very...
I followed this link from Seth Godin's blog to a Firefox extension for Squidoo. Now, I don't know much about Squidoo, but this comment about the extension is priceless : Slow - by Berni ______, March 19, 2006 5:37pm Looks as tho' could be useful and interesting but seriously slowed down my computer had to uninstall. I use Windows 98 maybe that is a problem and dial up. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | kick it! | live it!
Reading of telligenti Ken Robertson's planned series of posts about working remotely reminded me that I had planned of putting together a list of essential tools for remote development teams. Actually, the list was planned to be a small portion of a larger project, but for the sake of avoiding any more procrastination... In this series I plan to discuss some of the tools that I have found to be essential for geographically dispersed teams from the obvious to the not-so-obvious, like email and instant...
Last weekend I read two books, one had to do with developing using web standards and another was Professional Development with Web APIs : Google, eBay, Amazon.com, MapPoint, FedEx (Denise M. Gosnell, WROX). I was prepared for the API book to be a fairly lightweight book, focusing more on finding information/documentation about the mentioned APIs and doing some basic work with them than detailed code examples. And that is exactly what I found. Generally it was a pleasant read and I thought it was...
I previously posted my notes from the Dayton-Cincinnati Code Camp that took place in January. In it I wrote the following as part of my notes about Brian Sherwin's session on SQL Server Reporting Services: Debug Local run Individual report (?) – I don’t really remember what this means, but I thought I would record it anyway. It must have been something important since I wrote it in my notes. Luckily Brian happened upon my notes a couple of days ago and was kind enough to email me the following: I...
A few weeks ago I went through the exercise of downloading and setting up cruise control on my dev machine along with NAnt and some other tools (more on this later). The night before last I spent about 3-4 hours optimizing by build scripts to make them more portable and fine tuned a few things. Yesterday I began applying everything that I learned to a fresh install of Window Server 2003 on our new (used previously as some sort of linux dev box - nobody knows anything about it, it just was there one...
My wife and I were walking down an aisle at the Cincinnati Home & Garden show yesterday and heard the following from 2 couples in front of us: Wife #1 (to wife #2): Mary, Hi, how are you. Wife #2: Oh, Hi. I haven't see you in like two years. Husband #1 (to wife #2): She's really aged a lot hasn't she? Dawn and I both busted out laughing - I couldn't contain myself. I told her that I would have to remember that - she said she would slap the *** out of me if I ever said it. Share this post: email...
A few days ago I installed the Enterprise Library 2.0 (January 2006) and converted an existing C# ASP.NET 2.0 application (which I had only converted from ASP.NET 1.1 to 2.0 a few days prior) from the Enterprise Library June 2005 bits to the new ones. The only application blocks that I concerned myself with were the Configuration and Data Access application blocks. Following are my observations about breaking changes to one of our (Tellus') ecommerce code bases. YMMV. There were very few changes...
My co-worker, well respected C# programmer, and world-class civil engineer had a tough time today with his Windows Task Mangager. At one point he found that his Task Manager window was open, but had no menu bar showing. He called me over and showed it to me and I basically just quipped, "That's peculiar" and went back to what I was doing previously - something of utmost importance, I'm sure (probably reviewing the Big East standings on Yahoo Sports). Chad decided to reboot (twice!) and started getting...
for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | kick it! | live it!
As of midnight last night, under the threat of an AEIF (Armco Employees Independent Federation) union strike, AK Steel of Middletown made an aggresive move and locked out its 2700 man labor force. News reports this morning state that the union was willing to continue working last night and until a new agreement could be reached. They suggested continuing under the terms of the old agreement, but AK reportedly rejected that offer and chose to lock out the employees instead. AK Steel has a history...