.net thinking

New blog

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 19:49:49 GMT

The new blog is up.. Not too many posts yet, but hopefully the new one will not come to the same fate as this one.

www.hackstacking.com

I'll be back

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 14:03:37 GMT

After a year+ hiatus, I will be back. Changes are coming, and the blog is coming back. I don't think it will be here, but I'll be blogging again soon.

Stay tuned.

DeliciousNet and DasBlog Importer downloads

Sun, 05 Feb 2006 16:21:24 GMT

I've been way out of pocket lately.. But I have gotten a number of requests for downloads of DasBlog Importer and Delicious.net, which both got lost in the shuffle when I moved.. My server never came back up, temp hosting became more perm then I would have liked, excuse excuse excuse..

I've put the latest versions here, so please feel free to snag them.. Sorry for the delay to anyone that emailed me..

DasBlog Impoter Bin DasBlog Importer Src

Delicios.net Bin Delicious.net Src

The best

Thu, 17 Nov 2005 13:35:58 GMT

best... mario... kart... ever...

And I thought I didn't have time to blog BEFORE this came out.. oh man....

Is this thing on?

Mon, 31 Oct 2005 12:59:08 GMT

Yeah, not so much.

It's time for me to kick the tires again on the blog. It's been a really hectic summer, and the fall has only gotten worse. I posted before that we are expecting a new member of the family later this year, and to add to that we are closing on a house in the next few weeks. All this leads to less and less time to study, and post..

Excuses aside, I plan on spending more time with my blog. I'm also starting a new blog that will focus less on .net, and more on other technologies. More details on that soon..

Reminder, CTDotNet Meeting today

Tue, 27 Sep 2005 11:53:04 GMT

Just a friendly reminder that tonight the CT dotnet developers group is meeting, and Mauro Cardarelli is presenting on SQL Server 2005 (aka Yukon). More details here.

Sorry for the slow updates. Big blog changes coming soon. Stay tuned.

Fantasy Football anyone?

Fri, 02 Sep 2005 12:09:45 GMT

Serious players only. Individual D players. Hopefully lots of shit talking. Live draft this Sunday at 9:00am est.

Click this link to join

Don't publish your podcast in only aac

Wed, 31 Aug 2005 12:11:14 GMT

I've been on this podcast wagon for a while. It started with listening to dotnetrocks every week, then as more and more people started publishing audio content, I started to rely on radio (and even music) less and less for my commute time ear candy.

As I posted before, I'm also starting to get into the mac. Since I'm still pretty macdumb, I've been hunting for podcasts that might help me learn osx, and other things mac. I first have to say thanks to Adam who runs the fantastic maccast. This has quickly become my favorite mac podcast, if not my favorite podcast.

I have noticed a number of mac related podcasts publishing only AAC files, though. I realize AAC is a pretty dominant format, but please remember, it's proprietary. So in effect, you are immediately cutting your listeners to those that support AAC. I may own a mac, but I don't have an ipod, and I hardly use itunes. I do, however, have an mp3 player, and time in the car to listen to your content.

Maybe these podcasts feel that AAC is just way superior over mp3, and losing those listeners is worth the extra features and quality. Of course there is no quality difference, and the only show I know that comes out with a bookmarked podcast is the maccast, which offers it as a secondary feed, so I'm thinking those aren't the reasons. Maybe you just want less listeners. Doubtful.

So I plead to podcasts, please don't pigeonhole users by supporting only a proprietary format. If you want to publish AAC, more power to you, but don't forget about those who haven't latched onto that proprietary format. Some of us still have older mp3 players (or just non-ipods), or don't love itunes.

Presentation : Introduction to asp.net

Mon, 29 Aug 2005 02:16:12 GMT

Come see me give an introduction to asp.net to the Hartford Macromedia User Group on September 15th at 6:00pm.

I'm very much looking forward to giving this presentation. I plan on starting with .net in general giving an overview of the different parts of the framework, and why the CLR is just too cool for words. Then I plan on diving into how to make basic pages, and showing off controls a little, hopefully with some simple ado.net. Please do not expect me to drag a grid on a form :)

The presentation will be about 45-50 minutes, with 10-15 minutes at the end for questions. I'm curious to see what the knowledge level of .net is in the room. I'd love to get to talk a little about the page lifecycle, as well as playing well with web standards in asp.net, but not sure time will permit.

If you have plans on attending, and have any specific questions, please feel free to drop me a line.

Simplify (Or the day I organized my blog subscriptions)

Mon, 29 Aug 2005 02:06:13 GMT

I went away last week for a few days. While we were gone, I had limited access to the internet. Well, I had plenty of access, just a limited amount of time my wife would let me sneak away with the laptop :) In that time, though, I didn't keep up with blogs, just a few odds and ends of daily digital life. So after a long drive Tuesday, I decided it was time to check the blogs. The little number in netnewswire showed over 2000 new posts. uhm..

Now maybe its summer, but my overall interest in blogging has gone down a bit. A few months ago it would have taken me hours, possibly a couple days to get caught up on that many posts. That day it took all of about 30 minutes. There were probably some good posts in there, but I just didn't have the patience to sift through it. This has been a common occurrence lately too. Maybe it's the amount of redundancy, maybe it's the sun, maybe I'm sick of staying up to date. Maybe a little from column A, column B, and column C.

In any case, this weekend I cleaned up my blog subscriptions. A lot. I probably dropped about half of my feeds, and feel just oh so clean. Today after a whole day of reading about Cocoa, I clicked to updated my subscriptions. 40 new items. Ah, much better...

Digital identity crisis

Mon, 29 Aug 2005 01:49:03 GMT

So, I bought a mac. that's pretty much where I've been for the past month.

I've always wondered what the other side looked like, so one day I broke down and decided to find out. I was able to find a used mac on ebay pretty cheap, so I'm now the proud owner of a power mac dual 450 with 512 ram. At first I was worried Tiger would be slugish, but have been pleasantly surprised with the speed of Tiger on this older box, even when I have a few applications running.

It came on a Saturday, and boy was I excited. I had started the research some weeks back, figuring out what the hardware lines are, and what the applications besides tiger and itunes did. I had a few mac friends, so I asked them a few questions here and there, and they all seemed to fit the "I love my mac" mold. A few were surprised I was asking.

I had other things going on that Saturday, but I had to at least turn it on. So I pull it out of the box, and marvel at the case for a couple minutes. Macs are pretty. After reading all the mac propaganda as well, I can't say I wasn't excited, with very high expectations. Turn it on, and realize I haven't the foggiest clue what to do with this thing.

I purchased that mac primarily to evaluate it as a development platform. I mean I am a developer, so what else would I use this thing for? I decided, though, that if I want to develop software for a mac, I should probably use one, at least for a day or two. So my first project was to turn off one of my main workstations at home. Within 2 days I was able to turn the box off by finding free or cheap alternatives to the few applications I actually needed, and had moved all of my home computing over to the mac.

Everything is different. Installing apps is simply dragging a folder, that looks like a file, to your applications folder. Wanna uninstall it? Delete the file. The X doesn't close apps, get used to that. After some growing pains, I'm moving around ok in osx. Everything just seems a little simpler. Osx is of course bsd at its core, so things like sudo port install ruby make me smile as well. I'm really starting to dig the osx interface. It just feels warm and fuzzy.

Apple gives away the development tools, which also helped me along with the purchasing decision. If I had to pay for Xcode, I doubt the mac would have looked like a cool experiment anymore. Soon after I have moved my daily life into the mac, it's time to install some development tools. Xcode is first. The download and install seemed to take forever, much like any given vs.net install. Hmm, Xcode is different too. Way different. I'll come back to you. For now, lets look at textmate and rails.

One of the mac friends I have been talking to told me I needed textmate. Although I haven't even begun to really step into it, I can see textmate will fit the programming editor bill very well. So I sat down with textmate and started looking at rails. See part of the drive of looking at mac is to look at something new. So if I'm going to look at a dynamic framework like obj-c and cocoa, might as well spend more time with ruby and rails at the same time. I had been an on and off ruby/rails researcher, but spent a good amount of time playing with it on the mac, and have come to realize rails is very.. very cool. Rails will be a fantastic web platform for my little experiment.

So all this time I was reading about obj-c and cocoa on the side. I think they intimidated me. Xcode looks very complex when you first open it, which usually never scares me. But it did. So I bought a book. I'm about halfway through it now, and am impressed with the framework thus far. Objective-C is.. like.. different. See a theme here? Today it blew my mind when I read all ~~method calls~~ messages were instances of NSInvocation. Interesting. Cocoa and Obj-C make an interesting dynamically typed pair. At first glance, this still looks quite fun.

So this is getting a bit long. I've been gone for a while, but hope to post quite a bit more. But there may be a few mac/cocoa/ruby/rails posts on the way.

Spammers be gone

Mon, 08 Aug 2005 19:33:23 GMT

I'm sick of cleaning trackbacks. In the past hour I've gotten probably 50 trackbacks from some crappy ass site. So, instead of wasting more time with this, I just removed trackbacks from the site. Sure it's nice to see who tracks back to any given post, but if 80% of the traffic (probably closer to 90) is spam, whats the point? Maybe I'm starting to agree trackbacks are dead, just since anyone that can make ah HTTP post can spam up a site.

So spammers, spam away all you want. No one will see it but me, and what good is that since I already know your site sucks, and I really don't need to buy your pr 0 z4K, or used computer parts from you. I'll save my hard earned cash for respectable businesses.

Mini code camp (sql 2k -> 2k5) coming to Waltham

Thu, 04 Aug 2005 12:01:41 GMT

Thom Robbins has booked what looks like another fantastic free developer event up in Waltham. Adam Machanic will be speaking about SQL Server programming from SQL 2k -> SQL 2k5. Adam is one of the areas authorities on SQL Server, so I am really looking forward to this one. If you're interested, I would book now. I bet this one fills up quick.

Build presentation materials

Sat, 30 Jul 2005 00:15:32 GMT

Here are the materials from the presentation. Included is the sample app with the 5 build files, as well as the presentation without my company swag.

Here is a list of links for the various tools we discussed.

Last night's ctdot presentation and career fair

Wed, 27 Jul 2005 12:19:29 GMT

Thanks everyone for attending last nights ctdotnet presentation. The group first started with a career fair, spearheaded by SB, and it seemed to be quite a hit. SB brought in a few recruiting firms, let them all speak to the group, and then all of the group members took an hour or so to network with the recruiters, and themselves. It seemed to be quite a hit, but I would also love to get some feedback from people in the group that may have liked, or disliked the career fair.

While others were off "careering", I was putting the finishing touches on the presentation. The career fair ended a little late, and then it was my turn. I was quite nervous. My nerves settled a little as I began talking, but I'm sure it was obvious in the beginning. The presentation seemed to go pretty well. I'm anxiously awaiting the results of the evals. We started by talking about build systems in general, and why a development shop may want to investigate one. We then moved on to source control, where we spent alot of time talking about Subversion, as there seemed to be quite an interest in svn. I saw lots of people nodding when I was talking about some of the issues VSS users face. SVN isn't a holy grail, but it can certainly help.

We then moved on to build scripts where I discussed the high level of nant, and then went through a few sample build files, adding various features as we went down the line. We then talked about continuous integration, and I showed off cruise control.net a bit. I was worried about filling up the entire hour at first, but when it was time to go I think we went a little over an hour, and I sped through a lot of things I would have liked to spend more time on. I'm debating doing a more polished version at code camp.

Thanks again to all the attendees, and please feel free to leave career night or presentation feedback here, or any questions you may have in regards to the materials. I will be releasing all the materials from the presentation this week, as well as a long list of links that I used to prepare. If your interested, SB has already posted some pictures here.

My 10 minute impression of virtualearth

Sun, 24 Jul 2005 16:17:35 GMT

Oddly enough, I noticed MSN Virtual Earth was up at tao of mac. I had been waiting for Virtual Earth since I saw early screenshots, so I had to take a couple minutes to jump to some 10 minute conclusions.

My first impression was missing tiles. Of course it just launched, so I expect slowness, but missing tiles are still annoying. I like the size of the browsing window.

Other things I Liked :
Scratch pad.. fancy mini-bookmarks
Quality of photographs.. Most of the photos from my local area are much higher quality.
Mouse wheel worked for zooming in both firefox and ie

Things I didn't like :
Zooming and moving just isn't as fluid as google.
Color photos would be nice.

Overall I gotta say, virtual earth is quite nice. When I just want to zoom around and have fun I think google earth will still take the cake for now, but for utility I think I might find myself using virtual earth more then google maps. Congrats to the virtual earth team on launching a great new product!

Looks like there is already a site up dedicated to developers and virtual earth.. Excellent.. ViaVirtualEarth

Reminder, come see me ramble on about CI, nant, and source control next Tuesday

Thu, 21 Jul 2005 12:08:01 GMT

Next week I will be giving a presentation to the ctdotnet group on creating a .net build system using open source (or free) tools. I have an hour to talk, so expect things to go pretty quickly. I hope to walk through making a simple app with unit tests, adding it to subversion, building it with nant, and add it to ccnet, leaving breadcrumbs along the way of other things you may want to look at. I will also touch a bit on what is coming in Whidbey that may replace some of the tools I'll be demoing.

For those that don't know, this will be my first presentation. I mean sure, I've talked in front of people many times, but never outside of a business context. Also, the content has never been my responsibility either. This should be interesting :) So if you're in the area, feel free to stop by and watch me ramble. At least if the presentation bombs, the members has a neat career night beforehand ;)

Rick Strahl talks about the deep innerworkings of iis/asp.net

Wed, 20 Jul 2005 12:04:18 GMT

Rick Strahl has written an excellent post on the internal workings of asp.net and iis. Obviously not new information, but put together very well, in a very technical manner. Any asp.net developer should read this, twice.

How the hell did I miss this... for years?!

Wed, 20 Jul 2005 12:02:05 GMT

wincv.exe.. who knew?!..

[18:01] <NothingMn> really dig into System.Diagnostics.PerformanceCounterCategory
[18:02] <NothingMn> wincv.exe
[18:03] <tranqy> wtf
[18:03] <tranqy> where did this wincv.exe shit come from, and how did I not know about it earlier
[18:03] <tranqy> this is awesome
[18:03] <NothingMn> haha
[18:03] <NothingMn> it is it is
[18:03] <MuteThis> yeah, but its public only
[18:03] <NothingMn> i shipped in like v1.0
[18:03] * NothingMn smacks tranqy [18:04] &lttranqy&gt lol
[18:04] <Rivan> lol
[18:04] <Rivan> damn you tranqy.... its a MUST know.. :p
[18:04] <tranqy> no shit
[18:05] <tranqy> thats gonna cut my google traffic in half I think :)

Years of coding .net, and it took 15 seconds of dropping in the chatroom to find a huge timesaver.. thanks guys..
[edit] check the comments for a more complete description of wincv, as well as a link to a followup conversation.

unrefactor?

Wed, 13 Jul 2005 16:11:28 GMT

Sorry for the silence latley. I'll be back soon..

Walking by a co-workers desk I heard him say un-refactor. Then we started the discussion.. is it...

un-refactor
defactor
de-refactor
unfactor

Now one may ask why the whole subject even came up. ;)

.net on rails?!

Tue, 05 Jul 2005 16:42:04 GMT

Rails has fascinated me since I first read about it. A simple MVC system that makes creating sites almost too easy, all based on Ruby. I haven't had the time to investigate it as much as I would have liked, but some people have, hell, others have based businesses on rails.

The windows folks have taken notice too. Although I don't have an post on it, I get alot of search traffic with people looking for IIS Rails. Some have even taken matters into their own hands, and created a rails like framework for .net, enter Castle Monorail. I'm yet to even download this puppy yet, but already have pretty high hopes. To top it off, it is open source, and appears to be under a nice apache license. I can't wait to sink my teeth into this.

Via The Server Side .net

A very special Christmas this year

Tue, 05 Jul 2005 11:46:51 GMT

Come Dec 28th we will have our first new addition to our family. It's been quite a ride so far, and I know we haven't even begun to scratch the surface. Later this week I'll try to update the post with a picture of the best little "future developer" shirt I got at teched. MS knows how to get them young :)

Dynamic techniques for the CLR

Sat, 02 Jul 2005 17:23:19 GMT

Joel Pobar has written an interesting post with some thoughts on targeting the CLR with a dynamic language, a la IronPython. Then Corey mentions IronRuby. I was joking about the same thing with a co-worker Friday.

Via Corey's Ramblings

New England Code Camp 4 announced

Sat, 02 Jul 2005 04:01:44 GMT

Sept 24th and 25th in Waltham. Be there.

Recovering from your hangover with Richard Hale Shaw

Fri, 01 Jul 2005 11:36:26 GMT

Don't let a long day of BBQ and beer make you miss Richard Hale Shaw speaking on new language features in c# 2.0. This special presentation brought to you by the CT .net developers group is happening next Tuesday, July 5th from 6:00 - 8:00. Richard Hale Shaw is a phenomenally energetic speaker, who really knows his stuff. If you are at all interested in 2.0, and really, who isn't, make sure not to miss this one!

Google Earth <-> Google Maps

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 16:24:55 GMT

Well that didn't take long. Strolling through the comments here, I noticed Philippe Gouillou has released a simple site to take googlemaps urls and convert them to kml, and vice versa. Very cool.. Time to stroll through all of the google site seeing sites again with google earth open.

Using ruby to test your asp.net

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 12:09:42 GMT

Scott Hanselman posts on what looks like a great solution for web testing. Using ruby, the magical dynamic language that reads like you think, and watir, an open source web testing framework, Scott has created a pretty simple way to test your web sites from nunit. Anything that makes testing simpler get an A in my book, and using Ruby only gives it bonus points.

Continuous Integration != agile

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 12:02:30 GMT

Why is it everytime I hear someone talk about Continuous Integration, the word agile is usually right before or after it. I understand that the concept of CI came out of the agile methodologies, but in my opinion the two are definitely not tightly coupled as some may assert.

I see CI as a means of closing the feedback loop between the coders and the code (hmm that sounds agile). We as developers get immediate feedback on our commit, long before we forget what we just did. Powerful. For example, I add new code that depends on this shiny new open source dll, but forget to commit the dll. Within minutes the other developers are laughing and pointing at me singing Aaron broke the build. After putting my quarter in the swear jar, I can quickly fix the issue while it's still fresh. Sound agile? Sure. But in the end that commit could be part of a huge waterfall project just destined to fail, but still the feedback loop between the coders and the code is tight. There's value in that no matter your methodology, or absence there of.

Is it that everyone wants to be agile? I know I would like to work in an agile environment, and to some degree we are, but in the end we are closer to a traditional hunt, gather, and analyze shop. Yet there is still value both in our reliable builds, and the continuous integration that tests them.

/rant.. CI, although important to agile shops, can have a ton of value no matter how you develop. So don't just pass by it if you don't think your "agile", or have a nice set of unit tests to get feedback on.. (although unit tests aren't really tightly coupled to agile either ;)

Did I leave that on the stack or in the heap?

Wed, 29 Jun 2005 11:45:16 GMT

Jon Skeet has written a short, excellent paper describing value and reference types, as well as how they relate to the stack and the heap. Not that this isn't covered in many places, but this article is probably one of the clearest I have read, as well as providing real world examples. A good refresher for any .net developer..

via Rob Chartier

Google earth

Wed, 29 Jun 2005 11:33:37 GMT

Pretty much like keyhole. Pretty much free. Pretty much kicks ass. Go get it.

Seems it supports a couple of file formats for location saving. Google has published these "tours" which seem to be a binary format, then you can also save xml formatted files directly out of the app. I'm sure sites like these will start distributing kmz (binary) and kml (markup) files soon. Oh I can't wait for the hacks to begin.

via Jeremey Wright