Like the situation described in the post, the client needed to move the door to the server room.  I can’t even remember why but they were moving the door from one wall to another wall.

On the morning that the work was supposed to begin, the crew that was working on removing the door and walling in the opening (there were separate work crews for creating the new opening and closing the old) showed up early and removed the door and closed the opening before anyone arrived to work.  As luck would have it, one of the production servers locked up and needed to be hard rebooted.  The problem was there was no longer a door to the server room.  After considerable debate about the matter, the admin ended up having to actually chop a hole in the wall to the server room with a crowbar that he retrieved from the trunk of his car.

1. Firefox - 55.4%
2. Mozilla Compatible Agent - 10.99%
3. IE (what I have been using) - 8.7%
4. Safari - 7.18%
5. Opera - 3.18%
6. Mozilla - 3.16%
7. Everything else was bots and various rss readers

I had tried Firefox a few years ago and I didn’t really see any benefit but it clearly has the dominant market share of people who went to the effort of at least visiting my blog so it must be worth looking at again.  Within the Firefox category:  3.0 had about 30% share, 1.5.x had ~1%, and 2.0.0.x had the rest of the share.

I’ve only been through the first few so far, but an interesting discussion has come up in both podcasts about whether or not programmers should know the C programming language.  Jeff does not know C and seems to come down on the side of the argument that this knowledge is not necessary.  Jeff hasn’t specifically said this out loud, that I’ve heard, but I gather this is his opinion based on how the conversation seems to flow.  Joel, on the other hand, is of the opinion that programmers should have knowledge of the lower levels of programming even though it is not part of their daily job.  His thinking on this is that the lower level knowledge gives programmers an edge even when programming with the higher level popular programming languages of today.

I have to agree with Joel on this.  In my experience working with programmers in both categories, those who have a background of knowledge of the lower level programming languages always seem to be quicker at solving more complicated problems.  Of course, there are exceptions to this rule but I would say 98% of the time this is true. 

It is interesting also that when this topic comes up with colleagues, it is almost split right down the line in opinion with those who do not know C believing it is not necessary and those who do have experience with C believing this sort of experience and knowledge makes them a much better developer.

One good example supporting my argument (actually Joel’s argument) is garbage collection related issues.  I’ve seen programmers spend a huge amount of time attempting to understand why the runtime memory size of their program is continuing to grow when, in their minds, the garbage collector should be coming to the rescue.  Of course, the problem is usually that they somehow have a reachable reference to a huge collection of objects or something of this nature (usually several in fact).  Programmers with the lower level knowledge seem to pick up on these sorts of problems much quicker. 

Another area I have seen many issues with is threading.  Languages like C# and Java make threading a reachable concept for the programming masses.  This is a good thing unless you do not understand the underlying concepts of threading.  I cannot begin to calculate how many conversations I have had with programmers concerning the thread safety of their methods.  I also cannot count the number of blank stares I have received when I ask about the concept of thread safety in interviews.

I know that most will say that I am bringing up edge case problems that are not normal in business programming.  I am willing to concede that.  However, I also agree with Joel’s approach in that I tend not to hire programmers that do not have this knowledge because it happens often enough to be a problem.  There are exceptions, but those programmers are "exceptional".

Tags: softwarebusiness, stackoverflow

The idea behind this functionality is that you can generate a fully functional application based upon a LINQ to SQL or LINQ to Entities model.  This reminds me a lot of the Naked Objects Framework from a few years back in the java world.  Naked Objects generated a rich client Swing application but the concept is identical.  It does appear, however, that ASP.NET Dynamic Data allows a little more customization of the UI than I remember from Naked Objects.

I bet if most users of smallish data entry applications knew in advance how much the development of their small application was going to cost them, they would gladly accept an application with limited UI goodness for something quickly available and just works.

I know that I will consider this tool in the future when I need to create small data administration type applications.  Saving time and money on those small applications can make more budget available for the applications that can really impact business capability.

Tags: aspnetdynamicdata, aspnet, dotnet

A good overview of the configuration of Unity was written by Matthew Podwysocki.

The xml configuration is a little unique compared to other DI containers.  I plan on adding support for the xml configuration to Reference Assistant before the first public beta is out.

Tags: unity, ioc, dependencyinjection, dotnet

If you are going to be there and want to meet up, reply to this post or send me an email.

Also, if you are interested, I can give you a demo of the product I have been working on.  It is called Reference Assistant and is a Visual Studio Add-In that helps resolve issues around project references and type information expressed in configuration files.  Reference Assistant allows you to specify multiple sets of reference directories and dynamically switch between them, make sure that particular reference directories are always present for certain projects, add a reference directory to multiple projects at the same time, and helps resolve conflicts with different versions of assembly references.  It also parses app.config section handler types and configuration files for the major Dependency Injection containers and helps to resolve those references.  Reference Assistant supports its own method of extensibility allowing developers to add functionality that is not supported out of box.  For instance, developers could add parsing for their own custom configuration file formats or support for a custom written plug-in discovery framework. 

This is a brief description of the major features but there are many other smaller nice things as well.  Reference Assistant is in closed beta currently but the public beta is coming very soon along with the launch of the website and much more information.

Even if you aren’t interested in a demo, we can get together and talk about .Net, Visual Studio, the sinking value of the US dollar, or whatever.

Hope to see you there!

Tags: visualstudio, vslive

I am a little mystified as to why a developer would target Mono if they need to run on Windows, but then I have always been a little puzzled with certain aspects of the Open Source movement.  If the CLR is free for me to use in terms of costs to me or my customers, and available on pretty much every windows installation out there, then that is free enough for me.

Now targeting other operating systems with Mono is a different matter all together and is where I see Mono as a useful and quite interesting tool.

I will be honest.  I have not following the progress of Mono very closely at all.  When I saw the announcement of the pending beta availability I went to the Mono site and read through their blog.  I was shocked at how much they have working on other operating systems.  I have listened to podcasts with Miguel de Icaza when he talked about the relatively small size of the core Mono dev team so this makes their accomplishments nothing short of astonishing in my view.  Here is a short list of stuff they have working for mac developers:

• They already have Mono running on the iPhone.
• ObjC# bindings to provide access to Objective-C APIs from Mono
• Cocoa# has been developed to provide cocoa bindings.

I would imagine that Silverlight will help out some with Mono adoption since the team is also making that available on Linux via the Moonlight project.

Tags: dotnet, mono

In addition to Visual Studio Links, I will also write articles on Visual Studio periodically so make sure to subscribe to the rss feed.

For those who subscribe to this site, or visit often, I will still post entries here that are more general .Net programming topics.

Tags: visualstudiolinks, visualstudio, dotnet

Vishal Joshi posted an overview of the VS tooling integration that shipped with ASP.NET MVC last week.

Marlon Grech discusses how to add Input Prompt support in Vista with WPF using Avalon Controls Library.

Via Steve Pietrek: Letz Roeder has released version 5.1 of .NET Reflector.

Via Jason Haley:  Creating a Debugger Visualizer for Graphics instances on Code Project.  Source included, of coarse.

Via email from Ted Heuer:  ILog has released an open source java to C# translater that can handle generic types.  According to ILog, this is used internally to help port their java rules engine product to .Net.  It is also available as an Eclipse plug-in that can take an Eclipse project and generate a VS project.

Alessandro Del Sole has written an article on Code Project explaining how to Use WPF Controls in VSTO Solutions with Visual Basic 2008.

Keyvan Nayyeri has released Visual Studio Extensibility.  The book covers VS 2008.  As of when I am writing this post, a quick search revealed that Amazon has the book for $2 cheaper than B&N, even with a B&N membership.  Both are still showing the book as pre-release but Keyvan says that should be corrected very soon and Wrox should have it for purchase immediately.  From the posted table of contents, information that I have not seen covered in other books on VS Extensions include: 

• Debugging and Testing Add-Ins
• Creating a Windows Installer for your Add-In (where was this when I needed it?)
• Localization
• VS Shell, which is new to 2008 so it could not have appeared in previous books
• DSL Tools, also new
• Extending the debugger
• VSPackages
• MSBuild

Sara Ford explains how to turn off the prompting to rename your classes when you rename the files in Visual Studio.  With this option turned off, the renaming happens automatically without the prompt.

Carlos Quintero pointed out an excellent set of posts dedicated to learning the VS SDK.

Tags: visualstudio, visualstudiolinks, dotnet

Carlos Quintero posted an excellent summary of resolving Type instances and information from within VS.

This is a nice post on how to incorporate the Subersion revision number in to the assemblyinfo version number when building.

Alexander Brutt posted a VS 2005 project template for creating Sharepoint 2007 Timer Jobs (scheduled tasks that run under Sharepoint).  The post also includes a link that explains how to create the actual timer jobs.

The WPF Controls library, Avalon Controls Library on Codeplex, has been updated to v2.

Via DotNetKicks, Windows Vista Controls for .Net version 1.3 released.  This is a .Net control library for VS 2008 and windows vista, hosted on CodePlex.

Sara Ford posted a tip on how to stop the toolbox from auto-populating items in your solution.  She suggests that this could speed up load time for solutions containing large projects.

The sessions from the recent Mix conference have been posted here.  Sessions on ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight 2.0 are included along with many other topics.

Haibo Luo has updated his ILVisualizer debugger visualizer for 2008.  This visualizer will show the IL for methods you are debugging.  Source code included.

Good stuff from Channel9:

• Scott Guthrie discusses Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1.
• The Silverlight Blueprint for Sharepoint
• Inside IE8 Beta 1 For Developers
• Tips and Tricks with the Interop Forms Toolkit

Tags: visualstudio, visualstudiolinks, dotnet