Sonic Death Monkey

Monsterous Nerd!!!!

scromer — Mon, 17 Jan 2005 21:55:00 GMT

I just took the Nerd test and my wife was right:

“All hail the monstrous nerd. You are by far the KING NERD GOD!!!”

string nerdScore == “95“;

http://www.wxplotter.com/ft_nq.php?im

take the Nerd challenge unless you are afraid.......

V-BLAH

scromer — Mon, 17 Jan 2005 21:41:00 GMT

I just read this quote on Mr. Tegels blog and comments are off on his site so I wanted to post a little blurb on the following comment he posted.

“I love reading Rocky Lhotka's blog. You should read it too. Why? Because he's not afraid to call a spade a spade. Well, that, and he loves VB.NET.”

A comment like this makes my skin turn green and my clothes rip. I have watched video of Rocky speaking on TheServerSide.Net and agree he has very insightful things to say but on my list of reasons to listen to .NET experts “Love for V-Blah.Net” is not one of them.

C# will set you free........

Advanced User Control book

scromer — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 15:57:00 GMT

As I continue to build and work with existing asp.net web sites, portals etc. I find myself dealing exclusively with web user controls. Being the book hound I am I was looking through my collection of Wrox /Apress / Microsoft .NET books and realized something strange, I only own one book devoted to controls (and it's really not exclusively on user controls) written by Scott Mitchell . “ASP.NET Data Web Controls Kick Start” really only touches on user controls briefly and digs into the datagrid more than any other topic. This made me realize the there is a need for a book covering Advanced User Controls. I nominate Phil Wolfe to take on this authoring challenge, he knows all there is to know about user controls.

F#

scromer — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 18:38:00 GMT

“F# is a functional programming language, where a program is a series of bindings of expressions to identifiers.“

Check it out here: http://research.microsoft.com/projects/ilx/fsharp.aspx

Give me my data, and a side of Hash();

scromer — Fri, 23 Jan 2004 15:53:00 GMT

Currently on MSDN there is an interesting 6 part article written by Scott Mitchell-4GuysFromRolla.com fame and author. It is a 6 part series titled "An Extensive Examination of Data Structures", as of now parts I and II are available. Part 2 is particularly interesting to me because I use Hashtables all the time ( and the scaled down version called the ListDictionary() which lies in System.Collections.Specialized )

This article covers The Queue, Stack, and Hashtable in depth and is a great read, plus it's in C#!!!!!

Check 'em out
----------------
Part I
Part II

XEN not ZEN!

scromer — Wed, 21 Jan 2004 13:08:00 GMT

Sir Kent Tegels pointed me towards this article regarding the expansion of .NET :

"Xen, a new programming language coming out of Microsoft Research and developed in conjunction with the University of Cambridge, promises to bring together three disparate but integral components of programming, wrapping them together in .Net. Xen's creators use a geometric metaphor to illustrate this conjoining, calling the language a means to program with "circles, triangles, and rectangles."

Check out the full article here:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,1441409,00.asp

GROUPWISE SUCKS!!!!!

scromer — Tue, 20 Jan 2004 18:57:00 GMT

The company I Consult for currently runs Novell on top of Windows 2000 ( ZEN to distribute apps and Groupwise for email ). They firmly believe that Outlook is the Devil, that being said I can tell you from first hand experience that Groupwise is horrible. I receive emails 2 - 8 hours after the sender has hit "Send". After which time the information I need is long since stale and unusable. This leads to huge amounts of frustration, not unlike Micheal Bolton's hatred for InterChodes office equipment. I find myself asking the same question 3 times to be sure the receiving party got at least one of my emails. Web based mail is my only alternative, it's a sad day in SDM-Ville.

VB6 to .NET

scromer — Mon, 19 Jan 2004 20:26:00 GMT

I have run into allot of companies lately that need or want to move there legacy VB 6.0 applications to .NET. Amazingly they fear the change and think it carries a hefty price tag ( IDE, Training, Hours of Porting over code ). Well the truth is they are correct, thinking that any VB 6.0 programmer can just fire up VS.NET 2002, 2003 or Whidbey and move around like a mallard on the pond is a fatal EXCEPTION. I ran into some terrific articles on that very subject to see what all the hub-bub was since I didn't come from the VB 6.0 world of programming and harbor a distinct Hatred against visual VERY Basic. Hatred is a harsh word but it's correct; the finer points of the major pitfalls are so great that one author suggested that VB 6'ers should just clean the slate and move to C#, pity the thought.

Consider this snippet from an article

“By Michael Otey - I have an opinion about nearly everything, but I'm on the fence about Visual Basic (VB) 6.0 versus VB.NET. Microsoft and the VB.NET proponents claim that VB.NET is the next evolutionary step for VB—finally bringing to VB some of the advanced features that other languages have enjoyed for years. However, many expert VB developers maintain that VB.NET changes so many established VB features that it isn't even VB anymore.”

Some of the major points discussed were

VB.NET is a full blown OOP language with all the bells and whistles ( inheritance, method overloading etc.)
COM
Deployment
ADO.NET
Syntax

I'll post the articles later on for all to enjoy. Strangely though VB.NET has gotten harder ( sort of ) and C# - the next version of C++ (sort of ) has gotten easier. What's next? VB# ??????????

God Help us, everyone.......

Whidbey

scromer — Fri, 09 Jan 2004 12:37:00 GMT

I installed (and played with briefly) VS.Next - codename Whidbey late last night. My first impressions are "I WANT THIS AT WORK NOW!!!". I built just a small page that takes input and displays it on the screen, nothing earth shattering or revolutionary whatsoever. But I like the IDE's changes so far, the integration of pseudo-IIS is great and the new ability to do inline coding ( YUCK ) and source only ( YEAH ) will help those poor unfortunates stuck in the 90's chained to "Classic" asp's hodgepoge of delimiters "<%" mixed with html tags make the conversion a little less painful. Converting to OOP from scripting cannot be helped though, sorry asp'ers :( I will dig deeper this weekend and see if there is anything I don't love. Much thanks to Kent Tegels for getting me rolling on dotnetjunkies.com..

Yukon CLR Stored Procedures

scromer — Wed, 07 Jan 2004 18:23:00 GMT

I haven't really had the time to mess with Yukon as of yet but I came up with an interesting question regarding how the CLR stored procedures actually work. I was in the middle of a project and was in Enterprise Manager ( sql2000 ) writing a stored procedure and it hit me, what happens in the new architecture when an error is thrown in the CLR for a Stored Proc? Is it designed as one complete process where the CLR and T-sql co-exist or are they seperate layers? If an error is thrown in the common language runtime does it ever even get to the t-sql layer? If they are not one process does that mean it runs slower? I asked Kent Tegels this question and his answer made sense but he was not completely certain so this will take some investigation and reading on my part.