Mark Brown

Connection Strings

MarkBrown — Thu, 18 Sep 2003 11:14:00 GMT

I just love this place: connectionstrings.com

VeriSign Advertising

MarkBrown — Tue, 16 Sep 2003 14:07:00 GMT

This morning I misspelled a domain name in IE and a VeriSign advertising page came up. This Slashdot post explains why this is happening.

Design Patterns

MarkBrown — Tue, 16 Sep 2003 13:04:00 GMT

Data & Object Factory provides us with some common design patterns.

Free V37 Pocket PC

MarkBrown — Tue, 16 Sep 2003 12:02:00 GMT

My free ViewSonic V37 Pocket PC from Microsoft just arrived. I've had to wait 16 weeks for this thing to ship. I was hoping it had the latest OS installed but that's not the case. The V37 comes with Pocket PC 2002 Premium Edition. I wonder if there will be an upgrade.

[UPDATE] I talked to ViewSonic and they said the upgrade is supposed to be released this month. I guess I've got to keep checking the site for details. I wish they had a RSS feed for this.

LLBLGen Release

MarkBrown — Mon, 08 Sep 2003 08:00:00 GMT

Looks like LLBLGen Pro has been released.

Customer Support FAQ

MarkBrown — Mon, 18 Aug 2003 07:53:00 GMT

http://www29.compaq.com/falco/detail.asp?FAQnum=FAQ2859

ASP Today

MarkBrown — Fri, 15 Aug 2003 15:44:00 GMT

Hmm. I hope the new publisher can do better then this timely article. <g>

“Todays ASP Today article is:

Switching To Windows Server 2003 and ASP.NET 1.1. Part 2 - ASP.NET 1.1

by Alex Homer.

Abstract: This article, the second of a 2-part series about upgrading to Windows Server 2003 and ASP.NET 1.1, examines ASP.NET 1.1 itself. We first give a broad overview of the main new features in ASP.NET 1.1, including improvements to forms authentication and some of the ASP-related classes in the framework class library. Then we examine the issue of side-by-side execution of ASP.NET 1.0 and 1.1 applications in IIS 6.0”

Interesting VOIP Solution

MarkBrown — Tue, 12 Aug 2003 15:07:00 GMT

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,59953,00.html

http://www.sipphone.com/tiki-index.php?page=What%20is%20SIPphone

Would be great to have remote employees using this service.

.Text Bits are up

MarkBrown — Mon, 04 Aug 2003 22:30:00 GMT

http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/Workspaces/workspace.aspx?id=e99fccb3-1a8c-42b5-90ee-348f6b77c407

Another browser based on the IE engine

MarkBrown — Mon, 04 Aug 2003 10:19:00 GMT

“MyIE2 is the most powerful and fully customized browser on earth. It can open multiple web pages in just one window, and come with tons of other nice features.“

http://www.myie2.com/html_en/home.htm

Nice features and skinnable interface. Based on the IE engine.

Battle of the blog

MarkBrown — Mon, 04 Aug 2003 09:26:00 GMT

Something to think about if your company merges or relocates

MarkBrown — Mon, 04 Aug 2003 08:25:00 GMT

Joel (March 28): “... when you relocate more than a couple of miles, some employees' lives would be too disrupted to make the move, so you lose a lot of employees, and all the institutional knowledge, skill, and experience that comes with those employees. While I was working at Viacom one of their companies, Blockbuster, decided to move from Florida to Texas after they hired a new CEO who lived in — Texas! What a coincidence! Only a small portion of the employees made the move. For years and years the business press watched agog as Blockbuster made mistake after inexcusable mistake, re-trying all kinds of ideas that had failed only two years earlier.”
[Joel on Software]

TypePad

MarkBrown — Sat, 02 Aug 2003 09:51:00 GMT

TypePad is a new personal publishing service from Six Apart designed for creating full-featured weblogs. Based on the same core as our popular Movable Type publishing system, TypePad will add a broader set of features for creating weblogs while making setup a simple process involving no installation of configuration.

Looks like its going to cost a little money to use

TypePad's three user levels will be priced at $4.95 per month for users at the TypePad Basic level, $8.95 per month for TypePad Plus users, and $14.95 per month for TypePad Pro users.

Creating an Online RSS News Aggregator with ASP.NET

MarkBrown — Thu, 31 Jul 2003 18:03:00 GMT

http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnaspp/html/aspnet-createrssw-aspnet.asp

Parsing CSV files

MarkBrown — Wed, 30 Jul 2003 21:28:00 GMT

Ed Kaim points out a method to import a CSV file into a DataSet. I'm probably one of those fellows that found his site while searching Google. I went about the procedure a little bit differently. Here's what I put together:

static DataSet ReadCSV(string file)
{
    if (! File.Exists(file) )
        return null;
    DataSet ds = new DataSet();
    OleDbConnection conn = null;
    string FileConnection = "Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source=" + 
        @Path.GetDirectoryName(file) + ";" + @"Extended Properties=""Text;HDR=YES;""";
    try
    {
        try
        {
            conn = new OleDbConnection();
            conn.ConnectionString = FileConnection;
            conn.Open();
        }
        catch
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Database connection can't be established");
            return null;
        }
        string sql = String.Format("SELECT * FROM {0}",Path.GetFileName(file));
        OleDbDataAdapter oda = new OleDbDataAdapter(sql, conn); 
        oda.SelectCommand.ExecuteNonQuery();
        oda.Fill(ds, "TableName");
    }
    catch (Exception e)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(e.Message);
        return null;
    }
    finally
    {
        if(conn != null)
            conn.Dispose();
    }
    return ds;
}