Rick Strahl's Web Log

Weblog Posts in December 2003

End of year Reflections
December 31, 2003 @ 2:02 pm

It's New Year's Eve - I have nowhere to be and I'm having a nice kicked back, mellow day with no plans of big parties or fireworks. I'm looking forward to a nice quiet evening... The end of the year is a good time to sit back and to reflect. This has been an eventful year both personally and professionally. There have been lots of changes on both levels.

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Inky Business
December 31, 2003 @ 1:20 pm

I have several Ink Jets of various ages in my office here and I've noticed that the Ink usage light comes on just a little bit too soon on all of these printers.

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The next big thing - Part II
December 27, 2003 @ 11:34 pm

On the chance of sounding like a reactionary old fart I'm going to post a few more thoughts on this obviously charged topic started originally by Michael Earl. Steve Black as always makes a good point that we're being force fed new features that we really don't need. Not only that but really we're being forced into a new paradigm every few years and as developers there's a continual process of relearning going on. I'm torn on both sides of the argument. I agree with Steve's point but at t

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Finding Connection Strings
December 27, 2003 @ 11:33 am

Since I've been working on connecting to various database with various connection mechanisms - here are a couple of very useful links that show common connection strings for most different kinds of servers...

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Download Filenames
December 27, 2003 @ 10:59 am

Why is it that when you download software vendors insist on naming files Setup.exe or even sticking to some crazy 8 character convention that you won't be able to decipher 5 minutes after you've installed this software? I'm in the process of building Data Access Components and so I ended up downloading about 30 installs over the last 2 days. I'd say out of those 30, 20 had names that you wouldn't recognize.

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The next Big Thing - always
December 26, 2003 @ 12:04 am

Microsoft is already on to the next big thing while we're lagging behind. For one that attended PDC this year and was super excited to see what technologies are coming down the pike, it's also extrodinarily frustrating to not be able to take advantage of some of this technology. I can't tell you how many times I've been looking up in my development day and think to myself “Damn it sure would be nice to take advantage of this new feature today“. Generics, all the high level changes in ASP.Net,

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Debugging Objects Stored into Session Vars
December 23, 2003 @ 12:59 pm

When you use Session state in ASP.Net to store an object, then use Trace on the page to view the content of the Session object, Trace shows you a nice list of all the Session vars and their content. For most custom objects you don't much get info though: It returns the name of the class, which is the default implementation of ToString(). If you want useful information override the ToString() method on your custom class and return a string that contains the content of your class. You can use a

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Async Delegates and Security with PInvoke (Access Denied Errors)
December 22, 2003 @ 1:14 am

Here’s an interesting one I ran into today with Asynchronous Delegates and PInvoke calls. In Web Monitor I have a splash screen that pops up when the app starts. It runs on a separate thread so that it can pop immediately before the main form of the application loads. The form also contains a button that uses the Win32 ShellExecute API to load a URL for registration. It all worked well until yesterday.

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Global Statics and Static Constructors
December 19, 2003 @ 8:54 am

The use of static properties is certainly nothing new, but every time I demonstrate some of the ways I use Statics in conjunction with Static constructors at a conference there are a lot of folks who have not used this technique to manage global state in applications. Static properties are essentially properties that are global to all instances of a given object instance. Statics are not accessible on the instance itself but rather are a single store of memory that is referenced through

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Help Builder Online Demo updated
December 18, 2003 @ 1:07 pm

I've just updated the Help Builder online demo which can be used, among other things, to document a .Net assembly. You can put in a .Net Assembly that's not huge (less than 20 classes) and Help Builder will try to document it for you and spit out HTML and CHM documentation for it. Now I say try because if your assembly has external dependencies that may cause the assembly to not be accessible.

One Click Deployment - not quite...
December 18, 2003 @ 12:02 am

Many of you know that I’ve been a big advocate of smart client applications and whenever possible to avoid building complex interfaces in HTML and rather rely on rich client applications that communicate over the Web using Web Services or raw XML interfaces. While I think the tools to do this are out there I also think that we’re a long way off from making this a reality. Microsoft is trying really, really hard to make .Net sound like the solution to the HTML vs. smart client dilemma by try

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Gas Gripe
December 17, 2003 @ 10:23 am

We here on Maui have the highest gas prices in the country. I guess that’s the price you pay for living on a little island in the middle of nowhere, but it’s a little maddening when you hear the news that in the rest of the country gas prices are dropping continuously while here they go up with every piece of bad news but never down when things lighten up again.

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Typed DataRow Generation
December 16, 2003 @ 2:28 am

Yesterday I talked about some of the things that I don’t like about typed DataSets, so I decided to do something about it. My problem with the DataSet generator is that it generates A LOT of code. And a lot of that code runs even if you don't use a table in the database for example. The generated code does things like create new datatables for all the tables even if you don't ask for all of them. This is relatively slow because the table fields are parsed into Column collections for all fields.

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Typed DataSet and Business Objects
December 15, 2003 @ 2:31 pm

I've been giving some thought to the typed DataSet debate recently. For the most part my preference has been to use untyped DataSets because frankly it is easier to not have to worry about synching database and code every time a change is made to the database. For a long time I've completely ignored typed DataSets, but last week I dug in and took a closer look at what is really involved to make this work in applications. There's no doubt that typed DataSet provide a good amount of functionality

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Yet another Blog
December 13, 2003 @ 10:21 pm

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