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Books Written by Brian Nantz |
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Oreilly’s OS Survey |
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By host on
5/16/2004
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Recently Oreilly conducted a survey of the most useful Open Source tools. I found the results interesting. Of course many of the projects you would expect are there. But there are many I wasn’t expecting (like ASP.NET Enterprise Manager) and some missing that I thought should have been there (like Open Office / Mozilla / Evolution).
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The horse before the cart. |
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By host on
5/13/2004
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It just occurred to me today, after reading the Microsoft Developer Tools Roadmap, that many of the cool things like Indigo, XAML, Avalon, WinFS are all things way down the road. Remember way back when it was announced that Whidbey (now Visual Studio .NET 2005) would have all these cool features? Probably the most impressive one was the SQL Hosted CLR so that we can write Stored Procs and Triggers in .NET code. This was incredibly delayed from what I have heard from MS because VS.NET 2005 had to release in parallel with the next SQL release (YUKON). YUKON, while worth the wait, has taken the SQL team at MS 5 years since their last release!
The problem is that the technologies that I mentioned in the beginning of this post are being shown on MSDN TV and The .NET Show. They are being pumped into the development community in conferences, etc. But these things will not be released for a while. The next version of Visual Studio (Orcas) is due out with the next version of Windows (Longhorn). They a
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XAML Libraries |
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By host on
5/3/2004
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Recently, at work I was assigned to create a way to allow users to generate custom fields in order to customize out application. The customer should be allowed to add as many fields as he wants as well as validation for the field and be able to search on the field. The database for this is fairly simple. The Windows Forms User Interface is the hard part.
In the UI, I decided to use tabs. There are a set of predefined tabs that ship with the application and additional tabs can be added by the customer. On these tabs the customer can layout the controls he wants to use. I decided to host the designer to gain all the benefits of aligning controls and such. Initially the user will only have 5 controls: Label, Textbox, ComboBox, DateTimePicker, MaskedTextBox () and validators: .
Now that the user has laid out the tab I want to easily store this and retrieve it from the database. I’ll will have to tell you that I am vehemently against storing binary blobs in the database. So I started looking
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Interviewing with MS. |
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By host on
4/22/2004
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Microsoft is infamous when it comes to their interviewing. Here are a few helpful tips if you even find yourself in this precarious position!
http://weblogs.asp.net/JobsBlog/
http://www.sellsbrothers.com/fun/msiview/
http://halcyon.usc.edu/~kiran/msqs.html
http://www.techinterview.org
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/riddles/intro.shtml
http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/misc/100798-1.shtml
http://www.acetheinterview.com/qanda/microsoft_interview.html
http://www.techinterviews.com/index.php?p=46
And of course the essential book:
How would you move Mount Fuji
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Robocopy |
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By host on
4/22/2004
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Every now and then you run into a new tool that you should have had for a long time. I recently showed a co-worker DebugView from SysInternals. This is great for capturing System.Debug.WriteLine messages even better Log4NET trace messages. But I found one today: RoboCopy part of the Resource Kit! This is great for a primitive backup of directories because it only copies changed files! Another NEW TOOL I use regularly is LogParser, it allows you to run SQL queries against a variety of Microsoft log files.
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A few Open Source Links |
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By host on
4/20/2004
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Since I am in the habit of collecting Open Source .NET links. Here is Thoughtworks Open Source Homepage. Lots of goodies!
Also check out Joel Pobar’s Rotor (AKA SSCLI) Community Resources.
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This is an update to my UI blog |
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By host on
4/18/2004
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This is an update to my dasBlog/default.aspx?date=2003-09-10#a76f42258-8701-4282-adf0-cab62c75b96d">UI blog. I have met many engineers who think they are UI wizards. The problem is that they rarely develop for the average computer user who may not understand to hover over for tool tips, or think of right clicking to find more options, I have found many users like tabs! I hate tabs. But I am not the user. If my product is not intuitive and easy to figure out then we have failed. No training should be required. Anyway enough with the rant. Here is another useful UI website.
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Virtual PC is an essential tool |
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By host on
4/12/2004
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Virtual PC is an essential tool. MS is supporting it very well. The product manager @ MS stated that soon VPC will be able to import WMWare images. This would be a great advantage to VPC over WMWare. In using VPC, I have used the newsgroup for several questions; it is one of the most active newsgroups I track from MS. Most of those questions have directed me to either Robert Moir’s Website or this website which is itself running in Virtual Server! People are using VPC in ways I never imagined! They are using it with ghost to convert from WMWare images today! This is a great product even thought shared drives do not yet work with Longhorn L.
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