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Books Written by Brian Nantz |
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Cool Free XML Book |
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By host on
8/26/2004
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Here is the link (http://theserverside.net/books/addisonwesley/EssentialXML/index.tss) and if you register with TheServerSide.NET then you can get this book free too. Thanks to TheServerSide.NET.
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Visual Studio .Net Build Configuration Screen |
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By host on
8/15/2004
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Probably the most frustrating problem with Visual Studio .NET 2003 is that it doesn’t keep the build configuration setting properly. It’s probably that I am not checking the proper files into source control or something like that. It is so frustrating and embarrassing when you have changed code and hit F5 and the problem is not fixed. Then you add a break point and figure out that the project is not even being built! Hopefully, MSbuild will fix some of these problems. Currently I use a large solution (150 projects) which include enterprise template projects. I do some things in post build events and it is annoying that the post build steps are run every time I debug! Even when nothing is built! Then of course the build fails because the post build script failed. This is because some files might have been in use and couldn’t be copied in the post build event. MSBuild can’t come fast enough!
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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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