Development and Vista

Visual Studio vs. Vista: What's going on here?

What's going on here indeed?

I understand that applications/operating systems cannot always have full backward compatibility. But the inability to run their flagship development environment on their (near) future flag ship OS is just insane.

I'm sure that Microsoft will eventually issue some patches/fixes. But until then this is only hurt the adoption rate of Vista by developers and more importantly businesses.

Javascript ASP.NET MessageBox

In Windows Forms it is very easy to pop up a status message by calling MessageBox.Show(“message”). It is that kind of object model we want in ASP.NET for printing out JavaScript alerts. We want Alert.Show(“message”) in ASP.NET.

JavaScript: Alert.Show(”message”) from ASP.NET code-behind

Simple and Elegant. Makes you wonder why somthing like this was not included with ASP.NET 2.0.

How to contribute patches to Open Source Projects

Got some extra time? Want to help contribute to a piece of software which has improved your development or life?

Read this post by Scott Hanselman detailing the steps required to contribute patches to Open Source Projects.

Krugle, The Google for Source Code

Quickly find that Code Snippet you're looking for

find code find answers
Krugle makes it easy for developers to find source code and
technical information - fast!

This could be pretty useful as long as the script kiddies stay away.

Temporary File Name

The Path.GetTempFileName() It's an easy way to reserve a temporary file name without having to reinvent the wheel, Pretty neat.

Once GetTempFileName() is called a temporary zero-length file is created for you, therefore guaranteeing it's availability.
The only gripe I have is that I cannot change the file extension without doing more I/O work on the file. It would have been nice if there was an overload to change the extension. For Instance, generating temporary HTML files etc... Files generated are currently with the *.tmp extension.

Infection and 7th Son Podcasts

Two of my favourite podcast novels came to an end recently:

Infection by Scott Sigler (with lots and lots of violence) and 7th Son by J.C. Hutchins (the master of cliff hangers)

Both final episodes were awesome. And no, I'm not going to spoil it for you, check them out for yourself.
I've been a fan of Scott Sigler since the days of Ancestor and discoverd J.C Hutchins' work through his promos.
So hurry up and download them while they're still avilable for free.

Virtual PC Free

I know this is old news, but this application deserves a mention. Virtual PC has saved me more times than I can count.
Especially working with my legacy printer driver software.

Taken from the site:

Microsoft will also offer the free download of Virtual PC 2007, with support for Windows Vista, available in 2007

This is great news indeed.

Sharing information between User Controls

I recently helped a friend clean up some code he inherited.
This web application had many user controls which needed to maintain some common information between each other. So each user control loads up the state from the business logic for each of it's instances.
As this was too repetitive and a performance hit, I decided to use per request caching. So only the first instance loads the information, and subsequent request are thought the cache.

More information here:
http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/060904-1.aspx

First Post, Yet again

Well this is my second blog. Used to have one a while back I got rid of it. Mostly due to neglect really.

So why start all over again?
I realised that by having a blog I was able to keep track of my thoughts over the years. Well at least on a technical level, which gives a lot of perspective on my progress. So this is my second attempt at this, hopefully I would keep it up-to-date this time round.

Please be advised that I'm not a professional writer (if that's not Obvious by now). I'll try keep this blog clean, cohesive and technical as possible, but please do forgive the occasional digressions.