September 2008 Entries
Technorati Tags: Rants I always love it when you get a cheesy executive/manager who really stretches & attempts to sound technical but fails badly by using the term “Web 2.0”. First off, this term means absolutely nothing specific. I once had a non-technical CIO tell me that “JavaScript based Web Services are what Web 2.0 is all about”. Right then and there I knew he was really reaching for the stars to sound Savvy or technical, but in reality it really comes off pretty cheesy to a developer. What does the number “2.0” have to do with the entire internet...
Technorati Tags: Design Patterns Today, I came across a couple of confusing errors while trying to re-setup logging again on a new PC and running my web application. It was throwing an exception logging error for Enterprise Library in my Data Layer. Error 1: “Format of the initialization string does not conform to specification starting at index 45” This is a pretty common error that simply pertains to an incorrect DB connection in your config file (web.config, etc.) The problem on my end was that I had setup the DB connection string quite a while...
Technorati Tags: Tools Eventually I will get to some technical code Posts. But for now, I'm a bit delayed with some other things at work lately. I will be blogging about Code Generation, OOP, and other topics very soon though. In the meantime, I wanted to share a list of tools I regularly use now or have used in the past as a C# / ASP.NET Engineer listed below: ...
Technorati Tags: Job Searching If you're like me and have been in the IT industry for 5+ years (me 10), you start to realize that the grass is not always greener on the other side in a lot of shops out there. Before I get to the interview questions, I want to start by outlining the general types of shops and types of problems one can encounter in development shops. Characteristics of when the grass may NOT be greener: a) Poor Management or difficult culture & people micro managers who have to have their hands...
Technorati Tags: Opinion,Management,Teamwork I find it astounding how many development shops (from talking to many people over the years including my own experiences) frustrate the hell out of its own very motivated developers and push very good developers away literally. Pushing them away because a manager or set of managers are too stubborn and fail often to truly listen to the very people who they have hired to "do a great job" and to "give advice on what can be improved in order to benefit the business". Or maybe a manager has talked the talked but not walked the...
Technorati Tags: Subtext,Windows Live Writer,CSS The other day, when I started posting my first few posts, I was getting some weirdness in Windows Live Writer as it pertains to carriage returns. For example, when typing a post in Live Writer, a single line return appeared to be placing 3 line returns visually. The end result was a really spaced out looking blog post that just seemed strange to me while I was writing. This problem produced two results: a) When publishing my post, I noticed that on the live site, the line returns were showing up as one, not...
Technorati Tags: Rants I always love it when a fellow developer tells you at times he/she "doesn't recall" or "doesn't know" when you ask them a question (after doing your own research) based on something they clearly have done in the past (which is why you are asking them in the first place). Maybe that person you are asking had mentioned it to the team at some point, or maybe you know that in the past that they have done something like that, or maybe you even see it in use on their own...
Technorati Tags: FireFox,Tools Fiddler is one of the best tools to analyze web requests sent from a web site and much more. Normally, using Fiddler with FireFox is a huge pain and typically does not work well out of the box when testing localhost requests or any requests for that matter with Fiddler through Firefox. But by using FoxyProxy which is just a nice plug-in to FireFox, it allows you to setup different proxies in FireFox very easily, and you can then hook into Fiddler's proxy quickly, and start to catch requests over the wire when testing...
Technorati Tags: Subtext,Windows Live Writer,Open Source,Tools Subtext is a great open source blogging application that is free and has simply been getting better and better over time. This allows you to post to your blog locally for whatever reasons that you may have a need to do so (testing custom code, etc.). To setup Windows Live Writer to work with Subtext for localhost, perform the following steps below. (At the time of this post I was using Subtext v2.0 with Windows Live Writer v12.0.1370.325 and has also worked in previous versions of Live Writer) ...
