I'm definitely installing this one when I get a chance. http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/briankel/PDC2008-ShowOff-Entry-Clipboard-History-for-Visual-Studio/

Basically it keeps a history of your clipboard items like Office but with one killer twist. "Paste as {Language}". It will take the C# you copied and Paste it as VB. I'm sure it's not 100% but still helps quite a bit.

All of these new C# 4.0 dynamic features require parts of the DLR. Thus it looks like MS is taking the DLR and making it a first class citizen in the CLR. This also I'm guessing will make IronPython and IronRuby first class citizens as well. A huge win for the dynamic languages community. For C# 4.0 it is bittersweet. It means better interoperability when calling things created in IronRuby or IronPython but there are limitations. Below is an excerpt from the C# 4.0 WhitePaper (available here http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/csharpfuture)

Open issues

There are a few limitations and things that might work differently than you would expect.

·         The DLR allows objects to be created from objects that represent classes. However, the current implementation of C# doesn’t have syntax to support this.

·         Dynamic lookup will not be able to find extension methods. Whether extension methods apply or not depends on the static context of the call (i.e. which using clauses occur), and this context information is not currently kept as part of the payload.

·         Anonymous functions (i.e. lambda expressions) cannot appear as arguments to a dynamic method call. The compiler cannot bind (i.e. “understand”) an anonymous function without knowing what type it is converted to.

One consequence of these limitations is that you cannot easily use LINQ queries over dynamic objects:

dynamic collection = …;

var result = collection.Select(e => e + 5);

If the Select method is an extension method, dynamic lookup will not find it. Even if it is an instance method, the above does not compile, because a lambda expression cannot be passed as an argument to a dynamic operation.

There are no plans to address these limitations in C# 4.0.

To me this is a very huge limitation. I can already see that most of my interop with dynamic languages will probably involve collections of some sort. Also this would come into play with collections from Dynamic COM objects. LINQ is so powerful and easy to use, it may end up being a major annoyance to have to move away from it for dynamic typing. I hope they work on this for C# 4.5

Well I spent most of the day working on some peculiar problems with PICK. Then left to take my girlfriend out for her birthday. Just now catching up on whats gone on today at PDC. Man it seems like it was a huge day.

First off Windows Azure and the new .NET Services. From what I've read so far I can see some compelling uses for the .NET services and sharing content, id's and roles around the web.

The big one that I haven't seen much press on yet is C# 4.0. Looks like we are getting dynamic binding in the language. While this loses compile type safety it gives C# good ground against things like Ruby and PHP.

Named, Optional and Default parameters. Oh how I've been waiting for these since switching to .NET from PHP. I used to take advantage of these features all the time. It annoys me when I can use them in Attributes in C# but not on actual methods. I'm going to love this.

VS2010 and C# will CTP are available in a virtual PC here

Here's a better overview stolen from http://blogs.msdn.com/samng/archive/2008/10/28/microsoft-visual-studio-2010.aspx

1. Dynamic binding. We've introduced a new type, dynamic, which behaves much like object, but allows the operations performed on your object to be bound at runtime instead of compile time.
2. Named and Optional parameters. You can now specify default values for your parameters, allowing them to be optionally specified at the call site. We've also added the ability for your arguments to be passed by name, so that you can specify exactly which arguments you want to give, and refrain from specifying the rest (assuming they're optional).
3. Com interop features. We've done quite a bit of work to improve COM interop. These include:

• No ref for COM calls. For all COM calls that take ref arguments, you can specify an argument without a ref, and the compiler will generate a local for you and generate a ref to that local as the argument.
• No PIA. We have introduced the ability to deploy your applications which use Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs) without referencing the actual PIA at runtime. This allows compiling against them, but not needing to ship them with your application.
• Implicit dynamic for COM types. We now give you the option of turning all objects returned from COM into dynamics so that you can perform late bound calls off of them instead of having to cast the result in order to make it useful.

So today I was tasked with helping a client move an old custom VB6 app to a new Windows 2003 server. The company that created it was asking for an arm and a leg for a simple transfer. After we moved the entire program directory over everything seemed to be fine until we encountered an "ActiveX component can't create object" error. I was perplexed on how to track down the issue. There were not accompanying DLLs or OCX files. I tried Process Explorer to see if I could find any failed openings and the strings contained in the exe.

After some searching on the net I found this lovely page http://www.cryer.co.uk/brian/windows/trbl_nt_axccco.htm . It details on how to use Sysinternals Regmon to track down issues with failed ActiveX creation. Basicall you watch your program for registery key openings and look for any failed opens in the HKCR/Classes path. After running the program and encountering the error I found it.
HCKR\Classes\cdonts

When I saw that come up I immediately knew what to do. cdonts is no longer included with windows server. It is an emailing library using cdo. I've had to install it on new Windows 2003 servers more than once so old ASP classic sites could run. All I needed to do after figuring it out was copy the cdonts.dll over to the C:\windows\system32\ directory and run regsvr32 on it. Everything was golden.

I've been using Sysinternals for years. I'm always amazed at what new ways I can use their utilities to track down issues. Process Explorer has been a godsend for me over the years. After discovering it, removing malware from computers took me less than half the time it used to. It gives me so much information I'm not sure how I got by without it.

The Sysinternals Suite is a must have for any serious windows programmer or administrator. It ranges from programs to monitor network connections to being able to see and suspend individual threads in a program.

The other day I was posed with a problem to implement a "Send as Attachment" feature to an existing application. I thought, well this should be easy I've seen many other do it before. I quoted the work at a few hours, figuring some quick searching would give my my answers. I was wrong.

Sending an email using the default email client is very easy with the mailto: protocol. The problem lies in adding an attachment. Common mail programs like Outlook and Thunderbird do not support the attachment option. So, I started looking at MAPI the native API for doing this. I could not find any .NET wrappers. I did find that there were controls created by MS for VB6. Most of the .NET examples I found used COM interop with the ActiveX controls. But after trying these controls (which look like they were last updated in 98) I found them to not work in XP SP3. I'd get random exceptions and was never able to actually get an email dialog to pop up.

After failing with the ActiveX controls I was out of time. The MAPI native commands may have worked but it would take too long to set up the native calls and test it. After discussing with the client we ended up coming up with a bit hackish but workable solution. I would use the mailto: protocol and then launch explorer with the attachment selected. To them this is a minor annoyance that is acceptable. To me this an unfortunate sign of the times.

Things that were once "easy" for native applications become complicated and buggy for managed. It seems too often that I must make use native calls or old unsuported COM objects to get the job done. While MS has done a great job building up the .NET Framework. It seems that many native API's still remain unwrapped. Furthermore some places I read that the MAPI api is unstable on Vista. It seems that some API's are slipping through the cracks.

Well Code Camp 5 is in the bag. It was a large turn out and many great talks. My talk however drew no interest. Oh well, I tried and will try again. I'm thinking of making my post about LINQ and Refactoring into a talk.

The talks I went to:
The Intersection of F# and LINQ
This was a great talk about how F# takes LINQ and adds much more value to it with it's functional nature. The demonstration was a ray tracer that used LINQ to build up all of the reflected pixels. It was quite impressive. Combine it with the Arc talk and I am now very interested in Functional programming.

The Arc Programming Language
I had seen this talk a few days earlier. The speaker was hilarious and did a great job of bringing excitement back to lisp. Arc is a new dialect of Lisp that aims to cut down on parenthesis and add shorthand for common operations. He added objects to Arc with six lines of code, quite impressive.

BOO! A Wrist-Friendly Language for the CLI
BOO! is a another language along the lines of Lisp where it can redefine parts of itself through macros. The difference is it is statically typed like C#. It does offer quite a bit of reduction in code written. The presenter Justin Chase did a good job showing many aspects of the language. I also won a shirt for figuring out that the mystery function was calculating a fibonocci sequence. The code for it was quite cool, a,b = b + a or something like that.

Building MyTube with Microsoft Silverlight 2
Jeff Brand from Microsoft was giving this talk. It was a basic overview on SilverLight, the purpose for it and how to implement a simple youtube interface. I didn't stay for the entire thing, I had to go get ready for my talk.

My talk "Pick/Multivalue 101"
No one that was interested showed. Not that I was surprised but still a bit disappointed.  While giving the talk at my work we had over 15 people show. One of my co-workers showed and the other guy that showed was just looking for a place to sit. So instead we talked about LINQ, customized programming in Linux and a bit about Multivalue

I went to the speakers after party, got to gossip with some people from Magenic. Learned that Justin Chase left Magenic a few weeks ago to work on the Blend team at MS. He's a lucky guy and seemed rather excited for the features they are working on that he can't talk about. I'm sure some of them may come up soon at PDC. I did hear some gossip earlier in the day that SilverLight 2 RTM is going to be released as early as tomorrow (Oct 13th).

Being a developer is one of the luckiest professions in the world. Just take a minute and think about this: How many professions out there are you paid to learn? Seriously, if we wish to succeed we must learn. Many times we need to learn during the project. We are given the opportunity and often encouraged to learn new ways of doing something, come up with innovative ideas, implement new technologies. Many companies offer compensation for developers to get certified, keep up, to learn. I've also found that many of the people I know that went to college for CS came out ill prepared for the real development world.

I was lucky in some ways. I got a job running websites during high school, I was paid to learn and mature as a programming. I wasn't lucky that pay sucked and I had to get food from charity at times. But there was always being able to learn on the job and the outlook that real developers jobs paid very well.

Over the years as I've matured as a developer I've learned quite a lot. I strive to keep on learning, branching out into new areas. I've found that my inner urge to learn is also what has allowed me to succeed. Below are some of my tips to being a successful programmer

Be passionate

The one thing I've seen in every great developer I've ever met is passion. Passion for the job, passion for learning, passion for being challenged. There is no way to improve without having a need for it. If being a developer is just a job, just a way to make money, I'm sorry but you should find something else to do. I've seen many developers that have that attitude and they just don't make it. They make mistakes and never learn from them, they have difficulties completing anything on time, and wind up getting fired quite a bit.

Never be afraid to try something new

While sometimes it's hard to break out of things you know that work, learning that things can/cannot be done another way expands your experience and keeps your mind trying to work outside the box.

Keep up with the Joneses

This one can be very hard if you have a full schedule. But trying to keep up with the new technologies will expose you to new ideas, new ways of tackling problems. One cannot grow if one does not see another way.

Pursue certifications

Some people see certifications as a croc. They see that lots of tech schools teach for the test and thats it. I can understand that. I have persued certifications as a professional goal. Going through the MCTS certifications for ASP.NET and Winforms has exposed me to many things I probably wouldn't have known about in .NET. I try to read through the entire training kit books MS puts out for the certifications.

Gaining the certifications are also good for ones ego. Having the goal to set out and earn the certification can keep you discleplined and give you a sense of accomplishment. It's something you can show your bosses and peers that you do indeed know what you're talking about. It gives you more bargaining power when negotiating a raise or looking for a new job. While some may not help you as much as you'd hope, having both real world experience and certifications can be a 1-2 combo.

Microsoft's certification track is the best I've seen. You can start out by getting Technological specific certifications with the MCTS series. You can get just certified in ASP.NET, Windows Applications, Windows Mobile.. and on. Then you can expand on those with Professional certifications with the MCPD's. These ones include application lifecycle components. Professional ways of breaking down an application into logical, component and class diagrams to implementation of architectures and finishing with deployment and maintenance.

Learn new languages

This one can be hard for people that only use one language at work. Learning a new language again helps you get exposed to new ideas and ways of tackling problems.

The hardest thing is actually finding something to do in that language to learn it. I've found that the best way is to have something you implement in every language. Whether it's some tool you've developed or a little game. I had the Al Bhed translator. I originally developed it in PHP to help me out with the game Final Fantasy 10. I then tried doing it in JavaScript, then Java, then C++, XUL (firefox extension) and then in C#.NET Winform. It gave me a common goal in each of the languages and forced me to find out how to do it in each one. They all had their own strengths and weaknesses. PHP's Array functions made some of it very easy to implement, where javascript was a bit clunky. C# wasn't as elegant as the PHP but it was much faster in execution.

Try to find languages that have a different goal than just another application. Languages like F# for example. While it's possible to write every day applications with it, it's real power lies in analyzing and transforming data. Learning it opens up a world of mathmatics in new ways.

Learn new platforms 

Simply this means do not just be a web developer or an application developer. Continuously expanding the platforms you know can increase your understanding of how other people develop. I started out as a web programmer and over the years I've written programs for the commandline, windows services, web services, mobile phones, automated scripts, desktop applications, rich internet apps (flash, silverlight), dynamic web sites and more. I'm currently picking up XNA and trying to learn what programming a game is like. I'm learning a newfound respect for game programmers.

Seek out challenges

If your current job is not challenging you find a way to be challenged. Sometimes even playing around things outside of work is enough. Go to your boss and see if theres ways you can increase your workload, or get into more complex projects. Express an interest in new things. If you are stuck at a job where that is impossible, I recommend it may be time to look elsewhere. Get some certifications and new skills under your belt and start looking. There are some great tech jobs out there, good places to find a place to be challenged are in start ups or smaller custom software companies. Places like where I work at, Sierra Bravo. When I joined I had 6 years experience but still would consider myself a novice programmer. Within the next year I worked on more than 20 projects, on many platforms and felt like I had finally become a professional developer.

Now being on the verge of 4 years later I feel like I'm an accomplished developer, I'm able to start incorporating more advanced concepts in to my projects. I can see a much larger picture. As the years have gone on the scope of the picture I can see has expanded. I once could only see the single web page I was working on. Then I was able to start understanding the system of web pages I would design. I then started graduating onto being able to write a complete web site. That is when I decided that desktop applications were next. The scope expanded to understanding state, threads, and desktop experience. My first applications were cluttered, did not have much for layers. I started to learn more about the concept of breaking out applications into libraries and layers. These days I've graduated to an architect that can take the project proposal. Break it down to sections, logical components and build the applications architecture. Define the database, the data layers, the data objects and the front end. I can incorporate n-tier designs, abstract out business logic to a web service. Write API's that work for websites as well as windows mobile.

Really it all boils down to is: Have passion for your job, passion to learn new things and keep yourself challenged. Never be afraid to learn new skills. In this day an age a developer needs to know more than just one platform. They need to understand a larger scope to make it.

Ok in the last few years I've had to take over a number of websites written in VB.NET, or I should say written in VB but somehow using .NET. My issue really isn't with VB.NET itself. It's obvious the developers that did these sites (none of them affiliated in any way) came from doing classic ASP and moved onto ASP.NET. The problem is they continued with their classic ASP practices and did not seem to come close to grasping what ASP.NET really was.

Issues I've had:

• None of the sites will compile in Visual Studio
• All of the sites were running in ASP.NET 2.0 but none used master pages. They all used Server-Side Includes (which should be banned) to include common blocks.
  
• No use of controls or classes.
• No use of code-behind
• All SQL is dynamic and full of SQL Injection vulnerabilities
• All used include files which set up global variables and functions to be used in the page lifecycle (one of the main reasons the sites wont compile)
• One of the sites had every folder set up as it's own application in IIS. Their hosting provider has no interface for even seeing this, the developer used to call in to have this set up. More on this site later (refered to as BS1)
  
• Most of the sites only make use of the most basic controls
• One site (BS1) tried to use more advanced controls like Formview but failed miserably. In this instance, used all over the site, the developer made a formview, used an EditTemplate and bound a dataset to the formview. Sounds decent so far right? The issue came in after I made some changes that my data was not being updated in the dataset. Tracking down the issue was very hard to do when you have no "Go to Definition" and there are tons of "Include Files" that are copied and pasted throughout the site. I found that there was a  "Magic" function that did what databinding is supposed to do. It looked for any controls in the formview that matched the exact name of a column and bound the data.
  
• BS1 includes so many functions that recreate .NET functionality that his developer seemed to give up on getting to work within an hour or trying. I want to go home sick everytime a change comes up on this site.

Basically on every one of these sites we have pitched rewrites. Most of them on grounds of security, which is completely true. One of the sites we've had to take down due to rampant SQL Injections. It wont be up until the client decides on which overhaul to rewrite proposal they want to to sign off on.

If the BS1 rewrite ever happens I hope I am not the one to do it. While the site needs it, the business rules and database behind it are majorly complex and in some points completely bonkers. Redesigning the database will be completely out of the question due to the amount of time to migrate that and other business apps the client uses to work with it.

After all of the things I've seen I'm scared of how many classic ASP developers have moved to ASP.NET without taking the time to understand what ASP.NET (or even .NET) is all about. The thing that scares me the most is that it has been 6 years since .NET was released. Some of the sites were even written starting with ASP.NET 2.0. Yet the developers probably used Visual Studio as nothing more than a bloated notepad.

I came from doing site development in PHP 3/4. Classic ASP and PHP 3/4 development were alike in many ways. One would use server side includes to include headers/footers for the page. There would more than likely be a main include script that set up all the functions/classes and global variables to be used on the page. All the HTML was generated with inline code. I can understand moving from an environtment like that to ASP.NET you may start out recreating what you know.

What I don't understand why these developers never felt a need to move beyond that when there is overwhelming evidence that ASP.NET can do so much more. The old way is horrible to maintain, can take a long time to develop and there are much better practices out there. While I was a PHP developer I started using Smarty templates. I loved having templates that abstracted the presentation from the real code. Smarty has become one of the defacto standards in PHP development over the years. It gave me the introduction to using "controls" and "master pages". It made reuse easier and presentation cleaner. To go so long continuing the same bad practices is unfathomable to me.

Another thing that amazes me is ASP.NET actually works with server side includes. The dynamic compiler for the site will included the code and build a DLL for the page. I'm a bit pissy at MS for even allowing this. The included code is compiled into every DLL and whenever a change is made every one of those pages must be recompiled.

The company I work for, Sierra Bravo Corp, got its start connecting legacy PICK systems to the modern world. They accomplished this via a proprietary client-server protocol we internally call db_server (Official name is SierraDBC or BravoConnecter). Sure there are other PICK connection technologies out there none of them support multiple PICK systems and OS Platforms. Currently we support : D3, Universe, UniData, JBase, MvBase and others I don't remember right now.

I maintain the .NET client library. It was originally a port of the Java library which was a port of the COM library. It's come quite a long way since then. Recently we've found the need for compression to be added for some of our client. One in particular has many employees out in the field connecting via AirCards where bandwidth availability can be a problem. On top of that the application needs to retrieve quite a bit of real time data from the home office. Retrieving 2mb of client history is not unheard of.

After the server developer added compression to the result stream I started working on the client end. I figured it should be a snap. If we have compression turned on, just pass in a DeflateStream (fed by the NetworkStream of the TcpClient connection) to the StreamReader we already use to retrieve the results.

StreamReader ResultReader;
if (IsConnectionTypeSet(ConnectionOptionTypes.EnableCompression))
{
    DeflateStream dfs = new DeflateStream(ns,CompressionMode.Decompress);
    ResultReader = new StreamReader(dfs, Encoding.ASCII, false);
}
else
{
    ResultReader = new StreamReader(ns, Encoding.ASCII, false);
}

One would think that's all that it would take, right?

I was sadly mistaken. I would receive an exception (System.IO.InvalidDataException:"Block length does not match with its complement.") every time I would try to read from the stream.

The issue lies in the use of zlib for the compressed stream. zlib and DEFLATE use the same algorithm for compression. The difference is zlib sends two bytes of header data. So all the answers I found were to pop off the first two bytes of the stream.

StreamReader ResultReader;
if (IsConnectionTypeSet(ConnectionOptionTypes.EnableCompression))
{
    DeflateStream dfs = new DeflateStream(ns,CompressionMode.Decompress);
    ResultReader = new StreamReader(dfs, Encoding.ASCII, false);
    ns.ReadByte();
    ns.ReadByte();
}
else
{
    ResultReader = new StreamReader(ns, Encoding.ASCII, false);
}

 This worked just fine but I was annoyed about how ugly it looked. I needed to move that ugliness out of there. So I wrote a ZlibStream class to do this for me. I made it for only Decompressing streams since I didn't have the budget to go and actually implement the zlib headers.

[ZlibStream.cs]

    /// <summary>
    /// Supports decompressing a DeflateStream created by the zlib library
    /// </summary>
    class ZlibStream : DeflateStream
    {
        #region Fields

        private bool HasRead = false;

        #endregion

        #region Constructors
        /// <summary>
        /// Initiates ZlibStream in Decompress mode
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="stream">One of the System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode values that indicates the action to take</param>
        public ZlibStream(Stream stream)
            : base(stream, CompressionMode.Decompress)
        {

        }
        /// <summary>
        /// Initiates ZlibStream in Decompress mode
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="stream">One of the System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode values that indicates the action to take</param>
        /// <param name="leaveOpen">true to leave the stream open; otherwise, false.</param>
        public ZlibStream(Stream stream, bool leaveOpen)
            : base(stream, CompressionMode.Decompress, leaveOpen)
        {

        }
        #endregion

        #region Public Methods

        public override int Read(byte[] array, int offset, int count)
        {
            if (HasRead == false)
            {
                this.BaseStream.ReadByte();
                this.BaseStream.ReadByte();
                this.HasRead = true;
            }
            return base.Read(array, offset, count);
        }

        #endregion

    }

As you can see it is very simple. Since all the StreamReader does is call the Read method I just needed to remove those bytes during the first pass.  This class is extremely simple and limited in its functionality. Doing Asynchronous reads with BeginRead will not work. I checked via reflector and it does not use the DeflateStream.Read method. It handles the BaseStream's Read methods on its own.

The one thing I may need to expand is doing the popping of the two bytes. Currently it's not checking to see if the stream has any bytes to read. So far in testing this hasn't been a problem. I'm going to try and see if I can create a situation where the bytes are not available initially. I have a suspicion that the ReadByte() waits for a Byte to be available and errors out on the Timeout value

So my result is as elegant as can be

StreamReader ResultReader;
if (IsConnectionTypeSet(ConnectionOptionTypes.EnableCompression))
{
    ZlibStream dfs = new ZlibStream(ns);
    ResultReader = new StreamReader(dfs, Encoding.ASCII, false);
}
else
{
    ResultReader = new StreamReader(ns, Encoding.ASCII, false);
}

Over the weekend I started Reading "CLR Via C#". I picked it up at Borders earlier this year with a certification book. I was trying to get more MCTS certs at the time and never ended up reading it. Also every time I look at it I feel like it's that black box I'll never be able to understand. I realized this is a bad attitude to have, so I opened it up and began reading. Instead of becoming lost, I feel like some things are becoming found.

I realize I should have read this book right away. So far nothing has been entirely over my head. I have had to reread some paragraphs due to sentences being heavy on the the terms. Also the author "Jeff Richter" tries to use the correct CLR terms and they sometimes clash with C# and general OO terms. An example is he uses "type" as the term for a static class.

I've made it 11 chapters in and so far it has been full of those "so thats how that works" and "thats good to know" moments. The biggest one so far has been the Events chapter. He covers a C# feature that has not been covered in any of the C# books I have read.

In C# you can declare Events like Properties. That is instead of using "get" and "set" blocks, one can use "add" and "remove" blocks. He covers this because the default implementation of events in the CLR is a bit flawed when it comes to thread safety. The CLR will lock the full object when adding and removing event delegates. He gives an example of overcoming these flaws by implementing manual locking in the "add" and "remove" blocks.

private event EventHandler<SomeEventArgs> somethingHappend;
private Object mLock = new Object();
public event EventHandler<SomeEventArgs> SomethingHappend
{
    add
    {
        lock (mLock)
        {
            this.somethingHappend += value;
        }
    }
    remove
    {
        lock (mLock)
        {
            this.somethingHappend -= value;
        }
    }
}

As you can see it looks much like a C# property. It uses a private event that is exposed publically through two blocks. Other than the keywords the other major difference is you cannot set access modifers on the "add" and "remove" blocks. It would be very bad programming to let someone add an event delegate but not let them remove it.

I have one application that I maintain where this will come in very handy. Planning on testing out the difference very soon.

I highly recommend this book for any serious .NET developer. I kick myself for not learning more about the CLR in the first place. Visual Studio sometimes babies the programmer too much I think. That and many programmers are lazy and love to just know enough to get by. I find these kinds of programmers have a very hard time working at Sierra Bravo. We have such a large variety of projects that one must learn quickly and know enough to jump the entire gammut of .NET applications. As a .NET developer here it's impossible to just be an ASP.NET developer or WinForms developer. I like it that way, it ensures that I'm never board and am learning all the time.

In my tenure so far I have written, Winforms Applications, entire .NET CF warehouse management applications, fully globalized ASP.NET web sites, various web services, various windows services, System Tray utilities, a Vending Machine controller program (implementing various serial protocols), written TCP clients for propietary protocols and much more. I have also helped companies migrate to/from MSSQL databases with various front ends. Heck, I'm even working on a C++ Win32 mobile application this week. I have done more in 3 1/2 years than a typical programmer does in 10 years.

Understanding how something works makes it much easier to implement a project with it. I found when I was a PHP programmer that I really went from amatuer to professional when I studied how PHP parses the script, allocates memory for variables. This is not an easy thing to do without looking at the source code. There are no good books out there about the "PHP Runtime". Knowing the rammifications of taking advantage of variable variables and not unsetting after use helped me take one of my more complext php programs and reduce it's memory usage 3 fold.

I did a bit of impulse shopping yesterday.  I had $15 in reward zone coupons. So I went to Best Buy after work to see if I could find a new mouse to replace my broken MX Revolution. To my dismay they had it for $20 more than what I paid for it at the same store a year ago. I started looking at wireless keyboards as well since my current set up involves a ps2 extender cable and a ps2 to usb converter.

After finding the Logitech LX 710 keyboard/mouse combo was pretty nifty I went browsing the PC section. Low and behold I found in the back of the section that have one aisle end with clearance PC's. I have no idea why I haven't noticed this before but I haven't. Most of the PC's there were unboxed due to them being display models.

I've been wanting a Home Theatre PC for quite some time now. I bought a 360 hoping that it could work as one but it refusing to play most of the videos I throw at it. I have a bit of an Anime habit and gotta watch my Bleach, Naruto and Code Geass R2 every week.

After a bit of comparison shopping on what they had their I decided to pick up a Pentium Dual Core gateway for $434.
Vista Home Premium
Pentium Dual Core E2180 (upgradable to Core 2 Quad)
2GB DDR2 PC-6400
500GB 7200 HD
Geforce 7100 Integrated Graphics (with VGA and DVI output)
Integrated 5.1 Surround Sound (with Digital IN/OUT)
12-in-1 card reader media bay
DVD Writer with Lightscribe

There was a similar one for $120 less but it used Intel graphics, had half the RAM, no media bay, no built in surround sound and no DVD burner. It's easy to do the math it would cost at least $200 to upgrade the cheaper one.

It's nice that it came with Home Premium. Saves me from using my Vista Ultimate I got from Heroes Happen {Here}. I still may install it since it'd be nice to do development on it. I have been mulling over a flash card program for the little one. I don't have the time I wish I did to help her learn her alphabet and things like that.

When I went to ring it up I found out that on top of the $15 in coupons I had it was also 5% off for it being unboxed. Then they drop the bombshell that they need to do a restore on it to remove their display software. It'd take a half an hour and the store closed before then. I was able to convince them that I could do it myself. (after all it comes with a restore disc right?).

I get home, connect it to my Sharp Aquos 42D64U, connected my new wireless mouse and keyboard and booted it up. The first thing I get is command prompt full of diagnostic utilities. Geek Squad forgot their disc in the PC. I'll probably bring it back later today. It's got all these nice warnings about property of best buy. I find this funny because at my work we've done a bunch of software for Geek Squad. The founder has been to our place many times. We just got done doing a whole new scheduling system for them. I'm not sure but it's possible we may have even worked on one of these utilties.

After taking the disk out it boots to windows and auto logs in. This is where things get fun. Their display software is called A.R.C.H.I.E (didn't write down what it meant). I thought I'd be able to just stop it from booting up and all would be good. Boy was I wrong. This software rootkits itself to the system. Everytime windows boots it gets wiped clean. All new accounts, settings, programs are wiped and everything is put back to display mode. It launches tons of little programs at the start. Most I found where actually .NET programs (easy to tell cause they used the default .NET Winforms App icon).

I wish I had monkeyed around with this A.R.C.H.I.E thing longer to find out how they rootkited it so well but I was anxious to get a fully working media center that handle any format I throw at it. I go to open the big envelop they gave me with all the PC material and there's no disk. I'm a bit dissappointed but figure, I got that Vista Ultimate I can use that. After that I realize I have my Anytime Upgrade disk for my laptop and the gateway has the Home Premium CD key on the side so I can just do a clean copy of that. I get all booted into the installer, put in the CD Key and pick the clean install option. It then gives me an option of what drive to install it on. And here I see there's another partition, SYSTEM_RESTORE. The ARCHIE stuff hid it from Vista somehow (something I'd like to know how to do.. hate having drives show up in My Computer that don't need to).

I canceled out of the setup and rebooted. I did a better look over of the boot options. There are 4: Boot Options, Setup, System Recovery and Diagnostics. I'm rather impressed by this. Normally on a Dell you get 2. So I selected System Recovery and it brings me into a nice HP/Compaq branded system restore. It lets me revert back to factory settings. Exactly what I wanted to do.

The whole recovery process took about 15 minutes. Much faster than an install. It's pretty easy when all you're doing is a quick format and then copying files on the HD. While this was installing I realized I hadn't eaten yet today, the girl and the little one left that morning to head out to see family for the weekend and we hadn't done our grocery shopping this week. So I got on my laptop and ordered a Pizza (pizza hut Grilled Combo with stuffed crust, so decadent).

I got booted in and started my process of installing FireFox first, then removing Norton and all the HP crap. After I had it clean I installed my favorite codecs, mapped a drive to my network storage and tested out the PC. I was pleased to see it handles 720p content well and almost handles 1080p. I have a sneaking suspicion that the issues I'm seeing with the 1080p is the limitations of my 100Mb network. The video and sound get out of sync after a bit. I'm going to try moving one of them locally later to check this out.

My Pizza arrived during this time and it was tempting me o so much. I sat down had a couple slices, browsed the web and installed a few more little things here and there like AVG, Flash Player and Acrobat Reader. I started up Media Center and started watching The Hogfather. It was around 1am at this point and I fell asleep quickly.

After waking up around 4 I started playing again. I got profiles set up for Media Center (set up MC to run at start up), Lacey as an administrator since she'll probably be using this when I'm not here and Avalon as a standard user. I set up Parental Controls for Avalon. I must say Vista's Parental Controls are rather nice. Don't think many people even notice they exist. Does Mac even have this??

I went and customized their profiles to add bit of personal flair. I think Avalon will like the wierd pink animal clock sidebar gadget that ships with Vista. I also went into the Games folder for Avalon's and set it to hide the blocked programs. I am also impressed with this folder. No one ever talks much about the new Windows Explorer options in vista. I find being able to combine sorts and groupings very handy.

All in all I'm pretty pleased with the set up. While the case is a bit too big to be hid away nicely I can deal with it. The PC is not loud at all. While I was running The Matrix 1080p and had the sound off I could just barely hear the fan going. It is definitely quieter than the 360. I'm probably going to put some tape over the Power and HD LEDs. Too many of those things and my living room looks like a scene out of a sci-fi movie at night.

My next plans are to pick up a digital coax cable and hook it up to my surround sound receiver and get a DVI-to-HDMI adapter. VGA cannot handle doing 1080p output on the TV. The TV doesn't support it through VGA and when I do force support it works but I only get about 5fps. I wish my TV had come with both DVI and VGA connectors.. the one thing that it's missing in my eyes.

I also may go pick up a new video card. I was disappointed when I saw that Best Buy was out of their All in Wonder Radeons. I had just read they were coming back but didn't know that they already hit the store shelves. From what I could gather from the name it was 4830 with the 650 tuner chip and HD support. AMD has much better HD decoding support and having an HD tuner on top of it would be awesome.

Well I think I've rambled on long enough. I'll try to post some pics later

While I've heard lots about Unit Testing for years now I've never been able to force myself to implement them. I've always thought it'd take too much time. Time I could have spent writing code, getting work done. Then I go the project I am on now. It is a large project with a very tight deadline. A project that needs to marry different back end sources.

I've been put in charge of architecting the SQL Server back end and the entire middle layer for data access and business objects. I'm using many things I've not had a chance to use before at this scale (LINQ being the largest) in this project so there were many unknowns. The front end may not been done for a bit and I needed to test my data access functions. I decided to bite the bullet and write unit tests.

Normally I would write a small WinForms app to test the most important pieces. This is a dirty approach but it's fast. The biggest hurdle in my mind for Unit Testing was there was no quick way for me to implement and run the tests. Nunit is out there and has some VS integration but whenever I tried it I got confused of where I needed to go to get things done.

Now we have VS 2008 Pro with built in unit testing. While the testing framework included I'm told is decent it's not as good as Nunit. I personally don't care about that. The ability to go to the menu and create unit tests for methods or entire projects on the fly is a godsend for me. VS will create a project for you, include tests for any classes/methods you've selected out of all the projects in your solutions and then do it's best to create close to complete tests.

You can easily step into debug any test and run one or many tests. All the results are saved so they can be examined and compared. While the auto created tests need to be completed I am starting to find that writing to test my code interface is getting cleaner and more too the point. It's much more annoying to pass an object into a method that may only need one or two properties on the object. It's better to make the parameters basic types instead of complex.

The tests have to run against 2 different backends. While one of them will probably not change (the SQL Server) the webservice may end up being replaced. These tests will be invaluable for when that happens. We can then check to see if the new service is acting correctly and if not pinpoint the issues.

Well I've been working on the new theme for the blog. I have been co-opting the theme from j-maxx.net since it's about the only decent theme I've ever done before. It looks bad in IE due to dashed borders having white space inbetween the dashes instead of the background color.

For some background on the blog. I chose dasBlog as my software due to it having web services built in and has a user base of programmers I look up to. That being said it was originally .NET 1.1 software and the design is getting a bit annoying in some aspects. I'm looking at adding a better syntax highlighter, but adding it so it shows up in all the themes is not straightforward. I may just remove the other themes and only allow this one to simplify things.

I've also noticed that blogs edited after the date they were posted do not show up when you click on the date their were posted in the calendar. I'll have to track that bug down.

All in all it was pretty quick and easy to get the blog up and running. Designing the theme was very easy as well. They did a great job at allowing users to separate design from logic. I'm going to delve more into the templating system to figure out how they did it.