Scott Hanselman

You know there are some software products that are just too cool NOT to share.  CodeRush is one, many are mentioned on the Ultimate Tools List, and MaxiVista is another.

MaxiVista is a "virtual networked display adapter" that lets you use any machine you've got as a second (or third!) monitor! Here's how I use it.

I love MaxiVista so much that MaxiVista is helping me spread the word with an exclusive 30% off deal. How's that for the power of blogging? Spread the word with this HTML line below:

ComputerZen.com: Get 30% OFF MaxiVista - This will end on 11/7!
** This promotion has ended, but you can still try and buy MaxiVista! **

This takes MaxiVista from an already low $50, to around $34! If you've been holding out to buy it, just give up those eight mocachinos and go for it.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Steve Swartz, an original COM+ Architect, now an Indigo Architect (who hasn't blogged it seems, in a while) had this to say when presented with some FUD around Indigo and its place in the world. (emphasis is mine)

I would want to differentiate between what Indigo actually is and what I might think of as ideal programming practice.

If you want to pass complex object graphs by value across tiers, you will be able to in Indigo. If you want to share types between client and server, you will be able to in Indigo. If you want to deploy proxy classes in MSI files, you will be able to in Indigo. If you want to marshal around references to service instances, you will be able to in Indigo. Each of these techniques involves additional coupling of one sort or another. Theoretically, minimizing coupling is good. Didactically, people who are teaching other people to program will always take a hard line against coupling. Practically, in the real world there’s always some coupling: how much is a matter of taste and situation.

When you speak about Indigo as a manifestation of a programming ideal (service orientation), it sounds as different from the existing products as a [pneumatic] nail-driver is from a hammer. In fact, Indigo as it feels under your hands is quite similar to the existing technologies.” 

- Steve Swartz in a private listserv 10/2004

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Here's an interesting thing.

MyST Technology Partners have built an Office Research Service to access all content from the aggregation of RD blogs.

You add it to your Research Pane, with things like the Dictionary and Encyclopedia.

You can also right click on a word within Word and "Lookup" that word in a list of blogs. 

What a great way to remind us that "it's just data."

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Apparently there's a number of places online that say this can't be done. We needed to be able to add pages to an existing application that were basically "sub-applications," and they'd have their own /bin folder, but still be in the same VDIR and participate in the same IIS Application.

So instead of:

/webapp
 default.aspx
 foo1.aspx
     /bin
      app.dll
      foo1.dll

We could have

/webapp
 default.aspx
     /bin
     /mysubapp
      foo1.aspx
          /bin
           foo1.dll

If you try this directory layout as is, you'll get a "Parser Error" as ASP.NET freaks out due to its inability to find the code-behind for foo1.aspx.

However, if you add a private probingPath to your web.config:

<configuration>
  <runtime>
    <assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1">
      <probing privatePath="mysubapp/bin" />
    </assemblyBinding>
  </runtime>
<configuration>

And, tell your ASPX page where it can find it's code-behind file BEFORE the System needs it for the Inherits= attribute in the @Page directive:

<%@ Assembly Name="Foo1" %>
<%@ Import Namespace="FooNamespace" %>
<%@ Page language="c#" Trace="true" Codebehind="Foo1.aspx.cs" AutoEventWireup="false" Inherits="FooNamespace.FooWebForm1" Debug="true"%>

You'll be all set. Slick. Of course, this is all ASP.NET 1.1, and everything changes with 2.0 and the "/Code" directory, but it's still slick IMHO, and allows for a level of flexibility that I haven't seen before.  It also keeps your man/bin nice and tidy if you've got folks "plugging in" other pages to your web app.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

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