Scott Hanselman

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Finishing what was Quite A Day to start what we will be Quite A Week

October 25, 2003 Comment on this post [3] Posted in PDC | DasBlog | Speaking | NUnit | Nant | XML
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Whew.  A big day. 

  • My third wedding anniversary.  Woo hoo!  My great-uncle says it's the first 50 that are hard.  After that, smooth sailing.  (Just noticed the date on my wedding site...FYI: We eloped on 10/24/2000, and had the big to-do later)
  • Had lunch with Jim Blizzard, Phil Weber and Andrew Brust who is in town talking to PADNUG via INETA.  I'll be returning the favor in NYC at the .NET UG in January.
  • Upgraded to dasBlog 1.4.3297.0, and what an upgrade it is.  On the admin site, reporting for Aggregator Activity, User Agents, Crossposting to Longhornblogs.com, ClickThrough Tracking, URL Rewriting, oy!  I was chatting with Clemens a few minutes ago and he had some ideas around presence that will blow your mind.  Maybe we'll write it next week...
  • With Patrick Cauldwell leading the way and some SERIOUS CodeSmith'ing, basically re-wrote XSD.EXE and generate instance test data, domain objects (Account, Payee, etc), domain messages/operations (GetAccountResponse, GetPayees), documentation, and our custom Voyager templates.  As Patrick said, there's SO much more to code generation than Strongly Typed Collections.
  • 99% perfected the build process and now just need to improve NUnit2Report to include things like the Computer Name, and support for multiple NUnit xml input files.  Anyone else got a better NAnt Build Task for this?
  • Told my CST407 class at OIT what the Final would be.  They were shaking in their boots. :)
  • Heading to PDC on Sunday at 9am.  My days are packed full until I leave Thursday and it'll be 98 degrees the whole time.  Schwing.

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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Checking post-conditions in SOA as (or more) important than checking pre-conditions

October 22, 2003 Comment on this post [1] Posted in Programming
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I agree with Clemens on the postcondition discussion.  At the risk of using two quickie "gun/bullet" analogies in a month, I offer this one to explain why checking post-conditions is as (or more) important as checking pre-conditions.

It's better to take the bullets out of the gun, than to wear a bullet-proof vest.

Too often message validation is considered a defensive manuever to protect one's self from bad input.  I believe this "knee-jerk" style of coding is an artifact of C and C++ where engineers always check input pointers for nulls and such. 

In a system that is constrained by contracts, you certainly know as much about the outgoing messages and inherent contract as the incoming, so there's no reason not validate the outbound messages.

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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TicTacToe in 3.1 Languages

October 21, 2003 Comment on this post [0] Posted in XML
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I was cleaning up and I found these demos I used to do when showing off .NET Framework multiple language support.

·        TicTacToe in C#, VB.NET or J#

·        TicTacToe in C# for the Compact Framework

Feel free to use them in presentations and demos with attribution.   

You know, it would be fun if folks started translating TicTacToe into other languages so instead of a bunch of HelloWorld’s we had TicTacToe in all the .NET Framework Supported Languages…Cobol.NET TicTacToe anyone?

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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How to always launch Firebird in a new window

October 21, 2003 Comment on this post [1] Posted in Musings
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I converted Patrick to Firebird recently.  Firebird 0.7 came out this week, and I mentioned a peeve of mine was that it reuses its window when launching URLs.  To which Patrick said:

To always launch Firebird in a new window, put this stuff in your user.js file.

 user_pref("advanced.system.supportDDEExec", false);
user_pref("browser.always_reuse_window", false);

If you haven’t come to enjoy the wicked fast speed and elegant simplicity of Firebird, now is your chance.

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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Multiple Monitors and Productivity

October 21, 2003 Comment on this post [4] Posted in PowerShell | Gaming | Bugs | Tools
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Preach on brother.  I started using multiple monitors a few years back when the ATI video card on my Compaq Laptop supported using both the LCD Panel and the external monitor together.  I blogged on a bit on it earlier this year as did John Lam. 

I spent some time looking for the perfect dual-head video card.  Although you can certainly line up PCI Video Cards from more than one manufacturer, you’re better of with IMHO with a dual-head card.  Personally, the best drivers for multiple monitors are NVidia’s, and a MUST HAVE piece of software for anyone with >1 monitor is UltraMon, if only for it’s second “Smart Taskbar.”  It sports tools for systems with even as many as 10 or more monitors and supports stuff as advanced (and useful) as scripting your many monitors. 

I’m currently running an NVidia Dual Head Card with a ViewSonic 17” LCD at 1280x1024 and a 17” Joe-Monitor at 1152x864 and believe me, I will take the Pepsi Challenge against anyone with a single monitor at 1024x768 is more productive. :) I really would LOVE to have more monitors although I’d suspect 3 is the ideal number.  

I first saw this on Rory’s blog and had to check into it.  Rory points to a news item on Slashdot which has the following entry:

"A systematic study conducted by NEC-Mitsubishi, ATI Technologies and the University of Utah has concluded that the use of multiple monitors in the workplace increases productivity. The study is discussed on Tom's Hardware, EE Times, and there's a detailed press release on NEC-Mitsubishi. For those of us who use multi-monitors, this is not shocking. But maybe now that it's official, IT managers will view it as a good investment and not just for gamers."

These articles all showed and discussed productivity while using flat-screen panels.  It makes sense that NEC and ATI would.  With a setup like the picture below, couldn’t you be more productive?  At the client site that I’m currently working, the customer provided a monitor for my usage.  So, combined with my DELL notebook which has multi-monitor support, I’m doing multi-monitor development.  I can run my mail client or Query Analyzer on one screen and VS.NET on the other doing debugging.  So, there is a benefit without dual flat displays.  But don’t they look good?  So, forward the article to your management and get more work done while your surfing.

 
[Jon Box's Weblog]

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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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.