This was originally posted in my other blog, but I think it is something that is worth cross posting here. As I look back at the last couple of entries, I notice I have been more focused on the non-technical side of things. It could be because I have been pretty involved with projects recently where virtually all the problems were of the...

A few days ago, I was told that I am now an ASPInsider.  And just today, I discovered I am a Microsoft MVP for ASP.NET!  I cannot say how excited I am about these twin honors.  I will likely be more excited once I get over this stomach bug...

Try this.  In Amazon, search Books for ASP.NET.  The results look plausable, but they are sorted in “Featured Item” order by default.  This generally seems to me to be a way to have the most profitiable item first, so I generally search in “Bestselling” order.  Now that Amazon has indexed books, you get...

As some of you may know, I have another blog I write on Mobilized software issues (Pocket PC's, the .NET Compact Framework, SQL Server CE), as I discussed here. (Yes, it does require a free registration to get the full text of the Blog, no, I have not been bombarded by email from them since I registered).  I have finally convinced the folks...

I have a problem with deploying .NET CF Framework applications from Visual Studio .NET.  I seek your advice... I try to deploy to a device and get this error in VS.NET 2003: "Cannot establish a connection. Be sure the device is physically connected to the development computer." Apparently, what I did was upgrade to Activesync 3.7.1 AFTER...

Frans says: Stored procedures also will open up a maintenance problem. The reason for this is that they form an API by themselves. Changing an API is not that good, it will break a lot of code in some situations. Adding new functionality or new procedures is the "best" way to extend an existing API. A set of stored procedures is no different. This...

Frans argues that Rob is wrong about stored procedures.  I expect Rob will have some answers, but I have a good answer to at least one of the arguments Frans makes, about security.  He says: Ah yes, the good old dead horse, security! The most heard argument in favor of stored procedures is that with using stored procedures, security can...

I have started blogging about mobile software issues here.  A warning:  This site requires registration (which is free) and does not have an RSS feed yet.  And in the interests of full disclosure, I am blogging at the new site “for hire” for the new electronic magazine MobilizedSoftware.com.  It is an interesting...

Fabrice writes about makeing the Title as a server-side control, and dynamically changing it from code behind. This works well in general, but be prepared if using VS.NET to have the RunAt=Server attribute removed now and again (causing an error when you then reference the title in codebehind. Sigh. Hopefully, this will be resilved in Whitbey!

Panopticon Central talks about the likelyhood that what is called "Refactoring" in the C# IDE will be present, but called something else in VB's IDE, presumably because VB programmers will not know what refactoring is. If folks like Julia want VB.NET programmers to be given respect (as they should be) then we need to make sure that the VB.NET IDE...

The lowly validator will be updated quite a bit in Whidbey.  First, there will be validator groups, allowing you ro have validators that only fire when controls in the same group that create submissions (like buttons) fire.  The Whidbey validator framework alos allows you to set a control to get focus when an error occurs.  The group validator is...

Potentially lost in Andrews longer post on Whidbey changes for the ASP.NET developer, but deserving of special mention, is hte apility to collapse and expand HTML code.  So, imagine a long page with a number of tables.  If you are looking at just one table in particular, you can collapse all of the others and just concentrate on the one...

Version 3 of SQL Server CE will eliminate a lot of the problems that developers have neen dealing with, working with SQL Server 2.  One of my greatest shocks when I first userd SQL Server CE was that if I left SQLCE Query up and connected to my database, when I ran my applicaiton that accessed it, I got a sharing exception.  No more with...

In the CLR Internals class today, Jeff Richter gave a great deal of really good information.  One thing that I should have figured, but did not really know was about the impact of running Debug code on Garbage Collector performance.  Say you have code like this: public void foo() { BigOb big; big=new BigOb();...

From the CLR Internals talk at PDC, a really useful tidbit.  Create a module with a call early to System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Launch.  Create a method that does not get called until after the call to Launch. Compile the assembly, using /debug:pdbonly switch.  This tells the compiler to create the PDB, but otherwise creates code...