Jeff Schoolcraft

ReSharper Questionnaire

2007-04-20T06:12:43Z

So the folks at JetBrains have asked us to tell them how to make ReSharper better. They want you to fill out this questionnaire. It's hard to say what I like MOST about ReSharper, just about everything. Rename, templates, extract method, introduce variable, inline variable, the list goes on and on and on.

What do I like least? Exceptions, both the normal flavor and the "I just killed VS" flavor. They're not as frequent with VS 2005 and ReSharper 2.5.1. Load times when opening VS is another complaint, but at this point I'm complaining about details because everything else is good.

[Disclaimer: I have no vested interest in JetBrains. Well, none further than hoping they stick around to keep making my day to day development tasks easier/more enjoyable. If you guys are ever in need of a ReSharper Evangelist on the East Coast, let me know :) ]

NoVa Code Camp 20070414 Downloads

2007-04-20T04:43:35Z

I'm working on getting all the session materials up on NoVa CodeCamp. You'll find the complete list for the April 14, 2007 Code Camp here. If something doesn't work or is missing let me know and I'll try to work with the presenters to get things fixed.

If you haven't done it yet, please head over to CodeCampEvals.com and fill out the evaluation form. It gives the speakers and myself valuable feedback on how the event went, gives you 5000 community credits and entered into a raffle with some cool cube toys.

The uncertain future of WinProTeam*

2007-04-20T04:24:09Z

If you've attended a WinProTeam meeting in the last year or so you've probably been struck by how poorly the meetings are run. Maybe it's how disorganized the leadership seems when trying to do even the simplest things like sending out email or updating the website. Maybe it's meeting schedules constantly changing or getting canceled at the last minute. Maybe it's all of that, but it's evident that something is not quite right.

For me, and I can really only speak for me, I've been questioning the purpose and usefulness of WPT in it's current form. I've got a couple major concerns. First, we've got a lot of baggage because these groups were born of Charles Carroll. Second, I think we're serving two communities poorly -- one by diluting the space and the other by lack of focus.

I'd be suprised if you're in the ASP.NET space and haven't heard of Charles Carroll. That's been both good and bad for the group. In the initial days of ASPVienna and ASPRockville, the precursors to WPT, his popularity helped pull people to the meetings. As the rift in the community got larger and more and more people got turned off by Charles, his attitude or treatment of speakers, his involvement and later just association started to hurt WPT. I've had several speakers turn down opportunities to speak based on the possibility that Charles might show up. Even during the last couple years when Charles has had absolutely no involvement in the group.

To my second point, I think we're hurting both communities we're trying to serve. Vienna, VA is well served by Capital Area .NET. Vienna is actually well represented by usergroups in the Windows space. We might have offered a different/unique view/time slot to Vienna had our meetings been consistently good, but they weren't. I'd rather have those interested in supporting WPT Vienna move over to CAPArea and help them continue to grow than limp along with WPT.

As far as Rockville, MD is concerned, I think there is a desperate need for a solid .NET developer community. We went from monthly meetings, to every other month, to sometimes less frequently than that. Though attendance has dwindled some, it seems the core community in that area wants to support a usergroup, regardless of how bad they are. So we're trying to fix that. Well, Dean Fiala is trying to fix that, and I'm going to help with a few things behind the scenes. I think with a fresh start and the energy infusion from Dean and Jason Fabritz that we've got a really good chance of making RockNUG (www coming soon, it's being professionally designed) wildly successful. We'd love for you to help out and attend our inagural meeting in June. Details to be announced shortly.

NoVa Code Camp a Success!

2007-04-15T03:59:48Z

Thank you to everyone that came out at such an obnoxiously early hour to make NoVa Code Camp a success. I'd like to thank everyone that helped out with Code Camp, the track chairs, volunteer coordinators, all our contributors and especially the speakers; after all there wouldn't be a code camp without speakers.

I'm going to work with all the speakers to make sure I've got the best copy of whatever content they have (slides, codes, etc) and get it up on the site, once it's there I'll add another announcement there and I'll blog about it as well.

In the mean time, please head over to www.codecampevals.com and fill out an Eval form for NoVa Code Camp 2007. David deserves a thank you here as well, he got a last minute panicked request from me about evals and he had the whole thing set up in no time. He even grabbed our logo, listed our sessions, everything (and I was dumb enough to forget to give him any of that). So, thanks a lot, David.

Are you attending NoVa Code Camp?

2007-03-19T04:02:26Z

Have you signed up for NoVa Code Camp yet? If not, what are you waiting for? Maybe you want to know what a Code Camp is all about, how much it's going to cost (time and money) and what can you get out of it?
Well, it all started one dark and dreary day in Boston. Actually I'm not sure if it was dark or dreary but it definitely started in Boston on the guidance of then Microsoft RD Thom Robbins (since that time I believe Thom has taken the "red pill" and works for Microsoft now). To quote a bit from the manifesto: "The idea was simple – provide an off hour forum for the development community to speak and share ideas for them to come and enjoy." (http://blogs.msdn.com/trobbins/archive/2004/12/12/280181.aspx)

The idea has spread like wildfire and their have probably been thousands of code camps over the last couple years. The concept is still the same. It's done off hours so you don't need to miss work, ours is on Saturday April 14, 2007 from 8am - 6pm. The event is organized by local community volunteers, the sessions are presented by local talent and it's generally a very informative day. What does it cost? Nothing, it's free, just a few hours of your time.

What are you going to get out of it? Hopefully you'll learn something. If you're interested in speaking, you'll get the satisfaction of passing on some knowledge. You'll also get pizza for lunch, and we're raffling off some really cool prizes.

ACTION:

Go to http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=116036 and register for NoVa Code Camp
Tell your friends, coworkers and bosses about it (get them to sign up). I won't call it free training because that might not be specific to your needs, but it's definitely quality knowledge.
Volunteer (send an email to volunteer at novacodecamp.org)
Speak (complete our call for speaker document and submit it) http://novacodecamp.org/Home/Speakers/tabid/55/Default.aspx
Head over to ~~http://novacodecamp.com~~ http://novacodecamp.org/ from some general information.

Firefox

2007-03-13T09:03:58Z

Now I love Firefox, I've been using it forever, I'll show off a load of extensions to anyone who will let me, and have been a general evangelist to anyone I work with. When it takes time to swap between tabs, or when swapping tabs or creating new tabs causes my entire system to be usable I start to have doubts.

I know there have been complaints about firefox's memory management. I've had problems with pages full of images but I'm hoping that it's an extension that's eating 800M of memory. Granted I've got twelve tabs open, but that's a fairly normal scenario for me.

My first guess is my gmail checker, I've upgraded from the normal version to one that can check multiple accounts because I've got google hosting mail for the Queue and NoVa Code Camp.

I'll start taking extensions off one by one, there are something that I absolutely can't live without; super drag & go anyone? It might be easier to disable them all except the ones I can't live without and start adding them daily if I can watch Task Manager without seeing firefox's memory usage continually climb.

Anyone else had similar experiences? I'm running 2.0.0.2 on 64bit XP.

VMware and Ubuntu

2007-03-12T04:57:23Z

I have reason at work to need a local linux installation to do some development on. My linux distribution of choice in the past has traditionally been debian but I'm happy to use anything debian based, once you've gone apt you can't go back. For those that aren't aware apt is debian's package management tool and it allows me to do things like:

apt-get install mysql

apt will go out and find out what dependencies I need, occasionally it will recommend additional packages that I might like to install, go download it all, install it and through me into a minimal configuration setup (if needed) to make sure when it's done I'm up and running. No more of this rpm -Uvh --force --no-deps or whatever version of rpm hell you've experienced from redhat derivatives.

I don't have spare hardware laying around but I do have capacity on my dev box so a virtual machine seems a likely choice. Now that both the big players have free tools (Virtual PC and VMware Server) it's somewhat a matter of preference. I did a quick google search to see if there was anything I should know about installing Edgy (Ubuntu 6.10) in a VM and stumbled across this, a pre build VMware image with Edgy already installed. All I would have to do is download and install VMware server, download this image and wire it up.

My dev environment is 64bit Intel (not Itanium) and I'm running Windows XP 64bit edition, which means IIS 6. I'm having problems getting the VMware management website started, I've got to research this a bit to see what is causing this problem ("The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion").

Problems aside, it seems if you've got a need for a VM that's not mission critical you might find one neatly configured already out there, VMTN has hundreds. Microsoft has been doing the same with CTP's for a while now, a good move that lowers the barrier to entry for checking out the latest bits.

NoVa Code Camp April 14, 2007

2007-03-12T04:31:00Z

We're finally having another code camp in NoVa, this one is at the MS Facilities in Reston, VA.

For all your informational needs, go to http://novacodecamp.org/

We need speakers, volunteers and attendees. If you're interested in one or more of those roles hop over to the site and take the appropriate action (complete a speaker submission form, email volunteers at novacodecamp.org, or register).

SQL Server 2005 SP2

2007-03-12T04:30:00Z

Seems like I missed the announcement, almost a month ago now, that SQL Server 2005 SP2 was available.

Details here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/downloads/servicepacks/sp2.mspx

Tagged

2007-01-16T16:20:40Z

I've been tagged by Dean Fiala. It's a meme that's floated around the blogosphere for a while and (finally) hit me.

Five things you probably don't know about me:

I'm expecting daughter 2.0 in just over four months. (I get a ton of social points for announcing this way).
I started reading for fun in 7th grade (way late, I guess) with the book Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. That first copy was in ugly yellow hard cover, library binding edition. It's supposed to be a movie, I look forward to it like I did towards The Matrix Reloaded and Phantom Menace.
I love to cook. I'd love to be/get classically trained but have no interest in a restaurant (maybe a pit bbq place; indoors with picnic tables, brown paper, no utensils, just large quantities of smoked meat).
I intend to compete in a sprint triathlon this year. If I like it I'll try a couple olympic distance next year.
I miss debian. I covet OS X.

Now I'm supposed to tag 5 people. Yeah, like there are 5 people left to be tagged. I'm the fat, not so tall, white guy in a pick up basketball game, I was the last pick. I guess the meme ends here.

may webcast review 10

2006-05-12T04:00:00Z

Essential ASP.NET for the Web Developer (Part 10 of 15): Validation
Verdict: See It.
Details: A smorgasboard of topics including validation, focus, url mapping, control references and offline applications. They were all covered fairly quickly, though validation took a little longer because there is a lot more to deal with. Control references in the <pages> section of web.config are probably worth the whole thing, and maybe offline apps since we've implemented that before with an httphandler and a variable in web.config.

[Edit] Updated link to point to correct webcast, thanks Erwyn for the fix.

may webcast review 09

2006-05-11T03:58:00Z

Essential ASP.NET for the Web Developer (Part 9 of 15): Deployment
Verdict: See It!
Details: This webcast is reminiscent of why Fritz' Essential ASP.NET with Examples in C# was one of the best ASP.NET books I'd ever read. A very informative discussion focusing mainly on the mechanics of deployment options from within VS.NET 2005. Fritz had a fairly representative sample web site (master page, global.asax, user controls, sub directories with aspx, stuff in app_code, etc), went through several different deployment options, tracked down the assemblies and cracked them open with ildasm to show how everything got packaged up.

may webcast review 08

2006-05-10T05:14:00Z

Essential ASP.NET for the Web Developer (Part 8 of 15): Web Parts
Verdict: See It.
Details: Good overview of web parts, zones, catalogs and how they relate to Share Point web parts. There was mention of a service pack in the works to allow Share Point 2003 to use ASP.NET 2.0 web parts, I'm not sure of its status. A closing comment, Share Point V.Next is to be based on ASP.NET 2.0 so one could assume all 2.0 webparts will work.

may webcast review 07

2006-05-09T03:54:00Z

Essential ASP.NET for the Web Developer (Part 7 of 15): Membership
Verdict: Skip It.
Details: If you've never heard anything about the new membership features in ASP.NET 2.0 then you might want to watch this. I feel Membership is one of the most over publicized features of ASP.NET 2.0. It's a fairly good overview of the different login controls and shows the default Membership and Role providers with mention of custom providers.

may webcast reviews 06

2006-05-08T03:22:00Z

Essential ASP.NET for the Web Developer (Part 6 of 15): Client State
Verdict: Skip It.
Details: Covered some overview details of Cross Page Posting and how to access a strongly typed reference to the posting page (source, not destination). Discussed profile data a little, using native types. Talked a little about auto-detecting cookieless session key mode.