JCooney.NET

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Rather than reconcile my mobile phone bill the way a normal person would do it (by say marking off items in the bill with a pen and then totalling up the hilighted items) I reconcile my mobile phone bill the following way:

1. Download CSV phone bill from provider.
2. BCP file into SQL Server (DTS - yeuch).
3. Query a view to see “work related or possibly work related” calls.
4. Update “phone number” table with new work & non-work numbers.
5. Iterate over steps 3 & 4 until the number of “unknown“ numbers approaches zero.
6. Execute query to calculate total.

For uber-geekiness I have already considered:

• Using biztalk instead of BCP to populate the database (I’m pretty sure this is the approach bill would take)
• Querying my contacts list in exchange to suck out all those phone numbers (expediting steps 4 & 5)

Can anybody think of any other obvious optimizations I could be doing here? 

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I noticed some Hands On Labs for WPF (AKA Avalon) have been published recently on the Vista developer centre. Looks like a nice way to get into WPF coding if you’ve been holding off doing so. »

“ Now, before I begin the lesson, will those of you who are playing in the match this afternoon move your clothes down onto the lower peg immediately after lunch, before you write your letter home, if you’re not getting your hair cut, unless you’ve got a younger brother who is going out this weekend as the guest of another boy, in which case, collect his note before lunch, put it in your letter after you’ve had your hair cut, and make sure he moves your clothes down onto the lower peg for you.”

Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life“ - Part II - Learning and Growing

If you’ve ever opened your mouth to explain something, and words like this came out you just failed my “meaning of life“ complexity test.

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As a .NET developer my initial reaction when hearing about the failure of the recently-introduced Customs software system ICS might well have been something like w00t! The system, built on J2EE, WebSphere, DB2, backing on to an IBM mainframe database via MQ Series (or Websphere MQ as I believe it is now called) has had some performance problems since its introduction earlier this month, resulting in the existing barely-hanging-together legacy systems it was supposed to replace being extended indefinitely, even after $250M was spent on the new system. »

http://www.dhteumeuleu.com/ Via: http://spaces.msn.com/members/manodesign/Blog/cns!1pRsSVBaAuwgFSti-clSJ6Ng!263.entry  »

It looks like in the Xml Diff Specification* the authors chose to implement their own path-like language for locating nodes in Xml Documents. Does anybody have any idea why (asie from the obvious desire to create wonderful new things) why they didn’t use good ole’ W3C standard XPath? I can’t see any example expressions that couldn’t be written in XPath. * This was released in 2002. For those who only like cool, new, shiny things this is none of those. »

Joe Sango has just been awarded MVP for VSTS. Congratulations Joe. While I doubt anything will woo me away from Subversion for my personal stuff I’m really looking forward to working with VSTS in the not-too-distant future in the corporate environment. In addition to starting the Melbourne VSTS user group Joe is also working on integrating Eclipse with VSTS. »

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