JCooney.NET

I’ve recently started working on a project that uses MCMS 2002. The most important thing to know when working with MCMS 2002 is the name Stefan Gossner. This is more important than understanding how MCMS leverages ASP.NET, more important than understanding the Publishing API, how MCMS is installed or configured. Stefan is an Escalation Engineer for MCMS, and a prolific writer of tools and tips on this product. If you’re starting an MCMS project read his weblog from start to finish. »

I’ve been an avid follower of Daniel Cazzulino’s work for some time - XML and Code-Gen are two of my favourite topics which he is also interested in. He has been fairly quite lately however, here is why. His company has been working on a new project with PAG called the Guidance Automation Toolkit. Yet another thing for me to push onto the stack.

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$AU 30 was all it took to turn my design into something wearable. I think it turned out quite well. In real life the source code is quite legible, preserving the full horror of the imbedded assembly. Appologies for the poor quality photo (taken with the camera built into my smartphone, in poor light).

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How do Windows Forms events Happen? or Have you ever wondered how windows forms works? I think we’ve all heard the standard spiel - that it is an Object Oriented wrapper on top of the windows API, but that doesn’t begin to explain how it interacts with the underlying operating system. It’s also not a particularly satisfying description because every rich client technology from Microsoft for the past 10 years (from MFC onwards) has been a more object-oriented wrapper on top of the Win32 API. »

With CodeCampOz only a few days away it is probably too late to put in an order to think-geek for appropriate apparel. Instead I’m going to try and print up an appropriate t-shirt. Here is the design I came up with this evening over a cold can of Red Bull (with appologies to Steve McConnell and Jeff Atwood). I’m not sure if this is what I will “go live“ with. I’m thinking that some source code over on the top right-hand corner would look better, but I’m not sure. Incidentally, the code for this comes from the “unmanaged“ part of the CLR allocation profiler tool from Microsoft, and contains fragments of inline assembler mixed in with bits of C++. The picture (stolen from Jeff’s site, where he uses it with permission from Steve McConnell’s excellent book “Code Complete”) is a fairly faithful representation of my response when I first saw this code (I’m much more of a “managed“ type of guy).

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The means by which the GotDotNet web site has remained so bad for so long is a complete and utter mystery to me….a complete and utter mystery. »

As Darren pointed out a new version of the ASP.NET 2.0 beta quickstarts is availalble. Unfortuantely they don’t include any WebService quick starts like they used to (while still available in the Google cache). The quick-starts that ship with the Feb CTP don’t work with the latest bits. Hopefully we’ll see an update of the web service quickstarts in the near future. »

I’ve been doing some XSLT work the last couple of days so the Essential XML Quick Reference by Aaron Skonnard and Martin Gudgin has hardly left my side. It is a great book, and the fact that it is still quite relevant and readable 3 years after being published is a testament to the skill of the authors and the treacle-like progress of the W3C. This quote from Don Box on the inside cover cracks me up every time: “Essentail XML Quick Reference is one of the few printed references I would actually buy. »

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A while back there was some discussion of the use by Microsofties of the word ‘So’ to prefix every statement. Apparently this is not new or unique to Microsoft. From “The New New Thing” by Michael Lewis ch. 5

When a computer programmer answers a question, he often begins with the word ‘so.’

‘Why did you come to Silicon Valley?’

‘So…I’m from this small town in Iowa…’

‘So’ cuts across the borders within the computing class just as ‘like’ cuts across the borders within the class of adolescent girls. It’s the most distinctive verbal tic manufactured by the engineering mind. Silicon Valley engineers for whom English is a second or even third language acquire it as readily as native speakers.

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