Chris May

Here are some site statistics for the last 12 months. Over a quater million visitors and almost 750,000 page views. Not bad.

Hits
Total Hits	1,607,524
Average Hits per Day	4,380
Average Hits per Visitor	5.87
Cached Requests	132,924
Failed Requests	157,190
Page Views
Total Page Views	737,197
Average Page Views per Day	2,008
Average Page Views per Visitor	2.69
Visitors
Total Visitors	273,988
Average Visitors per Day	746
Total Unique IPs	49,647

It looks like my previous pagerank of 4 has been dropped to 3.

This kinda stinks. I would rather be going up than down, but it isn't that big of a deal.

Ironically, one of my other websites that was getting a lot less traffic than this one just jumped from a 3 up to a 4.  Go figure.

Google frequently tinkers with their settings, so I'm sure these numbers will not be static.

In a recent gathering of the ALT.NET group, ScottGu gave a demo of the upcoming MVC framework for asp.net.

The article (and video) can be found here.

Lots of people in the ALT community have been working with asp.net and MVC by using one of the OS frameworks out there like Monorail, but I am glad to see that MS is not sitting around waiting on this issue.

Hopefully this will make testing even easier. 

This article from MSDN shows just about every type of format string you can use on a date:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/az4se3k1.aspx

 

If you are using the NOT IN clause with a SQL Select statement with SQL Server it will not work if there is a null value in the list.  Say for example you want to do:

SELECT * FROM 
Employees 
Where 
Employee.Id NOT IN 
(  
   Select EmployeeId from 
   Salaries 
   where Salary < 100000
)

If the inner select returns a null value then the outer select statement will return no rows.

To try it, just run these 2 SQL statments against any table in your DB.

-- will return rows
SELECT * FROM 
sometable
WHERE ID NOT IN (1,2,3)

-- will return nothing
SELECT * FROM 
sometable
WHERE ID NOT IN (1,2,3, null)

Ok so the other night I was working late, and thought to myself... hey, I have some new music on my iphone, why don't I make use of my Klipsch iGroove speakers (as I had heard that most ipod accessories work with the iphone).

So I walked over to the speakers and dropped in my iphone. It fit perfect, as expected. I hit the power button... nothing. Ok, maybe I need to turn on the iphone. Nothing. Ok, maybe I need to hit the menu button... nothing.

I take the iphone out and try to power it up... nothing. I hold down each button for 10 seconds, and then try holding down both for 30 seconds. Nothing.

The iphone starts to get really really hot (almost too hot to hold) and I realize I am screwed.

So that is the bad part. The good part is that I was able to make an appt with the local Apple store within an hour, and they replaced my iphone with a new one.

So as stupid as it is that you could plug in an iphone into some ipod speakers and it would destroy the unit, it was nice that I was able to get a new phone as quickly as I did.

I will not be using any more ipod accessories with my iphone.

I am about 90% happy with my iPhone, but in order to sync it I have to use iTunes, so I have moved my podcasts and a small subset of my 450GB of mp3s into iTunes to sync it with the iPhone, and I just have to say.... what an awful piece of software.

I mean, it DOES a few things that are nice, like trying to find album art for you, but the usability of this piece of junk is about as bad as any piece of software I have ever used.

I won't go into it, but it really ticks me off when I am trying to do something sooooo simple and it takes me 15 minutes of screwing around and a few trips to google in order to find a way to do it.

So, in conclusion, iTunes sucks.  Oh, and I hate pretty much all the software on my wife's new Mac. 

That is all. 

I am about 90% happy with my iPhone, but in order to sync it I have to use iTunes, so I have moved my podcasts and a small subset of my 450GB of mp3s into iTunes to sync it with the iPhone, and I just have to say.... what an awful piece of software.

I mean, it DOES a few things that are nice, like trying to find album art for you, but the usability of this piece of junk is about as bad as any piece of software I have ever used.

I won't go into it, but it really ticks me off when I am trying to do something sooooo simple and it takes me 15 minutes of screwing around and a few trips to google in order to find a way to do it.

So, in conclusion, iTunes sucks.  Oh, and I hate pretty much all the software on my wife's new Mac. 

That is all. 

Here is a little dos script I wrote to rename all files in the current and subdirectories to have a different extension.

for /f "tokens=1 delims=" %a in ('dir /s /b /ad') do if exist "%a\*.old" ren "%a\*.old" *.new

If you run this from a bat file you will need to replace % with %%.

Too many to list.

Some of my favs are on this list, like Launchy and SnippetCompiler.

From CodePlex:

patterns & practices Team Development with TFS Guide (Final Release)

Welcome to the patterns & practices Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server project site! This guide shows you how to make the most of Team Foundation Server. It starts with the end in mind, but shows you how to incrementally adopt TFS for your organization. It's a collaborative effort between patterns & practices, Team System team members, and industry experts. This guide is related to our Visual Studio Team System Guidance Project.

Download the Guide

Final release is available! Start using the guide today, while we continue to make improvements.

• Download the Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Guide

Download the Diagrams

Download the Visio diagrams we used in the guide so that you can modify them and use them to document your own particular environment.

• Download the Team Foundation Server Guide Visio Diagrams

 

Yahoo has released a tool called YSlow that helps developers identify why a specific website is loading slow.

Take a look at this screen cap (click to enlarge):

 

Now that I am using an iPhone, I am kinda forced to use iTunes, which I happen to think is a total piece of junk.

The only redeeming quality of iTunes is that it downloads your album art.  I'm sure it does other stuff nice too, but it does so many things poorly that I try to avoid it at all costs.

But now that I am forced to use it, it was really really really ticking me off that it was not grouping songs from the same album into same album group.

These are not some random collection of MP3s, these are all songs from the same single RIP of a single CD, with all the same information in the ID3, and still iTunes can't figure it out.

See this picture for a good example of this.  Feel Good Hit of the Summer should be grouped with all the other ones.  Click the image to see a larger view:

So after screwing around with this for a period (way too long), I finally figured a way to get it to work.

Warning: this is dumb.

Edit the song that is not getting merged (the first one).  Change the album title to something stupid like "X".  Save it, then change it back to what it should be.

Then iTunes will finally merge the songs into 1 album.

 

When working with a SSRS report, the report framework will already "Denull" everything.  But in some cases, for example when you are working with numbers, you might want to display a value in lue of the "" that is displayed for nulls.

Now you would THINK, that they would just use the same ISNULL syntax that everyone knows from sql programming.

HAHAHHAHA... of course they didn't do that.

Instead you have to use a combo of IIF and IsNothing like so:

=IIF(IsNothing(Fields!Quantity.Value),0,Fields!Quantity.Value)

It isn't THAT big of a pain, but I wish MS would sometimes just realize how much easier it would be for them to just create an IsNull function in their own codebase than make their users write this out.

Oh well.  I guess when it comes to problems with SSRS, this is waaaaaaayyyyy down my list.

Speaking of "my problems with SSRS"... when are you guys going to support TBLR text??  Drives me nuts.  Everyone does "vertical text" in TBLR format, for pretty much every application, but now in SSRS you are forced to use TBRL.  When you give these reports to engineers that is the very first thing they say "You need to turn this text around the other way".... yes I know, I got my degree in Civil Engineering with a focus on structure design, so when you come from a background of seeing all vertical text (like on any plans) as ALWAYS, by requirement, aligned in a TBLR manner, and then you are forced to cock your head the other way to read it, it is really a pain.

But I guess I would still like to see MS fix their *terrible* PDF rendering first.  I just LOVE watching my reports take 4x as long as in CR, and end up 100x bigger in file size than they are after being saved in acrobat (15 MB for a 1 page PDF, open in Acrobat, save the file again, down to 150KB, with no visible change in appearance or quality).

 

Recently I ran into a problem where browsing to a newly installed web app produced a bunch of javascript errors.  Stuff like: "'Type' is not defined" and "'Sys' is not defined".

After debugging it for a while, I found the problem to be that URLScan had been installed on the server (Windows 2000 Server), which was preventing any requests with dots in the folder name.

URL Scan is a tool that MS suggested everyone install a while back that acts to filter out many malicious attacks.

So, with the default settings any request for a file inside the scripts\System.Web.Extensions folder would be denied as a 404 b/c of URL Scan.

To fix this, you need to edit the UrlScan.ini file, located in %WINDIR%\System32\Inetsrv\URLscan.  Near the top of the file, change AllowDotInPath from 0 to 1.

The run iisreset to restart IIS and you should be ok!

More info on URLScan is available here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/326444

 

Edit: It turns out that the areas listed below are the 77 official "Community Areas" of Chicago.  Each of these areas can be made up of multiple neighborhoods.

For example, the "Near West Side" is made up of the West Loop, and Greektown, among others.

http://www.answers.com/topic/community-areas-of-chicago

----------

This is not really a definitive map, as I see some places that appear to go by different names than are listed on this map, but this is the best one I could find.

 

Reflector is the one I have been using lately.

It runs well, and has a nice interface. 

Everytime a program on my computer hangs or crashes, dumpprep.exe spins for a long time getting a dump report ready for microsoft.  Only problem is, I never send the report, because I need to get back to work.  So all that time is wasted.

Thankfully, you can turn off this time wasting "feature":

1. System Properties (Either via System in Control Panel, or Getting Properties on My Computer)
2. Advanced Tab, and choose "Error Reporting". Set to "Disable Error Reporting"
3. You could also Select "Startup and Recovery" - Settings button, and change "Write Debugging information" from complete to none.

Credit goes to Peter Collinson www.clieuk.co.uk.

I recently ran into some seemingly strange behavior as I was testing a couple windows services I had written.

In my case, I had a test harness program that was referencing the service (an exe) but this could also apply to references to dlls if you are using the projects application settings (My.Settings.Whatever in VB.Net).

After figuring it out, it all makes sense.

When you create an application setting by providing a value in the project's "Settings" tab, the value is written out into a special <applicationSettings> block in your config file.

But, in order to make those values accessible via a strongly typed/intellisense method, a class is created to wrap those values.  The class is in the Settings.vb file that is generated when you first add an application setting to your project.

But there is one more interesting thing to note:  If the settings class doesn't find the item it expects in the config file, it will return the last supplied value by default. 

So what this means is that if create an application setting for XYZ for the value "123" and then change the app.config file directly to change the "123" to "abc", then "abc" will be returned when you run the program.  However, if you were to then alter the config file to remove or rename the XYZ item, then your application would return "123" again when it ran.

Also, if you directly modify the config file, and then try to edit the projects applications settings, it will alert you to the fact that some values have changed, and ask if you want to use the updated values from the config file.  If you say yes, it will overwrite the Settings.vb file to use the new values that you had supplied in the config file.

So, I was referencing a project that used these settings, but when I would update the config file, those updated settings were not seen.  All I had to do was go into the project settings tab, allow it to refresh the Settings.vb file, and rebuild the project.