Jon Knutson

Enough caffeine…..

2008-06-04T16:41:00Z

This shouldn't be shocking... but there is enough caffeine here to power a 3rd world country.

Mt Dew and Pepsi for breakfast...

The service is awesome...

Food and drink everywhere...

We had a great happy hour at the vendor show last night....

Getting to talk to reps from Red-Gate and Orielly books.

Tech Ed 2008 - Why Software Sucks

2008-06-03T18:32:00Z

I just got done with a session called “Why Software Sucks”

We were shown many examples of how software is too complicated.

A quick example is ups.com

If you want to track a package.. you need to click 5-6 times to get where you need to go.

If you just paste in your tracking number into google, click search, click on the result.. goolge can get you there faster…

Are we getting closer or farther away with the technology we implemented?

Is there a better way to do it?

Example two…

If you search by zip code for the nearest store…

You get a dialog that says no results were found.. would you like to increase your search…

Why not give them a message that says… no results were found within your 5 miles… we have expanded your search to find the nearest store and it is 7 miles away.

Why make the user click another button?

Why let them have a chance to give up and not make the trip to your store to buy your product?

Tech Ed 2008 ATrchitecture

2008-06-03T16:43:00Z

Change of Plans….

Pragmatic Architecture: The Role of an Architect

His definition of Architecture is people who can’t code anymore.

There are clearly differences between building a dog house and a skyscraper.

You are told you are building a dog house… you end up building a skyscraper..

Foundation isn’ sufficient, plumbing and electrical are sub-par for this scope.

Good architecture is the ities… scalability…maintainability…

More coming later… great thought provoking questions on what architects do… their role, how they should communicate with their teams…

I want to relook at the slides when they get posted in the next 48 hours....

Tech Ed 2008 Keynote

2008-06-03T14:21:00Z

Bill Gates just gave us a dog and pony show on silverlight and SQL Server 2008.

Great start to the conference.... Very cool to see him.

This is his last conference as a full time employee of Microsoft.

Learning that we can store time zones in SQL Server's new date time fields....

Next session.....

WUX306 - A Lap Around the Newest Features in ASP.NET and Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 for Web Developers

Discover how you can take advantage of the latest enhancements to ASP.NET and Visual Studio 2008 for building Web applications in your real-world applications.

Plenty of Caffeine… Mt. Dew and Coffee everywhere you look..

Plenty of people who haven’t had dates in a while… and still live in their parents basement.

Too many nerds in Hawaiian shirts

Tech.Ed 2008 Orlando

2008-05-13T14:35:00Z

I am going to Tech.Ed this year in Orlando. June 3rd - 6th.

http://www.microsoft.com/events/teched2008/developer/default.mspx

If you are going shoot me an email and we could meet up for lunch at the conference.

Disable "A program needs your permission to continue" dialog box

2008-04-03T14:55:00Z

I like this feature in theory, but it is anoying to me and needs to go away for me.

Go to Control Panel then select user accounts.

Highlight your user.

click the "Turn User Account Control on or off"

Boom... the last "A program needs your permission to continue" dialog you will see.

Uncheck the "Use User Account Control (UAC) to help protect your computer".

You then need to rebood and this issue is fixed on your box.

Laptop Screen is dim when plugged

2008-04-03T14:17:00Z

I am running Vista and have a Dell Latitude D820.

This morning when i started my laptop, my screen was really dim. I checked to make sure it was plugged in and it was.

Solution:

Press and hold the function key and then you can toggle your brightness up and down with the arrow keys.

I dug for 20 mintues in the control panel looking for a power setting.

Problems are always easier when you know the solution.

Common Web errors

2008-03-25T20:35:00Z

Trouble a web page when it isn't working correctly can be an easy if you know what the error codes mean.

If not??? You are looking for a needle in a haystack.

Here are some of the most common ones that i run across....

400 - Bad File Request - this usually means that the URL you typed in is wrong. Too many wwwwwwww's, the wrong domain name or my favorite... the .co

401 - Unauthorized - Security issue. Most cases this is the web server telling you that you need to login someplace first.

403 - Forbidden / Access Denied - Application security issue - normally a username password is incorrect or you are trying to access a directory that you need to be authenticated for.

404 - File Not Found - Simply stated, the file isn't there. If you are developing, check your root and your path... check your spelling... the webserver can't find what you are looking for.

500 - Internal Error - The web server can't retrieve the file due to a configuration issue on the server.

502 - Service Temporarily Overloaded - the web server has too many connections

503 - Service Unavailable - The web server is busy and isn't responding to new connections

Still Need IE 6??

2008-02-04T13:55:00Z

One of my clients still runs IE 6 and as you know, IE 6 adn IE 7 really don't work well together on the same machine unless you want to do some unsupported hacks.

I ran into this app and have tested it for a couple of days and have not found any real problems with it.

http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE

You can install way back to IE 3 if you want. We are just using it to run side by side with IE 6 and IE 7.

Quick File Transfer

2008-01-31T20:40:00Z

A client asked me last week how to get something big transfered to another client.

Easy responses were burn it to a DVD, use FTP, ect.

They didn't have access to those resources, so i told them about http://www.yousendit.com.

It has a free trial and the client got their information.

Primo PDF

2008-01-22T16:19:00Z

This is a little tool that i use when i need to generate a quick pdf and send it to a client.

http://www.primopdf.com/primopdf_free_idx.aspx

You install it,select it in your list of printers, saves it as a pdf on your machine, then you can email it.

Very Nice. If you can print it, you can PDF it.

Outlook Holiday VB Script

2008-01-22T01:48:00Z

Here is a quick snippet of code that you can use to import dates into outlook.

This script puts in the normal 8 holidays that most people get off.

Copy everything in between the ============== lines and save it as a .vbs file.

Then go to windows explorer and double click on that file.

======================

const ALL_DAY = 1440 '60 minutes/hour * 24 hours/day

const WORK_DAY = 540 '60 minuts/hour * 9 hours/day

AddCalendarItem "New Year’s Day", "", ALL_DAY, #1/1/2008#

AddCalendarItem "Memorial Day", "", ALL_DAY, #5/26/2008#

AddCalendarItem "Independence Day", "", ALL_DAY, #7/4/2008#

AddCalendarItem "Labor Day", "", ALL_DAY, #9/1/2008#

AddCalendarItem "Thanksgiving", "", ALL_DAY, #11/27/2008#

AddCalendarItem "Thanksgiving", "", ALL_DAY, #11/28/2008#

AddCalendarItem "Christmas", "", ALL_DAY, #12/24/2008#

AddCalendarItem "Christmas", "", ALL_DAY, #12/25/2008#

Wscript.Echo "Your Holidays have been imported."

Sub AddCalendarItem(subject, body, duration, start)

Const olAppointmentItem = 1

Set objOutlook = CreateObject("Outlook.Application")

Set objAppointment = objOutlook.CreateItem(olAppointmentItem)

objAppointment.Start = start

If 1440 = duration Then

objAppointment.AllDayEvent = True

Else

objAppointment.Duration = duration

End If

objAppointment.Subject = subject

objAppointment.Body = body

objAppointment.Location = "OOO"

'objAppointment.ReminderMinutesBeforeStart = 15

objAppointment.ReminderSet = False

objAppointment.BusyStatus = 3 'OOO

objAppointment.Save

End Sub

'BusyStatus Types

'Free 0

'Tentative 1

'Busy 2

'OutOfOffice 3

'http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/resources/officetips/apr05/tips0405.mspx

======================

File compare utility WinDiff

2008-01-21T01:35:00Z

Last week when i was tracking down my SRS/PDF error... i used a cool tool that i wanted to share with you.

WinDiff

You can download it here... http://www.grigsoft.com/download-windiff.htm

It is a file comparing utility. It clearly shows the difference between the files. Color codes them.

You can also do entire directories... which is great when you are trying to determine if someone manually changed a file on the production server :)

What? Me Test? It is a life saver...

2008-01-18T05:33:00Z

I am a typical developer. I want to do the cool things...

Testing does not fall into that category.

Today I became a big fan of testing.

Not the typical click the button, type in asdf into every textbox testing.

Model testing. For my project, we have tests written to validate the model.

What i mean by that is we have code written in a NUnit test, to create a customer, add some values, save it against the model, and verify that we actually have one as we call it through our finder.

A little more up front work to get this done, but a life saver when you have to make a schema change.. say a varchar field to an int.

Old school... you need to search and search and search... test...test.. test.... and you will still miss a couple of places.

New school... make the schema change locally on your database... then the decision is yours. you can make some of the changes you need to make.. or you can just run the NUnit tests and you can quickly see where the breaking points are in your application.

Guaranteed.. you will find a couple of things your forgot about...

This eliminates a lot of silly (i stayed up way too late last night) mistakes that sometimes get made.

Active Model is amazing

2008-01-18T05:22:00Z

I am so glad to be working with such an amazing database access layer here at Inetium. It is called Active Model.

No more stored procedures. Just save it to the model, persist it. Done.

Also we have generated a lot of code using codesmith templates which saves a tremendous amount of time.

Nobody likes to do repetitive tasks. If you make a schema change, we can quickly re-generate our model and get back to solving the real issues of our clients... not doing all the mindless work.