|
|
These blog entries are written by industry experts and leaders. We consider this content to be a good read for any software developer or web technologist.
Browse by Tags
All Tags » General Software Development (RSS)
-
I've got a small app in production that's been running without a glitch until the other day. It turned out to be a case where the server didn't have enough disk space and nothing more. That should have been the end of it, but I also decided to add myself to the error emails. The next day someone reported not getting their regular email, and I couldn't figure it out. Why would something that had been working perfectly and not been changed just fail randomly? I looked everywhere in the code and could find no reason, and nothing was logged about this. That said, there was an exception that was logged, but it was about my email, not the other. My email address was on another domain, and that wasn't allowed, but I just shrugged it off. Then it happened again today and all the sudden I realized what should have been very obvious. That small configuration change I had made to send myself error emails was the actual problem! My code first sent error emails before sending routine emails, all of which was one try/catch So when I added myself to the error emails, I introduced an exception that skipped the others. This was now easy to fix -- just make each email send be in its own try/catch, instead of one. And the lesson learned: any change, even a tiny configuration change, can introduce problems. Even bigger lesson: when problem occurs after small change, then your change is likely cause. Those should really have been obvious in retrospect, but I managed to convince myself otherwise. 
|
-
I'll be donating the following books, mostly sent to me by the publishers so they deserve the praise, to be given out at the Atlanta Cutting Edge .NET User Group on Monday night, November 6th: - The C# Programming Language by Hejlsberg, Wiltamuth, and Golde published by Addison Wesley
- Building Intelligent .NET Applications by Rea published by Addison Wesley
- Maximizing ASP.NET, Real World, Object-Oriented Development by Putz published by Addison Wesley
- Seeing Data, Designing User Interfaces for Database Systems Using .NET by Riordan published by Addison Wesley
- Designing Effective Database Systems published by Addison Wesley
- ADO.NET and System.Xml v2.0, The Beta Version by Homer, Sussman, and Fussell published by Addison Wesley
- A First Look at SQL Server 2005 for Developers by Beauchemin, Berglund, and Sullivan published by Addison Wesley
- Introducing SQL Server 2005 for Developers by DeBetta published by Microsoft Press
- Web Services Architecture and its Specifications by Cabrera and Kurt published by Microsoft Press
- .NET Security and Cryptography by Thorsteinson and Ganesh published by Prentice Hall
- Software Architect Bootcamp by Malveau and Mowbray published by Prentice Hall
- Pro Visual Studio 2005 Team System Application Development by Shrimpton published by Apress
Of course the big give-away is still the full one-year subscription to Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite with MSDN Premium, a $10,939 value, being donated by me and Mimsware, so come on out.
|
-
I've recently finally joined MySpace and created my own "space". I've looked a little at them before when they've been in the news, but I never really thought much of it. The funny thing is that even now that I have created my own "space", I still don't think much of it. I suppose its possible that I'm just too old to really "get it", but I don't think that's the case. My problem with MySpace is that its just NOT a very user-friendly community site at all. First, the layout is not at all personalizable -- like it or not, you get a single page with two columns with fixed content. The left column has a brief overview of your details with your picture, info on how to contact you, your details which are your answers to a fixed set of questions, your school information, and a few other things depending on what information you provide. The right column has a very limited blog summary, whether you use it or not, your detailed responses to a fixed set of more general questions, your friends, and comments. There is no way to move things from one column to another, reorder the position of items in columns, add new content that doesn't fit their categories, or add new columns or pages. In some cases if you don't supply the content then its entire area won't display, but in many cases you are still stuck with the content area even if you don't supply the content, and everyone gets this silly box at the top of their right column that says they are in your extended network or their profile is private. There is also no built-in way to change the look and feel of your space, beyond just adding raw CSS in one of your response areas, and the site was obviously not originally developed with that intent either. Now it is true that using CSS you can get a lot of customization, but my point is that there is no simple way to pick a set of colors or other look and feel properties, so everyone has to use CSS. And while things can be made to "work" using CSS to a large extent, its not been setup with classes in the majority of cases to make this easy -- instead my CSS is changing properties for table, table table, table table table, table table table table, things like that -- very ugly. Luckily there are plenty of other sites that have grown up around MySpace that give you the ability to specify what you want and then generate the CSS for you, but that's obviously not part of MySpace itself so its a really bizarre process for most users. This may have been sufficient if MySpace had been created 10 years ago, but its pretty laughable that any community minded site would be built like this in the last 5 years. So why is MySpace so popular? The answer to that question is also why I decided to join -- everyone else is already on MySpace. I'm not sure how it managed to grow to this point in the past, but that's irrelevant now that everyone is there. In my case, I found every single one of my nieces and nephews that are old enough to be on MySpace, so whether I like it or not, it is the best way to keep in touch and see what they are up to. Are there any lessons to be learned here? Not really for the most part, I just thought I'd share my findings for all the older generation techies. The only other thing I can say is that MySpace is a good example of why even though you should keep things "simple", you should also do things "right" when its easy to do. What do I mean by that? Maybe you don't need personalization in your first release, but you should at least use CSS in a good way so that it won't be hard to add later. By not having done that at an early stage, MySpace is now very much stuck since changing their layout now would completely break thousands of existing user "spaces" that work due to the hacks that have been identified and applied. So while you should keep things "simple", that should not be an excuse for sloppiness and spaghetti code -- you still should want to do things "right". On the other hand, I seriously doubt that any of these other sites that are trying to do it right now will succeed in replacing MySpace due to everyone already being on MySpace -- unless MySpace messes up and breaks existing "spaces".
|
-
I am
excited to announce that I will be joining Mimsware on October 26th.
Mimsware is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in the Atlanta area offering
services spanning software development, network infrastructure, and products to
corporate, government and small- or medium-sized businesses. While my focus
will of course be working on real applications for Mimsware, I will hopefully
also finally find a little free time for other activities. So if you're in the
Atlanta area and
looking for a great team of consultants to help you design and implement a
software solution using Microsoft stuff, then don't hesitate contacting Mimsware
to get proven experience.
|
-
My client has too much work for me to do as they've grown, so we need to bring on someone else to help us out. First and foremost, we need someone very good with MS Sql Server and T-Sql, including procs, dts, jobs, and more. Most of the work can be done remotely, but we also need someone that can help with network/database maintenance. That is not the main responsibility, but it does mean we need someone reasonably close to my client's location, so we need someone that is relatively near the Virginia burbs of Washington DC, or at least willing to relocate. It would also be great if this person was able to work with me on our .NET development, even using my ORMapper. If this describes you, and you're interested, then please send your resume to me at VAJob-at-WilsonDotNet.com. This is a great client to work with, but they're also very busy, so we're only looking for someone very good.
|
-
I'm all for really trying to push updates needed for security on people by default, as long as there are options to disable that "feature", but it seems FireFox is a little overzealous. Apparently the FireFox team just released v1.5.0.5, and so browser automatically found that update and installed it, which was the default setting. What's the problem? I had several pages open, and I was doing some real work in one (actively typing in an edit box), when with no warning all of my pages were simply closed and the install just started. I cannot recall any application that doesn't give you a warning if you're currently woring in it before proceeding with an update, even when things are configured to be automatic with no user interaction. Yes, I realize there is an option to ask me what I want to do instead of being automatic, but I think the difference should be that "ask me" does not do it automatically even when I'm not working, giving me complete control, while "automatic" should still give me a warning to save my work and close things if I am in the middle of things. What do you think?
|
|
|
|