BusinessRx Reading List

October 2nd Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data

2008-10-02T08:23:21Z

Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Amazon EC2 Support for Windows and ASP.NET: Big news announced this week: Amazon will be offering Windows Server 2008 as an option in their EC2 service. This enables you to use ASP.NET, IIS7 and SQL Server in the cloud. Using ASP.NET WebForms, MVC and Dynamic Data in a Single Application...(read more)

Lazy LINQ and Enumerable Objects

2008-10-01T10:30:00Z

Someone asked me why LINQ operators return an IEnumerable<T> instead of something more useful, like a List<T>. In other words, in the following code: List < Book > books = new List < Book >(); // ... IEnumerable < Book > filteredBooks = books.Where(book => book.Title.StartsWith( "R" )); ... we started with a List<Book>, so why isn’t the Where operator smart enough to return a new List<Book>, or modify the existing list by removing books that don’t match...(read more)

jQuery and Microsoft

2008-09-28T18:32:31Z

jQuery is a lightweight open source JavaScript library (only 15kb in size) that in a relatively short span of time has become one of the most popular libraries on the web. A big part of the appeal of jQuery is that it allows you to elegantly (and efficiently) find and manipulate HTML elements with minimum lines of code. jQuery supports this via a nice "selector" API that allows developers to query for HTML elements, and then apply "commands" to them. One of the characteristics...(read more)

A Twist on the Monty Hall Problem

2008-09-26T21:56:00Z

Steve Smith has posted a couple of interesting probability problem solvers on his blog recently. His most recent one is a twist on the Monty Hall problem . I mentioned the Monty Hall problem and its solution in an earlier blog entry of mine, For Some Probability Problems, Seeing Can Be Believing : When facing a particularly tough probabilty problem sometimes it helps to sit down and draw out the possible outcomes for the given scenarios. In doing so, things that may otherwise seem very complex boil...(read more)

In Memoriam to My Nephew, Matthew O'Bryant

2008-09-26T18:11:00Z

My nephew, Matthew O'Bryant, was one of the two US military personnel that was killed in the terrorist bombing of the Pakistan Marriott last weekend. He was a great kid (22 years old) and he will be missed very much by his wife, brother and sisters, parents, the rest of our family, and his many friends. http://www.wkrg.com/local/article/local_sailor_killed_in_pakistan_bombing/18566/ http://www.myfoxgulfcoast.com/myfox/pages/News/Detail?contentId=7499322&version=2&locale=EN-US&layoutCode=TSTY&pageId=3.2.1...(read more)

Silverlight 2 Release Candidate Now Available

2008-09-26T04:54:32Z

This evening we published the first public release candidate of Silverlight 2. There are still a small handful of bugs fixes that we plan to make before we finally ship. We are releasing today's build, though, so that developers can start to update their existing Silverlight Beta2 applications so that they'll work the day the final release ships, as well as to enable developers to report any last minute showstopper issues that we haven't found internally (please report any of these on the www.silverlight.net...(read more)

Raleigh Alt.Net Beer Users Group

2008-09-23T14:32:49Z

I am happy to announce that this Thursday (9/25) will be the first meeting of the new Raleigh Alt.Net Beer Users Group, or Alt.bug for short. The basic idea is just to go hang out and discuss whatever comes up. We might consider setting topics for future meetings, but for this first meeting we are just going to see what happens. I have already confirmed that Derik , Dug , and Jayme will be coming and hopefully many more will show up as well. The meeting will be at O'Malleys Tavern (Guinness and Red...(read more)

Transferring Large Files

2008-09-19T13:29:00Z

Every couple of weeks or so I seem to have a need to transfer (or receive) a relatively large file to another colleague or client. It might be a database zipped up into a 50 MB file, artwork totalling hundreds of megabytes, or various DLLs and source code. Over the course of my career I have used the following techniques for transferring data: E-mail - the most straightforward technique for sharing data. The major con is that many email providers reject attachments over a certain threshold, usually...(read more)

September Lounge Update

2008-09-16T17:36:50Z

August was a great month for The Lounge, with Scott joining the network the web publishers room hit an all-time high of 1.7 Million impressions in the month. To start out this month I have moved Sam Allen who runs the excellent site DotNetPerls from the Small Publishers Room to the Web Publishers Room. Sam has been writing some excellent articles and has been rewarded with great traffic. I am thrilled to announce that I will be handling sponsorship for the Herding Code Podcast. I am convinced that...(read more)

NHaml-Users Google Group

2008-09-15T13:23:34Z

Since NHaml has broken out of MvcContrib (which is a great decision I think, I hate contrib projects in general since they are very hard to maintain) there isn't a great place to ask questions about using NHaml so I went ahead and created a NHaml-Users Google group . -James...(read more)

Search Your Site Using Google's Custom Search Engine

2008-09-15T08:51:00Z

Remember when people used to debate what search engine was the best among the bunnch? Do you remember back in the day when Yahoo! differentiated itself from other search engines by having actual human beings catalog, summarize, and rate large swaths of the World Wide Web? Today, search is a commodity. It's ubiquitous. Web surfers expect there to be a search box and expect accurate results returned in the blink of an eye. Because of these expectations, it's now more important than ever that your website...(read more)

Three's Company, Too

2008-09-09T22:24:00Z

I try to keep this blog tightly focused on technical issues, but I wanted to share this happy bit of news: on September 1st my wife gave birth to our daughter, Alice Mitchell . Mom & baby are healthy and happy. If you'd care to read a bit more about this, I've blogged about it on my personal blog, ScottOnLife.com : Then There Were Three ....(read more)

What’s Wrong With This Code? (#20)

2008-09-03T01:12:00Z

Mike had to model answers. Yes or no answers, date and time answers - all sorts of answers. One catch was that any answer could be “missing” or could be “empty”. Both values had distinct meanings in the domain. An interface definition fell out of the early iterative design work: public interface IAnswer { bool IsMissing { get ; } bool IsEmpty { get ; } } Mike was prepared to implement a DateTimeAnswer class, but first a test: [ TestMethod ] public void Can_Represent_Empty_DateTimeAnswer() { DateTimeAnswer...(read more)

ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 and Form Posting Scenarios

2008-09-02T12:22:52Z

This past Thursday the ASP.NET MVC feature team published a new "Preview 5" release of the ASP.NET MVC framework. You can download the new release here . This "Preview 5" release works with both .NET 3.5 and the recently released .NET 3.5 SP1. It can also now be used with both Visual Studio 2008 as well as (the free) Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 edition (which now supports both class library and web application projects). Preview 5 includes a bunch of...(read more)

Quick Update

2008-09-02T12:21:59Z

I've received a number of (very nice) emails recently asking if I was ok - since my blog has been silent the last few weeks (and much of the summer). Just to address people's concerns - I'm alive and well. :-) I've just been on vacation the last 6 weeks, and have unfortunately not had free time to post (I've been changing a lot of diapers). I am still on vacation another week before I officially return to work. I did get a chance to write up a quick post this weekend that...(read more)