And we break our regular transmissions to bring you this news:
I got an invite to GMail a week ago, and I now have 4 invitations to give away. Anyone interested? Leave me a comment on the blog.
So far I must say that I’m VERY impressed with it… its not like any other web mail that I’ve seen. Its very fast, highly user friendly, and quite a nice way to handle e-mails.
[Update: All the invites are now gone… I’ll post more as I get more (if i get more?)]
Well, I’ve been busy over the past few days playing with DotNetNuke. I downloaded v2.0.4 on Friday, installed it on my work pc, spent about 30 minutes copying and pasting stuff from my company’s website into DNN and wowed my boss with what it could do. On Monday they released v2.1.1, so I got that down and installed it on my website.
Now I just need to learn how to make a custom component(desktop module), and how to skin it. I HATE “making pretty”. Ok, maybe HATE is a strong word… My graphical abilities are definately not my strongest skill, and for me to spend 5 hours making something that a more skilled person could do better in 5 minutes seems pointless. I know there are some sites out there with “premade” skins, and skins for sale… I went to one last night (DNNSkins) but that’s not only running DNN v1.0.10, but it also seemed to have no skins in its store. (its like its database is blank)… I tried looking at SnowCovered, but its UI kinda sucks, so I haven’t really found much. DIYWebsite (which seems to be an alternative front for Salaro) has a much nicer UI – you actually get to see samples of the site quite quickly so instead of choosing between 5 descriptions, you can choose between 5 looks. I’d love to use TemplateMonster (cool UI and plenty of skins), but they don’t do DNN templates. 🙁
Anyway, I’m gonna keep on looking for sites with cool skins – if anyone knows of any, let me know.
In a post by Isabella v., she mentions that CNN has captioned a picture of a bunch of kids running in a road smiling (with flames and smoke behind them) “Iraqi children run from a fiery explosion”. While its accurate, in that they’re running, the casual observer would read into it that they’re “running for their lives”, “scared”, and “fearful”. None of which is actually depicted in the picture.
I’d love to know why they’re all smiling, or why CNN would use it in that context without explaining the “apparent” contradiction.
Just a quicky – check out squishySyntaxHighlighter – a syntax highlighter for .Net code, written in .Net. It produces HTML formatted code that’s nicely colorized. (found via Matt Hawley’s blog)
Very cool – next time I post an article to SADeveloper.Net I’ll use this for my code formatting. (assuming they haven’t implemented it since my last submission)
Well, no, I’m not going mad…. and yes, I do mean it. (and no, I haven’t had that confirmed by an unbiassed observer, neither do I have any form of certificate to either prove my sanity, or my ability to make such statements about my sanity…. but lets get off this side track an onto the main point of the post which (i hope) will make the title more understandable)
The short version: Sunday was my birthday. But on Friday night, I had my cellphone stolen from my car while I was in it. (It was a “smash and grab”)
The long version: Well, where do I start… You know that a while ago I hinted that I’d really like somoene to buy me a GPS for my birthday? Well, since nobody seemed to be taking me up on the subtle hint, Charlie, Sean and I decided to buy one for ourselves. So we got a Geko 201, which I purchased for us on Friday.
On the way home (around sunset), I drive along the N14 from Centurion and take the R511 past Diepsloot. So I took the R511 offramp and, at the intersection, I stopped. I’d just SMS’ed Sean (who was coming to have supper with us that evening) and I put my cellphone back in the cradle of the car kit.
Anyway, to cut it short… I saw a gap in the cars a little bit away, so I started to do my checks around the car to see that I could pull off without killing pedestrians, or damaging other cars. As I looked over my left shoulder, I saw a guy duck down… I realised what he was doing, checked in front to see if I could pull forwards yet (I couldn’t), looked back and he was about to smash my front passenger window. The window was smashed. He grabbed the phone. I tried to grab it too – which knocked it out of his hand and onto the floor. At which point I realised that our brand new (still unopened) GPS was on the seat next to me, as was my bag with ID book, and various other important items. So I pulled them into the back of the car while he groped on the floor to find the phone. I had about 3-5 seconds where I could have done something, like hitting the stupid twit, or trying to wrestle the phone away from him, but I thought it would be better to just let him have it, and be gone. (I didn’t know if he had a “friend” nearby, a gun, a knife, or some other weapon)
I drove home as fast as I could (while being safe and obeying as many traffic signs as necessary) so that I could cancel the phone. I didn’t want him calling too many people (especially since my sim card is unlocked for international calls)… (Fortunately it looks like he didn’t make any calls.)
So that was my frustrating Friday experience… I’ll write about the good stuff later. 🙂
Ok, so this really got me smiling… check out Improv Everywhere, a group in New York (NY), who do “improv” acting in kinda random places… not staged – like in a shopping mall, or in a Starbucks (like this one called The Moebius)
I saw this on the VS Data Team’s blog today entitled ‘This was *awesome* (by yag)‘… I’ll quote a bit here:
“[A] guerilla group of performance artists who do live shows on unsuspecting New Yorkers. Gotta agree with him, my favorite is The Mobius as well. To quote the site: ‘Improv Everywhere agents created a living moebius strip in the Astor Place Starbucks. Seven undercover agents meticulously repeated a five-minute slice of time for twelve consecutive repetitions. Starbucks employees and patrons were frightened, confused, and ultimately entertained as they found themselves stuck, without escape, in the middle of a time loop.'”
I have the following code:
PropertyDescriptorCollection myColl = myObj.GetPropertyDescriptionCollection();
PropertyDescriptor pd = myObj.GetOneOfYourPropertyDescriptors();
if (myColl.Contains(pd))
{
myColl.Remove(pd);
}
For some reason, when it runs the line “myColl.Remove(pd);”, I get an exception thrown that says:
An unhandled exception of type ‘System.ArgumentException’ occurred in system.dll
Additional information: Source array was not long enough. Check srcIndex and length, and the array’s lower bounds.
at System.Array.Copy(Array sourceArray, Int32 sourceIndex, Array destinationArray, Int32 destinationIndex, Int32 length)
at System.ComponentModel.PropertyDescriptorCollection.RemoveAt(Int32 index)
at System.ComponentModel.PropertyDescriptorCollection.Remove(PropertyDescriptor value)
If I do:
PropertyDescriptorCollection myColl = myObj.GetPropertyDescriptionCollection();
PropertyDescriptor pd = myObj.GetOneOfYourPropertyDescriptors();
bool found = false;
foreach (PropertyDescriptor currentPD in myColl)
{
if (currentPD.Equals(pd))
{
found = true;
break;
}
}
The variable “found” ends up being true. So I know that the collection definately contains the item. So is this a bug in the framework? Is PropertyDescriptorCollection.Remove(…) not written correctly by Microsoft?
Well, the day was definately more detailed (higher tech level – 200-300) than last year’s dev days which was great. But unfortunately most of what was covered would really suite a small ISV, and not necessarily work in the environment I work in. (Not that my environment is out of the ordinary.) At work, we’re building a large framework for the rest of our developers to use so we don’t really use many of the automated/built in data access wonders of VS.Net.
So let me run through what I got out of the sessions (hrm, I was going to insert a table here, but BlogJet doesn’t have any GUI way to do that, so I’ll have to do it manually):
Opening Keynote: Realizing Your Potential
What I learned for me: Even Microsoft can have hardware problems, so you’d better make sure that you check your presentations and equipment well before you get up to present, run through what the procedure is if something goes wrong, and keep communicating – have a back up plan so that you don’t look quite so stumped, and can gracefully recover without saying “Its a hardware problem” and cutting the talk short.
What I learned for my company: (same as above)
Session 1: Best Practices for Designing and Building Smart Client Applications
What I learned for me: I’d better start reading some of those pattern’s and practices that I keep promising myself to read. They could really help me if I’m doing development myself for “freelance” work.
What I learned for my company: Not much – we use similar things to the “Observer” & “Command” patterns, but they do a lot more in some places and lack a little bit of the functionality in others. Perhaps we could implement the “Command” pattern a bit better… But then I must say that we’ve done all that without reading or knowing about the patterns. (We have a clever guy here that did that work)
Session 2: The Ins and Outs of Secure Data Access
What I learned for me: I need to get me some of that… 🙂 Specifically the DPAPI library.
What I learned for my company: I think this could be useful as we’re serializing (scuze the american spelling, but most developers would look confused if they saw the UK spelling) some objects, which contain connection strings… Of course they didn’t touch on areas of security that we really need, but then I guess if DevDays was to solve every company’s most difficult problems, then they’d be way better attended, would cost an arm and a few legs, and would just generally be entirely impossible to host.
Session 3: Developing Secure Smart Client Applications
What I learned for me: I can’t really remember this session too well. I think Ahmed took it, but I’m a bit stumped as to what he spoke on. (I’ll update this later when I remember)
What I learned for my company: (see above)
Session 4: Deploying and Maintaining Smart Client Applications
What I learned for me: Very cool, and definately a must – I loved the Application Updater component, and was pleased to have the limitations and benefits of the various “code download” deployment methods re-iterated.
What I learned for my company: Some of the Application Updater stuff maybe could be useful, but other than that… nothing.
Closing Keynote: The Future of Microsoft Development Tools
What I learned for me: Oh boy, oh boy do I love Microsoft’s new tools… of course it does leave me wondering how long it will be before trained monkeys will take over our jobs. I think I should go start my own company doing .Net development on Whidbey as soon as it comes out, so that I can get a head start on the rest of the masses. 🙂
What I learned for my company: WOW, geez. So much that will help us, and so much that will just replace a lot of the work we’ve done already.
Overall it was a great day – I got on a Caffeine buzz way too early for any “sane” persion, loved the presentations, can’t wait for the tools coming down the track next year.
And best of all, I got to actually meet one or two of the bloggers… Armand (who probably thinks I’m really rude – I kinda didn’t hear what he was saying to me as I was leaving (in a rush)… so till I see you in person, please accept this apology for my rudeness), Kevin (who I didn’t exactly meet, but who I watched winning too many prizes during the day, and sat on the other end of the table from him at the Blueberry Grill), Simon (who seems to organise most of the SA Developer things, and seems to be one of the “well connected” developers in SA), Thea, Iwan, and a few others who I can’t remember off hand. (Either coz I didn’t link them easily to their blog, or coz I haven’t read too many SA Dev posts from them (maybe coz I haven’t read too many posts on SA Dev recently), or because I simply forgot)
Anyway, it was a cool day on the whole… and for those who are interested, Simon posted this morning to where you can download IssueVision (the app that they worked through in the Smart Client Track, which has some pretty cool components)
I just checked, and the link Simon gave takes you to Barry Gervin’s blog where he says you can download the actual file from Microsoft over here.
Well, on saturday we did our first GeoCaching. For the geeks among us, the image on the right will have an impact. 🙂
I could repeat what we wrote on the GeoCaching website, but that would be a waste of bandwidth. So here are links to the caches we visited: JHB’s Best View, Message In a Bottle, Reporters Riddle #1.
We also collected a Travel Bug called Lightening Bug. I can hear you saying “Ok, so I kinda get GeoCaching, but what on earth is a Travel Bug?”… So I’ll tell you.
A Travel Bug is a metal dog tag that you “attach to an item. This allows you to track your item on Geocaching.com. The item becomes a hitchhiker that is carried from cache to cache (or person to person) in the real world and you can follow its progress online.” A sample of the dogtag is on the left.
Lightening Bug is racing with 4 other bugs placed by “The Four T’s”. There are 2 ways to “win” the race. The first is to get back to Sacramento, California (one of the bugs has already done that), the second way is to go through as many caches as possible before heading back to Sacramento, CA.
Anyway, we now have the bug and are going to try and move it around a few other Cache’s in SA (assuming we can’t convince a friend of ours who’s going to the USA in the next few weeks to take it with him).
Oh, and if anyone REALLY wants to be nice, you can consider sending me plenty of cash for my birthday (coming up soon) so I can afford a GPS system. 🙂 (Or if you have lotsa cash, you could buy me a Garmin Geko 301, a Garmin Rino 110, or a Garmin eTrex)
The guys in homecell were going to go on a mini-hike (5km) tomorrow, but its turned out that only Sean, Charlie and I can make it. So we were thinking of other things to do, and Sean suggested we just go have breakfast somewhere. I still wanted to do something out doors, so I was thinking of where we could have breakfast and still do something outdoors.
One of the places I thought of was at the Lonehill shopping centre (they have some cool places to eat there, and its on the edge of a small “nature reserve” thingy where you can go climb up the “lonehill koppie”)… when my mind suddenly remembered that there is a Geocache near there… So I quickly MSN’ed the other two and we’ve organised to go get breakfast and go find some geocaches. We’ve got 6 we’ve printed out, a few difficulty 1, 2, and 3’s, and one difficulty 5. I’m kinda excited to go find the treasures and add our own bits and pieces to them.
I’ve known about GeoCaching for about a year now, and have wanted to do it pretty much since the instant I read about it. And now, finally, I’m going to actually go do it! I’m SERIOUSLY excited. 🙂
What a nice way to start the weekend. 😀