This past week I managed to: Shovel snow Catch a cold Sleep for 16 hours on a Saturday Model the process of cross matching blood specimens to blood units for transfusion with a database schema. Meet various other work related hard deadlines… All of this fun activity didn’t leave much time for: Blogging This evening I finally got to jump back into a Reporting Services frame of mind in preparation for San Fran next week. Reporting Services ships with a utility to run “scripts” from the command line: the rs (rs.exe) utility. Most Microsoft server applications expose a COM object...

Someone in the newsgroups recently asked what the numbers mean in a release mode stack trace. For instance, what can you do with the following information? [NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.] aspnet.debugging.BadForm.Page_Load(Object sender, EventArgs e) +34 System.Web.UI.Control.OnLoad(EventArgs e) +67 System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() +35 System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain() +720 The stack trace gives us a little bit of information to go on, at least we can narrow the problem down to a specific method inside of a specific type, but +34 doesn’t seem to be particularly helpful – what does it mean? There...

I was flipping through SDTimes this week and came across the article “Turning Architecture Into a Profession”. The Open Group intends to begin a certification program for software architects. “While declining to discuss specifics of the program just yet, de Raeve did say architects will have to show they have a body of experience and that they’re capable of deploying an as-yet-undefined set of skills in the delivery of systems architectures in real-world situations. Among those skills are communication, conflict resolution, architecture modeling techniques, and the ability to apply methodologies and elicit shareholder requirements, he said.” Hmm, conflict resolution. Do you...

Perhaps I've overstated the title for dramatic effect, but as a taxpayer I've certainly donated some amount of money to failed software projects for the U.S. government. I’d be curious to see a post-mortem report on some of these projects to hear what went wrong. I’m sure the list could go on and on. Of all the agencies though, certainly NASA has the toughest job. I mean, you forget to put one tiny file into version control, and oops, $1.2 billion down the drain. I write about this story in the latest OdeToCode article - “Source Control: A Primer”. The...

Ad for the day When I first heard of an open source project by the name of DotNetNuke, I really thought I’d be looking at the source code to a first person shooter. As it turns out, DNN is everything one needs to run a website. Now there is a book dedicated to DNN ready to hit the market from my friends at Packt Publishing. Thought for the day I was listening to a Stephen Hawking recording during the commute today and he said: “Imagine now a star with the mass ten times the mass of the sun”. I tried. I failed. Threat for...

A storm brews on the distant horizon around the delivery of Longhorn and the Future Of of Assembly Versioning. Rocky Lhotka and Kent Tegels feel the versioning strategy coming down the road will stagnate Microsoft’s version of the .NET runtime. I wasn’t too alarmed by the article on the ServerSide.NET for a few reasons. First, to some extent, development life on Windows has followed this course and thrived for sometime. The Win32 API has been the foundation of the platform and changes come relatively slowly with major OS releases and service packs. On top of the API assorted runtimes and...

Every so often I take a look at an application and think, hmmm, with a couple tweaks I could have this UI looking really nice, but when I go to check-in the style sheet changes I realize I only have read-only access. Then I remember - after my last set of tweaks they revoked my commit privileges on all css files. Sigh. The measures people take when they don’t agree with your sense of color and style. Over the years I’ve recognized the flexibility style sheets offer, and I’ve designed (in the architecture sense) with css in mind. Still, I’ve...

January 18th is the next meeting of the CMAP user group in Columbia, Maryland. I’ll be walking through more code and architecture for the Community Starter Kit, and I promise not to show any more corny videos of man beating computer for comic relief.

Python has been popping up in my newsreader quite often these days (see Darrell’s 'Why Should You Learn Python?' and Sam’s 'Key Observation…'). I have fond memories of Python. I was working with a company building middleware for online multiplayer gaming. We had working demo games to exercise the framework, and I used Python code to control the behavior and actions of non-player characters (NPC) in the demo. I hesitate to say what I wrote was any sort of artificial intelligence, it was more like a script for NPCs to follow, but it made for great conversation outside of work....

It was an honor to be nominated; it's even a bigger honor to receive a formal announcement congratulating me for an MVP award. Being in company the likes of Scott Mitchell, Scott Watermasysk, Scott Hanselman, and Scott Cate is doing pretty well – and that’s just the Scott list.

Over the holidays I tried again to get mono and monodevelop running under SuSE on a Virtual PC. (Note: the monodevelop website has been offline for at least a week. Apparently there are a number of worms targeting PHP vulnerabilities going around). The good news is: Service Pack 1 for Virtual PC seems to resolve all the kernel panics I saw a few months ago. The bad news: is nothing is ever easy in RPM land. SuSE 9.2 seemed to work well with everything but mono, and I could not get both mono and monodevelop running even when building every...

I’m convinced smart clients will rule the world again one day, and we will all look back at ‘web application’ development as being the gigantic kludge that tied over application development until everything underneath us became virtualized. A few weeks ago I pitched a web service / smart client design to a handful of people at a customer site. The people who will use the software loved the idea, but the people who make the final decision do not – they seem to think every solution involves server generated PDF files. PDFs are to usability as lead weights are to...

It happens to everyone. You pop into the grocery store to pick up some soda and head to the 10 item or less express checkout lane. The person in front of you has 25 bags of vegetables. The clerk has to do a price check on red onions. The customer can’t find their debit card. The cash register runs out of paper. Suddenly, a wormhole appears and sucks all of the employees into the vast space-time continuum. While you wait in line for hours, the store staff drinks gin and plays blackjack inside an East Cleveland speakeasy circa 1921. I’ve...