April 2006 Entries

Windows Workflow Reading List

Windows Workflow is a part of the next-generation APIs from Microsoft collectively known as WinFX. WinFX also includes Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Presentation Foundation. From 50,000 feet away, WinWF consists of a visual workflow designer that plugs into Visual Studio, and a runtime to execute workflow instances. Here are some WinWF blogs I read: Paul Andrew (technical PM)Jon Flanders (a great collection of Biztalk and Workflow posts)Dharma Shukla (architect)Bayer White Thomas Restrepro (covers a variety, including Biztalk and WinWF)Moustafa Khalil (PM)Dennis Pilarinos (PM) WinWF also has a dedicated site: windowsworkflow.net, which downloads, samples, custom activities, and more. Of course...

posted @ Thursday, April 27, 2006 2:00 AM | Feedback (2)

The Promise of Partial Classes and ASP.NET

Web site projects in Visual Studio 2005 give us exactly one code-beside file per web form. We specify the name of the file with the CodeFile attribute in the form’s @ Page directive. There can be no other file – a web form and its code-beside file maintain a monogamous relationship. But wait! Partial classes in C# and Visual Basic say I can: “…split the definition of a class or a struct, or an interface over two or more source files. Each source file contains a section of the class definition, and all parts are combined when the application is compiled.” True, true, but there is...

posted @ Friday, April 21, 2006 3:26 AM | Feedback (4)

Blame The Romans

Blame the Romans: A Play in Two ActsBy S. Allen Act I [It is late in the afternoon on December 21, 2005. Two software developers, Ron and Barbara, pair program in front of a dual LCD display]. Barbara: Your fiscal year calculations are still *%#@ed!. Ron: No, no, look. It says that March 2004 is in the fourth fiscal quarter of two thousand three. That’s right! Barbara: I thought the finance guy said March 2004 is in the fourth fiscal quarter of two thousand and four. Ron: Wait, when you say 2004, do you mean the fiscal year starting in...

posted @ Friday, April 21, 2006 3:21 AM | Feedback (3)

Remote Desktop Hacks

I’m a heavy user of RDP (Remote Desktop, a.k.a. Terminal Services). I don’t remember how I ever got any work done before this technology existed. What follows are some miscellaneous tips. To login to the console session on a Windows 2003 machine, start the Remote Desktop application from the command line with /console. You can also shadow a console session, so a person physically at the machine can interact with the session, too. See: How to Connect to and Shadow the Console Session with Windows Server 2003 Terminal Services. There is also an interesting but Rube Goldbergian trick I’ve never...

posted @ Wednesday, April 19, 2006 4:42 AM | Feedback (32)

The MasterPage Article I Thought I’d Never Finish

… because it kept growing and growing. I was determined to finish this off tonight before falling asleep (always dangerous). Master Pages: Tips, Tricks, and Traps is an article covering all the inconspicuous points of developing and designing with master pages. Everything from URL rebasing, the munging of client side identifiers, using FindControl, nesting, and even tips for cross page posting. As always, I appreciate any feedback. I’m particularly interested to know if the reader finds the intermingling of Visual Basic and C# samples to be useful, or just a terrible idea. Now to sleep, perchance to dream...

posted @ Wednesday, April 12, 2006 5:09 AM | Feedback (150)

The ContentPlaceHolder – Not Just For Content

I’m working on an article full of tips and tricks for master pages. The article will be online soon, but I wanted to throw out one tip as a preview and get some feedback. A master page typically includes the single HTML <head> tag for a page. This approach gives every content page a <head>, but presents problems when a content page wants to add additional tags inside head, like <meta> and <link>, for example. The tags might be specific to the content page, and we wouldn’t want to include them in the .master for every page. As long as the...

posted @ Tuesday, April 11, 2006 3:06 AM | Feedback (7)

Ultra-Mobile Pricey Computer

When news of Project Origami began to spread like avian bird flu, I thought the decision to buy an ultra-mobile PC would be a no-brainer. A small device that can run Word, Outlook, OneNote, and GPS software on a reasonably sized display sounds infinitely useful - all I would need is a fashionable man purse to carry my computer around, right casey? Now I’ve seen some specs and reviews come on-line. Dr. Neil is playing with a pre-production UMPC and reports the battery life as ‘just over two hours’. I was hoping for 4. Meanwhile, the Samsung Q1 is available for...

posted @ Thursday, April 06, 2006 2:26 AM | Feedback (0)

A Tip for Microsoft Certification Exam Takers

When I took my first certification exam years ago, I spent an inordinate amount of time looking for missing semi-colons, counting parenthesis, and studying variable names. I thought the exam might fool me into picking an answer with a syntax error, and I’d get the question wrong. After working with the Assessment and Certification Exams team, I wish I knew then what I know now: There are no trick questions on the Microsoft certification exams. This is something the cert team wants people to know: if a question is asking about decryption using classes in the .NET framework, the question...

posted @ Tuesday, April 04, 2006 3:26 AM | Feedback (8)