Job ads these days are monotonous. They all seem to blur into the following: Come put your skills to work at a fast paced and growing company! Our work environment is highly collaborative, exceedingly innovative, and vastly stimulating!! Required skills:    - blah    - blah    - blah de blah de blah blah This position also requires excellent communication skills from a detail oriented self-starter who likes to mentor others and thinks out of the box. Salary commensurate with experience and our mood. We offer a competitive benefits package, meaning it’s the least we can get away with. Email your resume for immediate consideration...

Something I just noticed in 2.0: my machine.config is around 17 KB in size, compared to over 200 KB in 1.1. The file seems practically empty. A little comment at the top of the file reveals why: “To improve performance, machine.config should contain only those settings that differ from their defaults.”

Many thanks to the BaltoMSDN user group for having me present at their monthly meeting last week. The topic was “Debugging – Tips, Tools, & Techniques”. In a few weeks I’ll give the talk again at the MAD Code Camp. The Code Camp schedule is online – there are some great topics and speakers. If you are in the area - it will certainly be worth your time to attend. Register here. Here are some of the tools and libraries I use during the presentation (besides VS.NET): Enterprise Library Microsoft Debugging Tools For Windows (includes WinDbg) CLR Profiler SysInternals.com – for Process...

Milan Negovan has a nice article on the web: “Beware Of Deploying Debug Code In Production”. Includes a nice analysis of what is happening in the ASP.NET temporary files directoy.

One of the highlights of my Toronto trip was walking downtown and dining with the collective brain trust of Richard Hale Shaw, Walt Ritscher, Chris Kinsman, Rocky Lhotka, Brian Randell, Kevin McNeish, Derek Hatchard, David Totzke, and Rebecca Diaz. Here is a shot of Dave, RHS, Walt, Kevin, and Rocky. Kevin is looking up at the CN Tower.   I also want to thank those who came to my sessions. I hope you enjoyed the presentations and found them informative.

I came to the conclusion this week that I have at least one C++ habit I can’t kick. When I want to check an object reference for null, my fingers automatically type: Widget woo = GetWidgetFromSomewhere(); if(woo) {     // … }      Error: Cannot implicitly convert Widget to bool. After five years of working together, the compiler still doesn’t understand me.

Here is a subtle bug you can introduce into a query. Let’s pretend we are tracking coffee sales. CREATE TABLE CoffeeSales (     TransactionID int IDENTITY PRIMARY KEY,     Customer varchar(10) NOT NULL,     CoffeeType varchar(10) NOT NULL,     TransactionDate datetime NOT NULL,     Cost money NOT NULL )   INSERT INTO CoffeeSales    VALUES('Joe', 'Decaf', '2004-04-17 07:30:00', 2.25) INSERT INTO CoffeeSales    VALUES('Joe', 'Decaf', '2004-04-17 09:00:00', 3.25) INSERT INTO CoffeeSales    VALUES('Joe', 'Mocha', '2004-04-17 17:00:00', 5.00)   INSERT INTO CoffeeSales    VALUES('Amy', 'Maple', '2004-04-17 15:00:00', 1.25) INSERT INTO CoffeeSales    VALUES('Amy', 'Mocha', '2004-04-17 16:00:00', 4.75) INSERT INTO CoffeeSales    VALUES('Amy', 'Mocha', '2004-04-17 17:00:00', 3.50) Here is a query attempting to total up the sales for each...

This week I am traveling to Toronto to speak at VSLive! I have presentations on Thursday and Friday afternoon. Toronto is a spectacular city to visit, and the conference location looks to be in a beautiful spot. The following week I’ll be speaking at the BaltoMSDN user group meeting in Hunt Valley, MD, just outside of Baltimore. The meeting is on Wednesday, April 20th at 6:30. In between the two, I’ll be spending some time here, and some time here. I think I am addicted to satellite imagery. Is there a support group?  

Completely unpredictable ... .... since 2004.