Data in. Net in various ways
In DotnetRocks #553 Chris Sells said that he had written the code to manage data in Nerddinner.com in various ways.
In a weak moment I promised someone at work to write ‘Hello World’ with Microsoft’s various methods of data access so I was quite happy to hear this.
A quick Google session didn’t give me the code so I emailed Chris and asked it it is available online.
He responded fairly quickly and told me that the code is available here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/ff707264.aspx
Board work in tenant-owner’s associations
I have created a site to help the board work in tenant-owner’s associations here in Sweden and I really want it to take off.
There is enough functionality in there now to let people in, so I guess it’s time to start that weird people part called marketing. I wish @garyvee had written more about how to hustle
It is not that I want to quit my day job ’cause I actually like my job. I really want to help all the tenant-owner’s associations to have better boards of directors. The best part is that I am the secretary of the board where I live so I have some insight to board work in these organizations.
The strenuous part is that there are not that many articles I could write with essential key words in to get some attention to the application. Apart from that my prejudice tells me I have to convince a lot of non computer savvy people to change the ways the do what they have always done.
It’s a nice challenge.
Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk
I just finished reading Crush It!
I guess it is a narrow path to walk. To cater to both those who don’t know about the power of Twitter, Facebook et al. and those that already know who @garyvee is.
It was a really nice successor to David Allens Getting Things Done
The lessons learned are the obvious: Get your sh*t together, stop procrastinating and start pushing that flywheel where YOU want it to go.
All three books have already had some impact on my life in getting me to step up the effort with my latest project that I’ll write about in my next post.
In need of version control
A friend of mine, that I’ll keep anonymous, asked me to help her with an ASP page that didn’t work.
The changes she made wasn’t visible when she ran the script on the server. I got most of it running on my local machine and thought there should be no problem running it on the production server.
A couple of hours later the ASP file contained nothing but plain HTML and it still wasn’t working. By this time she was convinced the web server was serving an old file to visitors.
(No it wasn’t a caching issue.)
I didn’t hear from her in about two hour until she told me the issue was solved. Clearly a bit ashamed she told me she had an intern working for her. They had been working on the same file and none of them had a development server, so they were both uploading their versions of the same file to the server.
Not considering the lack of coordination and development environments, they definitively would have been better off using version control.
Call for logview4net user stories
Please let me know how you are using logview4net and what more you want it to do.
I know there are some who use it to monitor and consolidate Apache web logs.
One user told me he monitors the chat log of his MMORPG with logview4net running on a second monitor.
Another use is to watch for activity in an ftp archive.
How are you using it?
New release of logview4net (9.19)
Yesterday I made a new release of logview4net my multi channel log monitor.
I got a request for a TCP listener in addition to the UDP listener that was already there.
It actually wasn’t much work; First I copied the UDP listener, then I copied some code from the MSDN documentation.
I haven’t done any real testing though so if you want a stable TCP listener please try it out and give me some feedback.
The documentation isn’t updated yet, but the TCP listener is configured just as the UDP listener.
I just realized that the documentation doesn’t mention that you can use “ANY” as the remote IP address if you want anyone to be able to send data to your machine.
Reporting and/or data mining
When do you really need a reporting engine like Microsoft Reporting Services or one of the Data Dynamics offerings?
I’m working with a customer to rewrite an old application that is used to collect and publish a lot of data.
Some of the data is easy to pull from the database, but needs complicated layout. Other data is hard to get out of the database, filtering is ad hoc and it is published without formatting in an Excel spreadsheet.
There is also the unspecified requirement that the end users should be able to create their own reports and/or modify the shipping ones.
As far as I’ve experienced it is usually the creator of the application that ends up making modified or new reports anyway so I think a steep learning curve is OK. It is a good thing to have the reporting engine separate from the main application tough. That way you are not locked to the main applications release cycle. You also have the option to merge your application data with the customers existing data from other applications.
I guess I’ll vote against the reporting tool for the ad hoc Excel report.
logview4net 9.15 released
Get your fresh copy from SourceForge.
I need some help designing part of the GUI for the next release.
The changes in this release are:
- Fixed: [2250820] The part “User Interactions” in the settings dialog doesn’t expand if one adds more patterns.
- Fixed: [2250843] Manage actions missing scrollbar
- Fixed: [2250810] FolderListener: logview4net crashes if an additional file …
- Fixed: Http authentication in the RSSListener
- Fixed: [2250834] Save dialog default folder
- Fixed: [2250823] The default font is “Courier new”. But when one opens the font dialog then”Microsoft Sans Serif” is selected.
pifts.exe
I just read about pifts.exe at a fellow Swedish blogger.
It does look a little suspicious, but I am not convinced it is a cover up.
All the threads I have seen mentioning pifts.exe at the Norton Forum site, before being deleted, has contained loads of junk.
I might be a social attack against Norton.
Windows Azure goes local
According to Computerworld the technology in Windows Azure will be part of Windows Server in the future. I really hope this will come with a service pack about the same time Azure is released for commercial use.
By keeping the entry level pricing low, or free, this is a perfect way to get students and start ups on the Microsoft train. It doesn’t come as a surprise since Microsoft makes its money from selling licenses, but it’s nice to get the information out.
