CodeBetter.Com Link Blog

February 2005 - Posts

• Access your GMail account on a WAP device

  Just found this site, which provides WAP access to Gmail.  I was signed up in about 2 minutes, and browsing my Gmail from my phone.  gmailwireless.com - Access your GMail account on a WAP device -Brendan Posted Feb 28 2005, 04:04 PM by cblinkblog with no comments

• Write Less, Think More: The Code-Bloat Antidote

  From John Wood : Write Less, Think More: The Code-Bloat Antidote Recently I've been experimenting with an idea I had to encourage developers to improve their code. The idea involves enforcing an arbitrary line limit on the code they write. For example, I may tell them to implement a certain feature, but that the code they write cannot be longer than, say, 100 lines. That may sound like a stupid idea, but it always ends up with better and more well thought-out code. Let me explain the logic behind this. Posted Feb 28 2005, 11:05 AM by cblinkblog with no comments

• I Knew Something Was Wrong When my 7 year old said "D00d joo pwn m4d h4x sk1llz - w00t"

  A helpful guide for non-1337 parents from Microsoft Hopefully following articles in the same area will cover: How to convince your child that smashing the stack for fun and profit is just WRONG WRONG WRONG. Why SQL Injection attacks are so, like, 1990's. How to convince your teen that root-kits might not be the right kind of exploit for them.   Posted Feb 28 2005, 10:32 AM by cblinkblog with no comments

• MS Eating TDD Dogfood

  Test Driven Development proves useful at Microsoft One of the coolest things I got to find out today from the PM of the MSBuild product, Kieren, is that development on the next version of MSBuild has been done using Test Driven Development. Yep, Write a test that fails, make it work, refactor. In fact, since it started long before Team System, they used NUnit to develop the unit tests. Posted Feb 28 2005, 10:27 AM by cblinkblog with no comments

• A Bit of MSNegativity

  From Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - A Brief Comment on http://www.msnfound.com Today I found a post entitled MSNFOUND is so sad... which is in reference to the MSN.:FOUND website. The comments on the site on the Chanel 9 forums seems to be universally negative. Looking a little further, I notice that checking the Bloglines citations for http://www.msnfound.com also results in numerous blog postings about the site whose feedback is primarily negative. The reasons for this are unsurprising, and were listed in Robert Scoble's blog posting where he lambasted the creators of the site and asked for them to be fired. I agree with most of what Robert wrote in his post. I'd only add one thing, please don't hold this against us. We aren't as stupid as our marketing people make us look. Posted Feb 28 2005, 10:25 AM by cblinkblog with no comments

• Clemens Vasters: Enterprise Development & Alien Abductions - A Weekend With Indigo. Part 1: Simple Messaging

  Clemens Vasters: Enterprise Development & Alien Abductions - A Weekend With Indigo. Part 1: Simple Messaging One of the great things about Indigo is that changing bindings and therefore adding/removing capabilities and even adding/exchanging/removing transports can be done with no impact on the code itself. All of that can be done in configuration. So what I will do is to share the base samples with you as I write them, explain a couple of concepts along the way, and use some very simplistic bindings for starters. Posted Feb 25 2005, 10:26 AM by cblinkblog with no comments

• Using programmatic Impersonation from an ASP.NET Page

  Rick Strahl has a good article on Using programmatic Impersonation from an ASP.NET Page Several times I've heard the following question asked: I have an ASP.NET application and I need access to network resources that my account running ASP.NET does not have. How can I change the permissions at runtime without setting up Impersonation or using a high privilige account for my ASP.NET user account? In short, how can you raise permissions of an ASP.NET request at runtime to perform some task that requires rights that the standard account ASP.NET runs under cannot handle? Raymond Posted Feb 25 2005, 05:26 AM by cblinkblog with no comments

• In the "My protocol is bigger than yours" Department

  From Scoble: No RSS? No downloads? No interaction? Fake content? You're fired! Sorry, if you do a marketing site and you don't have an RSS feed today you should be fired. I'll say it again. You should be fired if you do a marketing site without an RSS feed. Saying that RSS is only for geeks today is like saying in 1998 that the Web was only for geeks. Posted Feb 24 2005, 09:43 AM by cblinkblog with no comments

• Goodbye Web Forms

  From Blogtastic ASP.NET Web Forms also seem to be incredibally complex to me. The Page class alone is a pretty big beast, with all those events going on under the hood. And don't even start me on Data Grids and Data Binding. Easy to setup something up in a prototype, yes, but simple to maintain? I'm not convinced. Fundamentally, web apps should be simple. You have a request with a bunch of parameters and you produce a response which is (to most intents and purposes) a string. Now I know that Web Forms are supposed to introduce a new model above all this stuff, but I don't think the abstraction works particularly well once you get beyond a prototype. Hmmm. I’ll have to think about this.  Posted Feb 24 2005, 09:23 AM by cblinkblog with no comments

• [ASP.NET] Scaleout Server - Distributed in-memory ASP.NET session state

  From Jon Galloway [ASP.NET] Scaleout Server - Distributed in-memory ASP.NET session state Saw this a few weeks ago on TheServerSide.NET and keep forgetting to post on it. This is a really cool solution to managing ASP.NET session state in a load balanced environment. ASP.NET offers three session state options out of the box, but they all have problems when you're load balanced: Posted Feb 24 2005, 09:14 AM by cblinkblog with no comments

• ComputerZen.com - Scott Hanselman's Weblog - What Great .NET Developers Ought To Know (More .NET Interview Questions)

  ComputerZen.com - Scott Hanselman's Weblog - What Great .NET Developers Ought To Know (More .NET Interview Questions) I tried to take into consideration the concerns that my lists contain unreasonable trivia. I tried to make a list that was organized by section. If you've never down ASP.NET, you obviously won't know all the ASP.NET section. If you're an indenpendant consultant, you may never come upon some of these concepts. However, ever question here has come up more than once in the last 4 years of my time at Corillian. So, knowing groking these questions may not make you a good or bad developer, but it WILL save you time when problems arise. Posted Feb 24 2005, 09:06 AM by cblinkblog with no comments

• Etymotic ER6 vs. Bose QuietComfort II

  Etymotic ER6 vs. Bose QuietComfort II I’m sitting on an Alaska Airlines flight up to Seattle right now and figure it’s a good time to put my two headphones to the test. I’ve owned both the QuietComfort I and II headphones for the past few years. Recently I purchased the Etymotic ER6’s and love them but I have not had a chance to test out Etymotic’s claims that they perform better than active noise canceling headphones (like the Bose). In short, they are right. The ER6’s kicked Bose but. Well they’d better for the price.  Take it from me – buy yourself a pair of these before you’re married (hear me Darrell?) because you’ll have a hard time convincing her that you deserve a pair of earphones that cost 100 bucks. No matter how sweet they sound! Posted Feb 23 2005, 09:35 AM by cblinkblog with 1 comment(s)

• Got Speech? For Your Applications?

  From Thom Robbins Blog: Got Speech For Your Applications? The judges will review and score all entries using a combination of how the sample exploits features of the Speech Application SDK. All applications will be judged and validated using Visual Studio .NET 2003 and the Speech Application SDK. Remember - Creativity and the usefulness of your application is the key to winning! I missed Thom’s last contest, where he gave away a bunch of mobile devices.  I’ve got to find the time for this! -Brendan Posted Feb 23 2005, 09:29 AM by cblinkblog with no comments

• Interoperability between .NET and Java via Web Services and Apache Axis JWS

  From  Joseph Cooney Interoperability between .NET and Java via Web Services / Apache Axis JWS Apache Axis is a Web Services library available in Java and C++, developed as an open-source project under the auspices of the Apache foundation. Although there are some related Apache projects implementing WS-* specifications I’m just looking at Axis basics (if and when .NET developers need to talk to Java Web Service developers) and also inter-op between the two Web Service stacks. -Brendan Posted Feb 23 2005, 09:10 AM by cblinkblog with no comments

• BradA's Top 10 .NET books [in Beta]

  BradA's Top 10 .NET books [in Beta] With some creative use of the Amazon Web Services I can get a list of the .NET related books and their Amazon sales ranking and other information about the book. But that doesn’t really give me the full picture… It tells me what books people are buying, but it doesn’t tell me what books people are finding value in. So, from the Google web service I am able to get an idea for the amount of chatter or buzz there is out there on a particular topic. That coupled with the number of comments a given book has on Amazon allows me to come up with a buzz rating for a given title. Posted Feb 22 2005, 09:10 AM by cblinkblog with no comments