Software Geek

For those of you who attended this week’s Applied Silverlight course in Oslo, thanks for coming! Here, as promised, are the demos.

For those of you who didn’t attend, where were you? But feel free to look at the demos anyway.

Got asked about a roman numeral parser during an interview. I have to say that I don’t mind when the process of obtaining employment plays into my strengths. The process was quite similar to a previous process where I wrote a spoken numerics converter. Not only that, there were many similar qualities to my int parsing routines. With that in mind I think I did fairly well. The goal at the time was to produce a routine to validate numbers up to roman numeral 30 or XXX. Didn’t take long, but in the end, I had left out many different validation techniques. I really wanted to revisit the problem since I had the code correctly written in my mind. Check the algorithms out, they should handle just about anything you can throw at them at this point. If you find issues, please feel free to submit your problems, since I’d love to solidfy things a bit more. Apparently roman numeral parsing has great application in reading dates.

Roman Numeral Parsing: Code Only: Bidirectional roman numeral parsing. [EDIT: Added alternate parsing routines and performance fixes]
Integer to Spoken Numerics: Code-Only: int/long/double conversion to Spoken Numerics
Phone Number to Words: Trying my hand at the old Phone number to Words teaser project!
Integer Parsing: DWC.Algorithms.NumberUtilities

Microsoft Distinguished Engineer, Brian Harry follows up on his recent announcement about Microsoft’s acquisition of of devBiz , developers of TeamPlain Web Access for VSTS. Brian heads up our Visual Studio Team Foundation development team, based in Raleigh, NC. Note that TeamPlain is unrelated to Teamprise , which to quote Jim Newkirk , recently ”announced a complimentary license of the Teamprise client suite for anyone wanting to connect to an open source project on CodePlex.”

If you are an existing devBiz customer, I encourage you to think about and weigh in on the following comment, on Brian’s weblog.

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“Another set of feedback we’ve gotten revolves around the devBiz components products - devMail, devDns and others.  We have removed these products from the market and are unsure what our future plans for them are.  I’ve seen requests that we open source them among other things.  We are considering many options ranging from including them in other products to making the source available in some form - either to existing customers, publicly or otherwise.  We want to make sure that customers feel that they have a good path forward.  We hope to reach a conclusion on a plan in the next few weeks on this issue as well.”

If the VSTS team decides to release some of the products Brian mentions as open source projects, I hope and wouldn’t be surprised to see them posted on CodePlex , which runs on Visual Studio Team System.

Scott gave a whirlwind presentation to a standing room only crowd at the North Dallas Dot Net User Group tonight. A wide range of topics were covered from IDE tips and tricks to ASP.NET tips to MS AJAX to LINQ and DLINQ (I still like to call it DLINQ rather than LINQ to SQL). I’m still not sure how all this got packed into a little over 2 hours.

This was the first meeting that I’ve attended at the new Intuit location. It was quite an upgrade in venue from the previous SMU campus location. Lots of projector screens and flat panels so it was very easy to follow along even if you were in the nose bleed section.

While there’s a ton of cool things going on with AJAX, seeing LINQ in action again reminds me of just how revolutionary LINQ is.

So, thanks for the great presentation Scott and don’t be a stranger to Dallas!

In April I will be going to see some family in North Carolina and I thought I’d take the opportunity to speak at the local user group there.  

On April 9th, I will be speaking at the Triangle.NET User Group in Raleigh, NC… 

Here is what I planned to cover..  Sort of think of it like Mix08 in 1.5 hours

Come hear about the exciting future technologies for web development on.NET.  Brad Abrams, Group Program Manager for the.NET Framework at Microsoft will discuss and demo new web development technology his team is working on.  In particular, you will walk away understand the ASP.NET MVC framework,

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why it was created and what it is good for.  We will also drill into the new innovations in Silverlight 2 that will be announced at Mix ’08 in Vegas.  

Pre-v2, when you load an assembly by path through Fusion (LoadFrom(), ExecuteAssembly(), etc.), it can actually cause two binds, not just one. The first bind loads the file at the given path. If that is successful, another bind is done with the display name of that assembly to see if it’s available in the Load context. If it’s not available, the LoadFrom() call is still successful - we throw away the results of the second bind. If it is available, we check the path returned from the first bind against the path from the second bind. If they’re identical, we keep the Load context IAssembly and throw away the LoadFrom one. (That means that that assembly will be in the Load context, not the LoadFrom context.) Otherwise, we keep the LoadFrom context IAssembly.

This is to ensure that the Load context remains order-independent - an important part of the design for that context. It’s an implementation detail, but I bring it up because it has some side-effects that are surprising to customers:

• The second bind shows up in the Fusion log. (It’s just another bind to Fusion.) It’s unsettling to see a failure in the log (for the second bind) when the LoadFrom() call succeeded.
• Doing a second bind by display name causes probing which slows down the performance of LoadFrom(), especially over http, when the file isn’t found immediately.

Fusion has stopping doing the second bind in v2. But, when using an older CLR, customers can avoid both side-effects by putting a redirect from the (more…)

I needed to create a new machine key for an asp.net site. I found a couple of command line utils out on the web that would create a new key but I thought it would be easier to just have it avail in VS.NET. So, I threw together this little macro that will generate the machine key and insert it. Just run the macro while you have you web.config open in VS.NET. If you already have a machinekey it will find it and replace it. If not it will just add it right after the <system.web> node. It should do the proper indents and everything too.

 1: Imports System

 2: Imports EnvDTE

 3: Imports EnvDTE80

 4: Imports System.Diagnostics

 5:  

 6: Public Module AspNetUtils

 7:  

 8: #Region "Helper Code"

 9:  

 10:  Dim _rng As New System.Security.Cryptography.RNGCryptoServiceProvider()