MarkItUp

Back when ASP.NET 2.0 (Whidbey) was released, I created a blogging application called SingleUserBlog.  I used this development experience to gain practical experience with using .NET 2.0 - and especially to learn about Web Parts as I wrote my book about them.  Times change though and now with the imminent release of Orcas it's time to move forward and try new things. 

These days my passions and interests are pretty evenly split between:

• Personal - Hockey coaching.  My longer term goal here is to coach hockey at a very high level - maybe National level.
• Technical - Web 2.0 - particularly Live branded applications, and furthering my formal skills as a solutions architect.

Effective immediately I'll be moving all, or at least most, of my blogging activity away from this site.  My technical stuff will get moved to my Live Spaces site:

http://showusyourcode.spaces.live.com

Here I will continue to talk about all the things that I usually talk about here.  In the immediate future this stuff will focus on my experiences in and around:

• Managing the Development Process
• Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5
• Virtual Earth 6 and Live branded applications
• My new application - a map based, ASP.NET AJAX application

One of the biggest reasons for moving my blogging into Spaces is to get much more first hand experience in using the platform.  Increasingly I'd like to move into this space to get ready for some of the new stuff that is still coming - such as presence and others. 

If you are reading this and you want to stay connected, I'd recommend that you get yourself a Live Space and add me as a Friend and then also connect via Messenger.  Getting Friend updates via presence is a great way to stay in touch, not just through blog 'articles', but also through other updates that you make to your profile.

My hockey coaching related stuff will get moved to another blog that I've created specifically to talk about my learning's in getting further into coaching and to provide guidance to others who are looking to get into this area.

Jason puts the call out for anybody wanting to attend the Adelaide Geek Dinner:

Code Assassin - Adelaide Geek Dinner Approaches

If you'd like to go, head over to Jason's blog and contact him from there about it.

See you there!

In 6 weeks time, we in Australia have to vote for which political party we want to lead our country for the next 4 years.  The incumbent party is a coalition of the Liberal Party (a major party) and the National Party (a relatively minor party).  Their opponent is the Labour Party.  This is the candidate message from the leader's of those 2 parties:

Currently, the contender - the Labour Party - is well in front, but expect to see the Liberal's come back strongly in the coming weeks.

Over in the US they are gearing up for next year's elections too.  It's always hard to read the political situation in other countries, where you aren't always aware of the "feel on the ground".  Next year's elections are certainly interesting though.  As an overseas observer I have to say that the last 7 years of the Bush administration's reign have been a very worrying time.  Through this time we've seen the US waging war on several fronts overseas and now we see threats being made on Iran and a looming arms race with China.  America, under Bush, appear to place a very low priority on foreign relations while at the same time, they seem to have mismanaged many things at home too (think: Katrina).  I for one am happy to see the end of the Bush era.  But what will we get instead of Mr Bush?  A quick look at the candidate pages on YouTube seems to give some indications:

Democrat hopeful

Republican hopefuls

Is it just me, or does watching that John McCain video just make your spine shiver?  How could a man who hopes to lead the most influential country in the world put out such a terrible video.  Surely he has something more to say than to spout off a horrid war message. 

Please don't tell me that we are in for another 4 years of war mongering.

Yep, I know that I should just move on after my short post about it yesterday, but there's something about the politics of Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace prize that really pisses me off.  I must admit that I don't know a whole lot about the prize, but I do know that, as a kid, I used to think that it was one of the beacons in our humanity along with other things such as the Olympics (but let's not even go there).

Now I think that I can see through the Nobel Prize as a club of old geezers who give the prize to whatever cause will help them get their fat grants for the next few years.  How else could Oscar-winning Gore get awarded?  After all he did was to tell a few lies, make up a few stories, and then fly around the world on a carbon-spewing jet to promote his movie.  Who knows, maybe if I'd promoted my web part book a little harder I would have been up for consideration!

I thought that the total irony of all this is that the day before Al's big Nobel prize was announced, a high court judge in the UK ruled that the film Inconvenient Truth was so alarmist that it could only be distributed in UK schools provided that it is accompanied by a note citing 9 important scientific errors contained within the movie.  You can read more about these errors via the following link:

     http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article2632660.ece

The real biggest threat to humanity is our own stupidity in that we blindly believe and reward politicians who serve up alarmist crap and then scam hundreds of millions of dollars from the general public for it.

Update: Here's a link to a story about the "British Truck Driver" who challenged the film being distributed in schools:

    http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2007/09/20/british-truck-driver-sues-ban-al-gore-s-film-schools

If you haven't seen the LinqDatasource control in action then take a look at this post by Scott Guthrie:

LINQ to SQL (Part 9 - Using a Custom LINQ Expression with the <asp:LinqDatasource> control)

After looking at that you might wonder - as I do - about where we stand with Datasource controls.  It appears that Dino Esposito was wondering the same thing too:

LinqDataSource vs ObjectDataSource vs SqlDataSource

Personally, I think that this is where Microsoft gets itself into a pickle.  Which Datasource to use?  When to use which one?

For most enterprise developers this won't be an issue as they will only ever bind to the ObjectDatasource, but for the enthusiast it's a pain.  Do I use the SqlDataSource or the LinqDataSource?  The question is mostly that it doesn't matter, but if you get to advanced scenario's - such as the one in ScottGu's post - then the LinqDatasource will likely give you a more 'strongly typed' outcome.

My preference would be that we cast the SqlDatasource aside and move to only ObjectDatasource and LinqDatasource from 3.5 onwards. 

This blog article couldn't have said it better:

Al Gore wins a Nobel Peace Prize - What a JOKE « ~Random Ramblings~

xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe

I seem to have inherited a nasty little bug in the last day or so with Visual Studio 2008 (VS2008) and Team Explorer.  Up until yesterday morning I had been working away quite happily connecting to either our internal TFS server or to our TFSNow TFS server and using VS 2008 to work on projects in them.  But yesterday morning when I loaded up VS2008 I noticed that my working TFS server wasn't already connected up... hrmm.  Oh well, I imagine that these things happen from time to time, so I manually connected to our TFS Now instance again and voila, I was connected as usual.  However when I attempted to load up a solution from Source Control Explorer I was informed that it was not currently configured for integrated source control:

I checked my Source Control settings in Tools | Options and sure enough I had TFS selected as the default source control provider.

Attempting to manually bind the projects didn't work either because there was no recognized server to bind to:

I thought that maybe restarting VS2008 might make the magical difference... but it didn't.  In fact, when I restarted VS, it seemed to have forgotten all about my saved server settings again and so I had to repeat the process of re-connecting to the TFS Server.

I tried lots of things after that, I tried:

1. Blowing away my workspace and creating a new one - nope!
2. Deleting my local TFS cache - nope!
3. Reinstalling TFC - nope!
4. Reinstalling VS2008 and TFS - nope!

Finally, as a sanity check, I called Mitch to see whether he could connect to the TFS instance and open these projects and he could.

So I'm not really sure.  I think that I'll go down the rebuild path.  Darn!

I saw this via bernardoh's blog:

The Right Brain vs Left Brain | The Daily Telegraph

 

I must admit, I can see it spinning both ways but I'm not sure that the shadow on the ground makes sense when she is spinning anti-clockwise.  Wierd.  Anyways, I loved this in the comments...

Am I the only one seeing the pole too?

Very funny!