Searching for my lost shaker of salt

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032281388&Culture=en-US

Also, if you are interested in speaking, visit them here.

... as told, South Park style.  This has to be the funniest thing I've seen on the internet in ages!

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=104073

(Found via Frank)

Found a nice place that has a searchable database of Regex's, as well as an online tester.  Very useful and handy, especially their cheat sheet!

http://www.regexlib.com/

This past Friday I got tired of having audio problems with my home theater system.  The picture is wonderful (though I'm sure it would look better on a 42” plasma TV :) but the audio is sometimes faint and we have to really turn it up to hear it.  During normal TV viewing, we leave the volume around -34 with super surround sound turned on and that is plenty.  However, Friday night is the best night of TV with Stargate SG1 and the new Battlestar Galactica.  These great dramas have wonderfully written story lines and dialog that you just want to hear every word.  Problem is, even at -24 I still can't hear every word!  And they are broadcast in Dolby Digital!

So, on a whim and with the belief that I could actually do something about this, I lifted and turned my entertainment center 90° and started playing with the wiring.  I bought this thing in November of 2002, so it had been a while since I was “back there”.  I noticed two flimsy cables going from the TV to the theater box, whereas everything going to and from the VCR were Monster Cables.  Could these problems that have been abound for nearly 3 years be due to cable itself?

In a word, yep!

The flimsy cables were my TV audio out, which is what drives the entertainment center audio.  DVD and VCR playback never really had audio problems, so this made sense.  I re-routed things around so that the TV audio out had monster cables direct to the entertainment center, and sure enough I could hear every word on my favorite shows.  Just servers as a reminder that a system is only as good as its weakest (or, in this case, cheapest) link.

http://www.indeed.com/

(Found by Darrell)

Okay, so it seems like today I am ripping off everyone else's blogs for my own.  Does that make me evil or nastier than normal?  Not trying to be, but my blog as become a place for me to remember things for future use.  And I have a feeling this site may be of use to me in the not too distant future...

My good friend Frank found this tidbit on the differences between C# and VB.NET.  As most of you know, I'm a C# elitist snob, but there are times when you have to work in any language.

http://www.harding.edu/USER/fmccown/WWW/vbnet_csharp_comparison.html

Linky (registration is required).

Rule the Web with ASP.NET 2.0
ASP.NET is a powerful framework for building dynamic, high performance, data-driven Web applications. ASP.NET 2.0 improves on its predecessor by helping you become more productive, reducing the amount of code you need to write, making your Web sites easier to manage, and improving your Web site's scalability, reliability, and performance. In this three-part tour-de-force, you’ll explore valuable aspects of ASP.NET 2.0 – from user interfaces to data access to performance – that will help you create better Web applications with less hassle than ever before.

Developing Compelling User Interfaces with Ease in ASP.NET 2.0
ASP.NET 2.0 takes Web UIs to a whole new level with a fresh set of rich controls and IDE features. In this session, you’ll learn how to:

• Establish common page layouts and content across your site with Master Pages
• “Skin” your site with Themes
• Manage the navigation of your site through site maps and navigation controls

Data Access with ADO.NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0
ADO.NET 2.0 drastically lessens the effort required to access data from your ASP.NET 2.0 Web application, freeing you to focus on what matters most – implementing your business logic – and introduces new objects, controls and techniques. This session will illustrate how to:

• Work with declarative data sources
• Utilize data binding
• Pass parameters to data sources without code
• Bind to hierarchical data
• Bind to business objects
• Use typed DataSets and TableAdapters

Building High Performance Applications with ASP.NET 2.0
In this session, we’ll explore the many improvements in ASP.NET 2.0 that will help you get maximum performance from your web sites, including:

• Configuring page output caching
• Caching a data source
• SQL cache invalidation with SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005
• Using post cache substitution
• Using client callbacks from your ASP.NET page
• Deployment techniques to optimize performance

This was a fun error I encountered when deploying software to a test server the other day.  While we all enjoy working in ivory tower situations where we can clean and scrub servers to our hearts content, sometimes you have to use what you are given.  And so, onto this PIII machine I deployed a ASP.NET app and went about doing some preliminary testing.  Part of that deployment involved installing the 1.1 framework and its service pack 1 (which requires a reboot--- something to consider when planning roll-outs to production servers!) that went without issue.

So my app is installed and after a little JIT studder of the machine, I am greeted with this message:

Access denied to 'c:\inetpub\wwwroot\web.config'. Failed to start monitoring file changes.

Whaaa?  I carefully re-read the message when it hit me: “I have no web.config in the wwwroot directory!”  Something very strange was going on, and with a bunch of folks over my shoulders wanting answers from Mr. Certified, the heat was on. 

All hail Google!  Copied and pasted the whole error message and got the right answer right away.

Basically, this machine had Sharepoint 2001 installed on it and Sharepoint 2001 does some things to directory security the root directory of the web server.  And, if like everyone use, all your subdirectories inherit their permissions from the root it will affect your app.  By verifying/adding/changing the following permissions everything worked as expected:

Everyone: Read & Execute, List Folder Contents, and Read.
SYSTEM: Full Control
Network Service: Read & Execute, List Folder Contents, and Read.

Saturday, October 29 (I'm assuming Reston, VA)

http://blogs.msdn.com/gduthie/archive/2005/08/11/450410.aspx

Be sure to keep tabs on the official website for all the details

http://www.madcodecamp.com/

This is a neat piece of freeware that cleans up a project directory--- and all the cache directories that are sometimes corrupted during development.

http://www.dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/roydictus/archive/2005/05/18/80663.aspx