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Wednesday, February 27, 2008
The cool kids over on the other side of the fence always make these really cool "cheat sheets" for whatever bit of tech kit they're using and I fully expect someone with some good design skills to produce one for ASP.NET MVC. You hear that Rob Conery? Scott Hanselman? How about you Phil Haack? I fully expect Scott Guthrie, who is a Word among Bytes, to conscript some stylish hipster graphic designer to produce a masterful, stylish and yes, useful cheat sheet for the MVC masses at Mix '08, an event I sadly won't be attending because my company considers
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Monday, February 25, 2008
I ported the CopySourceAsHtml to work with Visual Studio 2008. There are some workarounds to get the existing addin to work with Visual Studio 2008 but they all assume you have 2005 installed, which I don't. I recompiled from source, built against .NET 3.0, removed some crufty code thanks to FxCop and removed a call into olepro32.dll that wasn't needed. I'll provide the updated source if anyone cares, this is just a quick posting as I'm flying out the door :) To Install Download the CopySourceAsHtml AddIn zip. Unzip to \My Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Addins, if the Addins folder doesn't exist
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Monday, February 25, 2008
Anyone that's using my Zune Marketplace Mp3tag source will probably want to upgrade to the latest version of Mp3tag, which as of today is 2.40! I've been using the beta version for awhile and the tagging dialog is much better than in the original 2.39 release, easier to tag those albums where you only have a few of the tracks. Get it from the official download site. In a related note I've been using Mp3tag for about 2 years and I finally pulled the trigger and donated some dosh to this excellent free program. Thanks to Florian Heidenreich for
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Tuesday, February 19, 2008
I'm starting to see more ASP.NET MVC samples and questions come out and I'm realizing that a large portion of the ASP.NET crowd doesn't even realize that a huge reason for the MVC movement is because of the Ruby on Rails framework. A lot of new .NET MVC developers are struggling with architectural questions that have already been debated and answered in the Rails community, which makes Rails a great resource for when you're first starting out or you're curious how to handle certain situations, like nested resources or how to structure your controllers. Speaking of controllers one great
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Thursday, February 07, 2008
Often you'll need to represent some hierarchical or parent-child relationship in your application and one thing you'll struggle with is how to cleanly mesh both the parent and child controllers yet keep them nice and RESTful. The secret is in good routing. The problem A popular example is tickets belonging to events (event as in Burning Man, not OnClick) and you want to get all the tickets for a certain event, as well as be able to work with just tickets or events. You want nice and pretty urls as well, so you're hoping for something like this: /events/1/tickets
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Tuesday, February 05, 2008
I just saw a quote from Joe Rosenberg via the MSFTextrememakeover that included one of the most asinine and scary things I've ever heard about Microsoft: Rosenberg said. "The company has lost sight of its principal focus, which is to produce value for shareholders." What's scary is that this is from a "Chief Equity Strategist" yet after this quote I wouldn't trust anything this guy has to say about money or investing because if there is one common theme among the most successful companies and individuals it's that their primary focus is to do what they love and to be
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Monday, February 04, 2008
Given that the current (and past) Zune software lacks any decent metadata editing I've been using Mp3tag to adjust the various tags as well as grab album art. One cool feature of Mp3tag is that you can look up album information from a variety of online sources, most notably Amazon. From there you can grab track listings and album art to help flush out your metadata. Only problem is that sometimes the Zune Marketplace files an album differently than Amazon which means it won't show up correctly in your ZuneTag (see mine in the upper-right). After poking around with
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Sunday, February 03, 2008
I'm a big fan of SubSonic, a ORM/DAL generator slash utility belt of goodness. Like any tool there is a little configuration and setup you need to do to get everything rolling and while Rob Conery has some great podcasts on doing just this sometimes you just need to remember that one little option vs. wanting to watch a 10 minute podcast again, regardless of how melodic and sweet are the dulcet tones of Mr. Conery's voice. 1. Download and Install SubSonic. Seems simple but hey, some people need to be told everything :) 2. Create SubSonic DAL as an