Blogging the night away

Is anyone going to the girly geek dinner that needs a date.

I'm heading to Barcelona on my own & looking to meet other developers. An evening with female developers sounds far more appealing than an evening with the male alternative.

If any one is interested & superficial enough to care what i look like, i'm the one on the left here :-) flickr


http://barcelonagirlgeekdinner.pbwiki.com/The%20First%20Barcelona%20Girl%20Geek%20Dinner%207th%20November%202006

http://geekswithblogs.net/waterbaby/archive/2006/10/15/94094.aspx?Pending=true

So the main reason for giving my blog a bit of much needed TLC is that i'm off to Teched in a few weeks & wanted somewhere to keep track of my time there - somewhere i could jot down titbits of information so i don't forget.

If you're going to be there then drop me a line, craig [dot] edmunds [little at sign] gmail [dot] com.

See you there

I've been tearing my hair out with this, finally found the answer!!
I installed yesterdays beta of the .Net Framework (build 2.0.40607.0), had a little play around with it at lunchtime but then had to get back to work. Loaded up the project i'm currently working on, hit debug and whoa!! what's gone on here!

A nasty popup - Error Message: "Error while trying to run project: unable to start debugging on the web server.""!!!

The workaround (after many hours of hair pulling) is to go into the properties of your website where you can find a new tab "ASP.NET" in here you're able to choose the version of the framework you want to use.

In my headphones on the way to work today:
Still Keane

Just thought i'd have a little rant about the fact that in VB "Advanced Members" of classes are not shown by default! The problem came up when i was trying to explain to a colleague how to write out client side javascript from the server side "Page.RegisterClientScript or something like that" i told him but he couldn't find anything in intellisense!

Then i rememberered -
goto tools-->options-->text editor-->Basic and uncheck the "Hide advanced members" option!

Why oh why oh why!!

In my headphones on the way to work today:
Keane - Hopes & Fears - Don't like the current single but the album's pretty good, the singer sounds like the poor bloke in Moulin Rouge!

I had this problem a while back & it's reared its ugly head again - thought i'd post it coz i couldn't find any info on this anywhere!!

You have a simple object based on the class
<serializable()>_
Class Test
Public MyProperty as String
End Class

you run it through a serialization procedure

Dim myClass as New Test
myClass.MyProperty = "hello"
Dim sb As New StringBuilder
Dim sw As New StringWriter(sb)
Dim serializer As New XmlSerializer(myClass .GetType)
serializer.Serialize(sw, Message)
Console.Write(sb.ToString)

Expecting to see something along the lines of

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<test>
<myproperty>hello</myproperty>
</test>

But no!! You don't!! You get something like

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<test xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
<myproperty>hello</myproperty>
</test>

Which, when you try to use it (i was trying to send it to a 3rd party webservice) breaks the application!! Luckily it's easily (if you know how) solved, the Serialize method can take an XmlSerializerNamespaces object as its 3rd parameter, so

Dim myClass as New Test
myClass.MyProperty = "hello"
Dim sb As New StringBuilder
Dim sw As New StringWriter(sb)
Dim nameSpaces As New XmlSerializerNamespaces
nameSpaces.Add("", "")

Dim srializer As New XmlSerializer(myClass.GetType)
srializer.Serialize(sw, Message, nameSpaces)
Console.Write(sb.ToString)

Solves the problem.
Why, i hear you ask?

i had a dig around using reflector and found a defaultNamespaces property on the XmlSerializer object, funnily enough, the two criminal namespaces are added to this property during the construction of your serialize object

Private Shared Sub .cctor()

XmlSerializer.cache = New TempAssemblyCache
XmlSerializer.defaultNamespaces = New XmlSerializerNamespaces
XmlSerializer.defaultNamespaces.Add("xsi", "http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance")
XmlSerializer.defaultNamespaces.Add("xsd", http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema)
End Sub

When it comes to calling the Serialize method, a quick check is made on the namespaces parameter, if it's nothing (hasn't been passed), or doesn't contain any namespaces (you haven't added any to the object you passed in) it uses these defaults.

IIf(((namespaces Is Nothing) OrElse (namespaces.Count Is 0)), XmlSerializer.defaultNamespaces, namespaces)

So there ya go.

In my headphones on the way to work today: Outkast - Speakerbox. Pretty good, esp the track with bam boo rapping!!

Just got back from Microsoft’s Technical Roadshow & I’ve got to say - overall i was a bit disappointed, considering ASP.NET has been around for over two years you’d think that when Microsoft hold a show (or shows) of this scale they’d be aiming at an audience with more than a basic knowledge of the product. I went on most of the developer track events with a smattering of security & a pretty interesting session on biztalk (integrating the Heterogeneous Enterprise), and it seemed like the pre requisite for the majority of them was having seen a pc before. Topics such as “An Introduction to ASP.NET” and “Building Data-driven Websites with ASP.NET” were hardly likely to set anyone’s pulses racing! Whilst I’m not complaining that these sessions aren’t valuable, and that there are people who would appreciate this level of session there should be further sessions (another track even?) where those who want it can dig further into particular technologies (Level 300 as MS like to call them).

Is there a call for this kind of thing? I think the speakers Microsoft use are some of the best around, particularly Mike Taulty, Niels Berglund (who I was surprised to not see there weds/thurs) & Jeremy Palmer from InterQuad - I’m pretty sure that’s not his blog but I just found it when I googled him & thought I’d include it any way, no offence intended if you read this Jeremy! Wouldn’t it be nice to have them tackling deeper issues?

I’ve got to do some sort of “transfer of knowledge” for my colleagues & am planning on whittling the content down to a few discrete topics- “security for the developer”, “patterns & practices” & I’m gonna do a bit on Infopath & Webservices (we currently don’t use Infopath in our company – I’m going on a one man crusade to change that….)

In my headphones on the way to work today: I've lost my bleedin MP3 player!! Not a happy chappy at the mo...

I'm a Microsoft developer working for the leading supplier of software solutions to the travel industry in the UK, my work generally involves the design & building of components for our E-Commerce solutions, ranging from small database projects to legacy integration & just about anything in between.

I think this blog is just going to be me giving an idea of my (a developers) point of view on microsoft's technologies - mainly .net but probably some sql server included. I'll blog on strange things i come across when coding & solutions to those problems, events i attend (and things i learn at them), and anything else that may come into my mind in between.
I also quite like the "I am currently listening to...." kinda thing so to start off:

In my headphones on the way to work today: The Streets - Original Pirate Material (Pretty good)

I'm going to move all of my posts onto blogger.com because i'm haviogn trouble logging into my old one.

I think this blog is just going to be me giving an idea of my (a developers) point of view on microsoft's technologies - mainly .net but probably some sql server included. I'll blog on strange things i come across when coding & solutions to those problems, events i attend (and things i learn at them), and anything else that may come into my mind in between.

I also quite like the "I am currently listening to...." kinda thing so to start off:


In my headphones on the way to work today:
The Streets - Original Pirate Material
(Pretty good)