Dotmad.net

After browsing through Abhishek Krishnan’s gadgets blog, I started thinking, which gadgets do I use in my life?

My primary thing is my cell phone (Motorola i880), which I use to listen to podcasts and take the occasional photo. While driving I use a small FM transmitter connected to the phone.
The other gadget in my house is my wife’s Dell Axim x51v PDA, which she uses extensively as a mobile medical (she is a doctor) database (and I get to tweak it for fun).

Which gadgets do you use?

Nicholas Allen wrote a post detailing the different throttling parameters for a service:

• MaxConcurrentCalls limits the number of service calls (messages) that the service will have processing at one time. You may get less than this maximum number if the concurrency or instancing behavior of your service does not allow processing multiple messages.
• MaxConcurrentSessions limits the number of persistent connections (sessionful channels) that the service will accept messages from at one time. Again, you need a minimum level of concurrency in your service for this to become an issue.
• MaxConcurrentInstances limits the number of copies of the service (instance contexts) that can exist. This is only interesting if your service is permitted to have multiple instances.

Another useful post from Phil Haack, this time showing how to write multiple culture tests using the mbUnit framework and the MultipleCulture attribute.

Phil Haack wrote a post on .Net services people frequently tend to forget about the re-invent, so I made a list of his pointers as well as some of the comments:

1. System.IO.Path.Combine(folder, filename)
2. string.IsNullOrEmpty(string)
3. Path.DirectorySeparatorChar
4. Path.GetFileName(fullPath)
5. Environment.NewLine
6. Path.GetTempFileName()
7. System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch
8. System.Net.NetworkInformation.NetworkChange
9. System.Web.VirtualPathUtility
10. System.Web.HttpUtility

I have been reading for the past month or so a large number of blog posts dealing with Microsoft’s lack of respect for “Alpha geeks” and the inferiority of “Mort” type developers.
I already objected in the past to some of the places this superiority complex was taking some developers, mainly the idea that those “Alpha geeks” somehow lead the developers community toward a brighter and better place.

So I decided to check out the original meaning of the phrase, and guess what I found:
Tim’s view was that alpha geeks, as a whole, are leading indicators.
In this context, at least, it doesn’t necessarily indicate that the alpha geeks are the best technologists - someone who is very expert in a particular technology but doesn’t look for new stuff wouldn’t fit. “Alpha” also has connotations of superiority and dominance that also don’t necessarily fit. The point in this context is that alpha geeks are the people who like to explore and try new things.

Not leaders (as the “Alpha” term implies) and not master technologists - only market indicators.
If we use this meaning, Microsoft shouldn’t build software to address those people - it just need to study their behavior and respond as it sees fit.

And that brings us to “Mort“.
The fact is most “Mort” type developers get their job done. Maybe they don’t write the most beautiful code out there and they like to use wizards - but that doesn’t mean they write bad software.
Maybe we should add the “humility” attribute to the “Alt.Net” developer’s list of qualities.

Any pet owner encounters the problem of dog/cat hair around the house, so we developed several ways to fight this scourge:

1. Carpets are your enemy (if you must have them, you can brush them with a rubber object)
2. Cover your sofas with fleece blankets - easy to brush and cheap enough to throw away
3. Use sticky rollers to clean your clothes when you go out (even for work)
4. Roomba - a robotic vacuum cleaner - I simply can’t imagine life without it (and you can program it yourself!)

Oren asked his readers for a way to create Word & Excel documents without using COM.
I read the answers, and came up with this list:

Excel:
Essential XlsIO for Windows Forms
Aspose Cells

Word:
Essential DocIO for Windows Forms
Aspose Words
TX Text Control

I ruled out all OpenXML solutions, because they really work only with Office 2007.
Users of Office 2003 may be able to use them, but only after installing a package, and users of older versions (as well as Open Office users) can’t read those documents.