Recent Blog Posts

If you see any F# code listing, you will see that almost all of them start with the command #light. Right now, this is a requirement. The first line in any F# file must have #light. After reading about the language, I grokked that it allowed for a shorter syntax than the alternative, #light "off". Here's what I've been able to figure out so far. From Development in a Blink, I see this:

One of the first questions I came up with yesterday when digging into F# was this: what does an F# type look like to C#? As a noob, that's an interesting question to me. Of course, being a noob, I had no clue about how to create a custom type. So, I asked Google what an F# type definition looked like, then massaged that until I had something that I might not completely understand, but that does show the problem at hand. I created a lame Name class that only supports a first name. Boo-yah!

A long while back, I mentioned that my wife, Jean, and I were looking at starting up a company. Well, we've done a lot of thinking about what the product should do and how this should be done. Because of other recent activities, I haven't had a lot of time to execute on the idea. The fact of the matter is that we still like the underlying concept, but the implementation concept has morphed several times since we had the idea. The biggest changes are these:

For anyone who read this thing, I apologize for the long break. Between my last post and now, I wrote a book with my good friend, Kenn Scribner. The book, Effective REST Services via .NET, is currently in the technical review stage. This means that some really smart people are reviewing the book and letting Kenn and I know where things don't make sense or are just wrong. Kenn was asked to write this book back in July of 2008 after developing a bunch of samples and other content for the folks involved with WCF/Oslo. Kenn then asked me to collaborate with him and I accepted.

If you do any work with LINQ, you have to go out and buy the LINQ Pocket Reference by Joseph and Ben Albahari, ISBN 978-0-596-51924-7, O’Reilly. It’s a tiny, 160 page book that will literally fit into the back pocket of your jeans. I love it, use it whenever I'm doing LINQ stuff. It's a permanent fixture on my desk and in my laptop bag. Just go buy it, now! It's $10.19 at Amazon. If you program for .NET, there is no excuse to NOT own this book. Skip lunch today if you need to budget for the money.

I found this in the forums, but it wasn't super easy to dig out. Hopefully, this post will help someone find things a bit easier.

CNUG.org sent this to me, and I'm passing it on as a member of LCNUG.org. This will be a lot of fun for Chicago area developers!

My wife and I have had ideas for different ventures over the years. Because we always had a youngster in the house and not in school, we focused a lot on making the years before school started as happy years. This Fall, our youngest enters full day Kindergarten in Lake Villa, IL. This means that Mom and I will finally be able to get one or two of these ideas off the ground. We like the idea of an arrangement where I act as Architect on most projects and as a developer as needed. To this end, we are launching Friseton.com. Jean and I got to name the titles we wanted. She's the president of the company. She's been in charge of running the household for the last 13 years, so this title just seems right. I always liked the idea of a Chief Software Architect. Bill Gates gave himself that title when he stepped down as Microsoft's CEO.

Tonight, I ran into a scenario where adding the SqlTrackingService to my WorkflowRuntime set of services caused the completion of a simple workflow to hang. To diagnose, I instructed Visual Studio to break when exceptions were thrown. With this, I was treated to a break in System.Data.Sql.SqlConnection.OnError. The SqlException being thrown stated "MSDTC on server '[machine name]' is unavailable." If you look, you'll see that MSDTC is a manual start service on Vista. To fix this issue, just start MSDTC in the Services Control Panel applet and run your workflow code again. You'll be treated to full tracing at this point.

Some friends recently saw my resume and asked about the 40+ languages that I claim to have written code in. Essentially, they asked why I have that claim and questioned if it was even factual. I have that claim because many employers want someone who knows 'Special Language X' in addition to all the other qualifications. In any interview, I usually explain this as follows: "I want to make it clear that no matter what odd wrinkle you have in your system, I know enough about languages and programming in general to tackle your special case."

Every once in a while, Visual Studio 2008 will lock up on me. When it was in beta and even after release, I ran into a situation where it put up a dialog saying "Blah blah blah" with the options:

Over the past month, I've finally taken the plunge and decided to finally read those classic technical books that everyone seems to have read (though that many have only skimmed). I've also been reading oddball classics that are recommended by acquaintances and folks in the know. As for the big classics that I've read since May 1:

I had a chance to see David Chappell speak at the Microsoft offices in Downers Grove this past week. If he is coming anywhere near you to talk on Software + Services, I recommend that you go see the talk. I've got a summary of what he covers here, but you've got to see him in person to get the talk. The man is an amazing communicator and helped me connect some dots that I hadn't quite connected in a while—whether that was due to sloth on my part of great speaking on David's part, I don't knowJ.

I have a friend who teaches Computer Science. One of the things we've discussed is the need for students/entry level hires to really understand basic data structures. This is true even though most popular languages do the basic ones quite well (linked list, hashtable, queue, stack). A consequence of these things being in most languages is that many of today's students aren't being required to actually build these data structures as part of their education. Many problems in the work place involve situations where one needs to know the characteristics of the data structure in order to implement the most efficient algorithms. One acquires this knowledge through actually building the data structures at least once.

In case anyone in Lake County, Illinois/Kenosha County, Wisconsin reads this blog, I'd like you all to know that the LCNUG group is already gaining momentum. To give some people an idea of how fast things can move, I'd like to take some time to explain what is going on. I'll post (when I remember to do so) about what is going on with the group and how we are doing as we go through our gestational phase.

I want to take a few moments to announce the formation of a .NET Users Group in Lake County, Illinois. Our first meeting will be at CLC in Grayslake, IL. I'll be the inaugural speaker giving a beginner level talk on Windows Workflow. For details, please visit www.lcnug.org. If you plan on attending, are interested in sponsoring, or have questions, feel free to contact me (scott at scottseely.com).

Today, I had to debug a strange problem. We have a web application that does some fancy printing. The main application server is a Unix machine, the print component lives on Windows. The network between these two has all sorts of fun firewall rules that HTTP type requests can navigate so long as the proxy on the machine is setup correctly. Unfortunately, the Windows test box didn't have the proxy setup correctly and I didn't have easy access to the one account that runs the service. To make the proxy set for all users, I had to ask my good friend, Google, how to do this. Google answered "Change the default connection policy for all users." Google didn't explain how to do this very nicely (what a jerk!).

I was checking out the ads for the local office supply and electronics stores during my lunch hour and I saw that Office Depot was selling the ViewSonic VX2235wm for $259-- the same price as I paid for the hunk of junk Samsung. I plugged it in to my laptop and IT JUST WORKED! Everything is crisp, clear, perfect!

This last weekend, my wife bought a 21.6" Samsung SyncMaster 223BW monitor for me for my birthday (happy 36th to me!) so that I could bask in dual monitor goodness when working on projects at home. I attached the monitor to my PC over the analog hookup (because I don't have an digital port available on my laptop). I know this port to be very good for other projectors. I used this laptop to teach at a number of locations over the past few years and have never had a problem when connecting to a fancy overhead projector. It worked great on several projectors at Microsoft when I worked there, it worked fine when I taught for Wintellect last year, so I know this wasn't the issue (though I did think 'hmm-- could the port be goofy?').

Florin Lazar has an interesting post on using C# 3.0 to make writing transaction blocks a little 'pithier'. In 'A Simpler TransactionScope', he suggests using a delegate and a lambda expression to accomplish his goals.

I just want to test the Windows Live Writer.

Scott Hanselman put up a post showing some nifty LINQ code. I've been dabbling with it a little here and there, trying to see what it gave me. I like the new way of declaring member variables:

Did you know that you could run a simple, effective home with your Web surfing, telephone calling, TV watching, machine backups, book writing, code editing, music listening, game playing life, all on Microsoft products and all for a reasonable price? Over the next several posts, I want to cover how my family is using Microsoft technology to make our lives better. Today, I want to give a brief description of the home network.

Just some random thoughts while reading the news over lunch. Nielsen Rating apparently released their numbers for websites for January 2008. According to the numbers reported at http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/venture/archives/131937.asp, Google got the most eyeballs in January. What I find interesting is that the numbers for time spent on the web site implies a different ranking. I whipped out Excel for some simple analysis. The results? The top 4 companies in terms of eyeball hours are in the exact wrong order. Companies are presented in order of unique audience #s, measured in thousands (000). I added the 'Person Hours/1000 people' and 'Rank on Person Hours' columns.

Usually, FSB is entertaining. Today, the guy running the FSB blog is hilarious. The post isn't much until the last line. I won't spoil this for you but, if you have 30 seconds, go here now and read. Hilarious!

I don't think that buying Yahoo is a good thing for Microsoft. Instead, they should continue to out innovate their competition. One thing that has been a weakness for Microsoft recruiting has always been that they can't get many great developers. Really, really good developers can work wherever they like. If they prefer to live near family over Redmond, they typically tell Microsoft 'no' when asked to join the firm. Others, like me, say yes and then eventually decide to leave because one can't develop Microsoft product outside of their core development centers (Shanghai, China; Bangalore, India; Cambridge, England; Fargo, ND, USA; Silicon Valley; and Redmond, WA, USA). They avoid the many big cities that have first rate developers. My short list for new development centers in the USA is as follows:

I have had the pleasure of spending the last few days improving application performance. Specifically, my job is to improve the 'speed' dimension of the application. In doing this, I've been getting reacquainted with some well used tools: SQL Query Analyzer and dotTrace Profiler. (For those of you familiar with when SQL Query Analyzer was last available under that name, I'm working with a completely functional, happy, SQL Server 2000 installation.) It's been quite a few months since I last did this. Given that not many people get a chance to do performance analysis and improvement on a regular basis, I think that now might be a good time to rehash some common mistakes and the way to fix those mistakes.

I have a sickness. My illness causes me to skip sleep, to skip meals, and to allocate no time to play video games. Occasionally, enablers have given me money to encourage me to indulge in this illness. I have no interest in getting ‘help’. I am an author and I write about technology topics. ...

Tony Baer has an interesting post at http://www.onstrategies.com/blog/?p=251, 'SOA in a Recession?'. The question here is 'what will SOA investments look like during a recession?' Having been a part of the big client server moves of the mid to late 1990s, web deployments of 1997 to the present, and someone who has done training on SOA across the country for Wintellect, I have to say that SOA feels different from the previous two items. For client server, we had to start thinking about our applications differently. Bits of the application lived in different processes on different machines. Here, we had to rearchitect applications to deal with a new security model and to deal with the greater latencies involved in method and database calls.

My blog is back up and running. Expect lots of stuff on WCF, .NET, and other things that interest me.