DotNetDoc - Daniel Egan

  So I went to the OCDotNet user group meeting last night to see Paul Sheriff. Paul is a great speaker and it was a packed room. He was doing a talk on debugging, which is something that absolutely EVERY developer needs to master. 

Now I will get some grief for saying this next statement, but be that as it may, I think that if you show me a great debugger, I will show you a great developer.  Joel Spolsky. from Joel On Software wrote a book called  “Smart and gets things Done”, and while it hits on the core of my statement in a broader sense, he describes the developer that you WANT in your shop.  It is amazing how many times you run across a developer\coder\engineer\architect (whatever they want to be called at the time) who is so smart, that they make your head spin, but when it comes down to shipping a product they just can’t get it out the door because they are ALWAYS looking for a better way to refactor their code.  They burn through endless cycles on the smallest parts of the code as you watch your deadlines slip past and disappear in the horizon. 

Now, one of the most time consuming tasks for (most)  developers is not  writing the actual code,  or creating the documentation ( um yeah.. we all fully document our code right?), but figuring out what went wrong when your code does not work.  I don’t care how phenomenal of a coder you are or what patents you have pending for your work, ALL of us have spent hours trying to track down a bug in our software. As a matter of fact, I think debugging is an art form for developers. It takes a very keen eye to look over someone's shoulder and pick out a bug in 50 lines of code that the poor developer has been staring at for an hour. When I was teaching at CSUF, I loved leaning over and saying: “Oh, you are missing a semi-colon”, and then watching as their shoulders drop and they let out an audible sigh (part frustration, part relief). 

So make sure you take the time to build up the valuable skill. Go see one of Paul Sheriff’s or John Robbins’ talks, or read that chapter you skipped past in your C# book of choice, it will save you time in the end, I guarantee it.

Paul Working his Magic at the OCDotNet User Group

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Paul will be doing a number of talks in the Southern California area on WPF. These are FREE two 1/2 day events. You don’t want to miss them.

8/24 LA – MSDN Presents : Fundamentals of WPF - http://bit.ly/147fCd

8/25 LA – MSDN Presents : WPF in the Real World - http://bit.ly/sDCxF

9/1 LA – MSDN Presents : Fundamentals of WPF - http://bit.ly/1v8HZS

9/2 LA – MSDN Presents : WPF in the Real World -  http://bit.ly/ivtZl

9/23 LA – MSDN Presents : Fundamentals of WPF - http://bit.ly/JpuO7

9/24 LA – MSDN Presents : WPF in the Real World - http://bit.ly/xKGwg

Here are the slides for my talk at the TechDays08 Conference in Costa Mesa CA on Nov 11th.  I will add the code for the talk this weekend.

You can find the code for the demos below. A big thanks go to Stephen Walther for the demos.

DotNetDoc – Daniel Egan

JQueryDemos (2).zip (2.04 MB)

TempateTutorial.zip (3.38 KB)

So I have mentioned before that LADotNet.org runs a Masters Series on Saturdays and this Saturday is no different. This week it is being presented by Ken Getz. Ken is a great presenter and we are glad to have him back in California (Sorry Florida). Anyway, as he was going through delegates and events and he covered something I was not aware of.

Anonymous Delegates. Whenever I used delegates in the past, I aways had a method that could be passed that would handle the call. You can also pass a proceedure or "Block of Code" instead of passing a pointer to a method like below. (Both C# and VB)

Setting up membership for your ASP.Net website is pretty simple. All you need to do is:

1.  run the scripts using the aspnet_regsql.ext tool (C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.Net\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regsql.exe    your version number may be diferent) to set up the database tables.
2. Add a membership section to your web.config. Making sure that you add the <clear/> tag since you need to override the machine.config.
   
   

      41     <membership>

      42       <providers>

      43         <clear/>

      44         <add name="AspNetSqlMembershipProvider"

      45                   type="System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider,
                            System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,
                            PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a"

      46                   connectionStringName="LocalSqlServer"

      47                   enablePasswordRetrieval="false"

      48                   enablePasswordReset="true"

      49                   requiresQuestionAndAnswer="true"

      50                   applicationName="/"

      51                   requiresUniqueEmail="false"

      52                   minRequiredPasswordLength="1"

      53                   minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters="0"

      54                   passwordFormat="Hashed"

      55                   maxInvalidPasswordAttempts="5"

      56                   passwordAttemptWindow="10"

      57                   passwordStrengthRegularExpression="" />

      58       </providers>

      59     </membership>

      60   </system.web>
   
   

3. Add a connection string once again using the <clear/>  tag to clear out the machine.config settings. (I will tell you why soon) 
   
   

      16   <connectionStrings>

      17     <clear/>

      18     <add name="LocalSqlServer" connectionString="Data
                Source=xxx;Initial Catalog=xxx;Persist Security
                Info=True;User ID=xxxx; password=xxx" />

      19   </connectionStrings>
   
   
   

4. Then load up the Web Site Administration Tool by going to Website\Asp.Net Configuration in VS2005.

5. You will then be about to configure your membership using SQL2000/2005 using this tool.