I Love Anomalies

Posted in: Programming by Steve on August 30, 2006

So I was under the impression that .NET 1.1 applications can run under the 2.0 framework without issues.  I was wrong.

I built an LLBLGen Pro application for 1.1 and was trying to add a new record.  It was giving me a primary key violation on the index.  If the application was running in 2.0, i got the error, if it was running in 1.1, it was working fine.

It’s nice to know that I was able to get it working after looking at it for 4 hours.  blah!

So you want to build a large solution in Visual Studio?

Posted in: Programming by Steve on August 22, 2006

I’ve been trying to come up with a standard way for our company to set up the web solutions in Visual Studio 2K5.  I want to use the Web Application Projects (from Scott Guthrie’s group, thank you!) along with my class libraries and user controls.

I ran across a post from the Web Development Tools Team Blog that I will start to use in my own projects.  They have a 3 part post on the subject, but I will only use the first 2 in my own projects (since part 3 is using the built in VS web server.

Visual Studio 2003 SP1

Posted in: Programming by Steve on August 16, 2006

Microsoft has finally released Service Pack 1 of Visual Studio 2003. I’ve been waiting for this release for about, um… 3 years now. It’s too bad that they don’t put any other releases out there for programmers and developers to use. I’d rather have the fixes in place that bother me than wait for the full monty.

LLBLGen Pro v2 Article

Posted in: Programming by Steve on August 15, 2006

Found a great article on how to start using LLBLGen Pro with ASP.NET 2.0

Franz Bouma – LLBLGen Pro v2.0 with ASP.NET 2.0

My Impressions of LLBLGen Pro version 2

Posted in: Programming by Steve on August 10, 2006

Solutions Design has released LLBLGen Pro Version 2 to the masses and I have to say that they have done a great job of listening to their developer base. They take a lot of ideas and suggestions on their forums and implement as much as they can for each release. I am very happy with the new features and will be writing more about them as time permits. For those of you who don’t know, LLBLGen is an O/R mapper for .NET. What their program will do is map objects to tables in any database (From SQL Server to Oracle to MySQL). Retrieving and saving data with these objects have been made very simple with the generated code that comes from LLBLGen.

Each “project” in LLBLGen will create a Class Library that you can add to your ASP.NET project. It will work with 1.1 and 2.0, and you can choose from either c#.net or vb.net. It is also “smart” about generating code after you make schema changes. It will not add the new changes unless you explicitly refresh the project and the code doesn’t get replaced unless you re-generate it.  You can also add your own code to the Entities that are created and it doesn’t get overwritten either.

I am very happy with this product and want to let others know how easy it is.  I will put a small example up here in the next few days.

New York, New York

Posted in: General by Steve on August 3, 2006

We’re back after our little 5 day vacation in New York City and I’m going through some computer withdrawal. Even though I was at the computer programming for 110 hours a week for 4 months, I still had the urge to sit at the computer and check my fantasy teams, read the other programming blogs, etc… It’s in my blood. It’s why I went into the business in the first place.

Anyway, I digress…so our vacation was very fast paced and not very relaxing at all. But it was good to get out and be around people for 5 days. After programming that long and not going out much, New York is definately the place to go to get your fill of people.

Our trip started out on Thursday morning at 3:00 AM. We had to get to the airport by 5 so we could check in since our plane left at 6:15 AM. So we got to the airport, got through the line and onto the plane. We almost missed the plane, but we barely made it.

Once we landed, we got some breakfast at the airport and waited for Debbie’s uncle. Now, Debbie’s uncle Arnie has a minivan that was pimped out by his kid. It is a red 1994 Caravan with white racing stripes up the middle, spinning wheels and a premium sound system. I found it very amusing when we were trying to figure out which car was. Debbie didn’t remember which car was his, so she was trying to guess which one it was. She spotted the red mini-van coming around the corner and she was right.

So he picks us up in the mini-van and we are going to head down to do the Statue of Liberty tour. But Arnie decides to give us an “Urban Experience”. So he takes us right down the main street of Harlem. We are driving down the middle of Harlem in this pimped out mini-van and pretty much the only white people there (except on the tour buses). After this, we make it down to the parking garage and get in line for the Statue tour. We got there too late to actually get into the statue, but we can walk around Liberty Island. We then got on the ferry to go to Ellis Island. We toured everything there and by the time we were done, it was about 3:00 PM. We hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast and we were tired and hungry, which isn’t a good mix.

So we headed down a few blocks to a place called Circa, which is a kosher deli right down Day Street, across from Ground Zero. Arnie’s family is Orthodox Jewish, so they don’t eat anything that is not kosher, so they can’t eat at fast food places, etc… The food wasn’t very good at this place. I had a tuna wrap that wasn’t really a tuna wrap, but what can you do. There wasn’t any other place around there to chow. After Circa, we went to Ground Zero to pay our respects. I was surprised to see that there wasn’t much more than a wall that has the names of the people that died that day.

So after that, we went to our hotel, which was the Helmsley Park Lane, just on the south end of Central Park. It is a very nice hotel. We had some problems such as the air conditioning going out on Friday morning, and the TV that was connected to a computer kept crashing. It was a good hotel, I’d stay there again, but I would have to request a discount because of these issues. We got back to the hotel around 7:00 PM and went right to bed. We’re lucky that we did go to bed early because the air went out when we woke up at 5:00 AM.

So we got up early Friday to go down to Times Square. We got a couple of passes to the double decker buses to take unlimited tours for 2 days. It passed right in front of our hotel so it was a good deal. We could get on and off as we pleased and catch the next bus that came 15 minutes later. We caught one of the buses and we went to the Intrepid Air and Space Museum. The Intrepid is a retired aircraft carrier that has been converted into a museum. They had a bunch of retired fighters like an SR-71, an F-16 and a Harrier. It was pretty cool, but unfortunately it was about 95 bazillion degrees outside so the times we were on the deck were quick and we didn’t spend much time outside. We got a good picture of Debbie and her bagel shop!

The next stop would be back at the hotel to change, so we thought we would take the Uptown tour bus which would pass by our hotel after going around Central Park. We were planning on going to the Museum of Natural History. By the time we got done with the tour, we were tired and it was almost too late to go to the museum. I was really bummed because it was the one thing that I wanted to see. So instead, we took a nap and then headed back down to Times Square to catch the “Night Tour” which went downtown and across the bridge to Brooklyn to get a nice view of the Manhattan skyline.

After the tour, we went into the Toys R Us flagship store so Debbie could look around. They have some cool things in there like NYC buildings made from legos and a 3 story ferris wheel inside the building.

On Saturday, we got up a little later and we decided that we wanted to go see The Producers. We went and got tickets from the TKTS booth (in like 5 minutes, which is awesome) for the afternoon show. It was a really good musical, even though I’m not the theater type.

We then went on the Downtown tour which went right down to the southern tip of Manhattan and back around to Times Square. We found we were pretty sick of tours because we weren’t able to enjoy this one. First, we got the last seats on the second level of the bus. It was a combination of the sun beating down on us and the exhaust from the bus that made us sick. So we moved downstairs where it was a lot cooler. There, we found a black lady talking to her friends that were on the bus ahead of us for about 45 minutes and was very loud. We couldn’t even understand the tour guide at all. So we were frustrated and hot and tired, so we got off the bus and grabbed a taxi back to the hotel to shower and grab some dinner. We hit up Mickey Mantle’s which was just down the street from our hotel.

After dinner, we headed down to the Rockefeller Center to take a look around and see what was going on down there. We had tickets to go to the “Top of the Rock” at 11:00PM so we were a little early and we walked the plaza area. We ran into some guys asking for donations for the FDNY in a little odd way, but we didn’t have any cash on us. The view from the top was incredible. We had just gotten some rain that morning and that cleared up the haze. It allowed us to see a lot further than we would have any other night we were there. After that, we headed home for our last night at the hotel.

Sunday morning, we woke up, got some breakfast at our favorite place (Papa Bear East) and then packed up. Debbie’s uncle picked us up with 2 of his kids and we headed for Chinatown. For those of you who haven’t been there, it’s absolutely crazy. Vendors are trying to sell knockoff Prada, Coach and Rolex (among others) but can’t have them on display. They have to be in a back room or, as we found out, in someone’s apartment. We HAD to go up 3 flights of stairs to someone’s apartment to see the goods. Debbie got a new purse out of it. I got a lot of water. So we went back to Arnie’s place, showered, ate dinner and crashed for the day. We spent too much time in the sun and out shopping.

Monday, we went to the Cradle of Aviation in Garden City. It’s a museum that says it was where Charles Lindburgh took off for his trans-Atlantic flight. It was pretty cool. Just like any other museum, but it’s those sort of things that I’m interested in. We then headed for the airport and waited and waited and waited in crappily air conditioned terminals for our plane, and then we waited some more in our plane while 30 jets in front of us took off. We were 2 hours late getting home, but it was nice to get home.

Overall, it was nice to get out. I’ve had my fill of people though. Until next time, peace out.