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Video Training - Get your learn on

2010-07-07T08:31:01-07:00

You have to keep growing in the technical consulting business. I'm constantly reading books but sometimes I get burnt out on reading. Sometimes I like to hook up the laptop to the TV and watch some video training. I use a couple different web sites for video training. I think I've posted on VTC before but that was probably a while ago, so here we go -

VTC - Virtual Training Course
VTC has a huge library of topics on just about everything you can imagine. You can learn everything from Photoshop to SQL server. It's $30/month and worth every penny.
http://www.vtc.com

LearnDevNow -
The focus of LearnDevNow if Microsoft development and it's amazingly robust. The videos are very professional, if a little dry. I highly recommend them. It's $99 for a year of access.
http://www.learndevnow.com

I'm Back

2009-11-30T09:17:12-07:00

I had to reformat my server several months ago. I took a meticulous backup (or so I thought) but realized I did not take a backup of my blog. Consequently I lost all of my blogs from this year.

Today I was cleaning out my hard drive and found a backup from June. Ok, good enough. I'm back!

As of today I'm going to try to start posting regularly again.

Async web services the easy way

2009-03-06T16:50:58-07:00

Source:Begin/End Async WebService Proxy Methods

Have you ever needed to kick off a long running process through a web service and immediately return control of the page to the user? I have a process which takes about 10 minutes to run and I don't want to just set the page timeout really really high and make the user sit there and watch IE grind. With the tweak to the project file described below, web service "begin" and "end" methods will be generated for the web service when you add it as a web reference to your project. If you had a HelloWorld() method you would now have access to a "BeginHelloWorld()" method which can fire off the web service and NOT wait for it to complete before returning control to the user.

You can add WebReference_EnableLegacyEventingModel with a value of true to the first ProptertyGroup section in your csproj file. You will have to close visual studio before doing that and update your web references to generate the updated class with the begin/end methods.

Hosting a project on an XP UNC share... again

2009-03-03T19:54:48-07:00

I just upgraded to Vista 64 bit from XP.  6 gigabytes of memory and a velociraptor 300 gig drive make it wicked fast and responsive under the worst conditions. 

But wait... Bios command limit reached!  What?... ok, I wrote a blog about this.  No problem...

... Bios command limit reached... unable to monitor changes .... what?!?

Hours of searching later I ran this from the run prompt and it started working again.  This issue has been around since 2005 and it's still here even in Vista 64 bit. What a sigh of relief to get my intellisense back!

Oh, the command:
Drive:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\caspol.exe -m -ag 1 -url "file:////\\computername\sharename\*" FullTrust -exclusive on

Browser war shifting?

2009-02-25T11:04:12-07:00

This article at ComputerWorld says since the introduction of firefox to the market that IE's market share has fallen from 95% to 70%. While that is still quite the majority it means that as web developers we have to start taking "standards compliant" browsers seriously. With IE8, which microsoft asserts will be standards compliant by default, will hopefully usher in a new time of compatablity across all browers. I know that's an unlikely scenario but we can hope right:?

In the past with most people using IE, I've pretty much ignored "alternative" browsers but with the recent shift I've started coding so my work is visible in firefox / safari / etc. I actually feel a bit of pride when I see my creations work across multiple platforms. I even tested my latest gadget on an iphone and it looks great. I have to give a lot of credit to jQuery of course because it handles a lot of browser-specific functionality automatically, but their victory is my victory and I'll take it.

Does your app work in firefox? Yes - How about safari on a mac? Yes -

These are the questions we're going to be asked, and "yes" is the right answer. A pool of 30% is a nice size group of potential customers to draw from, especially when the IE user pool is shrinking.