Someone has way too much time on their hands. Check out the Waterfall 2006 conference web site - it's a great laugh. Read more

Having recently upgraded our application from ASP.NET 1.1 to ASP.NET 2.0 we were conducting some multiuser test scenarios and discovered a number of problems in our application with data readers not being closed or transactions being completed, etc.These problems all related to threading conflicts and the lack of thread safe code in our data layer. It... Read more

Still no luck on the recruiting front.The last few candidates through the door all managed to embarrass themselves in one way or another - usually through pretending they knew things and then being shown up. If you ever get to interview with someone who knows what they are doing then the last thing you want to... Read more

What a week! I've had a deadline that has been approaching for a number of weeks where my team has had to make some new functionality available in our software to meet compliance with a standards body in one of our markets.We've had ages to get it done and the initial estimates for time gave us... Read more

When interviewing developers and analysts I have a series of practical exercises that I run them through.One of the exercises is a debugging exercise in winforms and vb.net. Internally we actually use ASP.NET/C# for all our development, but a good .NET developer should be able to handle any language thrown at them.In any case, the exercise... Read more

I do quite a few interviews for developers, business analysts, testers, and the like and you'd be suprised at just how poor some of the applicants can be.You get these resumes with all sorts of wonderful references, great job history, experience on all sorts of cool projects and then they turn up and you just can't... Read more

Joel Spolsky (of JoelOnSoftware fame) has posted a bit of a rant about the quality of programmers coming out of Universities in the US lately, and blaming the problem on the lack of mental challenge current courses present.Having spent the last 6 months scouring the local job market (Sydney, Australia) for talented people and coming up... Read more

Gamespot has released their best and worst list of games for 2005. Having just played through Myst 5 in a bit over 10 hours, and also having completed the single player version of Call Of Duty 2 in about the same time (on regular) I thought it would be interesting to see what the "experts" have... Read more

I've just spent the last 2 days getting my team to migrate our solution from ASP.NET 1.1 to ASP.NET 2.0 most of which was spent cleaning up compiler errors and making changes to get rid of warnings, etc.This went suprisingly smoothly considering the main solution has over 20 projects in it, and that there are some... Read more

A good way to find blogs worth reading is to look at blog awards site. The KBCafe blogs are one such place. Jump on over and check it out at http://www.kbcafe.com/rss/?guid=20051222133901. You might find something there you haven't seen before. Read more

Still no luck on reporting via web services. You can do the basics in many packages, but if you want to hook into a web service with WS-Security then you need to "roll your own" provider.I'm actually looking at SQL Reporting Services 2005 for it at the moment, since it also features the ability to provide... Read more

Scott Guthrie has a post about capturing the reason for unexpected ASP.NET application shutdowns. Check it out at http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/12/14/433194.aspx Read more

I’ve been trying to solve the business issue of end user ad-hoc reporting in a web services world and I'm coming up blank. If you have any ideas on this problem, please post a reply - I'd love to hear from you.At the moment I’ve tried hooking Crystal XI up to a web service, but the... Read more

The Atlas project (Microsoft's Ajax kit) is now available for download on the ASP.Net beta release site. Worth a look if you're getting into Ajax and .NET 2.0. P.S. Demo's work cross browser (eg Safari) which is a nice thing to see. Read more

The google sightseeing blog has an amusing entry about using the infamous numbers from Lost as latitude/longitude coordinates. When combined in the right way, they pinpoint a small island in the Pacific. Very amusing :-) The blog entry is at http://googlesightseeing.com/2005/11/05/4-8-15-16-23-42/ Read more

With the release of Visual Studio 2005 Microsoft have been publishing new documents and guides faster than the eye can blink. The Patterns & Practices team have been putting out a good chunk of these, and they've also just released a new CTP version of the Enterprise Library (or EntLib).It's a real shame that their stuff... Read more

Paul Thurott (WinSuperSite) has put some screenshots on his web site of the installation procedure for Office 12 and of Word 12 as well.The installation pictures are probably a hint as to what will happen with MSI v4, and the subtle visuals in the installation shots are really nice - very similar to the Aero visuals... Read more

This one's doing the rounds in the office at the moment. I thought I'd share it with you for you enjoyment ;-) http://www.clientcopia.com/top.php Read more

I've been looking at incorporating a spell checker into an ASP.NET application on and off for a while, but could never really find anything that was suitable - either there are popup pages involved, or it was all client side validation which meant dictionaries had to live on the client machine to be useful. I've just... Read more

Microsoft's Coding4Fun boys have put out an article showin how to navigate and play your music library with a simple .NET 2.0 app. Go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/coding4fun/webcoder/musiclib/default.aspx and have a look if you're interested. Read more