Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

Recently we got a Messageboard post from a regular at eggheadcafe.com asking what the XMLNS namespace declarations were for in his XSL stylesheet document. I fired back almost subliminally, "To disambiguate..." Of course I know what it means, but a lot of people aren't sure. Just to see what's out there I googled the word and got 159,000 hits. The most common definitions and usage examples: To establish a single grammatical or semantic interpretation for. State unambiguously or remove ambiguities from. [this one is a no-no- dictionaries should never resort to using another form of the same word they are attempting to define! These guys actually did it twice in the same sentence. DOH!] Namespaces disambiguate elements with the same name from each other by attaching different prefixes to names from different XML applications. >No really, it's a word! It means to clarify a term. Don't you gotta just love that last one. It actually comes from the Jargon Databa...

"Beh-heh! Of course I got PLAN! Dey don't ever vork, but I got one!" Well, Boris, how about this: You want to deploy a .NET usercontrol app for which you have created a COM Callable wrapper (Register for COM Interop) and you want to deploy it via a web page in Internet Explorer with the typical CAB file codebase setup and an INF file in the CAB that says what to do. Easy, right? NOPE! Dig this from HOW TO (Q311297) : Components That Are Required by the COM Interop Program The client computer must have the Microsoft .NET runtime installed before you deploy the COM Interop assembly. Developers must deploy all .NET assemblies that are included in the program. Developers must deploy all Interop assemblies that represent distinct COM that are included in the program.All COM components must be deployed and registered on the client computer. Limitations of .NET Components Deployment Developers cannot install assemblies from the Web directly into the Global Assembly Cache (GAC...

It ain't a dead horse in my opinion, and I enjoy kicking it once in a while. The problem with VB.NET is really that we just didn't need a new language to complement C# for the .NET Platform. Listen, I started out with Applesoft BASIC, wrote some of my best stock analysis software in Turbo Basic, and was a Microsoft Beta Tester for the first version of the BASIC Compiler. I've made a lot of money as a classic Visual Basic Programmer with VB 5.0 and then VB 6.0. I've dabbled with JAVA, C++ and Delphi / Pascal. There's no question that its easy to write code in Visual Basic. Its also easy to write VERY BAD code in it. I see it as a marketing decision. By all indications, at the time .NET was being developed, there were 10 times more VB programmers than C++ programmers. And people made the decision that they would provide all these VB crybabies with a VB-like language with a whole bunch of helper classes that would enable them to use these crutches to "migrate...

It was good the first time around, should be better now: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/thankyou.aspx?FamilyID=321cd7a2-6a57-4c57-a8bd-dbf62eda9671&displaylang=en&Hash=6F8N5F5

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windowsserver2003/servicepack/default.msp x

When you go to create software with OOP-oriented reusable "drop it in - plug it in" type objects, this question must be successfully answered before you begin. You don't need fancy UML diagrams. What you need to do is learn how to ask (and correctly answer) this question at every point in the development cycle. If I am developing a VOIP application, for example, built from reusable objects of functionality, and I come to the part where i need to do audio capture and playback output (from the microphone and to the speaker), that's an object. Actually, its TWO objects. One for capture, one for playback. It shouldn't matter if I use DirectX, some Wave Audio ActiveX control with a C# wrapper, or even the WaveOut API - the functionality, the methods and the interface can all be exactly the same. What it SHOULD NOT HAVE is being tied in with RTP / SIP Packets, or IPEndpoints. Those are OTHER OBJECTS that have nothing to do with Audio capture / playback. So the questio...

Get it here ( .http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=77960733-06e9-47ba-914a-844575031b81&displaylang=en&Hash=PKKGSD4 )

CNET Reports on Vigilante attacks on bank "419" scammers and the ISPs that host their sites. These are the scum who perpetrate fake bank deposit scams - you've undoubtedly gotten email from them. The 419 Flash Mob is attempting to recruit as many people as possible to launch denial-of-service attacks on spammers' bandwidth and report them to their Web hosts and to legal authorities. The Web site provides contact details of computer crime units in seven countries. Web sites with the following banks names are being attacked: Abbey Trust & Offshore Bank; First Global Trust; Allied Trust Bank UK (which is listed twice because two separate Web sites use this name); Crystal Bonds & Securities; Kash Bank Corp.; Liberty Stronghold Securities and Finance; and BBVA Finance & Clearinghouse. I kinda like this type of Internet vigilante-ism. Kind of smacks of the Old West, where the Lone Ranger and Tonto had to take the law to the bad guys. Hell, I'd lend some of...

Recently a programming buddy and I were discussing various options for the population of various properties to a UI-oriented class from a generated Database - oriented class that "kind of" belongs with it. The idea was, he is generating the DB classes from stored procedures using a code - generator and it isn't feasible to change them around. However, he needed the flexibility to bring some or all of the properties in an instance of one of these DB - oriented classes into his UI-oriented class, allowing for the most flexibility without having to hard - code stuff or use reflection. I suggested a possibility that I've used before: Pass an instance of the DB class into the Ctor of the UI class and store it in a private field there. Then, you can rig up the UI-class properties, fields or members in any way you want. This is far from a new idea - but our little exercise made me think how few times I've seen developers use this technique. Here's a simplistic il...

I've run across this a couple of times before, but I never created a permanent link to it for convenience. Scott Hanselman, guru extraordinaire , has quite a comprehensive list of utilities that he recommends. Its so good, and so extensive, that I thought it would be a nice gesture to post a link to it here: Scott Hanselman's Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tools List Of course, there is a selfish method to my madness. Now that it's on my own blog, I'll never have to look for the link again.