Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

I gotta tell you, if there is one killer exception message that n00b programmers bitch about, that's the one. And 99 percent of the time, the real problem is what's between the keyboard and the chair! Look, if you get this message it means you tried to use an object variable that's null. If it's null, that's either because you have a coding logic error that's allowing it to come back null, or some condition that you didn't forsee brought it back null and you didn't have defensive code to check for this. If it legitimately can come back in a state of Nothingness, then you need to test for that and code the rest of your logic accordingly. You CANNOT assume! Wanna know something else? Out of those 99 percent, a similar percentage of programmers have not taken the time to wrap their code logic in a Try / Catch or Try / Catch / Finally block. If they did, they wouldn't be posting inane questions to forums and newsgroups about it! It's OK if you are li...

"Pluck your magic twanger, Froggy!" -- Andy Devine Recently I started playing with some ideas on using RPC Ping endpoints to help promote one of my websites, ittyUrl.net . For those who aren't familiar, it is customary to ping RPC servers with the title and url of a new blog post. Most Blog hosting software already has this built in. But - it also works for websites with articles, forum posts, or that display custom search results, like mine does. The idea is that these RPC servers will be prompted to go out and request your post and they'll index it, and many sites (some not so noble) will pick up the links and essentially you have gotten yourself some free backlinks (of course, backlinks with a low or no PageRank can actually do you harm from an SEO perf standpoint, but that's a separate issue). One example site that more or less picks up everything for you is weblogs.com . They have a "rolling" display of all the ping updates they've gotten, and ...

"Rudy's arrogance has gotten the best of him. How can a man who failed to prepare New York City for a second attack after the first one, who sent firefighters and emergency workers into Ground Zero without respirators and quit the Iraq Study Group to raise money keep America safe?" -- DNC response to Rudy Giuliani presentation alleging Clinton failure to respond to terrorism Yep. On the C# newsgroup, one poster provided a link to " Flowfinity ": "Flowfinity Blackbird is an add-on to Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 that empowers ASP.NET developers to deliver "Wireless-Ready" applications for BlackBerry®. Using unique features of Visual Studio 2005, Blackbird shortens the BlackBerry application development learning curve for Microsoft .NET developers." I haven't tried this yet as I have no current need to target Blackberry devices. But, he claims to have developed several applications using it. To get into a little more detail from the FAQ:...

"Oops! Wrong hat..." -- Bullwinkle It's interesting to observe the global warming debate and how easy it seems to be for various proponents on one side or the other to replace science with emotion - to the point of virtual hysteria in some cases (see my post on Al Gore ). I remember when I was doing research for my Ph.D. thesis, my faculty mentor and professor, Dr. James Gould, would exhort me "not to give up, finish the job" -- mostly because the data collection process was so time consuming and lengthy, and consequently I would occasionally get discouraged at how much work it can be to put together a first rate dissertation. I was collecting daily solar radio output data from NOAA, and developing programs to do all kinds of mathematical calculations on same (FFT, autocorrelation, various filters such as stochastic and Kalman, etc.). In this collection and research process I became acutely aware of the effect of the Sun on earth's climate, weather, and eve...

"No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." -- Nietzsche And so continues my never-ending love/hate saga with Windows Vista: You try to open Internet options From the IE Tools menu, or from the Control Panel Internet Options applet. In IE, you get a dialog box "this operation has been canceled due to restrictions ...". In Control Panel, it just silently fails. Yeesh, methinks - more Vista BS! Well this just cropped up on my Vista box (or at least I just noticed it). So after not directly finding anything with a few well-placed searches (which right there indicates it's probably a fairly new issue), I decided to start undoing some of Microsoft's little "hotfixes". The latest crop were all installed on June 13, 2007 and the ones I removed include these KB numbers: 929123 931213 933566 905866 936825 I'm sorry I cannot be more specific, but I'm not gonna reboot after every single one. I uninstall four to six at a time a...

Nobody in the game of football should be called a genius. A genius is somebody like Norman Einstein. - Joe Theismann Time machine: It's 1986. I'm on the 20th floor of an office building in downtown Orlando , where I work as a commercial real estate and mortgage broker for a national real estate firm. The top music video on MTV is Steve Winwood's " Higher Love " with Shaka Khan on backup vocals. Ella Fitzgerald , First Lady of Song, has died. We are looking out the office window at the Challenger shuttle takeoff, and suddenly there is a large voluminous plume of white smoke going off in all directions. I was the first and only one to say to my co-workers, "Something is wrong. I think the Shuttle just blew up." I believe this is when I first became aware of the arrogance of complacency. The reports that came out later, and the Columbia disaster report from the more recent disaster, were eerily similar: "For both accidents there were moments when mana...

using System; using System.Net.NetworkInformation; using System.Web; namespace MACAddress { public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { IPGlobalProperties computerProperties = IPGlobalProperties.GetIPGlobalProperties(); NetworkInterface[] nics = NetworkInterface.GetAllNetworkInterfaces(); Response.Write("Interface information for "+ computerProperties.HostName + ": "+ computerProperties.DomainName + "<BR/>"); foreach (NetworkInterface adapter in nics) { IPInterfaceProperties properties = adapter.GetIPProperties(); Response.Write(adapter.Description + "<BR/>"); Response.Write(" Interface type .......................... : "+ adapter.NetworkInterfaceType.ToString() +"<BR/>"); Response.Write(" Physical Address .....................

From the site: "User Samples phase-out – Schedule update in Fall ’07 We will not phase-out User Samples until we can provide customers with a great alternative. We will update you with further schedule information in Fall, 2007." That's really good news to me. I've got samples I've uploaded there that have been downloaded over 52,000 times. And I cannot tell you how many great pieces of helpful code I've downloaded from other kind souls who want to share their work. Thanks, Microsoft. You got this one right. In fact, there have recently been fresh uploads of samples in the User Samples area at gotdotnet.com ! Codeplex is great - but not for sharing user samples - unless you want to move the whole gotdotnet.com section there.

A man speaks to his doctor after an operation. He says, "Doc, now that the surgery is done, will I be able to program in C#?" The doctor replies, "Of course!" The man says, "Good, because I couldn't before!" Yes, Tech-Ed is in Orlando once again! Q. Are you going to be there? A. No, but I do live in the Orlando area so I'll be at the Influencers party at Margaritaville Wednesday evening Q. Then why did you post "Greetings from Orlando". A. Every other slob in the Universe seems to think it's important, and so i didn't want to be left out. Q. Why aren't you going to be at Tech-Ed? A. I'm very busy. I'm writing code. And frankly, I'm "conferenced to death" and need a break. To illustrate my point, I went over to the Convention Center to pick up my ticket to the influencers party. I saw a lot of .Netters walking around at Tech-Ed. Most of them looked downright tired! Besides, Dr. Dotnetsky told me not to go,...

Microsoft has come out with a beta of it's Live "Shared View" application. This will probably seem reminiscent of Remote Assistance (Terminal Services, Remote Desktop, whatever name you may be familiar with). However, it offers some interesting new features. First off, the program is advertiser - supported (at least in this iteration) and is free to download and use (that's right - free - as in "beer"). You can share just an individual application, or your entire desktop, with up to 15 other participants. You can invite attendees via Live Messenger or email. It works very nicely - in fact I tried it out today with a work partner and it worked seamlessly right through the corporate firewall -- and doesn't seem to take up a lot of resources. Plus, when you are connected, users can switch control - one user can share their desktop, and then the other user can choose to switch "sharing" and share their desktop instead with the first user. I pred...