Ultimate Developer Tool List and WSSF Woes

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I first met Scott Hanselman at the bus stop outside the W Hotel in Seattle. A group of devs including Rob Howard, Scott and I were waiting to go the the Mother Ship to have our brains crammed full of Geek Food. This guy is a ball of fire, I'm not sure if he ever sleeps (Scott Guthrie is another one of those). N.B. -Hanselman is walking to fight Diabetes and you can help!

Anyway, Scott has come out with his 2007 version "Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List". Once again he features my litle UrlKicker tray tool that will band-aid broken copied urls together and take you there, search on a number of providers with a copied search phrase to the clipboard, and even has a little "notes" facility that enables you to make notes and view them.

WSSF Woes

One of the problems you may encounter when using GAT packages and framework - generation wizards like the WSSF (Web Services Software Factory) is that the wizards don't always want to allow you to do "custom stuff" and mix it in with their view of the world. For example, if you use the Service Factory Data Access option and want to generate repository classes for your custom update that runs a stored proc that you have added yourself, there is already a default UpdateOne guy in there and he tells you "can't do it 'cause there already is one". Yes, I KNOW there is one, and I want it to stay there, but this is ANOTHER ONE and I want that one too! Sorry, bud, no can do. So, to maintain "best practices purity", at least for now, what I did was to go Get the guy I wanted, update the fields on the object, and then call the Save method. That's not one but TWO database calls.


Where is Dr. Dotnetsky?

Our eggheadcafe.com denizen and prognosticator, Dexter Dotnetsky, appears to have disappeared from the GeekOSphere. I'm making every effort to get back in touch with Dexter, and hopefully I'll be able to get him to resurrect more of his endless pointless, useless geekisms. In the meantime, you might want to bone up on your grammar - with his "all time pet peeves list".

Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

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