Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

"Everything you can imagine is real" -- Picasso As we approach the end of another year, most people begin a period where there is more introspection and reflection about their inner feelings and aspirations, making donations where appropriate to favored causes, hopefully spending more time thinking about the family unit and the blessings that it provides. I’ve already given thanks to my Twitter brethren for the enlightening 140 character or less pearls of wisdom and links they’ve provided. And I would like to extend the same thanks to readers here. I want to wish great peace to anyone who reads or has read my UnBlog, a happy Thanksgiving and Holiday season, and don’t forget – work isn’t everything. Take time to nurture your family and loved ones, and make an effort to do good in your community. Not only now – but all year. Commune with your family and friends, support those who need help with whatever resources you may have available to you, and – above all – be confident in ...

Is fuel efficiency really what we need most desperately? I say that what we really need is a car that can be shot when it breaks down. –-Russell Baker I had a chance to reflect a little bit today on Silverlight and Flash and I’d like to offer these observations. I have some not insignificant experience with Flash. Many developers are too new to remember FutureSplash – but I remember it very well, and I used it when it first came out, circa 1995. That was the predecessor of today’s Flash, which was ultimately purchased by Macromedia, and now of course subsumed into Adobe. A lot of the stuff you read today revolves around “Flash vs. SIlverlight”. The media loves controversy, and they’ll hammer on this subject ad-infinitum – often to the extreme detriment of any real content.  If you are on Twitter, the latest volley was about MLB (Major League Baseball) dropping Silverlight and going back to Flash for their video coverage. Its seems like every Tom, Dick and Harry Blo...

  Based on a casual googling of this problem, it appears that some developers have spent days trying to figure out why an integer they set on the generated proxy field comes over the wire into the actual WCF service as ZERO.  I didn’t spend days figuring it out, but it certainly did cause no end of annoyance and cursing until I  did. Let’s say you have a WCF service and for one reason or another (maybe your app is on a Handheld device and you cannot use “Add Service Reference”) you’ve set an ASMX – style “Add Web Reference”.  Your code in the generated proxy Reference.cs class may look like this:   public int Quantity {             get {                 return this.quantityField;             }          ...

Like many other .NET Developers, I try to work as efficiently as possible for the benefit of my employer and clients. I don’t take smoking breaks, I usually eat lunch at my desk in about 10 or 15 minutes, and I don’t waste my employer’s time needlessly surfing the net. But many employers don’t seem to appreciate that. They look at what they see as a problem, and use web filtering software like WebSense to block employees from “doing bad things” under the guise of “improving productivity”.  You know what I say to that? Bull! Look, there are always going to be a small minority of employees who are irresponsible and don’t have good work-ethic values who will spend hours of their employers’ time surfing “unacceptable” web sites. But to punish everyone for the offenses of a few is like using a sledge hammer to swat a  gnat. If you block people from web sites, what do you think they’ll do instead? Their productivity won’t increase – the “Baddies” will just do something else, ...