Sometimes technical, sometimes not, never a kitty

One feature I'd love to see removed from all versions of VS is the ability to name a setup package "setup.exe" or "setup.msi".  For the most part, the developer community is really good at naming installers intelligently.  The problem really stems from Microsoft.  It does not take too many powertoys, fonts, add-ins, etc. before one accumulates a large number of "setup.exe" files.  Or worse yet, a new one overwrites an old one you may still need.

Maybe it's not an entirely VS thing.  It was the Consolas font pack that started this rant today, and that may have been another installer.  Regardless, this is a general plea--when you create an installer, please use a name that identifies what is going to be installed.  Thanks in advance.

The May BADNUG meeting has been cancelled; Tony can't make it tonight.

The next meeting is tentatively scheduled for June 22.  Collect your favorite tips and trick for SQL Server 2000 or 2005 and be ready to share them.  We'll demonstrate SQL Delta, Fuzzy Matching and a few other topics, then have a sharing session.

Thanks to TASC, we have a free license of SQL Delta for one lucky attendee--a $295 value!  If you've never been to a BADNUG meeting before, this would be a good first time.  We'll have the schedule revised shortly, and you can register through the site at http://www.badnug.org/. 

In his "Passionate Programmers" post, Justin James makes a point I doubt anyone disagrees with--hire people who truly enjoy their job.  That's not an idea exclusive to scientists or programmers--that's true in nearly every job, whether it's molecular biologist, floral designer, carpenter, doctor--whatever.

Near the middle, and just as I'm agreeing with his post, Justin makes one statement I have to take exception with:

Programming is increasingly a matter of gluing together libraries written by a few select people, the ones who are having all of the fun. At this point, the places where truly interesting codesmithing seems to occur is in the shops making development tools (Sun, Microsoft, Borland, etc.) and the small places doing niche work. Some of the FOSS projects are extremely interesting as well, and they have the advantage of not caring about profits, so they are free to work on unusual and creative projects regardless of potential market size. Anyone in between these types of environments is just gluing together libraries written by a big-time player into a standard, boring C/R/U/D application.

Boring, as we've established, is very subjective.  Just because I don't build frameworks or controls doesn't mean my work is boring, or that I'm a simpleton.  I really enjoy web design--it has elements of database work (especially optimization, which can be fun), graphic design, copywriting, server and network administration, programming, etc.  I get to use both creative and analytical parts of my mind, more so than writing just "boring old framework code".  I think it's really exciting to launch a new website and see a business grow, or see an established one enhanced.  It's fun working with graphic designers, or even getting to do some yourself.  Saying "anyone in between is just gluing together libraries" totally misses what all goes into other types of work.  It's a little disrespectful, and sells hort the skills and talent a different type of work takes.

Likewise, integrating multimillion dollar ERP and WMS systems isn't a real programming challenge, but they can be intricate puzzles.  The stakes are high, and success makes businesses and people work better.  That's my kind of challenge!

I read a variety of technical blogs.  Some are agile, some are pragmatic, while others are iffy, lazy, angry or corporate.  Most of them have extensively documented approaches to programming, and zealots of each approach engange in long blog battles over why they're right and everybody else is an idiot.  I don't really have a name for my approach, but my entire programming philosophy can be boiled down to a single mantra:

I will not write a Daily WTF

This is what I repeat to myself everytime I open Visual Studio or Enterprise Manager ("Enterprise Damager" as my network buddy Brad calls it).  I like it because there's no rational counterpoint.  No matter how many specs I have, nor how many meetings I've endured, in the end, it all comes down to my mind and its control over 8-10 of my fingers (I'm not a very good typist, so sometimes I only use 6 fingers).

When you have VS 2005 generate a strongly-typed dataset for you, it also adds some comments as to the date and time of generation, as well as who generated the code.  Here's one line of these comments (you'll find this at the top of MyFile.Designer.vb):

Sometimes, truer words were never spoken...

There's another sproc-or-not battle royale going on over at CodeBetter.com.  Not going there, but one statement Eric Wise made isn't completely correct:

First, you can be sure that no sql injection attacks will ever occur.

That's part of a longer paragraph, but if I read the paragraph correctly, not taken out of context.

For the most part, Eric is correct.  But, if SQL statements are generated dynamically in a stored procedure, and in-line parameter concatenation is part of the statement, then you're just as susceptible to SQL Injection.  For instance, code such as

IF @orderId IS NOT NULL
 select @sql = @sql + ' AND order_id=' + @orderId

would be susceptible to SQL Injection.  I have seen code such as this used (including some by as reportedly high-level DBA), and sadly written some myself.

There's an excellent paper on the right and wrong of dynamic SQL at http://www.sommarskog.se/dyn-search.html; I have a summary blog post at http://aspadvice.com/blogs/rjdudley/archive/2005/06/30/2626.aspx.

The Control Gallery at ASP.NET still exists, it's just not on the menu anymore.  It has been moved to the Resources Page, along with Hosts, Community Sites and Case Studies.  VWDE, Starter Kits and The Sandbox are on the Downloads page.

Alex Lowe has a short explanation in this thread: http://forums.asp.net/thread/1294935.aspx

My latest ASP Alliance article has been published, titled Getting Started with the Club Site Starter Kit:

Since the release of ASP.NET 2.0, several starter kits have been released as examples of programming practices. These kits are also good starting points for actual websites and can be valuable to novice webmasters. This article will demonstrate how to download and install the Club Site Starter Kit, configure a different database to prepare for a production site and change the appearance by modifying the master page.

There is one correction to the article--Listing 4 is incorrect.  The MasterPage filename in Figure 20 should be "caddyshack.master", and Listing 4 should then read:

<%@ Page Language="VB" MasterPageFile="~/caddyshack.master" Title="Untitled Page" %>

Find the full article at http://aspalliance.com/839.

Eric says crazy filename parsing is something else you should stop doing.  If you're creating output files, you probably need to timestamp the file name to keep the files separate.  Step away from the keyboard before you do anything crazy--you can do this in one line of VB.NET:

Brendan Tompkins has a nice post on printing a web page as a PDF using webSuperGoo's ABCPdf component.  The example is written in C#, but shouldn't be too hard to translate.

 So what’s the solution to your website printing problems at least until you can guarantee that the majority of your users will be using a print-friendly browser?  Simple, when a user makes a print request on your site, dynamically create PDF documents on the fly making sure to include all of your users page state, and output that PDF document to the browser. 

Full article at http://codebetter.com/blogs/brendan.tompkins/archive/2006/05/22/145267.aspx.

At the last BADNUG meeting, someone mentioned they wished there was Intellisense for SQL Server.  I said there was such a product; Red Gate recently purchased it, and is now giving it away until Sep. 1, 2006!

Also included in the package is a 14-day trial of Red Gate's Dependency Tracker, which is a wickedly-cool database diagrammer.

More information and download link at http://www.red-gate.com/products/sql_prompt/index.htm.

(I apologize in advance for anyone I'm citing below.  Your intentions were good, but IMHO, your technique leaves soemthing to be desired.)

Almost as annoying as bad-question-askers-in-forums are the click-here people.  That was bad enough on web pages, but it's gotten worse with the explosion of blogging.

First example comes to us from John Cilli's Commerce Connect.  John found an article that he'd like to share:

Before I "click here", I'd like to know what the article is about.  Maybe it's something I already read this morning.  Maybe it's something he thinks is useful, but not necessarily something Id find so.  No indication.  John's blog is reputable, but whatif this is a random blog--could "here" be a trojan waiting to infect my system?  And since my Internet usage at work is monitored, I can't just click willy-nilly.  Chances are I'll forget when I get home, and any benefit from the article is lost.  The article title and maybe a snippet or short abstract would be really great (see me pat myself on the back below for an example).

John Papa brings us our next example, but it's more of a "Where's Waldo: Hyperlink Edition" style of linking.  Can you see the download link below?  It's that little tiny one labelled "Attachment(s)", below the Google ads and Published information.  This isn't so much John's fault as it is the skin designer's.  Unless John designed the skin.

So who does links well?  Mike Gunderloy does a good job, with a title and short description.  Scott Hanselman as well.  I think I do article links prett well; see http://www.rjdudley.com/blog/First+Ultra+Mobile+PC+Comes+To+US.aspx for an example.

I'm sure both everyone of you reading this article has seen more than enough examples.  Share some below.  But don't be a bad linker; not in the comments, nor in your posts.

<update 2006-05-19>

Jesse Ezell adds one to the list.  Hey Jesse, what is 'this'?