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ILMerge for creating distribution DLLs.

Fri, 2007-04-06 08:50 — jlopez

ILMerge is a tool available for download at
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=22914587-b4ad-4eae-87cf-b14ae6a939b0&displaylang=en

One use of the tool is described at http://jasonhaley.com/blog/archive/2007/04/05/138404.aspx
The basic sequence (as outlined in the article):

Opening CSV Files in .Net

Tue, 2007-04-03 15:44 — jlopez

One of the most common formats to get data exported from other systems in is the CSV (comma separated values) format. A good starting point for this pseudo standard is found here: Wikipedia on CSV. As this format is not published by any standards body, you may find some files are easier to open than others. However, most spreadsheets can open the format and massage the data as needed.

DotNetNuke 4.4.1 Password Reset Via SQL.

Mon, 2007-03-05 09:47 — jlopez

I was looking to reset a password in DotNetNuke 4.4.1 and found this link:

http://support.ihostasp.net/Customer/KBArticle.aspx?articleid=44

Apparently this is for a prior version, as the 4.4.1 stored procedure uses the "ApplicationName" and not the "ApplicationID". I was successful in resetting the password using the small modification found below.

Has programming stagnated?

Tue, 2006-06-27 16:00 — jlopez

Over at Coding Horror I found an article linking to Alarming Development which was hosting an article claiming that programming as reached a dead end.

Muds and teaching programming to children.

Wed, 2006-05-17 10:23 — jlopez

Today’s post will seem a bit off topic from the usual technology related topics, but I also do work on game designs, both for the computer and traditional board games. I also have a twelve year old son who wants to learn something about what I do all day.

A long time ago, I worked on “muds”. Muds (a.k.a. Multi User Dungeons) are the text based precursor to the current graphical games such as Everquest and World of Warcraft. Being text based, they were cheap and easy to host and could be created and extended by mere mortals instead of the massive development houses required to create a modern graphical world. Many popular muds continue to exist to this day. (Realms of Despair, one of the classics, still has hundreds and hundreds of users online at any given time).

Bring rogue programmers in from the cold.

Tue, 2006-05-16 08:58 — jlopez

One interesting resource for programmers is "The Daily WTF". It is a great place to read about things that should *not* be happening in your organization: antipatterns for code and business processes (mostly code).

A recent "The Daily WTF" discusses the plight of a company where a “rogue” programmer built an inefficient spreadsheet for a supervisor, only to find it was too popular and those inefficiencies brought down the database by overloading it with connections. Operating outside of IT, the understanding of enterprise requirements was not there. On the other hand, many have argued that rogue programmers exist because of unresponsive IT departments, and they provide a valuable service.

Excel Spreadsheet Transformations

Wed, 2006-05-10 13:34 — jlopez

Today I had an request to transform data that came from a printed report into usable Excel data. The data had been printed to PDF, so a PDF to Excel converter tool did the bulk of the work. However, even after being placed in Excel, there were two remaining requirements to achieve this goal. The first was to remove the recurring headers and footers of the report. The second was to reassemble each reported item's three lines of data back into to a single coherent row of data.

To do the initial transformation (removing the headers) I used the following VB for Applications code:

Trusted connections between XP and a SQL instance on a different machine.

Tue, 2006-05-02 11:22 — jlopez

Often in production ASP.NET environments the web server is not part of a domain (per security guidelines) and yet would benefit from a trusted connection to the SQL server. Using trusted connections is well explained in this article:

Using trusted connections with asp.net.

In my development environment I maintain SQL on a different machine than I develop on as well. Although the best solution to trust is using proper application pools, Windows XP (from which I write code on and run my IIS tests) does not support them. In this case, the "editing the default context" solution works well.

Domain specific languages, are they worth it?

Fri, 2006-04-21 11:13 — jlopez

Yet another interesting discussion of Domain Specific Languages popped up:

http://www.artima.com/forums/flat.jsp?forum=106&thread=155752

Domain specific languages (DSLs) are scripting languages (usually) built on top of a traditional environment. For programmers who have written code only in a single language model, moving to a DSL model can be a bit of a shock. The fundamental idea is that when your base programming language is becoming constraining in some way, you can build a DSL on top of it to remove some of the limitations. (Another option is migrate to a more powerful language, but sometimes that is too drastic of a step to take.)

Google Analytics

Tue, 2005-11-22 14:16 — jlopez

Google is testing a new service: "Google Analytics". If you already use Ad Words, then this additional reporting can be useful for determining which words are getting you the best results. More than a hit counter, the product allows you to monitor four items to help you understand your marketing successes and failures.

  1. Campaign tracking variables: These are URL elements you can use in web advertisements, e-mails, etc. These codes allow you to track the number of users arriving from different marketing efforts. Most marketing people have figured out how to use different landing pages or similar variables to track marketing responses, but these are particularly useful when combined with the other Analytics features.
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