I think David Kirk made a mistake. TradeMe is doomed and he wasted $700m on a web site that can’t survive with a radical change.
Why?
Because everyone I talk to about TradeMe has been burnt to one extent or another – either by not receiving the goods/money, getting the wrong goods, being slagged off by a buyer or seller, etc. TradeMe is unwilling and probably unable to provide anything more than rudementary protection to it’s users – it’s no better than the notice board at your local supermarket.
Sooner or later the number of pissed off users is going to exceed the satisfied users. Sooner or later, the number of dodgey dealers is going to exceed the genuine dealers. Sooner or later people are going to get bored with idiots trying to sell crap for rediculous amounts – it’s just not funny any more. The joke is over. Time to move on to something that gives a better service to traders.
This is new for me -
maybe for you too. To debug a javascript block from Visual Studio, add the
following to your script block:
debugger;
Make
sure your IE advanced settings have Disable Script Debugging turned off.
When the browser hits the debugger statement it will display the page source in
Visual Studio and allow you to step over the code, examine variable values and
do all the lovely debugging stuff you need to do.
Wish
I'd know about this a few years ago!
Darryl and others have mentioned recently about the impending doom that is IE 7 :] If you are like me and decided not to use it - for one reason or another - then beware that it is very likley to be automatically installed on your favourite computer weather you want it or not.
Now, dont get me wrong, I like IE7 but during the early betas I had an issue with it and Visual Studio Team Suite so I haven't used it on my work machine since then. I do use it at home though and it works fine, but from a user POV I don't think it works any better than IE6. From a dev POV I've just realised that I haven't done any testing on my sites (personal or otherwise) so I should probably stop blogging and get testing!
Anyways, my main gripe is that this is rolling out as a critical (or at least high priority) update so most users will get it without asking for it. I can understand the justification for doing this - it does fix a lot of potential security issues so it would fall into that category - but I can see this causing some problems for a lot of people.
We (actually my wife) purchased a camera on the weekend. It's a Nikon D80. We got it from Photo & Video International in Merivale Mall and I must say that they are without doubt the best camera shop in Christchurch - if not the whole of NZ. Very professional, very friendly, efficient and knowledgeable. It's so refreshing finding real service again!
As for the camera, it appears to work very well. It has a quick shutter speed, is not too heavy - we got the 18-135mm lens so it's a bit heavier than the smaller lens - and comes with all the features we want in a SLR. The previous model, the D200 is a little faster if you are taking lots of rapid shots but otherwise the D80 is identical - same lens and chips - but is also cheaper by a few hundred bucks.
Alex has just released Base4 version 2.1.
I haven't been following the progress of Base4 that closely but it appears that it has matured into a very stable and innovative product - take a look at the 15 minute video if you doubt my word! I can't see how any other product could be simpler to use than Base4. It's awesome.
Alex: it might be a good idea to do some benchmarks like the NHibernate v ADO one I saw recently - sorry can't find the link now. It would be interesting to see the comparison. I'm thinking that Base4 would stack up very well against NHibernate :)
My work PC has been
performing very poorly ever since I installed Office 2007 TR2. Last week I
removed this and it didn't seem to help very much. After a few calls
to our support people and some monitoring of the running processes in Task
Manager I managed to figure out that the MacAfee Virus scanner was the
problem.
IT'S A PIECE OF CRAP
- NEVER USE IT! At least, not if you want to do any work. Luckily I
could uninstall it so my machine is back to full speed again - Visual Studio now
takes less than a minute to open a file.
Phew, glad to get
that off my chest.
Not trying to sound
desperate here but Intergen are still looking for talented people.
In
Christchurch we currently need :
- Project Manager /
Business Analyst
- 1 Senior .Net
Developer
- 2 Junior /
Intermediate .Net Developers
- 1
Tester
Initially this is
for a new initiative working closely with a major customer on some big
systems. It's a very desirable team to be in (for Intergen) and will
involve working closely with the customer supporting existing systems and
creating new systems. The customer is very successful in their space and a
great organisation to work with.
Looking on Seek at
the weekend there was 140 or so IT vacancies in Christchurch and I'd say 90% of
these were for developers and a good majority of these were for .Net or
Microsoft technologies. So given the huge demand and
fantastic choice you have at the moment, why would you want to work for
Intergen?
Well, for me, it's
about the people and the work. We have some really smart & fun people
working for us - people that can make your working day an adventure. The
work is varied and leading edge - we have no fear of using the latest
technologies if it fits the requirement and we understand the risks - things
like .Net 3, Office 12 etc.
If you are at all
interested in chatting about the opportunities - or know someone who might be -
then please send use your CV or contact me on 021 583 793 or contact me via
email.
There's been a few
comments here and there about the lack of support for Visual Studio .old on
Vista. I was reading bharry's
post on this and it makes perfect sense to me - anything that takes time
away from future versions is a bad thing in my book.
However, Microsoft
are definitely going to extraordinary lengths to provide compatibility for as
many applications as possible. For example, VB 6! There is still a
heck of a lot of VB code out there and it's not going away soon (btw, have you
noticed the investment Microsoft have made in VB6 <-> VB .Net migration
and tools since the big stink last year?). I don't know how anyone
can say that Microsoft don't care or don't listen - that's just patently
wrong.
I installed Vista
RC1 on a fast machine over the weekend so that I could work on a small
DotNetNuke web site (for a moonlighting job - don't worry, the boss knows
:). During the process I had to install SQL Express. Vista gave me
an interesting warning message that told me I needed SQL Server 2005
SP2. Now after a bit of hunting around I finally realised
that SP2 doesn't exist yet. Hmmmm, this could be a problem.
However, I then noticed the Application Compatibility icon on my desktop and in
about 1 minute I had SQL Express running in XP SP2 mode.
Now I don't know
about you, but I can't remember ever knowing enough about the future to tell
users of my applications that they should get a patch that does not yet
exist. Frankly, I find this to be amazing that Microsoft would go to these
lengths and a clear demonstration that of their commitment to delivering a great
product.
So, now I really
want Vista at work - not because it's necessarily any better - but mainly
because it's new and shiny. New is good because it will have the latest
goodness (and sure, the latest bugs). Shiny is good because I spend 10-12
hours a day looking at computer screens and I need a bit of a change to keep me
interested. Oh, and I guess it's faster and easier to use and all that
boring stuff too.
This is a great
industry to be involved in.
We have a bumper spring season of user group sessions coming
up over the next couple of months, including 2 national tours and an
international guest speaker.
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28/09/2006
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The
future of web development and Windows Vista
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Presented by Darryl Burling & Nathan Mercer
Darryl Burling (Developer Evangelist - Microsoft New Zealand) and Nathan
Mercer (Platform Strategy Group - Microsoft New Zealand) are visiting to
present a session on The future of web development & Windows Vista...this
is a two part presentation not to be missed delivered by very knowledgeable
and well recognised presenters from Microsoft New Zealand hot from presenting
at TechEd 2006!
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11/10/2006
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ASP.Net
2.0 GridView Deep Dive
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Presented by Renato Haddad
This session will explore usage of the GridView Control in ASP.NET 2.0
applications.
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19/10/2006
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Get
LINQ'd - Part 1
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Presented by Ivan Towlson
In this 2 part presentation, Ivan Towlson and Alex James will present the
in's and out's of LINQ & Entities. In part 1, Ivan will explain how to
use LINQ, how it works under the covers, why it's not just "yet another
Microsoft data access stack" and its wider ramifications for .NET
programming.
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31/10/2006
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Team
System Something
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Presented by Anthony Borton
Anthony Borton is visiting from Australia and will present a session on Team
System. Details to follow soon but if you have anything special you would
like to see then please ask when registering.
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16/11/2006
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Get
LINQ'd - Part 2
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Presented by Alex James
In this 2 part presentation, Ivan Towlson and Alex James will present the
in's and out's of LINQ & Entities. In part 2, Alex will continue where
Ivan left off and explain how to use the new ADO.Net Entities feature to
create logical data models for your data access layers.
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Plus one or two more sessions in December that is TBA.
And don’t forget:
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Don't
miss the great kiwi
SQL
Getaway
Two
days of hard core SQL programming demo's, discussions, tips &
tricks. Nothing but data!
November 25-26th, Porirua Wellington
More details here!
Brought
to you by the NZ .Net User Group
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I’ve been very quiet on the blogging front since
starting work for Intergen. The change seems to have sucked all my
creative juices so that by the end of the day there is little left for anything
else. The state of my garden is more evidence of this. It’s a
shame really because there has been some great blogversations and campaigns
going on lately. I haven’t really even had time to read blogs.
However, spring is upon us and I’m feeling a but more
invigorated these days, although I still don’t have much to blog
about. In the past I’ve tried to keep to technical subjects as much
as possible and I don’t want to change this, but I really should blog
more about NZ .Net User Group activities. So, here goes… (next
post).
Ok, so the trick to having a new battery is that you still have to charge it occasionally. But thankfully my notebook (paper one) and pencil still worked so I managed to pickup lots of nice tips from Scott Guthrie, all of which I'm sure you can find on his blog already.
However, my favorites were:
MaintainScrollPostition. Add this to your Page tag to have the browser restore the scroll position after a postback.
DefaultButton. You can set the default button for a Form or a Panel. Useful for a search panel at the top of the page.
OnClientClick. My JScript skills are more rusty than my ASP skills so I was very pleased to see that I can use this to do simple confirmation/cancellation dialogs. Eg: OnClientClick="return confirm('Are you sure you want to bomb Beirut?');"
Cross Page Postbacks. I knew about this but sort of forgot it. Could be most useful for a search page. Not sure if you can specify a target though.
RSS Toolkit. I already have a job to add some content to a community sight from an RSS feed. The RSS Toolkit will make this pathetically simple.
And lots more. I can't wait to get back to work and implement a few of these on my current project.
I asked Scott at the end of the session if it would be ok to re-present his slides at a user group event and he was very agreeable to that so I think it's about time we had another meeting!
I'm feeling inspired enough to attempt some live blogging. That's what TechEd (and a new working notebook battery) does for me. So, I'm sitting in the the Sky City theatre waiting for Scott Guthrie to start his ASP.Net Tips & Tricks session - his final one for TechEd NZ before he flies off to Australia. 
And I'm using Windows Live Writer which is awesome. More soon.
TechEd 2006 is a blast already. I've only managed to get to one session so far - Paul Andrew on Workflow Foundation (checkout the article on Paul in Computer World) - but everyone is in a great mood and things seem to be working really well. This is the biggest TechEd ever - about 2200 attendees plus loads of presenters, sponsors, partners and other assorted klingons :]. It was a little tight for room after the keynote when everyone flooded out of the room at the same time, but otherwise, it's not too cramped. The Hands on Labs - where I am spending most of my time - are working really well. We had the room three quarters full yesturday afternoon and today there has been a steady stream of people filling in time between sessions etc. There's some really great labs to do to - eg, the ones on LINQ and ADO 3, and Workflow Foundation. The yellow Intergen shirts certainly get peoples attention, especially when we travel in herds! I'm a bit scared of travelling alone though in case I get picked on. (I'll post a photo as soon as I get a mo). If your missing out on all the fun of TechEd because you couldn't get tickets then take a look at http://www.techedlive.co.nz/ for a live feed of news and activities.
Voting is now open for the New Zealand .Net Blog of the Year. You can cast your vote from the Links page of the User Group site.
You can vote for me if you like, but as I’ll be counting the votes then I guess I’m ineligible :{
If you want your blog to be included in the voting then you need to be in the OPM list - just following the instructions on the page linked above. You can also post a shortcut to vote for you blog thus:
http://www.dot.net.nz/blogvote?blogname=MY Blog Name Here
Votes will of course be filtered for obvious fraud!
Like Rod I am completely baffled by the game of Football. I'm sure it takes considerable skill to perform some of the elegant goals you occasionnaly see in the Readers Digest versions we get on the sports news at night, but for the life I me I cannot explain why anyone can sit through the remaining 89 minutes of utter boredom.
To make it worse, I've been surrounded by devotees of the "Beautiful Game" for the last month - either at work or socially - and even the most ardent of these fans will admit that it can be a tad tedious at times.
On the odd occassion that I have been tortured with more than a glance at the action it has inevitably been 0-0 in the 83rd minute, or some mumma's boy has tripped on a blade of sharp grass and ruptured his spleen.
Xenu gave us hands for a very good reason. FFS - just pick the damn ball up and run with it!
I’ve been at Intergen for 1 whole week now and I feel like Neo after taking the blue pill – or was it the red one, I forget. While I enjoyed working at Airways and the University of Canterbury anyone would be hard pressed to describe them as high pressure work environments!
Intergen has a large team by New Zealand standards and we are producing some great solutions for large and small organizations. It’s great to be working with such a large team and the environment is fun.
I’m currently working on a small community portal site (for about 30,000 users) using EPiServer. This is an ASP.Net CMS from a Swedish company. Yes, I’d never heard of it before Intergen but I’m beginning to like it a lot. It’s very quick to create sites with and it performs very well. There’s a lot to learn though so progress has been slow this week, but I’m getting there.
Intergen are currently looking for more talented people to join the team in Auckland, Wellington or Christchurch. If you are thinking about a change then I highly recommend that you checkout the web site and send your CV along. If we like you and you sign with Intergen before the end of August you get to take home a free 19” LCD monitor. Sweet little bonus (that I unfortunately just missed out on :< ).
Here’s today’s Dilbert for my last day at Airways.
Rob mentioned it here first and while I don’t normally re-blog other’s posts I thought this was significant enough to mention.
I used to do this quite a lot with VSS – sharing files between multiple projects. With VS 03 and VSS it was sort of necessary to do this because of the awkward way that VS creates VSS projects. I haven’t had to do this with TS Source Control yet but I can see that it would be useful.
Of course, if your migrating a large VSS install to TFS then you may need to do this.
If you have been living in a cave this week, you may have missed the announcement about the demise of WinFS. On the face of it, this post seems reasonable but like some of the respondents I'm a tad disappointed and worried.
We have been hearing for many years about the new file system based on SQL that would let us do all sorts of cool things. It never seemed to happen until WinFS came along. Now that WinFS is gone(ish) the future seems very uncertain.
At least it looks like ObjectSpaces might actually happen in the form of ADO.Net Entities but Microsoft are very late with something that has been done by many others already - e.g., WORM, nHibernate and Base4. I think Entities will succeed only because of LINQ - without that, it's no better than the other players in the ORM game.
Vista & Longhorn were supposed to deliver the fantastic new file system. After using Vista for a few weeks I'm now inclined to think that Vista is just a fancy XP. I'm sure MS will sell lots of Vista to home users via the OEM channel but I'm yet to see one valid business reason for Vista and if there is to be no WinFS then what will be the point of Longhorn Server? Security? - sure but it's not like XP/2003 will stop being secure when Vista/Longhorn ship. Performance? - maybe, but at a hardware cost. Wizbang? - it has plenty of that but apps won't look much better until they have been redsigned for Vista, a simple recompile won't make them look like Vista apps. WinFX / .Net 3? - well I can do all that on XP/2003 and as most users are still going to be using legacy OS's I'm probably not going to be writing apps for Vista/Longhorn any time soon.
I think Microsoft have reached a cross-road in the development cycle. Products are getting pretty solid, features locked down, integration is coming together. The final picture is starting to become clear. I haven't lost faith in Microsoft - far from it - but they are going to have to pull something convincing out of the marketing hat to reassure the congregation.
The 2006 .Net Blog of the Year competition is underway!
This year the contest will be run slightly differently.
- Bloggers will need to register their site for voting to be counted.
- Voters will place their SINGLE vote after logging in to this web site**
- Prizes are planned...
To be eligible, blogs must:
- Be authored by someone resident in New Zealand
- Preferably include a large proportion of content relevant to .Net programming or the .Net programming community
Sites should be registered as soon as possible - the later they register the less time they will have to attract votes - but there will be no cut-off for registration.
Voting will commence from July 1st and run until Sunday 20th August. Results will be announced at TechEd in Auckland and via this web site.
To register a blog, visit http://www.dot.net.nz/Default.aspx?tabid=78
The worst part about changing jobs is having to setup a new dev machine with all the tools I like. So, to help me remember, here’s a list of all the stuff I’m currently using and where to get it. You may also find some of these useful.
Free Stuff
Base4
BlogLines Notifier – For my blog reading
CopySourceAsHTML – VS05 addin to copy source code to the clip board as HTML
Cropper – Fantastic screen capture tool
Daemon Tools – Virtual CD mounter thingy
DebugView - Great for capturing trace (Ta Nic)
DPack – a big bunch of addins for VS 05
IIS6 Manager for XP
ieSpell – Spell checker for IE 6
Paint.Net – More than adequate image manipulation for my level or artistic ability.
PowerShell
Reflector - Dont use it often but when I do I love it (Ta again Nic)
Ruby On Rails – Ha, ha. Just kidding Tim :]
Snippy – Useful for creating Snippets.
Spike – Network clipboard
SQLPrompt – RedGate’s Intellisence type thingy for SQL. This is only free for a limited time so remember to backup a copy.
Synergy – Mouse & Keyboard sharing for multiple machine setups
XP Power Toys – Command Prompt Here, Alt-Tab Replacement, Image Resizer and others
Team System Goodness
Admin Tool – Manage users across all 3 servers.
SideKick’s – Handy utils for MSBuild, Workspaces & Status.
Team Edition for DB Pro’s - CTP
Plus all the WinFx – sorry, .Net 3 stuff – have this on disk though
Not Free Stuff
SQL Bundle – RedGate Tools – ESSENTIAL
I’m sure there’s more but that’s all I can find at present.
There’s a great – but somewhat confusing – video up on Channel 9 covering the new Concurrency & Coordination Runtime – otherwise known as CCR (not to be confused with those ancient rockers!). My definition: it lets you coordinate multiple threads and events without using nasty locks and semaphores and shared memory etc.
These guys are certainly passionate about it and it looks like one of those lovely little elegant libraries that makes you really happy to use. One day soon I may actually need it. Actually, I’ve been having problems with UI threading and async web service calls recently. CCR makes this sort of coordination trivial.
Rod Drury just announced that Archive Manager (aka Aftermail) just won the Best Exchange Product Award at TechEd USA. This is truly fantastic and yet another indication that Kiwi’s really can create world class products. Well done Rod – you and you team are a great inspiration.
Now we just need about 20 more Sam’s & Rod’s and we can make a takeover bid for Microsoft :]
.. you know who!
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