Windows 7

I recently got a new laptop at work with Windows 7. At first, I was skeptical about running a new operating system from Microsoft. Any operating system fresh out the doors from Microsoft has always had problems with security, stability and performance. But I’ve been refreshingly surprised. I haven’t had any problems with stability or performance (security is yet to be seen), and the new layout is growing on me. I really like the new task bar. I like how you can pin programs to it (as a replacement of the quick launch area). It seems that every time I start to miss how something is done in Windows XP, I find some new better way to do it in Windows 7.

Umbraco CMS

In my work building web sites, we’ve started to leverage a content management system (CMS) called Umbraco quite heavily. It makes it really easy to build a web site,  and I’m finding that it’s extremely extensible. It uses the tinyMCE rich text editor. You can create pages on the fly. You can insert both content and controls into pages. Then as a huge bonus, it’s written in .NET. You can write controls both in .NET and XSLT. I suggest people check it out.

I’m a father!

On Saturday, Februrary 28, 2009 at 6:28 AM my wife Anna gave birth to Jacob Cole Etter. He came out weighing 7lb 5oz and 20 1/2 inches long. He’s very healthy. My wife is doing ok. They might be released from the hospital today.

Coat Killed by Nerf

It was a tragic day today at the office when we found Tim’s coat lying on the floor dead. He appeared to be killed by a nerf arrow, but the coroner is still to release the offcial cause of death. We had little idea how troubled Coat was. He was clenching an empty shot glass, and a bottle of perscription medicine was close by. It is truly a sad day.

Coat Scene

File Locking

I’ve been recently working on a web site that has a service to update data on a web site. The service watches an FTP directory for changes and processes any files that come up. Then after it’s done processing, it cleans out the directory, but when it would do that, there would be issues with locks on files sometimes. At first, I suspected that the IIS FTP service was locking the files for caching purposes. I disabled the caching in IIS to see if that would be the solution (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/f0cd5c87-fbc9-4ba0-9c2b-633c776b05d5.mspx?mfr=true). Nothing.

I finally figured out that one of the classes I was using to process the data was locking files. I was using the System.Drawing.Image class to resize images, and as it turns out, the class puts a lock on the image files its using. The locking issue would only come up every now and again depending on how fast the garbage collection would work. Luckily, the Image class implements IDisposable. Wrapping all my uses of the Image class in a using statements took care of the problem. It also reduced the memory that the process uses.

REST-ful CINNUG

Last night was the monthly Cincinnati .NET User Group (CINNUG) meeting. I really enjoyed it. Dan Rigsby gave an excellent presentation on using REST in WCF. It was the perfect blend of practice and theory. He even touched on URI rewriting and RSS/Atom feeds. Then, there was a separate presentation at the end about MS AZURE which sounded cool. At the very end, they gave away lots of cool stuff like software and an X-Box. I walked away with an MSDN subscription.

Baking

For those who haven’t heard yet, my wife Anna and I are expecting our first child. The baby is due March 11th and has been in the oven about 5 months. We recently had the sonogram. It’s amazing what you can see. It showed him sucking his thumb and toe, yawning, and kicking mommy’s bladder. It also showed how proud he was being a boy.

Working with the query string in .NET

I often find myself having to build/parse a URL query string outside of the HttpRequest instance. In many cases in the past, I’ve written custom code each time I want to do this (using the string.Join and string.Split methods). I recently stumbled on a quick and easy way to do this without custom code. It all revolves around the System.Web.HttpUtility.ParseQueryString method. The parsing part is pretty obvious.

Building the query string is not so obvious. Under the sheets, .NET uses the HttpValueCollection class to deal with the query string parameters. It has methods to add and remove parameters, and the ToString method on this class builds the formatted query string. The class is internal (annoying, I know), so you can’t just call the constructor. The ParseQueryString method actually returns an instance of HttpValueCollection as a NameValueCollection. To get an empty instance of the HttpValueCollection, just call HttpUtility.ParseQueryString(string.Empty). You can then add your parameters and call ToString to get the resultant query string.

Being a Coverage Nazi

Lately, I’ve been trying to promote automated unit tests at my company. The reception hasn’t been warm to the idea. It seems like I’m the only one that understand its importance. I’m planning to do a formalized lunch-and-learn to further convey this importance. But in the mean time, I noticed that you can configure CruiseControl.NET to fail builds if the code coverage falls below a certain percentage. I wrote some initial tests, configure cc and set the required coverage percentage right below the coverage generated by my tests. I hope this gets developers to start writing tests.

Bit of humor

Here’s a bit of humor:

http://artlung.com/smorgasborg/how_to_tick_people_off.shtml

I can honestly admit that I’ve done several of these