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Now Playing: Episode 5 of Devcasting - Less is More
Now Playing: Episode 4 of Devcasting: Firefox Extensions
Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1
POSTing to a webpage and using it's response (HttpWebRequest and HttpWebResponse)
Developer Workshops in Moncton in January 2007
It's Coming: PDC 07, October 2 - 5
Dev East 2006 Slides
Developer Podcast #3 Posted - Now Called Devcasting
Vista / WPF User Experience Showcase
VPC From Microsoft with IE6 and IE7
Debugging SMTP Filters
Dev East Was Great

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 Wednesday, January 03, 2007

   
     

Episode #5 of the developer podcast Devcasting is up.  Derek Hatchard and Mike Mullen talk to Dan Martell about the notion of "less is more" in software development.

This show ran long so it is split into two parts:

Part 1

Part 2

Posted by Derek Hatchard 1/3/2007 10:33:16 PM (Atlantic Standard Time, UTC-04:00)
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 Thursday, December 28, 2006

   
     

Episode #4 of the Devcasting podcast has been posted:

http://devcasting.com/index.php/2006/12/28/devcasting-4-our-favorite-firefox-extensions-oh-and-derek-got-a-zune/

Posted by Derek Hatchard 12/28/2006 11:26:47 PM (Atlantic Standard Time, UTC-04:00)
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 Wednesday, December 20, 2006

   
     
As you may already know, Visual Studio 2005 Sp1 is available for download at Microsoft.

I updated my copy with SP1 this morning and it took a little less than 2 hours to complete.
2 hours is far too long, especially when I need to keep an eye on it to click on ‘OK’ or ‘Accept’ periodically.

Hopefully it will address my Dev environment crashing because of its buggy Source Safe integration. Grrrr...

A little about SourceSafe
For your own sake, stop using SourceSafe – please!

Download Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1

Revised: 2006/12/21
See Things I wish I'd known before I installed VS 2005 Service Pack 1
Posted by Sebastien Aube 12/20/2006 2:20:34 PM (Atlantic Standard Time, UTC-04:00)
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You might encounter a situation where you need to Post to a web page and read it's response.

Here's a function that uses System.Net.HttpWebRequest and System.Net.HttpWebResponse to do just that.
''Usage
' Dim xmlDoc As Xml.XmlDocument
' xmlDoc.Load(MakeHttpRequest("request=listPersons&filter=last(a*)","/requestManager.php","application/x-www-form-urlencoded"))
Protected Function MakeHttpRequest(ByVal data As String, ByVal url As String, ByVal contentType As String) As System.IO.Stream

	Dim retVal As System.IO.Stream
	Dim httpRequest As System.Net.HttpWebRequest
	Dim httpResponse As System.Net.HttpWebResponse
	Dim encoding As New System.Text.UTF8Encoding

	Dim uri As New System.Uri(url)
	Dim postBytes As Byte()

	postBytes = encoding.GetBytes(data)
	httpRequest = CType(System.Net.HttpWebRequest.Create(uri), System.Net.HttpWebRequest)
	httpRequest.ContentLength = postBytes.Length
	httpRequest.Method = "POST"
	httpRequest.ContentType = contentType

	Dim postStream As System.IO.Stream = httpRequest.GetRequestStream()
	postStream.Write(postBytes, 0, postBytes.Length)
	postStream.Close()

	httpResponse = CType(httpRequest.GetResponse(), System.Net.HttpWebResponse)
	retVal = httpResponse.GetResponseStream()

	Return retVal
End Function
Variation: If the webpage you are calling expects xml you could easily replace and pass a valid xml string as data
replace
httpRequest.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
with
httpRequest.ContentType = "text/xml"

You could even go further and return an xml document if the expected datatype is "text/xml".
Posted by Sebastien Aube 12/20/2006 1:44:56 PM (Atlantic Standard Time, UTC-04:00)
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 Monday, December 18, 2006

   
     

I am planning two developer training events in Moncton, New Brunswick in early 2007 (tentatively the weeks of January 22 and 29).  I'll be doing one week and it will be a .NET focus - probably Professional ASP.NET Development but if there's demand for something else I can switch it.  The other week will be Mike Mullen and the focus will probably be either Professional PHP Development or Building Ajax Web Apps with Prototype and Dojo.  Again, Mike is flexible based on demand.

Details are not finalized so there's time to influence the schedule or topics if you're interested.  We hope to offer these workshops from time to time.  To keep costs in check we are trying to avoid advertising so please help us spread the word by telling your colleagues in Atlantic Canada.

Classes will be a minimum of 3 people and a maximum of 5 people.  The cost is $1200 for the week.

Posted by Derek Hatchard 12/18/2006 11:19:10 PM (Atlantic Standard Time, UTC-04:00)
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 Wednesday, December 13, 2006

   
     

You heard it here first:  the next Microsoft Professional Developers Conference will be October 2 - 5, 2007 in Los Angeles, California.  The Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) is the definitive developer event focused on the future of the Microsoft platform.

Registration is NOT open at this point.  The dates have simply been announced.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/events/pdc/

It was PDC 03 that tipped me off to the coming web-desktop convergence.  It was PDC 05 where I saw what a real Avalon (humph, WPF) designer could look like with timelines, transitions, reflection, etc.

Start saving your pennies or start dropping hints to your boss!

Posted by Derek Hatchard 12/13/2006 9:35:40 AM (Atlantic Standard Time, UTC-04:00)
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 Monday, December 11, 2006

   
     

Here are slides for 5 of the 7 Dev East presentations.  Some have code included.  If you are looking for something that's not here, ping me at derek@ardentdev.com and I'll track it down for you.

Mike Mullen - Next Generation Web Applications

Frazer Smith - Dynamic App Config with VB.NET

Tyler Davey - Virtual Earth: Adding the 3rd Dimension

Sean Smith - Halifax on Rails: An Intro to Ruby on Rails

Derek Hatchard - The Ajax Revolution

Posted by Derek Hatchard 12/11/2006 10:00:33 AM (Atlantic Standard Time, UTC-04:00)
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 Friday, December 08, 2006

   
     

Finally got podcast episode #3 and show notes posted at http://devcasting.com/index.php/2006/12/06/devcasting-3-give-me-20-cents/.

The show has a name now:  Devcasting.  And we're in iTunes.  Just search the iTunes store for devcasting or browse through the Technology category of the iTunes podcast directory.

We're looking for your favourite Firefox extensions for an upcoming show.  Email them to me at derek@ardentdev.com.

Posted by Derek Hatchard 12/8/2006 12:12:19 AM (Atlantic Standard Time, UTC-04:00)
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 Wednesday, December 06, 2006

   
     

The Panel is the place to collect showcases of the new user experiences [in Vista and WPF] and provide insights on how they were implemented.

http://www.microsoft.com/emea/msdn/thepanel/

Definitely check out UniveRSS, a 3D Vista RSS reader.  I can't really see myself using this but it's neat to see.  (And it did run like crap on my tablet because the NVIDIA WDDM drivers aren't final and things crash when I try the pre-release.  Of course the XP driver causes problems too - could be a hardware issue I suppose.  Or just crappy drivers.  Who knows.)

UniveRSS: http://www.microsoft.com/emea/msdn/thepanel/featured/universs.aspx 

(CBC Radio 3 is in the screenshot - woohoo).

Posted by Derek Hatchard 12/6/2006 11:09:39 PM (Atlantic Standard Time, UTC-04:00)
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 Saturday, December 02, 2006

   
     

This is pretty cool:

a VPC virtual machine image containing a pre-activated Windows XP SP2, IE6 and the IE7 Readiness Toolkit to help facilitate your testing and development. The image is time bombed and will no longer function after April 1, 2007

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/11/30/ie6-and-ie7-running-on-a-single-machine.aspx

Posted by Derek Hatchard 12/2/2006 1:34:45 AM (Atlantic Standard Time, UTC-04:00)
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 Wednesday, November 29, 2006

   
     

If this looks familiar to you:

public class Catchall : ISMTPOnArrival
{

void ISMTPOnArrival.OnArrival(CDO.Message msg, ref CDO.CdoEventStatus EventStatus)

then you know that debugging SMTP filters sucks.

Posted by Derek Hatchard 11/29/2006 3:10:37 PM (Atlantic Standard Time, UTC-04:00)
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 Tuesday, November 28, 2006

   
     

http://www.derekhat.com/index.php/2006/11/28/dev-east-was-great/

The room was packed and the content was great. Definitely a success.

Thanks to everyone who helped with Dev East. Special thanks to Mike Hatfield and Darryl Skeard who showed up early to help with registrations and setup. Thanks to Chris Maxwell at the Dalhousie Faculty of Computer Science for much needed tech support. And thanks to Dr. Morven Gentleman for the great venue.

Posted by Derek Hatchard 11/28/2006 11:43:18 AM (Atlantic Standard Time, UTC-04:00)
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