The Freedom of Virtualization For awhile now I have been enjoying the freedom of developing with virtual machines.  The biggest advantage it has given me lately is the freedom to do whatever I want to the laptop I use as a workstation.  What I mean by that is I don't even blink twice if I want to try a new operating system anymore.  Maybe I want to run a version of Debian Linux or Ubuntu to keep my Unix skills polished up.   Or maybe I want to try running a 64bit version of Windows Server as my main operating system to...

Visual Studio has long supported the concept of opening more than one file.  Most all IDE tools and text editors support this concept so it is nothing new.  In Visual Studio as files are opened they are displayed along the top in tabs (also a standard convention).  This allows developers to switch between files they are working on easily.  However there are times when developers need to compare two files at the same time.  Using Tabbed Groups developers can view files vertically or horizontally.  There is also the ctrl-tab feature which allows developers to quickly switch between files they have...

When I was in high school one of my math teachers took it upon himself to teach a few students about computer programming.  It wasn't a real class it was just something he put together during our free period.  Instead of attending study hall we'd go to this computer programming class.  Basically other students in the school called the few of us taking the class the "Star Trek" club.  Honestly I didn't watch Star Trek and never have.  It just never interested me.  I know that I just lost thousands of geek points by stating I am not a Star...

I've recently been digging into writing Sidebar Gadgets for Windows Vista.  As a client developer mainly, writing a gadget has brought me back to my Javascript / HTML / DHTML / CSS roots.  Over the next several weeks I'll be writing some entries on my experience writing gadgets but before I get into the gory details let's talk about debugging.  For those of you that are starting out writing gadgets the first thing you are going to run into is how to debug them.  Overriding Alert Once you get your initial gadget setup (which I'll cover in a later...

The other day I was playing on my aging Powerbook and thought I'd investigate writing applications on Mac OS X using XCode.  I tried several years ago but honestly after reading some documentation on Apple's web site I wasn't any better off than when I started.  Instead of going the documentation route which didn't work I thought I would try a different approach.  Today we have something we didn't have years ago that is a lot better than documentation and that is called videos.  They say a picture is worth a 1,000 words.  Well a video is worth that times...

Since SQL Server 2005 .Net developers and DBAs have had the ability to create custom SQL CLR types.  It wasn't until recent I found a few uses for them.  Not only did I find a use for them but a DBA who is a team member did as well.  If you would like more information about SQL CLR types or are new to them start by reading the introduction here.   What follows is a walk through from start to finish creating a user-defined type (UDT).   The project source code is available at the end of the article. Maintaining Data Integrity One of the advantages of SQL...

I have Data Dude (aka, Visual Studio for Database Professionals) installed on my local machine.  However, my other team members don't have Data Dude installed.  They are running Visual Studio Team System for Developers.  This puts us all in a quandary.  For example, if I update the database with Data Dude, how do the other developers get the latest updates installed to their local sandbox?  Better yet, how do they generate fake data for the database when they don't Data Dude installed?  This is supposed to be addressed in future versions of Data Dude but I needed something now.  Here is...

It is day two of TechEd and my feet and legs are killing me.  My feet didn't get a chance to rest after the four day whirlwind tour of Disney World.  I told my wife that I was going to have to go to TechEd just so I could rest :)  Here is day two's activities. Biztalk WCF Adapter The first session I attended this morning was an overview of the WCF Adapter for Biztalk which is in the R2 release.  Don't get your hopes up just yet because it isn't available.  I was told it  wouldn't be out until 3rd quarter. ...

One of the engineers that works on the same team I work on blogged about his trials and tribulations of using Enterprise Library 3.0 with Environmental Overrides.  Last week I checked in Enterprise Library 3.0 into team foundation server and he got assigned the task of re-configuring all of our config files to use the new feature of environmental overrides.  Currently we have test, beta and prod environments for our main application so this was something we thought we could immediately benefit from.  His review it turns out is less than shiny based on how environmental overrides were done in EntLib...

Believe it or not, engineers or developers tend to structure their applications in Visual Studio various ways.  For those that are just learning .Net and Visual Studio it is hard to decide where to put things.  Hopefully this article will provide some guidance. Where did I put that file? So you've decided that you want to write an application in .Net.  For learning purposes you start adding controls or pages to your application and you are well on your way to making a somewhat usable app.  After awhile you start to notice your solution becomes a cluttered mess with files and...