« January 2005 | Main | March 2005 »
February 28, 2005
GIS web service
You can get USGS GIS data via an XML web service. Might have some interesting possiblities, maybe a project idea for CPT 355.
Posted by mikel at 09:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 24, 2005
Header bitmaps for NSIS
I started to play around with NSIS for an upcoming project and I ran across some nice looking header bmps for the installer.
http://www.deviantart.com/view/12957541/
Posted by mikel at 08:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 23, 2005
ASP.NET without Web Forms
Interesting idea.
http://mikeroberts.thoughtworks.net/blog/archive/Tech/dotNet/GoodbyeWebForms.html
via The Daily Grind
Posted by mikel at 05:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 22, 2005
New Intro C# and OOP Book
Professor Kyle Lutes' new book written with Professors Harriger and Purdum will be published in March. I've had a small role in this book writing the solutions for the end of chapter exercises and review questions along with reviewing the last few chapters.
It's now listed on Amazon and Barnes & Noble (though it looks like B&N hasn't been updated with the new title yet)
Posted by mikel at 07:57 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 21, 2005
Indiana Trademark information online
Here's where you can access Indiana's trademark information.
http://www.in.gov/apps/sos/trademarks/
Posted by mikel at 01:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 18, 2005
mjberger.com email problems
If you've tried to send email to anyone at mjberger.com over the last couple of days you might have had problems. I host this site and my email with your-site.com. They are cheap, offer pretty basic hosting, and have been fairly reliable. Nothing great or outstanding but just what I was looking for in a host. That is until now. Obviously, having email down for 2 days is really bad. There customer service hasn't been great concerning it. They did nothing to proactively inform me of the problems. It took several hours to get an email response back (to another email obviously). It looks like most mail is starting to come through now but they still haven't enabled webmail yet.
All of this I can deal with, but now it looks like they are trying to hide the fact that they are having outages. On their members only technical support boards people started posting how they are considering moving to other hosts. Rightfully so I say. But instead of being open about it and resolving their customers' complaints they've totally shut down the message boards! Not only does this prevent people from getting status updates about the servers and making any new complaints, I'm wondering if those posts will be missing when the message boards come back up.
Thanks your-site.com for a lesson in how to not handle your customers' problems.
[Update] Looks like everything is ok with the message boards now. There was just some problem with logins.
Posted by mikel at 03:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 15, 2005
Overloaded Web Service Methods
I was a bit baffeled when I was told that you couldn't overload methods in a web service. Did a little googling and found that you actually can (sort of). Using the WebMethod attribute MethodName you specify a unique name but the actual name of the method in the C# code is exactly the same. This means that the WSDL defines each method as unique but that when using it from your C# code they are all overloaded methods with the same name.
Posted by mikel at 06:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 13, 2005
New book for mobile software development
Writing Mobile Code: Essential Software Engineering for Building Mobile Applications by Ivo Salmre
http://www.awprofessional.com/title/0321269314
Hopefully we can get a copy for the Mobile Computing Lab library to use in CPT 355.
via Jonathan Wells
Posted by mikel at 04:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Deployment Patterns for Microsoft .NET Compact Framework
A good article covering deployment for the Compact Framework by Box and Fox. Looks like this came out last November, but I can't find that I previously stored a link to it anywhere. Another good reading assignment for the deployment lectures for CPT 355.
via Kevin Lisota
Posted by mikel at 04:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 11, 2005
Installers
I've used the setup project that comes with Visual Studio .NET but I've run across several good recommendations for the free Nullsoft Scriptable Installer System.
Something to research in the future.
Posted by mikel at 04:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 10, 2005
One instance of an application
Ran across this looking up some examples about web services. The SingletonApplication zip contains a demo of an application that checks if it is already running. Needed this awhile ago for another project and couldn't find a good example.
http://www.ferncrk.com/faq.html#WindowsForms
http://www.ferncrk.com/faq/winforms/dotnet_1.1/SingletonApplication.zip
Posted by mikel at 01:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 09, 2005
Chappell on Indigo
David Chappell provides an overview of Indigo. I haven't finished reading it yet, so I'm just stashing it here for later. Looks to be a good read, possibly something useful for CPT 450.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/longhorn/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnlong/html/introindigov1-0.asp
Posted by mikel at 04:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 08, 2005
.NET CF future
Mike Zintel has an interesting follow up to his request for guidance for V3 of the .NET Compact Framework.
http://weblogs.asp.net/mikezintel/archive/2005/02/07/368829.aspx
Posted by mikel at 07:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 05, 2005
Skype
I used Skype with David last week. The whole experience was great. Simple to install, signup, and use. The voice quality was really good on both my desktop workstation (external mic) and my Tablet PC (built in mic). Both David and I did a conference call with our uncle Russ on Thursday. After a couple glitches we were able to conference call and again the voice quality was great. Talking on my Tablet PC sitting on the couch in Indiana to my brother in Michigan on his Mac and my uncle in Idaho was pretty amazing. I had used Skype a couple months ago with Ed and we didn't have much success then. Not sure what was different but it worked great this time.
My only complaint is that it isn't easy to share contacts between two different computers.
Posted by mikel at 09:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Eric on Transparency
Another good article by Eric Sink in his Business of Software series.
I've been thinking about starting a Swoosh blog for sometime now. This might just be the motivation to finally do it. I've got several different ideas about upcoming features and have been reading some interesting things about different basketball statistics that Swoosh customers would find interesting. The blog could be a good place for that sort of thing.
I've also thought about setting up a discussion forum too. But I don't think I'll do that yet. I think the only thing worse than no discussion forum is a discussion forum with 3 posts and 2 of them are by the administrator. Its sort of like walking into a ghost town. Potential customers are likely to stumble on the forum and think the product isn't popular. Frankly, the Swoosh user base just isn't large enough yet to support a discussion forum. So I guess when you see some sort of discussion forum you'll know we've hit some sort of tipping point.
Posted by mikel at 09:46 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 04, 2005
Risky Business
Dr. Cornwall has a post about a new dissertation about entrepreneurs and risk. I'd agree that the entrepreneurs I've know are prudent risk takers. Actually, I'd like to think of myself as pretty risk averse even though I've started my own company and have no guaranteed income longer than my current contracts. I do enjoy the "eat what you kill" mentality of working instead of just having a paycheck handed to me every month regardless of my performance that month. But I don't think that makes me a risky person. I suppose that's where the "over" confidence in my abilities come in. I don't worry that I'll be able to land another contract or come up with a new idea for a new software product after my current batch of contracts and ideas run their courses.
The only real way to get ahead and be successful (whatever your definition of that is doesn't really matter) is to take a look at the world and see what everyone else thinks is risky but you realize isn't. Then do just do it. If everyone knows something isn't risky then someone else will have surely done it already and there's no opportunity there. If everyone including yourself thinks its risky and you do it anyway then there really was no opportunity there in the first place.
http://forum.belmont.edu/cornwall/archives/002123.html
Posted by mikel at 01:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 01, 2005
Tivo SDK
Tivo has released a SDK for creating apps to run on your PC to communicate with your Tivo. Home Media Engine (HME) apps are written in Java.
More info on the PVR blog.
Posted by mikel at 12:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack