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Archive of Entries
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Most recent blog entries
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google earth |
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The Woolston Blog
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By daniel on
6/29/2005 4:00 PM
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| i cant stop using it! its soooo addictive. its similar to nasa's worldwind app, but with finer detail. for those unfamiliar with google earth, its a zoomable (is that a word?) satellite imaging application. basically, i can zoom down on to the earth and depending on the quality of the sat captures, i can zoom down to the car level. some of the better scans are of new york, l.a... i was able to zoom down to the statue of liberties torch. thats cool...really cool. check it out at: http://earth.google.com. its an application, so you'll have to download and install. and high speed only. dialup users would only be frustrated with the speed of the refresh rate. |  |
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sleep deprivational coding |
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The Woolston Blog
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By daniel on
6/28/2005 4:00 PM
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i keep telling myself that i'm going to go to bed before 1 a.m. but it never seems to happen. I get so much done at midnite that its hard to turn off the puter. its great for the customer but its probably not the healthiest thing i could do. i get lost in what i'm doing and find myself obsessing over the solution to the current problem. i guess thats a huge sign that i love my job. i think about it all the time. nick and i get to work with some of the newest stuff (not 2.0 framework tho) and while its awesome, it does mean an incredible amount of time spent in books and online docs. but we're enjoying it. hopefully it shows, even when i'm tired at 2 p.m.
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commerce work |
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The Woolston Blog
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By daniel on
6/23/2005 4:00 PM
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finished up most of the shopping cart functionality last nite. (laaaate last nite). Created a custom control to handle the add to cart functionality, so that we can just drop that control on any module where we'll want to have purchasing ability. this will allow us to retail product anywhere on the site.
will move on to order processing and verifying everything in vault. i say verifying, when really its just checking it in and letting cruisecontrol.net take over. so cool.
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more on cruise control .net |
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The Woolston Blog
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By daniel on
6/21/2005 4:00 PM
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i wanted to elaborate a little more on my excitement over cruisecontrol .net. we have the application sitting on our dev server, and its primary task is to sit and watch the source control folders for new or updated files. if it finds a change, it fires off a Nant build script and waits for the results of the new build. if the build fails for whatever reason, cruise control sends me email stating the nature of the failure. there is also a utility that comes with cc.net that i highly recommend using: cctray. this little service runs in my tray and polls the cruise control build. if theres a failure, i get a popup bubble stating that the build on the dev server is bad. what awesome integration. no more weekly build chaos (note previous job where they used rational's toolset.) I'm going to jump into cc.net and nant some more on the weekend on my own system at home, just to become more familiar with the apps.
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procs procs and more procs |
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The Woolston Blog
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By daniel on
6/20/2005 4:00 PM
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finished up the store procs this morning. moving on to the data objects now. using codesmith to generate a good chunk of the classes. I love that application. i cant believe that vs.net doesnt have this built in. i need to take a better look at creating my own templates, for future projects. This project is so drastically different than the meijer project. no more datasets across the wire! its so much better to serialize objects and then pass them to your business layer. faster and cleaner.
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commerce kit |
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The Woolston Blog
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By daniel on
6/18/2005 4:00 PM
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started looking at the asp.net commerce kit. its pretty generic and shouldnt be a huge deal to build into our site. i just need to modify a few tables and start changing the procs that came with the kit. also need to populate the products table and come up with some category codes. shouldnt be too hard, just alot of manipulation of existing stuff. Nick had a huge breakthrough with community server and the cs api on friday, so we'll be restructuring the application on monday. once i have all the new stuff, i'll have a better concept of where we're going with the commerce application.
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dts data driven query task |
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The Woolston Blog
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By daniel on
6/16/2005 4:00 PM
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spent a good chunk of today and last nite (till 4 a.m.) working on a DTS package for our current customer. i fought a good fight with the parameters on the binding table and the vb script; but finally tonite (at 8:30 p.m.) i had a break through. all my rows imported as need, be it update or inserts. hooray...maybe tonite i can sleep.
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community server |
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The Woolston Blog
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By daniel on
6/15/2005 4:00 PM
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well the other shoe dropped, so to speak, on our project. our client would like to have a forum as well as some other minor features to add to the list of components for their site. so the somewhat obvious choice was to drop .text and move on to community server (which is co-authored by the same feller who wrote .Text). We actually had the chance to conference call/Live meeting with Alex Lowe and Scott Watermasysk, the principal developers. Nick was able to dig into the api a little with them. It seems pretty likely that we'll develop around their api rather than implementing the portal. Nick really has his work cut out for him on that.
I continued working with Sql2k DTS packages today. Was able to finish up the FTP retrieval process for the amg foxpro databases. I have to find a decent extraction tool that will let me unzip the files to a single folder rather than parsing them into the amg subfolders. shouldnt be a big deal..mainly google work.
i might even try to get some sleep tonite.
might.
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moving right along |
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The Woolston Blog
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By daniel on
6/12/2005 4:00 PM
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the project is moving right along. we mapped out some more requirements. I'll be setting up a DTS package (or few) to map some foxpro databases to our sql server db. and after that i'll be moving on to the store modification. we're using some microsoft commerce server components to save on time. tagging control is working like a charm. nick was able to get Vault up and running; which is so much better than source safe. .net Cruise Control and nant were setup. those apps are really cool. as we check in our code to Vault, cruise control monitors that and nant runs the visual studio compile script. any errors in the build and a message is spit out (or emailed) letting the developer know that his submitted files caused issues. pretty cool. well geek cool anyway.
off to read dts docs now.
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again with the coding |
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The Woolston Blog
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By daniel on
6/10/2005 4:00 PM
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worked with the .text framework some more tonite. we're implementing the ".text" (pronounced dot text) structure for our current project. this will implement the blogging and trackback functionality with out having to code something thats already open source. this component is way more complicated than it probably needs to be. you should see the httphandler list. its insane. and the problem with running the thing on your laptop is that you have to have the thing sit as your root localhost project. well thats just great if all you do on your laptop is work with .text framework. But if you wanna crank up VS2003 and work on other stuff you're somewhat hosed because .text's httphandlers intercept EVERYTHING! so into IIS you go and change the home directory to something else and then remember to change it back. i know its kind of minor but its still p.i.t.a.
started some scratch work on the podcast module that we're going to bring to the table next week as a 'gee whiz' added value to the project.
the ta
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late nite coding |
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The Woolston Blog
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By daniel on
6/8/2005 4:00 PM
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spent the better part of my evening coming to the realization that i dont have delete functionality on a row by row basic for the tags. aw crap. thats gonna mean about 9 more stored procs and i'm gonna have to change the interface to the tag class again. crapola.
spent a good chuck of the nite writing this:
Select @sqlscript = 'SELECT Distinct Top ' + Convert(varchar(5),@Limit) +
' o.[TagID], t.[TagName], (select max(TaggedOn) From [dbo].[taggedobject] m
where m.TagID = t.TagID) as [DateLastUsed], (select count(*) from taggedobject s where o.TagID = s.TagID and o.ObjectType = ' +
'''' + @ObjectType + '''' + ' and s.ObjectID = ' + convert(varchar(20), @ObjectID) + ') as [Count],
t.Created, t.LastUpdated, (Select 1 Where ' + convert(varchar(20), @MemberID) + ' in (Select s.MemberID From TaggedObject s Where s.TagID = o.TagID And o.ObjectType = ' +
'''' + @ObjectType + '''' + ' and s.ObjectID = ' + convert(varchar(20), @ObjectID) + ')) As [MemberHasTag]
From [dbo].[TaggedObject] o Join [dbo].[T
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Visual Studio 2005 Launch Date! |
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The Woolston Blog
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By daniel on
6/7/2005 4:00 PM
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quoting ftponline:
Visual Studio 05 to Launch November 7
Posted 09:47 AM
Finally, the long-awaited launch of Visual Studio 05, SQL Server 05, and BizTalk Server 06 is official.
Microsoft Vice President Paul Flessner said at today's keynote address at Tech•Ed in Orlando that the trio of products will "launch internationally the week of November 7th," apparently at a series of events across the globe in what he says "will be the biggest launch ever." (I assume he means for that product group, because I doubt this will top the Windows XP launch, unless there is a Rolling Stones theme for Whidbey.)
However, Flessner didn't use some of Microsoft's magic words such as "RTM," for release to market, when the gold disks ship to manufacturing. So, the exact date the shipping bits will be available for customers is still a bit nebulous, but presumably can't follow the official launch event by long.
Details on the launch will be posted at http://msdn.microsoft.com/launch2005.
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weekend coding |
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The Woolston Blog
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By daniel on
6/5/2005 4:00 PM
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worked on the paging and sorting portion of the component. had to work in a funky sort of sorting method, because the user may be sorting on tag name or by count and then it must filtered for a paged set of data. dont want to use grid paging, cause its too lame. nothing like bringing back a thousand rows when you only want to display 10. sql 2k5 will solve some of those issues, but we're not quite there yet. monday morning and i'll have to finish up the paging (still need to round out the next/prev methods) and then we're going to build some demo pages for a customer demo on tuesday. it should be an interesting day.
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dotnettag control |
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The Woolston Blog
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By daniel on
6/3/2005 4:00 PM
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finished building the beta tag listing control today. it looks really cool. Nick and I worked on the data repeaters dynamic font sizing. that turned out really well. the control adjusts each tag's font sized based on the popularity of the tag.
I have to say, again, how great the new Enterprise Library is. The config and db blocks work well. The documentation is thorough and free. I'll be interested to see nick's implementation of the logging and exception blocks. we're still very much in the architecture/beta building phase. it's tough but very cool.
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