Every second rate charity seems to have its own special day, when poor office Jills and Johnnies are forced to Dress Like Idiots for an Inconsequential Reason.

In an effort not to be left behind in this world of Idea Viruses, I'd like to propose that Microsoft DotNet should have its very own day, with stupid costumes to boot.

Dress as your favourite namespace for 'Dot Net' Awareness Day!

To try and shock those managerial executives who continually resist upgrading from legacy applications into dotNet, why not dress as a Demon from the DLL Hell!?

Or to show the light, why not attach some angelic wings and dress as a heavenly Assembly with click-once deployment?

Can't afford an expensive costume? Why not dress as the Garbage Collector? Sure to be a hit with the ladies! Or you could dress as the Global Assembly Cache and eat all the doughnuts. Why limit yourself to just one doughnut? Thanks to side-by-side versioning, you can eat all the Doughnuts you want!

I already have my costume designed. Mentally at least. While everyone else will be dressing as the predictable System.Data.SqlClient, or the angular System.Xml, I will be wowing my colleagues in a stunning garment fashioned to represent the dazzling System.ComponentModel.Design.Serialization namespace, with a very natty little IDesignerSerializationProvider hat.

And you can be sure there will be no Java drank on "Dot-Net Awareness" Day!

Even the little kids can join in. Imagine how unique your children will look, dressed in their little GUID costumes.

Hang on... the caffeine high is fading away now... hallucinations subsiding... no longer envisioning dot net as a bizarre series of monsters... must get on with work...

Includes such rookie problems as:
My freaking breakpoint doesn't work!
"Find" doesn't find what I'm looking for! and the famous Bypass Proxy for Local Addresses Gotcha.

My freaking breakpoint doesn't work!

Maybe the configuration settings are set to 'Release' instead of 'Debug'.

This normally leads to about two hours of frustration as a dot net rookie desperately beats their head against the keyboard. But it's a lesson that once learnt, is retained for life.

I can't get this freaking tool window to dock properly!

Patience is a virtue... Slow down and try again. You'll get the hang of it. And if it's any consolation, tool window docking is made far more intuitive in Whidbey (Visual Studio .net 2005).

I've released a windows executable to someone else and it doesn't work!

First thing it may be of course is that the .Net framework is missing from their machine. If that's the case, I'm sure a clever kid like you would find it in no time. No, I want to write about a slightly more interesting problem.

If you realise a tool onto a shared drive, or a server drive, you may get a security exception, something like this:

Unhandled Exception: System.Security.SecurityException: Request for the permission of type System.Security.Permissions.EnvironmentPermission, mscorlib, Version= 1.0.3300.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b76a5c461734e019 failed. etc.

If that's the case you may need to log on to the server in question and use the Microsoft .Net Framework Configuration utility (in the control panel/administrative tool). You may have to grant the necessary permission to the assembly in question. (You can also use the "Microsoft .Net Framework Permissions Wizard" to achieve the same result.)

"Find" (F3 or Ctrl-F) doesn't find what I'm looking for!

Find no longer lets you search the entire project. To do this, instead use 'Find in Files' [Ctrl-Shift-F]. C++ Developers have been doing this for years.

Another gotcha with 'search' is that unless you select 'Search hidden text' it won't search inside any collapsed regions (ie. #Regions that are hidden).

Source safe keeps showing me the wrong version of my project!

When dealing with branched versions of projects in source safe, they will sometimes (often?) hold onto the wrong server bindings, which basically means that although you want to work on one version, you keep getting shown another. If left untreated, This is of course configuration management Death. To fix this in Visual Studio .Net, go to: "File|Source Control|Change Source Control|Server Bindings"

ASP.net works fine at home - but when ever I try to run an application at work, I get a 404 error! God mother freakin damnit!

Okay - chill out on that language you nasty geek. This is often caused by failing to check the 'Bypass proxy for local addresses' checkbox in your browser (under Options|Connections|Settings|Lan Settings|Proxy Server).

secretGeek is now available via RSS. Whether or not my dodgy RSS hack will continue to work (for how long I don't know) ... But it works okay for me.

Outputing RSS has turned out to be a very easy process. I'm not sure if I've got the right version, etc.

Just cross fingers and hope it keeps working. It does for now:

Next thing is to move existing content into the Rss file. And to make my rapid blog page RSS aware, too.

Here are the ASP functions I use for outputting the RSS:

Public Sub SaveRSSItem(RSSItem, sFilename)
   Dim filesys, readfile, sFileContents  
   set filesys=CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")  
   set readfile = filesys.OpenTextFile(sFileName,   1, false)
   sFileContents = readfile.readall
   readfile.close      
   sFileContents = replace(sFileContents, "",  RSSItem)   
   set readfile = filesys.OpenTextFile(sFilename,   2, false)
   readfile.write(sFileContents)
   readfile.close
End Sub

Public Function MakeRssItem(sTitle, sLink, sDescription)
  Dim rss
  sLink = "https://secretgeek.net/" & sLink 
  rss = "" & vbcrlf
  rss = rss & "" & vbcrlf
  rss = rss & "  " & vbcrlf
  rss = rss & "    " & sLink & "" & vbcrlf
  rss = rss & "    " & _
      vbCrlf & "      " & _
      vbcrlf & "    " & vbcrlf
  rss = rss & "    " & _
     RFC1123Date(DateAdd("h", 5, Now)) & "" & vbcrlf
  rss = rss & "    Leon Bambrick" & _
      vbcrlf
  rss = rss & "    " & sLink & "" & vbcrlf
  rss = rss & "  "    
  MakeRssItem = rss
End Function




Function RFC1123Date(dateSpec) 
  Dim astrDay 
  Dim astrNum 
  Dim astrMonth 
  astrDay = Array("Sun", "Mon", "Tue", "Wed", "Thu", "Fri", "Sat") 
  astrNum = Array( "00", _ 
    "01", "02", "03", "04", "05", "06", "07", "08", "09", "10", _ 
    "11", "12", "13", "14", "15", "16", "17", "18", "19", "20", _ 
    "21", "22", "23", "24", "25", "26", "27", "28", "29", "30", _ 
    "31", "32", "33", "34", "35", "36", "37", "38", "39", "40", _ 
    "41", "42", "43", "44", "45", "46", "47", "48", "49", "50", _ 
    "51", "52", "53", "54", "55", "56", "57", "58", "59", "60") 
  astrMonth = Array("Jan", "Feb", "Mar", "Apr", "May", "Jun", _ 
    "Jul", "Aug", "Sep", "Oct", "Nov", "Dec") 

  RFC1123Date = astrDay(WeekDay(dateSpec) - 1) & ", " & astrNum(Day(dateSpec)) _ 
    & " " & astrMonth(Month(dateSpec) - 1) & " " & Year(dateSpec) _ 
    & " " & astrNum(Hour(dateSpec)) & ":" & astrNum(Minute(dateSpec)) _ 
    & ":" & astrNum(Second(dateSpec)) & " GMT" 
  End Function 

There are still big improvements to be made in both RssBandit and SharpReader, but each is more than decent for now.

Can you recommend a blog? Leave a comment at the bottom of the page.

Julia Lerman Blog
Joel on Software
ISerializable
dilbert
Scobleizer
Larkware News
Seth's Blog
Sean 'Early' Campbell & Scott 'Adopter' Swigart's Radio Weblog
Don Box's Spoutlet
Critical Section
Marquee de Sells: Chris's insight outlet
Scripting News
Maxim V. Karpov
Clay Shirky's Essays
GotDotNet: Samples
Wired
datagrid girl
Panopticon Central
Sanjay's Coding Tips
CNet News.com
Techdirt
Sam Gentile's Blog
Ryan Dawson on Longhorn
Boxes and Arrows
Luke Hutteman's Weblog
BTJdotnet.net
Boing Boing Blog

Wot's it all about then?

The mandate of this website:

secretGeek contains articles/blog entries from Leon Bambrick, regarding DotNet, Visual Basic .Net, Blogging, Novel writing, ill-humour. Various other things.

It's available via, RSS

The site was previously maintained using SmartJelly, a quick and dirty CMS written with 'traditional' Asp, but was rejuvenated in 2014, using a custom blogging engine written in asp.net MVC. In 2016 it was moved into asp.net core (hosted on linux)

I can be contacted via email to LeonBambrick@Gmail.com

Self portrait:

In an effort to convince readers that I am a real person, I have included a photograph of myself.

Look away now if easily frightened by floating heads.

Gloat:

Wot's it all about then?

The mandate of this website:

secretGeek contains articles/blog entries from Leon Bambrick, regarding DotNet, Visual Basic .Net, Blogging, Novel writing, ill-humour. Various other things.

It's available via, RSS

The site was previously maintained using SmartJelly, a quick and dirty CMS written with 'traditional' Asp, but was rejuvenated in 2014, using a custom blogging engine written in asp.net MVC. In 2016 it was moved into asp.net core (hosted on linux)

I can be contacted via email to LeonBambrick@Gmail.com

Self portrait:

In an effort to convince readers that I am a real person, I have included a photograph of myself.

Look away now if easily frightened by floating heads.

Gloat:

Bumped into T.S. Eliot in a dream last night.

'I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,' he said.

This gave us pause. We stood there, quietly, for an age. Thinking sober thoughts about life. About humanity. About coffee.

After a long while I turned to him. 'and how big was it?' I asked.

'Sixteen and a half,' said Mr Eliot. 'or in dessert spoons: three.'

10: get the simplest case working.
20: get something twice as good working.
30: release to users
40: get something 5% better working.
50: goto 30

I was mentioned at various of the blogs I subscribe to by people such as Julia Lerman, Erik Porter, Roy Osherove and Andrew Duthie.

Also got a hell of a lot of traffic from Code Project.

As a result my site was shut down for a day. I hope my regular reader was not inconvenienced. So if you're out there, regular reader, I am sorry.