Today, I gave a presentation at the West Michigan Day Of .NET, and I promised I would post my slides and demos. My presentation was on CodeSmith, and was basically an updated version I did back in October at the West Michigan .NET User Group. Anyway, here they are, and I'm also told they'll be available on the Day of .NET site soon.

I'll post more info later, but I wanted to get this out there for anyone who might have been there and looking for the slides.

Technorati Tags: Day Of .NET | CodeSmith

I think I've neglected to point this out up until now, but here it is anyway. Brian and I are going to be there tomorrow night, and I'm looking forward to a few days of intense sessions. If you're going to be there, let me know and maybe we can meet up. Hopefully, I'll get a chance to spend some time in the Mix BlogZone too!

Technorati Tags: MIX | MOX07

On just about every project I've worked on, we end up having?an object that has a property that comes from a list of known values that don't change. Because of this, we end up with the data in two places stored in two different ways. First, it's in the database as a lookup table, mainly so we can ensure that we don't lose any of our data integrity. We also end up with an enumeration in our business classes, so we can program against the known values. As a result, we end up converting between that int an the enumeration quite a bit, and this quick helper method from Paul Wilson is a nice tool to have in my back pocket.

I can now see a time when I won't have to have an int property in my objects if it's a lookup value - it can be an enum and just convert as it's loaded.

By the way, another way I've solved this in the past is to not use an enum, and instead use a set of constant ints that represent my lookup values. This is actually my preferred method of handling this right now - even considering this helper method.

Technorati Tags: Enum C# ASP.NET

Jim Becher, a good friend and co-worker, has just released version 2 of IISReporter, a great tool for anyone who wants to be able to monitor their IIS servers. He hooked me up with a copy, and I was able to monitor the traffic over at Tourneytopia.com during March Madness, and see how many people are on the site at any given time - which was especially useful when we had a few minor fixes to get in while the entry window was open. I could wait until late at night, and once the site got down to less than 10 users, I would upgrade the site.

It worked out great, and if you have IIS servers that you monitor, I would definitely recommend getting a copy.

Jim also runs IISInfromation.com, a site with some pretty good information about IIS in general. He says he's got a couple of articles coming about compression, so maybe if enough people hound him, he'll get those posted!

Technorati Tags: IISReporter | IIS

Scott Watermasysk comes up with another great tips article?- this time about caching. All of the tips are great, but there are a couple that stand out. First, he talks about VaryByCustom, allowing you to basically set a custom key for your cache (so you could cache by role, or something common among users). Another one is about over-caching. Basically, if you cache beyond a page or two on a grid, you're pretty much wasting memory, because very few people actually go beyond page 1.

Oh yeah - the tools to view what's in your cache are good too, although, I think I'll stick to the Low-Tech way.

Technorati Tags: Cache

Steve Rowe has a humorous graphic about where developers feel they stand in the programmer Holy War. My background is in C++ and my preferred language is C#, so I'm sitting among the most arrogant groups.

Ask my team, and I'm sure they'll agree it's appropriate!

We have a pretty major release going out tomorrow, so the past two to three days have been spent working on fixing bugs and getting the software solidified for the release.

I think I've heard the above statement at least a couple of times (I probably even said it), but what I didn't realize was that?Joseph Cooney?has laid out the steps to be WOMM certified. I found this via Jeff Atwood, who?has better graphics and the T-Shirt!

From my four year old the other night:

"I'm going to count backwards in English. Uno, Dos, Tres, Quacko, Chico, Thursday"

She can count - she had just finished counting to 20. I have no idea where that came from though!

?

I don't know why, but this fascinates me. I want to know more!

We usually plan a couple of hours to get the brackets entered into Tourneytopia.com, but we always hope it doesn't take that long. And that's the case this year too. If you've got a pool over there, you're all set to take entries, and if you don't, it's not too late to sign up!

Technorati Tags: Tourneytopia | NCAA | March Madness