Friday, May 28, 2004

For those with questions or doubts

Following up a recent discussion at Neopoleon.com I post these articles:

A few scientists discuss the question: 'Does God Exist?'

And the next article in that series: 'What Is God's Purpose?'

This is an extremely good article, Why God Has Permitted Suffering taken from the brochure 'Does God Really Care About Us?'.

Friday, May 21, 2004

Handling Exceptions

Just read an article by Daniel Appleman in .Net Developer's Journal on Handling exceptions. For new programmers or those new to .Net Try... Catch may seem like a simple way to avoid UnHandled exceptions, and pretty them up. That's all I used them for. But I had heard of more you could do with them.

Dan's article was extremely well written. Simple and to the point it helped me to understand this great facet of .Net better. I knew that you could handle different types of exceptions by having different Catch statements, almost like a Select statement. I also knew, however, that this should not be used as logic flow.

Example: If you have code that should accept a numeric, and somebody enters text, you shouldn't use exception handling for this, you should do something like IsNumeric.

What Dan really helped me to understand is what the difference between a SystemException and ApplicationException is. Also, why you would want to roll your own exceptions for let's say a namespace or class.

This .Net Dev Journal has some nice articles on SQL Server Reporting that I'll have to spend more time with. For now, it's back to projects.

Monday, May 17, 2004

A weekend away, and the work waited for me

I spent the weekend in Bar Harbor with my wife. What an awesome experience. From seeing all of god's creation from Peregrine falcons and their chicks to Bald Eagles. Went out on a four mast Schooner, and got to hoist sail with the crew. Got sun burn, but who doesn't from time to time.

My system was wiped over the weekend (as per request) so I am re-installing Visual Studio. This should be better since I'm letting it go default. I had installed and un-installed so much... SQL 7 was listed in add and remove programs, but if I tried to un-install it SQL 2k came out.

Sometime this week I'd like to see if I can get into a discussion with Rory. I want to ask him why he's atheist.

I have more, but busy as always. I'll try to get some pics of the trip up.

Thursday, May 06, 2004

Just need to let off some steam!

Try this for a little stress relief!

Also... I've been looking through some articles on Visual Studio 2005, ASP.NET 2.0, and the improvements to Visual Basic and C#. WOW!!! A lot of cool features. If you get a chance pick up the April edition of .Net Developer's Journal. It has a good interview with Chris Sells and a nice overview of some of the new features coming out.

This site is supposed to be dedicated to newbie coders, which I still consider myself one of. Lately tho I have been buried with work, and may be lacking in my posts. Forgive me... drop me a line with questions... and let me know what info you would want as a Newbie.

One piece of advice, learn proper Patterns and Practices quick! You can do something, or you can do it right. And doing it right the first time will save you headaches. Instead of scratching your head and starting over, you can just jump right in and make changes if you need to. You may think commenting and normalizing and learning how to do a stored procedure properly take too much time, but you really save time in the end.

Monday, May 03, 2004

Free software is crap?

Interesting point in the April '04 DotNet Developers Journal feedback section. Sam commented that 'Open source and freeware just make it harder for the developers that are trying to scratch a living out of this industry.'

Interesting thought, and probably somewhat true. I can see the arguments for Open Source and freeware, money's tight. But could the software money be tight because the companies trying to get paid for software can't fight a price war with free? I can see that too.

These folks that are working on Linux... are they sinking their competitors? Well, not really.

But other things, like the smaller customer base apps... this is where it gets delicate.

I can't prescribe anything, but we'll see how it pans out. What are your thoughts?