Andrej Tozon's blog

There's a discussion going on here and here about the new SLODUG portal, which was recently put up by local developers' community. By the developers, for the developers. So, what's the problem? I don't really know the reason why they decided on the MS' CodeZone implementation; personally I think it's not intuitive, limited and somehow outdated. Don’t get me wrong, I certainly agree we developers need a meeting place to share our knowledge but the problem might lie elsewhere. Go to David’s si.Blogs page and count how many developers’ blogs are listed. Not many. I think we should first encourage our developers to start their own blogs by putting up a site like www.codebetter.com or www.dotnetjunkies.com, then syndicate all blog entries and integrate them with a simple forum (e.g. in a way that blog comments show up as forum posts). Looks like codezone-si certainly is going this way, but the tool, chosen for this, might be a bit awkward.

I wish the codezone-si catches on, we need this kind of community. However, making people contribute to it, is another story.

If you ever used any of the Microsoft Application blocks  in your application, you'll love the Enterprise Library, released by Microsoft Patterns and Practices group. The library is composed of seven application blocks, all extendable, designed to work together and, what's best, very easy configurable with new  Enterprise Library Configuration Console.

The library includes QuickStart samples (C# and VB.NET), application blocks' source code (with unit tests).

Excellent stuff. Go get it!

I've just run into Dejan Sarka's SQL blog while searching for his »valueListString-to-rowset« SQL User-Defined Function he presented at the last Slovenian Developer Users Group (SLODUG) last week. Subscribed.

You can also check other SQL (Solid Quality Learning) blogs here.

Wow, so long time and no posts…

Anyway, this one took me quite some time to figure it out: I use Outlook Express as a newsgroup reader and I was used to starting it by simply typing news:// in the command prompt. I don’t know, I’m just more of a keyboard guy and I liked this shortcut; I don’t really use desktop icons and, if possible, start Word by typing winword.exe.
So, invoking OE from the command prompt worked fine for me, until I installed XP SP2 on my machine. From that moment on, OE just wouldn’t  show me newsgroup posts anymore. All the newsgroups were there, the posts were retrieving from the server successfully, except when I clicked on one to see the whole post, this app just moved the selection focus to the newsgroup name again. Weird. I knew this was somehow connected to the security enhancement features of SP2, but I just couldn’t find any information about this issue anywhere on the net. Maybe because this wasn’t really an issue. After a month or two, I asked myself a question: how many people starts their OE the way I do? And I went and finally started it “the proper way” – by Start menu. Woohoo, works.

Wow! When I installed Lookout a couple of months ago I thought it was great having all of my emails indexed for instant access. And now comes this great tool from Google. First, it installs as its own web server running on port 4664. After that, it indexes some of your office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), Email (Outlook, Outlook Express), temporary internet pages and AOL IM conversations. It even integrates into your common Google search page (http://www.google.com/) by adding the Desktop option on the page and including your desktop hits among the web results. Searching speed is just amazing. Very useful also for searching for the files you know you once downloaded from the web but cant remember which folder you have put them in :) As this is a beta product, I am sure they will add indexing support for even more file types in the future. Cant wait.

Other news Im excited about: Looks like Visual Studio 2005 is going to support C# Edit and Continue feature after all. Yes!