Rob Garrett - Blogs

May 2005 - Posts

• IPAQ GPS

  I finally purchased a car mount kit for my IPAQ so I use GPS in my car. My GPS unit is separate blue tooth box, which sits out of the way on top of the dash. Blue tooth seems to eat battery on my IPAQ, so I made sure I purchased a mount kit with power. Read More... Posted Monday, May 30, 2005 1:35 PM by Rob Garrett | 0 Comments

• Question about generics

  In my previous post on Generics, I received a comment from Eddie, who was asking why developers would want to use the following constraint, in the example below, when he would pass the parameters as IComparable interface types. public static bool IsLessThan Read More... Posted Thursday, May 26, 2005 11:32 PM by Rob Garrett | 0 Comments

• Oops

  I forgot to mention in my last post, about Generics, that Sahil Malik helped me out with the solution. Between the two of us we figured out why parameterized constructors are not allowed when creating new instances of generic types. I would have edited Read More... Posted Wednesday, May 25, 2005 11:54 PM by Rob Garrett | 0 Comments

• C# Generics

  I've been playing around with generics in C# today. Simply put, generics are akin to templates in C++, only much better. My aim in this post is not to explain the in's and out's of generics, in the new 2.0 version of the .NET Framework but to highlight Read More... Posted Wednesday, May 25, 2005 11:44 PM by Rob Garrett | 5 Comments

• Amazon image manipulation

  Ever wondered how the strange Amazon.com URL for images works? Aaugh.com has a great article on how to manipulate Amazon images by changing the URL. When I eventually get my MP3 tag writer off the ground this will be just what I'm looking for to obtain Read More... Posted Wednesday, May 25, 2005 9:51 AM by Rob Garrett | 0 Comments

• Common Table Expressions

  Today I was delighted to learn about common table expressions in SQL Server 2005. Essentially, CTEs replace the need for cursors when executing statements against rows in a result set. Here are some examples... Let us assume that we have an employee table, Read More... Posted Friday, May 20, 2005 4:45 PM by Rob Garrett | 0 Comments

• Are you a smart programmer?

  .... If you are you might want to take a look at the following job advertisement from Ontology Works . As a software developer I always become suspicious of any job that advertises "programmer" positions and not "developer" positions (see blog post on Read More... Posted Tuesday, May 17, 2005 1:52 PM by Rob Garrett | 2 Comments

• Firefox 1.04 Released

  Version 1.0.4 of Mozilla Firefox has been released, which fixes a couple of critical security vulnerabilities. Download here. Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! Read More... Posted Friday, May 13, 2005 9:34 AM by Rob Garrett | 1 Comments

• New MSDN Subscription + VS2005

  When Microsoft launches Visual Studio 2005 they are planning to role out 5 new premium MSDN subscriptions types. At this time MSDN Universal and MSDN Enterprise will no longer be on sale. Existing customers of Universal and Enterprise subscriptions will Read More... Posted Friday, May 13, 2005 9:02 AM by Rob Garrett | 0 Comments

• GetSection vs GetConfig: Solution

  Okay, after faffing around for a couple of hours on Google and experimenting with the new Configuration Management API I managed to find a solution to my earlier problem . The following code demonstrates the new way of retrieving the maximum HTTP request Read More... Posted Wednesday, May 11, 2005 10:25 PM by Rob Garrett | 0 Comments

• GetSection vs GetConfig

  I'm in the process of writing an HttpModule in ASP.NET 2.0 / Whidbey and have run into a problem when trying to get the maximum HTTP upload limit. The following code works great in ASP.NET 1.1, but in 2.0 the call to get the property returns null. I have Read More... Posted Wednesday, May 11, 2005 4:57 PM by Rob Garrett | 1 Comments

• Mid-Atlantic Code Camp Web Site

  If you're a resident developer in the MD/VA/DC area and you didn't attend last Saturday's code camp, you're probably kicking yourself and saying "bad developer!, bad developer!". Not to worry, there is always the next camp. Should you be wondering how Read More... Posted Tuesday, May 10, 2005 9:30 AM by Rob Garrett | 0 Comments

• Code Camp in Reston

  This last Saturday I attended my first MSDN Code Camp in Reston, VA. I am a big advocate of developer training events, and any all day affair that gives me an excuse to mingle with fellow developers, and Microsoft .NET experts, gets a thumbs up from me. Read More... Posted Sunday, May 08, 2005 11:06 PM by Rob Garrett | 0 Comments