Video on the Web

Found this really good overview of Video on the Web.  Being that my only real use/knowledge of video on the web is YouTube, I found this information to be very enlightening and useful. I currently work for a media company and should probably be more familiar with the use of video on the web, but I must confess that I am not. So reading this was hopefully the starting point for me to broaden my understanding of video on the web.

The power in reading source code

Scott Hanselman has been posting a series for a while now called the Weekly Source Code where he is pointing folks to good source code to check out. Scott makes the following comment at the end of this post “Nothing makes me realize what a crap programmer I am like reading a good programmer's code.” And I have to agree with him completely. Unless you are looking at someone else’s code you will never realize that what you believe to be great code, maybe really is not. It is not until we compare what we have done with someone else, that we realize

I have always liked the analogy of programming being art and therefore a programmer is an artist. Every programmer brings their own style and flair to the design and creating of code. This is evident when you give 5 different programmers the same problem to solve. They will most likely all arrive at the same solution, but how they got there will be completely different. In my opinion that is a very good thing, you want to have diversity, not robots! And a great way to learn and grow your programming skills is by looking at the code that other people have written. You may be surprised at some of the things that you see and what you can learn. Plus I enjoying getting some insight into how a programmer approached a solution to a problem by looking at the code they employed.

So I strongly encourage all developers to make it a habit of checking out source code. There are lots of places to get source code from… other projects where you work, it can be from open source projects, third-party tools you have licensed, etc. Just go get some and start reading, learning and maybe even be inspired!

Sharpening the Saw – Project Euler

I recently ran across the Project Euler site. Here is the synopsis from the site’s About page.

“Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems.

The motivation for starting Project Euler, and its continuation, is to provide a platform for the inquiring mind to delve into unfamiliar areas and learn new concepts in a fun and recreational context.”

If you are unfamiliar with the term Sharpening the Saw it is from Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In a nutshell it is the practice of continually improving your skills and your knowledge – taking time off from the daily grind and getting motivation and encouragement. It could be reading a book, attending a conference, etc. But just recognizing that you need a break once in a while and that you need to improve your continually.

So I started working through the 250+ Project Euler problems this week. I have completed the first few and already I have learned a lot about some of the cooler LINQ extension methods in C# as well as math in general. Mathematics has always been a struggle for me and I think a lot of it has been that I never truly applied myself as well as I could have when I was in school. So these problems are not only challenging me from a programming perspective, but they are also providing me an opportunity to improve my overall Mathematics knowledge.

It may take me a very long time to complete all the problems that are out there, but I am excited and looking forward the challenge. Also, I think there is a great opportunity here to use these programming challenges as a way to learn another programming language as well. As you will see on the Project Euler site, there is a wide variety of languages that other people are using.

Web Platform Installer

Microsoft has released an update to the Web Platform Installer application. If you are not familiar with this little tool, you need to check it out. Here is the overview from the product’s home page.

“The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 (Web PI) is a free tool that makes getting the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer easy. The Web PI also makes it easy to install and run the most popular free web applications for blogging, content management and more with the built-in Windows Web Application Gallery.”

Scott Guthrie also has a nice blog post about what it can do for you. When I upgraded to Windows 7, I used the Web Platform Installer to install SQL Server Express 2008 and configure my Web Server and IIS settings. It made the configuration very simple and straight forward. I highly recommend the use of this great application.

IIS Modules and Handlers - One web.config for Both IIS 6 and IIS 7

I recently started running my development projects on IIS 7 when I upgraded to Windows 7. I initially created a separate copy of the web.config with modified settings for the <httpHandlers> and <httpModules> sections as these need to move with IIS 7. In IIS 6 the <httpHandlers> and <httpModules> sections are located within the <system.web> section of the web.config file. However, with IIS 7 they need to be configured in the <system.webServer> section. So I did just that, I moved and modified those sections so that I could run in an Integrated App Pool. Please read How to Take Advantage of the IIS 7.0 Integrated Pipeline for more details on the differences between running in Integrated versus Classic mode.

However, I was recently looking into the ELMAH (Error Logging Modules and Handlers) Project and noticed in their demo application that they had thoroughly documented the IIS 6 and IIS 7 settings in their web.config and found this cool little comment:

<!--
    The <system.webServer> section is required for running ELMAH under Internet
    Information Services 7.0. It is not necessary for previous version of IIS.
    In general, it would be best to include it for all .NET Framework 2.0 and above
    configurations in order to have a more portable solution between various
    versions of IIS.

    IIS 5.x, IIS 6 require the modules and handlers to be declared in <system.web>
    whereas IIS 7 needs them declared here and complains if they are in fact
    declared in <system.web>. Fortunately, the
    <validation validateIntegratedModeConfiguration="false" /> entry tells IIS 7
    not to worry about the modules and handlers declared in <system.web>.

    If you only ever want to use IIS 7, then do the following:
    1. Remove handlers and modules from <system.web>
    2. Remove the <validation validateIntegratedModeConfiguration="false" /> element
-->

So I did a little research (Google search) on validateIntegratedModeConfiguration and found this MSDN Article on ValidationSection Class [IIS 7] that explains how this works.

Therefore, since myself and the other developers are still running a mixture of IIS 5.1 (Windows XP) and IIS 7 (Windows 7) I am going to update our shared web.config so that we no longer need to maintain separate versions of the web.config file for the different IIS versions, but can use one common one. This will make things a lot simpler. Then once we are all running on IIS 7, as well as all of our downstream environments, we can turn this off and remove the <httpHandlers> and <httpModules> entries in the <system.web> section.

Browser Chooser

Browser Chooser is a great little app that I ran across the other day.

Description from the Project Home Page on Codeplex:

“Browser Chooser is a small tool acting as the default browser allowing you to choose what browser to open the link in. It gives you the flexibility to choose what browser to use for any given task. It is developed in VB.Net and geared towards Windows Vista and Windows 7.”

I run Google Chrome as my default browser, but end up getting a lot of emails with links to content stored on SharePoint sites. My pain point before was that if the link was to a Word or Visio document, I cannot open it directly in Chrome and I would need to copy/paste the link into IE or Firefox. But now with Browser Chooser, I can select the browser to use when opening a link. Awesome!

Many thanks to Jan Ole Peek for creating this must have utility.

Go download it: http://browserchooser.codeplex.com/

Are you a thriving developer?

I recently came across a great website Thrive For Developers. This is a Microsoft sponsored site that provides great resources to Advance Your Career, Enhance Your Skills or Connect With Your Community. We all know that times are tough, the economy is down and the job market is tough. Whether you are looking for a new career/position or to enhance your current one, there is a lot of great content that you should check out here. I am currently listening to the Driving Your Career – Soft Skills to Move You Forward series and have been learning a lot.

I would highly encourage anyone who is concerned about advancing their career (and that really should be everyone), to check this site out and take advantage of the many great resources that are available.