Setting up II7 Remote Administration

The article, Remote Administration of IIS 7: Install, Configure, Connect by Dave Lawlor is a great write up of how to get your Windows 2008 server setup to allow remote administration of the IIS 7 web server. It allowed me to get things setup very quickly on my sandbox server.

ASP.NET Mobile Definition File

In my current project, we are considering creating a mobile page (geared towards the Blackberry) that a set of users can access to validate/actualize some data that the system is tracking for them. I started doing a little research on how to correctly detect that the users are on a mobile device and render the pages. In the course of this research, I came across this hot off the presses blog from Scott Hanselman, Mix: Mobile Web Sites with ASP.NET MVC and the Mobile Browser Definition File. Scott details the cool new Mobile Browser Definition File that has just been released by Microsoft out on CodePlex. if you doing any mobile device development for ASP.NET websites, this is something that you should definitely check out.

When to pair program

The blog entry How do you decide when to pair program? by Gojko Adzic is a great read.  I agree with the group's final decision. Please go check it out.

Help me make this Regular Expression better...

I was recently wanted to update a SQL Script file that was populating some seed (test) data into a bunch of database tables. I had scripted out the data in the table using a tool and all of the datetime columns were being updated with string values similar to the one below.

'20081208 13:54:31.236'

I wanted to update all of these to midnight of the current date, so that the data would be current every time the seed data is loaded. To do this I wrote the following T-SQL to put my date into this format in a variable:

DECLARE @CurrentDateString varchar(30)
SET @CurrentDateString = REPLACE(CONVERT(varchar(10), GETDATE(), 102),'.','') + ' 00:00:00'
PRINT 'Current Date: ' + @CurrentDateString

Now,  I wanted to update all of the existing string datetime values with my new variable. I had about 75 strings like this in the seed data script file. I fired up Notepad++ and started to work on a Regular Expression to find and the replace all of these entries. Since, writing Regular Expressions is not a common thing for me, after a little googling and some hacking, I came up with the following:

('20081208)\s[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9].[0-9][0-9][0-9]'

This is probably not the most efficient expression that I could have written, but it go the job done. Anyone have any suggestions for making this better? Thanks!

Is your ASP.NET AJAX Web Site Slow?

If your ASP.NET AJAX web site is slow, it may be because you are using UpdatePanels. Please read the article Have you ever wondered why CodePlex is so slow? by Dave Ward. It points out the inefficiencies of using ASP.NET AJAX Update Panels and suggests a better approach with an example. A very good read for any ASP.NET developer who is concerned with performance.

Agile Reading List

Last week I attended an Agile Mini-Conference (hosted by my company) featuring Martin Fowler and Neal Ford. During the course of the day, there were many books and papers mentioned by both of these Agile luminaries. Below is the list that I compiled.

Books

Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns
Kent Beck, ISBN 013476904X

The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master
Andy Hunt & Dave Thomas, ISBN 020161622X

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition
Frederick P. Brooks, ISBN 0201835959

The Productive Programmer
Neal Ford, ISBN 0596519788

Pragmatic Thinking and Learning
Andy Hunt, ISBN 1934356050

Essays

No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering
Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.

Code as Design: Three Essays by Jack W. Reeves
Jack W. Reeves

Developer Basics: Good Source Control Practice

Jeff Atwood has a great article, Check In Early, Check In Often This covers what he considers the golden rule of using source control. After working on a large project with 5+ developers, I would have to agree with his views concerning the "giant dollop of code" and that when you check in smaller bits of functionality, each check in makes that code "infinitesimally more functional".