I may have created a monster

I may have created a monster. It started off innocently enough. I wanted to teach my boy (who will be known as "The Ace") a little about programming. He's a tremendously creative kid. I thought he might get some enjoyment out of creating something like a website.

One of the great things about programming is the instant gratification you get. You write a little code and then get to try it out. That's right up his alley.

So in the spirit of teaching him how to program, I picked up Alice. You can download it for free at http://www.alice.org. It's a really wonderful system designed to teach object oriented programming to kids.

Well, the Ace used it for a bit and enjoyed it but it wasn't what he wanted to do. He wanted to make a website. On a side note, his brother (The Deuce) LOVED playing with Alice. He had a lot of fun putting animals out and then controlling them with the mouse. Back to the Ace....

So to make a website, I first tried to have him use Fireworks from Adobe. That was going okay, but again, it's not what he wanted. Plus, when he was using Fireworks, he was on MY computer! We can't have that!! So instead, he is now on his own computer. It's a Windows box and I have Visual Studio installed there.

Last night, we created an ASP.Net website. I taught him just enough Visual Basic so that he can click a button and get sent to another page. I also taught him how to write an IF/THEN block to check a password. It was 10:00 at night and he was still going strong. We had to pull him (literally crying) away to go to bed. When I woke him up this morning, his first words to me were "Can we work on my website after school?" Oh boy...

It's a good thing I like teaching. :-)

ASP.Net the new Ruby on Rails?

Wow... I'm just watching this video about how the Model/View/Controller design pattern is going to be implemented in ASP.Net and VB.Net. As many of you know, I enjoy working on and with Ruby on Rails. RoR is entirely based on the MVC design pattern. It's surprising to me just how similar the ASP.Net implementation of it is.

Considering the benefits of MVC, it's surprising that Microsoft hasn't implemented it so rigorously before. Nonetheless, I'm glad to see that they will finally be releasing it. As to the title of the post, the MVC architecture makes a LOT of sense in terms of the web. When we look at the market penetration of VB.Net and ASP.Net versus RoR, it's clear who the winner is. We, the developers, are!

I don't really think that Microsoft implementing MVC poses any real threat to RoR. In fact, Ruby on Rails may actually benefit from more people knowing about and being comfortable with it.

MarkNeustadt.com dual booted!

I just updated the site. It's been long over due. I really liked the style I had before but this new style is cool too. Plus it's got the slick new accordian stuff in the Projects, Employment and Technologies pages.

The content is about the same, it just looks different.

Safari 4 = WOW

I am and have been a Mac head for almost two years. I'm really really happy with their products. Today, they just launched the first beta version of Safari 4. In addition to lot of neat new eye candy, the javascript engine has also been reworked.

All I can say is WOW.

I'm a DotNet programmer by trade. ASPX pages are heavy users of javascript so when I heard that the JS engine was faster, I was really excited to try it out. Sure enough, it's true. My ASPX pages are significantly faster! If you're in the mood for an adventure, give Safari 4 a try.

http://www.apple.com/safari/download/

Log4Net and Performance

Wow... I just removed log4net from my project.  What a performance hog log4net is! 

Let's be clear... I had simply disabled log4net by turning the responders "OFF".  I never modified the code to check to see if debugging was enabled or anything like that.  Just turning it "OFF" didn't really help anything.  I kept finding errors in the log that it was unable to get access to the log file like it wanted.

By commenting everything out, my performance jumped!  I suppose at some point I'll go back and add the logic to only log things if it's turned on.  Right now, I don't need the logging so I'll leave it disabled.

Stupid Data Type problems

Why why why... why do all companies have to have their "own" date formats?  I'm trying to insert some records into an Oracle database from a VB.Net application.  The oracle datatype is DATE. 

 So in my stored procedure call, I try to format the value as a date.

objCommand.Parameters.Add("iStartDate", CType(StartDate, Date))

No luck.  I get an error telling me that there's an invalid character or some such thing.  In order to insert the record I have to format it.

objCommand.Parameters.Add("iStartDate", Format(CType(StartDate, Date), "dd-MMM-yyyy"))

Again... not a huge deal.  Just something else to get me cranky.

Properties and Web Services

Such a weird thing...  the project I'm working on is using a distributed architecture.  Everything is all on my workstation, but the architecture is split out into a web service as one project and the UI as a separate project.

I just ran into a very strange situation where some properties of the objects in the web service weren't exposing themselves!  Even if I tried to use the web service itself by accessing the .ASMX page... they just weren't there.

It turns out that I had marked the properties as READONLY and for whatever reason, that was preventing them from coming out in the web service return object.

YARG.  >:-(

I removed the READONLY attribute and just set the setters to do nothing.  Finally!  Back to work.