PS

Oh yes.

And I'm eternally indebted to the fine folks at Virgin for upgrading my broadband connection from 512Kbps to 1Mbps. Good work fella!

Ssshhhh!

I've been very quiet of late. I know this.

I've been doing something even more fun than simply writing code. Writing code for money!

Yes. I've been in my job for a couple of months, now, and it's really good fun. Okay, sometimes it's not, but then most of the time it is.

I sadi a while ago that it was really useful having a second person in the background telling you where your application sucks, or at the very ;east not where it sucks, but what would make it even cooler.

Well now I have a whole squad of them. The upshot of it is that although I'm not reading so much, I am teaching myself lots of quite cool things. There are a couple of reasons why I haven't been frantically blogging about them:

1. It's nothing particularly new
2. It's not neccessarily .NET focused (I've been doing a bit of JavaScript, bit of network type stuff and so on...)
3. It's not that interesting (I mean, who really wants to know about freezing table headings a la Excel?

So I've been quiet. There are stil a whole bunch of things I'm planning on doing in th enot too distant future, though:

1. Get a wireless Router
2. Get a New suit
3. Start writing my software Magnum Opus
4. lPut together a code library to help me write stuff after my software Magnum Opus
5. Get a proper host
Register my very own domain name
6. Some other crap, I'm sure.

But what I've noticed is that now I write code for a living, rather than wanting to do less for fun, I actually want to do more for fun.

So that's where I've been. I've got a whole host of not-quite-so-new ASP.NET stuff to write about, couple of false starts, and an entire code demo in the making, which'll be along shortly.

Anyway. Just wanted to share.

Yes yes yes

Yes quiet. Yes more soon. Yes yes yes.

I don't care, though. The Hoff is on telly tonight.

If I was going to turn, I'd turn for him.

Just wanted to share.

A really handy tip...

I can't remember where I heard or read it, but I remembered a handy tip for when you're having trouble working with datasets.

I was having a mare with a dataset earlier on today, and I thought that something was up with my columns, but I remembered this single method call (luckily!) just before I embarked on a woeful quest of 'for each c as DataColumn in MyDataSet.Tables(0)' and stuff like that.

Here it is:
MyDataset.WriteXML(Response.OutputStream)
Very handy.

Still didn't sort out the prblem, though. The dataset was exactly as I expected. It was just one of the assemblies I was working with that was playing up. Still, we live and learn, do we not?

It's like they reached into my head...

... And put what they found in there on the web.

MSDN's Coding4Fun sitelet (Is that even a real word??) does rock! A whole bunch of great brains doing nothng productive? I'm right on down wit' dat!

Summer must be coming...

... I've just swatted my first wasp.

There are some things in life that I don't need to see...

And one of them is at the end of Scott and Rory's 4th tech-ed video.

The hopeful look on Rory's face. The little half-smile. That'll be haunting me for weeks...

Great little Add-in

I've been meaning to give the Copy Source as HTML a go fro ages. I reckon it would make my life much easier when it comes to code samples. And of course it would. Half the reason I don't put too many code samples on my blog is that I don't have the patience to read plain black text, nor do I have the patience to go through and manually highlight big blocks of code.

Lucky, then, that I now have this neat little VS add-in to let me put in things like this:

    Protected Function GetSubordinates(ByVal EID As Integer) As DataView

        GetSubordinates = New DataView(GetEmployees.Tables(0))

        GetSubordinates.RowFilter = "ReportsTo = " & EID

        Return GetSubordinates

    End Function

Useless bit of junk code, but hey neato! Just copied and pasted strainght in.

Nice.

Apologies for only just getting on the bandwagon...

It's the little things...

Now and again I'll have a really productive day. Everything'll fall into place, compile first time and just run.

Sometimes, though, I just think of a really small thing and think to myself 'gee. Y'know, it really would be nicer if it did that.'

Like today. I'll expand on it later, when I've actually finishedit, but suffice to say it involves ASP.NET, Repeaters, home-grown viewstate persistence and a whole load of kludges that I never thought I'd have to go near.

Grrr. The devil is, indeed, very much in the detail!

Apologies for teasiness.

Cheap. Nasty. Dirty.

Just a quick one to tell both my readers that if they don't already, listen to Mondays.

Here is what it's not:

• Safe for work
• Intellectually Challenging
• Mature
• Educational

Here is what it is:

• Funny
• Crass. But in a good way.
• Alternatively Educational

Well it's good clean fun, anyway. So listen to it. Both of you!

Do I get a Mondays mug now?