ASP.NET Blogs

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"As I mentioned in Flash Player Update 3 we finally realized that multi-core CPUs are here to stay. So why not follow the times and take advantage of it? As most of you hard core Flash developers know, rendering is a huge bottleneck. I"ve seen a couple of blog post complaining that their second core/CPU is  not doing anything when they run the Flash Player. Well people, this is about to change in this update." [1]

I suppose you could argue the ability to split work across multiple CPUs is a good thing... however, this is just a sign that they really just need to start pushing some of this work to the GPU instead of taking up more and more CPU power (both Silverlight and Flash will be using the GPU to some degree with video... why not push a little more down the pipe?). One GPU can do far more rendering than a couple CPU cores, and the gap is only going to widen in the future. I can see how multi-core rendering might be useful, but I actually like the fact that on my multi-core machines the processes that are going bonkers are capped at 100% of one core. That means I still have 50% of my CPU power available to make sure the rest of my machine is still responsive and I can still click on buttons in other apps. Are Flash movies really getting to the point where they need to suck up this much juice? Looks like with the next update of the Flash Player, an over the top Flash movie will once again be able to drag down the performance of my entire machine.

[1] http://www.kaourantin.net/2007/06/multi-core-support.html

 

 

Since my last post introducing the bleeding edge IIS7 hosters who started offering free hosting on Beta 3, several new Web hosters joined the mix, including gate.com , parking.ru and myhosting.com who went live today! If you"re looking for a free Web site and want to check out the new features of IIS7, sign up with one of these hosters now! The complete list of hosters can be found on the goLive page. Read More......(read more)

Last week it was announced that DNN won Editor"s choice from Visual Studio Magazine, read the press release here !...(read more)

A day or so ago Joe posted a link to the speaker announcements for the OpenForce 07 conference in Vegas in November. There are some very cool topics that will be covered out in Vegas. I hope to meet as many of you as possible, and see you in my presentation as well! Here"s a link to the OpenForce page. Here"s a list from the current Speaker"s page. GENERAL DGN100: DotNetNuke Open Force ’07 Keynote Address Shaun Walker DGN103: Panel Discussion: DotNetNuke – The Road Ahead Joe Brinkman Nik Kalyani...(read more)

In the early days of May Don Syme announced the availability of F# 1.9.1.9, hardly a month later and in a silent way version 1.9.1.18 has been released, this new version has a few fixes (some of them important), a few extra keywords (F# 2.0 is on the works) and a couple of changes in experimental functions. By the way, the image shows a code sample from Expert F# the upcoming book by Don himself (and how do you like my Spanish Visual Studio?). These few lines open a Windows form, fetch the HTML from an URL and display it on the form. Download recommended to anybody who likes functional programming (ML, Scheme, Caml, Haskell, Lisp, Erlang, etc.)

It"s that time of year, the time of year when developers everywhere decide they"re being hard done by and that it"s time for them to change jobs.

There are lot"s of reasons why a developer might feel like it"s time for a change, they"re all quite important when combined however individually they"re easy to live with (perhaps not comfortable but easy).

A cuddle is all that most developers need. Rather a pat on the back and to feel needed and loved. This might sound such a simple thing, but something as mundane as a boss saying "Good Job" can completely change the way a developer feels about his or herself.

I strongly believe that if more developers "felt the love" the amount of churn within the industry would be much lower, the standard "two year term" that the majority of developers go through after which they jump to a new job (and usually company) could be easily avoided just by treating developers properly.

We"re a fickle bunch really, the occasional "go home early!" or buying the team a round of drinks at lunch time goes down wonders. These small things really do wonders for morale. Be warned though, just doing this when you want something from your developers will be spotted, we might not be the most socially active of people, but we can spot a bullshitter (afterall, it takes one to know one).

So why is it that most managers and bosses don"t get this? Well they just aren"t used to it, it"s rare to work with a bunch of people who are usually intellectually superior to yourself, there are few professions where this is the case. A lot of developers resent the fact their managers tend not to be super smart (where they"re not!), this different breed of underling needs a different type of management, they need a little TLC every now and again.

The discontent many developers feels can manifest it"s self in different ways, these are all masks, hiding the real issue as above where all a developer really needs is a cuddle (like our kitties to the left).

The first way is "we don"t have enough processes", where that isn"t one of the reasons, there"s usually "we have too many processes", ironic, but you"ll find both in many of the places where people are unhappy.

Another way of discontent surfacing is in "my manager is a plonker", generally being overridden by someone you don"t believe in causes so much anger and hatred amongst developers which bubbles up into their mind and becomes a reason they might want to change jobs.

Yet another is the issue of not enough cold hard cash. "SHOW ME THE MONEY" is a phrase I"ve heard many a developer utter, in reality it"s rarely money that"s an issue, the difference between a job whereby  you earn £33,000 or £35,000 is a whopping £166.67 a month (before tax), so whilst a £2000 pay rise might look like it"s got lot"s of 0"s on it, in reality, it"s hardly a life changing sum.

"I"m not being paid what I"m worth!", perhaps, what are you worth though? If you"re earning enough to eat and pay your bills, is that enough? When is enough enough? Something you"ll find as a developer over time is that resigning means a pay rise, even if you stay. Most companies are afraid of technology and the thought of losing your eyes into the world of 1"s and 0"s is terrifying for many managers, because of this, when a developer resigns there is almost always a counter offer made by their existing employer, this is corporate bribery which is something I wrote about back in December.

Cash is King, or atleast that"s what your mind might be telling you, but take into account these other considerations.

Travel Time: If you spend an hour a day traveling to work and an hour traveling home, that works out to be roughly 500 hours a year or 62 and a half extra working days a year (Spent sitting in your car!). If you can find a job which is 15 mins away from home, just think how much extra time you"ll get for your social life (soe of you will have one, or a friend with one!).

Doing something you enjoy is worth it"s weight in gold. Like doing ASP.NET work and you have an ASP.NET job, not just a .NET job? Good on you. Programming isn"t about making money, it"s about having fun. Find a job you enjoy.

Anyway, a good friend of mine has just gone through this and I wanted to write a little about it.

I just had a situation where a potential client gave me a zip file of about 200 files. They wanted us to give them an estimate on how long it would take us to recreate each screen in ASP.NET 2.0. I did not relish the thought of typing in all those file names into an Excel spreadsheet so I could assign hours to each one. So I wrote a simple little utility to grab each file in the folder, and add that file name to a StringBuilder object. I separated each file name with a CRLF. Once I had all of the files in the StringBuilder object, I simply copied the text to the Clipboard. Then I opened up Excel and pasted the contents of the Clipboard into an Excel column. Bingo! I now had all those file names into Excel, ready for me to assign hours to!

C# Code
private void GetFiles()
{
  System.Text.StringBuilder sb = new System.Text.StringBuilder(1024);
  System.IO.FileInfo fil;

  foreach (string strFile in System.IO.Directory.GetFiles(@"D:\Customers\ASP"))
  {
    fil = new System.IO.FileInfo(strFile);
    sb.Append(fil.Name.Replace(".asp", "") + Environment.NewLine);
  }

  Clipboard.SetText(sb.ToString());
}

VB.NET Code
Private Sub GetFiles()
  Dim sb As New System.Text.StringBuilder(1024)
  Dim fil As System.IO.FileInfo

  For Each strFile As String In System.IO.Directory.GetFiles("D:\Customer\ASP")
    fil = New System.IO.FileInfo(strFile)
    sb.Append(fil.Name.Replace(".asp", "") & Environment.NewLine)
  Next

  Clipboard.SetText(sb.ToString())
End Sub

I hope this little tip helps you the next time you have to do something like this!

Paul

If you place on a web page a ModalPopup and a Silverlight control, you might end up with the ModalPopup hided by the Silverlight control.

To avoid this at the time you call Sys.Silverlight.createObjectEx you need to give the following property to true:

isWindowless:"true",       // Determines whether to display control in Windowless mode.

And then everything works again and you see your ModalPopup. 

Long running WCF Services is another great feature of the new Orcas Beta 1. Implementing durable service is always a combination of persisting the message itself as well as the state of the service. The current version of WCF provides stateful WCF services using sessions. However this feature does not address a lot of the most common enterprise stateful services scenarios on which state of an service instance needs to be persisted to a more robust durable store in order to handle unexpected events...(read more)