CurtBlog

Was watching a bit of Real World Austin and while I realize the show "jumped the shark" awhile back, it was still a fascinating trainwreck of a social experiment at times.  At the very least, you got archetypes in cliched situations (city boy vs country boy, militant black man vs downhome southern boy, homophobe vs homosexual, etc.).  The latest seasons seem to be more about taking 6 Abercrombie models who are willing to sleep with anything and get smashed at the drop of a hat.  Throw them into the biggest hottub you can find and see what happens. It becomes more about being a Real World cast member, whatever that means, than any kind of real human interaction.  At best, it's really nothing more than a soap opera, scripted or not.  I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but I keep hoping the show somehow mixes things up and becomes interesting again.

My friend Trevor, a Nashville transplant from Northern Ireland, is blogging.  Had a good time with him on my trip over there a few years ago.  He shares my interest in cooking and has some wonderful photos of some of their garden bounty.  I really need to live somewhere where I can have a garden.  The herbs on the porch are not enough.

On a side note, I wish some of these services like Blogger and Blogspot would make it easier to syndicate content.  I have a bunch of friends using these services and I can't keep up with them in my aggregator.  Which generally means I only check them out when I'm thinking about it, which ends up up being once a month at best.

This wasn't immediately obvious to me and I did look through the docs a bit without any luck.  I had a group of images all embedded in the same .resx file and I wanted to reference them programatically at runtime.  Typically if you have a single file embedded in your project, you can just use the GetManifestResourceStream method off the executing assembly and get a stream reference to the file.  But that doesn't work if you have multiple resources in the same resource file, you can only get a handle to the main .resx file.  The trick is to use the ResourceManager class to reference the .resx file and then you can get access to all the objects.  So something like this works:

System.Resources.ResourceManager resourceManager = new System.Resources.ResourceManager("MyApplication.Images", GetType().Assembly);
Image myImage = (Image)resourceManager.GetObject(imageName);

I spent some time yesterday catching up with Billy Hollis. Billy is the Nashville Regional Director and I first met him while at my last job in Nashville before moving to Chicago.  We talked a bit about the new Enterprise Library as Billy works a bit with the Patterns and Practices group at Microsoft.  I personally find that for most applications, the new EL is a bit overengineered and it takes a bit of a learning curve to get up and running with the new app blocks.  Definitely not as simple as the old Application Blocks, although maybe that's good.  But sometimes simple is better.  Billy is continuing to refine what he calls the Composite pattern for Smart Clients, where you have a main exe shell that takes care of basic plumbing like security, logging, tracing, context. etc.  This exe then can load other assemblies on the fly, depending on the user's needs and security profile.  I was struck by how similar this idea is to one that Jon Rauschenberger has been thinking about for one of our clients.  In addition, the Patterns and Practices group is working on their own Composite Application Block, currently up on GotDotNet Workspaces.  So it seems that people are pushing the envelope enough with Smart Clients that it is time to start thinking about more extensible architectures.

Well, as usual Scott Guthrie gave a very compelling 2 sessions on ASP.NET 2.0 here at TechEd yesterday.  Now I've seen a lot of this stuff before along the way, but it was still pretty incredible to watch what he accomplished in just a couple hours.  Starting from a completely blank solution, he built a web app including:

Datagrid bound to a custom business object, going to a details screen with editing
SQL based output caching
A complete login system including login screen, status, custom message based on login user and new user wizard (these are all new controls in v 2)
Role based authorization, including page customization
Drag and drop webparts
Localization

That's just part of it.  Also demoed the new validation built into the IDE, allowing you to target either browser or spec (XHTML, 4.01, etc)
and have intellisense change in the aspx code view to only show the supported client-side script, events, controls, etc. that are supported.
Also can check for disability compliance.

This morning he also demoed default focus at the form or panel level, as well as scrollbar position memory on postback that can work separate from
SmartNav, as well as client callbacks for doing AJAX style stuff like filling in a treeview on the fly when you have a lot of data.  The cool thing is
this all works not just in IE, but also in Firefox, Safari, etc.  Any number of these features would take 2 days to a week or more in the current
1.1 platform.  It's going to be cool to see what is possible with this release, it's a big jump forward in functionality and productivity.