Pop Art Blog

Since I'm posting this in advance, I hope my session titled Understanding LINQ was a huge hit and everyone loved it. I've been working on the content for a while and its tough whittling it down to fit inside the specified time slots; there's just so much cool stuff. I probably phat-fingered some keys once or twice, but hopefully I didn't start my sentences with "So...." too often or speak so fast that I made a whistling noise. I hope you enjoyed it. Here's what you need... Read More...

I'll be speaking at the InnoTech Conference in Portland, Oregon on April 16th and 17th. My session will get you started with LINQ , a new feature available in the Microsoft .Net v3.5 Framework. Language-Integrated Query is one of the most compelling features for your business in the Microsoft .Net 3.5 Framework. LINQ provides a succinct and expressive layer over your database tables, stored procedures, XML, and other objects. You’ll learn how to get started with LINQ and gain some visibility... Read More...

Such a casual question at party could have terrible consequences when you use weak passwords on the Internet. The best advice is to use a unique password for each account. If you spend all day online like me, plus a little more at home, you've probably garnered somewhere north of 50 or more accounts. The question to ask yourself is which of those accounts are just fine for a hacker to slip into because you used a weak password? Probably none, right? Just to put a little more emphasis on it, let's... Read More...

When I was 8 to 12, I was big into Dungeons & Dragons. My brother was five years older, and sometimes I could sit with his friends and play. We had all the books, much to the chagrin of my parents. When the D&D cartoon came on, all other things ceased to exist for those short 30 minute chunks of time. Now that I'm older, I watch a new show called Start-Up Junkies, its on the MOJO channel . I first heard about the show at my local .Net User Group meeting. The PADNUG organization gets together... Read More...

One of my teammates recently had a problem with some Flash injection code. She was setting some properties and then calling a function on a JavaScript object that threw an error. We got a message that said "Object doesn't support this property or method". We isolated it down to a timing issue by dropping an alert() into the code just before we called the method. With the alert() pausing execution for a few seconds, the browser had enough time to fully instantiate our object. Without... Read More...

...or two. I've had two projects this week where their/my bacon was saved by the branching strategy used for the source code repository. In my line of work, I touch a wide variety of projects. Some are still shiny new and others were written years ago; they're all in a source control repository. Modern source control repositories (and by modern, I mean things that are not your file server or P:\ drive) let you create a branch. Branching might appear complex at first, but it's really pretty... Read More...

LINQ is an acronym for Language-Integrated Query and a new feature in v3.5 of the .Net Framework from Microsoft. This new version of Microsoft .Net reached RTM status a couple of weeks ago — this framework is chock full of brilliant things I can use to improve my efficiency and effectiveness on daily tasks here at Pop Art. As one of my favorite features, LINQ helps me write data-driven application even faster than what .Net 2.0 brought to the table. A common example starts with launching Visual Studio... Read More...

I think you're a good person, but I can't be with you. I have to break up. Sure 2007 was a fun year, galloping around the estate with that thick scent of delicious coffee in our hair and eager for the new dawn of a dark roast. We had some good times. The Techni Vorm label made me feel European too and I tried to embrace it, I really did. Its not you, its me. It wasn't easy with your friend, Virtuoso, the coffee grinder. He never made it simple for us. I don't think he ever really... Read More...

In my experiences as a software developer, its fairly normal to hear comments like the following: That's too many hours They don't have the budget I'm not paid enough I had the good fortune of attending a Portland XP Users Group presentation a few weeks ago by James Shore. He got off on a slight tangent and gave us (well, at least me) a simple equation to chew on: He explained that at its core, Return On Investment is represented by the previous equation. It can help explain quite a bit... Read More...