I don't have any real attachment to the people I am currently working with.

You can argue that it's because I'm a consultant, just a hired gun. I shouldn't be attached to any people in this company. I've been here a year, longer than a fair number of them. But I'm just that guy that knows a fair amount about .Net, and makes a good devil's advocate from time to time.

But the thing is, none of them have any attachment to each other, either.

It has bugged me for a long time. Back around the mid-point of my stay here, they even tried to hire me a couple times. I couldn't bring myself to seriously consider it. The biggest reason was the lack of a "team". I've often wondered how it could be like this. I'm not sure how it got here, but one of the things I've realized is this - I've never gone out to lunch with anybody else who works here. I've never seen any of them go out for lunch together, either. For the most part, I could not tell you much about any of my current co-workers. I just don't really know anything about them.

It's not me. I'm a little shy, but everywhere else, given enough time, I have always managed to come out of my shell. But recently I realized, it is probably because nobody bothers to find anything out about anybody else. Nobody makes any effort. Now, I'll be the first to admit - it is a very hard thing to do, especially when you are the new guy on the block. And, really, instead of griping about it, I should be trying to fix it. But I can't bring myself to do so - I've mentioned it to the powers that be, and they assured me that when they move (they have outgrown this space, and are moving near the end of the summer), things will be different. I'm just a consultant, and repeatedly reminded that I am an outsider. That is fine - I had may chance to become an "insider".

I should have realized the problem back when I started. On my first day, no one made any mention of lunch, or even where there were good places to go for lunch. No one tries to gather up the troops for a beer after work on a Friday. A vendor even sent in lunch one day - we all gathered lunch and went back to our desks.

It really is the simplest form of team-building, and it really does go further than any other for the same level of cost and time. You need to have a place to go, to get to know about the lives of your co-workers. To find out what makes them tick. To learn what you have in common. Otherwise, there won't be anyone to watch your back when crunch time comes.

Find them here.

I've avoided doing the link fest thing, mostly because Mike and Jason do an AWESOME job of it, so I don't have to, but the last few days on the Windows Off-Topic list have produced a lot of interesting things, so I'm posting them here, mostly so I can find them to follow up when I have time (I think there is a free 5 minutes sometime in late April 2020... :))

Open Workflow Engine - It's Java and open-source, and it has a C# interface library. [Via Oswald Campesato]

PostSharp - A free and open-source post-compiler for the .NET Framework. [Via Slavo Furman]

Ping Pong Development - I have to admit doing this on occasion. :) [Via Mark Brooks]

DasKeyboard - matches perfectly with DasBlog! This is some seriously hardcore hardware. [Via Shawn Van Ness]

These aren't from the OT list:

Stop Fakes - a site by the US Patent office pertaining to IP theft, especially in terms of small business. Don't know how useful it all is, but I'll probably check it out some more anyway.

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - an online version of a book, mostly about Scheme, which is another of those languages I keep meaning to look into more (after Ruby, Python, and LISP). [Via Xevious on the PragProg list]

I have used PRINT statements in my SQL while I'm trying to develop something a little complicated, but I always take them out when I'm done. Actually, I've turned over a new leaf in the last year or so and have been trying to keep business logic out of the database altogether, but that's a different post.

I was integration testing some code I had just finished up in our web project, and I couldn't even get to the spot, as some other code was blowing up first (I guess nobody had bothered to test it, but again, another day's post). I looked at the SQL error message (well, the first one - there were a bunch, but the rest didn't seem to make much sense). Then I looked at the sproc and the C# code, and I couldn't make any sense of the spaghetti (it was bad code - another contractor (those damn consultants! :) )).

So, I decided to look into the other SQLErrors a bit more. Turns out, they were actually the results of PRINT statements - you can tell because their Class property was 0. The SQLError.Class property holds the Error Severity Code - 0 means there was no error, which is why I ignored them at first. So, after looking at them, I discovered the Message on the last one was completely blank, because the value being appended in the PRINT statement was NULL, I discovered. So, the problem was a data setup issue - a field that shouldn't have had nulls did. I fixed the field and updated the table definition to make that field no longer nullable, and the problem has gone away.

So, it turns out that if for some crazy reason you want to put business logic in your stored procedures, you can actually make use of PRINT statements for debugging.

Seems like maybe they may be more relevant to the real world - at least by the structure of the actual titles. We'll see if the content is more real-world oriented! Details here.

Wexford, PA is #28 on Money's Best Places to Live list!

Of course, how useful is a list that has a place in Jersey as the best place? :)

So, my dear old Dell Axim is obsolete (ok, maybe it was obsolete when I bought it :)). It's an X5 I purchased back in February of 2003, and it came with PocketPC 2002 as the OS. Dell briefly offered an upgrade to Windows Mobile 2003, but at the time, it just wasn't worth $30 to me - my X5 worked fine, and did what I needed it to do. I could write code for it using the lastest tools (VS 2003), and I was happy.

So, I finally got around to installing the beta of VS2005 at home, and I finally figured out what I was going to monkey with to see how the new features stacked up - time to do a little work on mobile development. Except, I just discovered - CF 2.0 doesn't run on PPC 2002.

And Dell, in their infinite wisdom, doesn't sell the upgrade CD anymore. Or offer any way to get it, like perhaps a download. And I just don't use my Axim enough to justify replacing it with another $400 PDA (at least, not until I'm ready for a new cell phone, and Verizon offers some decent products - not that I don't enjoy my Motorola v710, but...).

So, does anybody know of a place where I can buy the upgrade? I tried eBay, but that just didn't work.

Microsoft is providing free e-learning classes for Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005. Once the actual software is released, these title will go back to being "paid", so if you have time, now would be the time to check them out.

I'm not having a good day - I keep making dumb mistakes. But, you, dear reader, can learn from one of them:

If you want to add stuff to your page (like those little badges and site meters), don't go looking through the code. Sure, you can do it that way, but it's not a simple matter of just hacking up the page layout for some random control using Visual Studio - you would have to actually change code. No, the way to do it is to go into the \Themes directory, find your theme, and edit the "homeTemplate.blogtemplate" file.

It makes perfect sense when you think about it - you're really just changing the layout, not the function. My old-school ASP roots are showing.

Now you know, and knowing is half the battle!

Seems like I'm dumping out a lot of code snippets today. Oh well, I had been planning to do it for a long time, so I guess it's about due. I have to say I have a minor code generation fetish, so hopefully some of my legions of readers will find these things useful...

Let me know here if you have any comments or questions about any of these things. I know none of them are terribly well polished - I'm hoping to clean some of them up and post updates. And maybe add some new ones...

DataScripter is a tool I threw together last fall to let us script out a database at a client site. It's not much, but it does the job pretty well. Jason Haley mentioned he was planning to build a CodeSmith template to do this, and I remembered I had this laying around. I had to strip out some of the code that used internal libraries, and it is quickly thrown together, so I wouldn't recommend using it as a "Best Practices" example, but it does what it needs to do.

Enjoy!

Ages ago I wrote a simple "port" of Craig Andera's FlexWikiPad (which is a client/local version of FlexWiki) for PocketPC, which I called FlexWikiMobile. It has been languishing on my hard drive for like 9 months now, so I thought I would post it (I have posted it to my home site, but nobody ever goes there). I'm not actively doing anything with it, so if you want to steal it and make it your own, feel free. I do still actually use it ocasionally.

Basically, I took Craig's rendering enigne, stripped it down, and "Mobil-ified" it. It's pretty good for reading, with slight editing. To really use it, you need to first create a wiki with FlexWikiPad and copy it to your PocketPC. I have my wiki in my PocketPC's documents folder, so my notes always are in sync between my work laptop, my home desktop, and my Dell Axim.

Enjoy!