I used the simple kit found here: House of Home Brew Octoberfest Kit .  This was a great starter kit, and I am very happy with the results.  Very good solid octoberfest.  Almost as good as a store brought variety, but I had the fun of making it myself!

 

Enjoy!, I swear more coding articles coming soon.  New job so I am doing less and less .Net.  

I started brewing a batch of Oktoberfest on Saturday.  It is looking good so far.  I was excited to use a few toys I picked up to make brewing easier.  Like an autosiphon...  Guess it helps to have the right sized tubing to use the toys you want to!  In a month I will start my next beer, prob a wheat beer for the end of summer... which in florida is around thanksgiving.  My next batch will not be a kit at all, but I will buy all of the ingredients piece meal for this one!

 

More coding articles to come soon!

At VS Live! in Orlando this week.  Having a great time looking at neat new items available in VS 2008 sp1.  The day that it was released to public beta, our class presenter was commenting on items that he wished were in the WPF designer.  (ordering properties alphabetically) and guess what?  This was included in the beta. 

I checked out sessions about Asp.Net Dynamic Data, ASP.Net MVC, WPF and some WCF today and yesterday.  Very neat stuff, but after talking to some other people at the sessions about Asp.Net MVC the most common questions was "How does this relate to me?", "Why is this cool?", "Why use MVC over webforms?".  I was surprised that many devs, even ones who go to VS Live to get up to date on the latest and greatest, don't read blogs and books, and don't try to find a way to do things better.  Testability wasn't important to them.  Removing spaghetti code wasn't a important.  Fixing build problems also wasn't that important. 

All said and done, I think that Alt.Net is a great idea.  I hope it continues to grow, but I also hope that people don't start to rebel against the rebellion.  Hopefully people can take the items they want from the Alt.Net movement.  I know that I do not believe in all of the ideals.

Well back to the conference grindstone.  Gotta talk to my companies main dev and try to convince him that the coolness that he saw in TFS can be won without $20 Grand using free open source projects that work better.  Well at least the important pieces!

I told you I would blog about this soon!!

reasons why I moved away from VB.Net, let me count the ways... IIF is evil.  Pure evil.  check out the MSDN on IIF.

There is a small note in the remarks:

Note   The expressions in the argument list can include function calls. As part of preparing the argument list for the call to IIf, the Visual Basic compiler calls every function in every expression. This means that you cannot rely on a particular function not being called if the other argument is selected by Expression.

So if you decide to write some code reading in anything that may compile wrong like:

x as int

iif(isnull(x), 0, x= x + 1)

This will blow up.  Just looking at it, this code should run fine, but check that note out and you will see that x is null.

 

-Jay

Around December, when my wife decided to stay home with my son, we needed to loose a car.  So I got my new Shadow Spirit 750.  I get about 48 mpg city, about 130 miles per tank.  Pretty sweet.   It is also a lot of fun.  Now this couldn't happen if I didn't live 5 miles from work.

 

Gotta love it!

 

-Jay

This link is for my own good.  I did not know the difference between the different implementations.  It is always good to find a blog post that makes you understand the code you are writing that day better!

 

Thanks to dev102 and Shahar Y... great post!

http://www.dev102.com/2008/04/08/4-key-differences-between-implicit-and-explicit-interface-implementation/

 

-Jay

Wow this is cool stuff...  While reading a blog post about multithreading in Paint.Net, I was sent over to Windows Live Labs Volta.  I had to pass this one around the office.  Once i get through my current list of Blog posts, this will be my next adventure.  I just have to post about it now so I don't forget.

 

Coming up next... The evils of IIF and why VB.Net tricks you! 

 

-Jay

Anyone else having an error on forms authenticated .Net 2.0 forms today.  Seems like SP1 changed the ReturnUrl.  I will post a fix when i find it.

Error:

Server Error in '/' Application.

---

Access is denied.

Description: An error occurred while accessing the resources required to serve this request. The server may not be configured for access to the requested URL.
Error message 401.2.: Unauthorized: Logon failed due to server configuration.  Verify that you have permission to view this directory or page based on the credentials you supplied and the authentication methods enabled on the Web server.  Contact the Web server's administrator for additional assistance.

---

Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.1433; ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.1433

 

Love to see the red / of death!!

 

So here is the deal.  .Net 2.0 Service Pack 1 won't let you redirect twice.  i.e. if you have a default page, and a logon page.  You only want to allow https connections and all unauthorized traffic needs to get sent to logon.aspx.  A new user gets sent to default.aspx... which routes them to logon.aspx because of your web.config settings.  It hits logon, and you check logon to see if the user is over ssl.  if not you redirect them to https... 

in .net 2.0 you don't need to specify https://domain/login.aspx.  you just need to specify https://domain/... It sees the user is still not authorized and sends them to logon. 

in Service Pack 1... not so much.  You get a windows logon window when you hit https://domain/?redirectinfo

 

Hence the bug...  just changing the code to hit https://domain/login.aspx fixes this issue....  Welcome to Monday!

 

-Jay

Hello again, After being very lax writing posts on this blog, I now have new  projects going at work and at home.  I should have some more free time this coming month with my wife traveling to visit family with our new baby.

So onto my projects...  I have 2 web projects going on at work, reworking the companies Online activation process.  2 different web projects built into one, along with some back end work.

At home I am making a new web site bounty.jaymcneely.com (also bounty.netcodemonkey.com)  This is a demo page that is a proof of concept for an idea I have had. 

Concept:  Attendance is a problem with large groups that have members from many strata of age groups. Certain members are an asset at events, but they sometimes cannot come out.  Sometimes they can be convinced.  So if a user wants somebody to come to an event, he can place a bounty on that person.  Other people can also place bounties.  Once someone gets that person to come, they can claim the bounty, and emails will be sent out to alert people who they owe.  Once the person comes to the event, the money is due.   Pretty simple site, but it has some complexity to it. 

So I can't just make this site, I have to play with some new toys at the same time.  I want to use SubSonic, NUnit Tests, and some better design options.  Since I am hosting on GoDaddy and I cannot run sites in a high trust environment.

Should be fun, come back and track my progress!

 

-Jay McNeely

Good news, yesterday I just finished bottling my first batch of beer.  I got a kit for Red Ale, easy to follow instructions.  I let my house get cold one of the days that it was fermenting, and I think my yeast had issues because of this.  The Alcohol percentage will be low because of this.  I hope that the sugar I added to the bottles to create carbination will still work.  Overall the beer smelled and looked like red ale after a week of fermentation.  In 2 weeks I will take a bottle out and give it a try.