Craig Nicholson

Scott Hanselman visiting SA

Craig Nicholson — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 21:58:11 GMT

Scott Hanselman will be in South Africa in December and spending time with the developer community in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Find out more about the events and how to RSVP over here.

SQL Server 2008 and .NET Framework 2.0 SP2 dependency explained

Craig Nicholson — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 09:39:02 GMT

Recently a local SA Developer .NET community member reported an issue installing SQL Server 2008 Express as it required the as yet unreleased .NET Framework 2.0 SP2.

I have explained the dependency in my post over here.

A practical use for filtered indexes

Craig Nicholson — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 18:11:40 GMT

Finally there is a solution to having a unique column with NULL values in it. The answer is using SQL Server 2008 filtered indexes but there is a practical limitation as well.

Tech-Ed South Africa 2008 Photos

Craig Nicholson — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 07:31:10 GMT

I took some candid photos at Tech-Ed South Africa 2008 down in Durban and I’ve blogged them on my post over here.

Time to monetize your gaming creativity

Craig Nicholson — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:40:44 GMT

You’ve played Xbox 360 games with the millions of gamers on Xbox LIVE. You’ve chatted, shared, and dominated in games of all kinds. But what if those millions could be playing your game?

Better still – what if you were getting paid for it?

Read more in my post about it over here.

Silverlight 2 with Brad Abrams reminder

Craig Nicholson — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 11:42:04 GMT

Just a quick reminder that there is still space available for the SA Developer .NET session Silverlight 2 with Brad Abrams. Please take a moment and RSVP over here on the forum thread.

Develop a game and win money

Craig Nicholson — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 07:23:36 GMT

The 2008 Microsoft XNA Dream-Build-Play Challenge has begun and its looking like its going to be a really cool competition this year. The best part is that is a worldwide competition so that means even us South Africans can win.

Read more about it on my blog over here.

Blend doesn’t support managed type converters

Craig Nicholson — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 06:33:17 GMT

If you are busy trying to develop using Microsoft Silverlight 2 beta 2 and Microsoft Expression Blend 2.5 June Preview you might have encountered errors while working in Blend such as The TypeConverter for "DataGridLength" does not support converting from a string. although Visual Studio doesn’t complain about the XAML and the code runs just fine.

WatermarkedTextBox control for Silverlight 2 beta 2

Craig Nicholson — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:33:48 GMT

When Microsoft released Silverlight 2 beta 1 they included a really cool control called the System.Windows.Controls.WatermarkedTextBox control. It lived in the assembly System.Windows.Controls.Extended.dll and was included in your XAP file when you did a build. However in Silverlight 2 beta 2 the one control that didn’t make it was the WatermarkedTextBox control.

See my blog post here for the workaround and updated source code for the control.

Microsoft Silverlight 2 Beta 2 released

Craig Nicholson — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 00:36:23 GMT

Yes after they promised earlier this week its finally available for download. See my post over here for all the details.

New primary blog - CraigN.NET

Craig Nicholson — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 17:34:09 GMT

It seems that a lot of people didn't see a previous post about my new blog over at CraigN.NET.

Please ensure that you update your feed reader with the new feed http://feeds.feedburner.com/craignnet/.

Silverlight 1.1 UserControl C# template code does not follow best practices

Craig Nicholson — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 10:59:16 GMT

Why does the Microsoft Visual Studio team not follow the best practices internally? When creating a Silverlight 1.1 UserControl under Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 it generates the following code by default.

    System.IO.Stream s = this.GetType().Assembly.GetManifestResourceStream("Project1.UserControl1.xaml");
    this.InitializeFromXaml(new System.IO.StreamReader(s).ReadToEnd());

Most developers would realise that this is not good code. Why do I say this, well firstly the code is creating two objects, a System.IO.UnmanagedMemoryStream and a System.IO.StreamReader, that implement IDisposable and are not disposing the objects immediately after use. Yeah sure the finalizer will take care of any unmanaged resources at the end of the day but why not just release the resources in a predictable and up front manner. I have recommended that Microsoft use the following instead.

    using (System.IO.Stream s = this.GetType().Assembly.GetManifestResourceStream("Project1.UserControl1.xaml"))
    {
        using (System.IO.StreamReader sr = new System.IO.StreamReader(s))
        {
            this.InitializeFromXaml(sr.ReadToEnd());
        }
    }

If you feel strongly about best practices, please take a moment and vote for this on the feedback site here.

Cross-posted from CraigN.NET.

Telkom in the dwang for claims

Craig Nicholson — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 22:45:46 GMT

It looks like Telkom is in a bit of a pickle over its recent "Do Broadband" advertising. A post on MyBroadband details the complaint from a consumer that says its false advertising.

Mr Moorad lodged a consumer complaint against Telkom’s “do” broadband campaign, arguing that the advertisements claims of being suitable for ‘movies, gaming and music’ is misleading.
According to the ASA website, the complainant submitted that the advertising states that one can “do” music, movies and on-line gaming, but only affords the user 1GB. “This is misleading as a DVD-quality movie is at least 4GB and online gaming needs at least 20 GB monthly to play daily.”

While I agree that the "do movies" claim is a little bit of a stretch as I doubt Telkom would promote torrents and illegal movie sharing. They must surely be referring to paid movie downloads, I can't think why a consumer would want to pay for a highly compressed movies that are sub-DVD quality, can you?

I however don't agree that to "do on-line gaming" you need at least 20GB monthly of bandwidth. Is Mr Moorad downloading the games before he plays them or maybe he is playing Battlefield 2. As an Xbox 360 gamer I regularly play on Xbox LIVE and its common to work on about 150MB per hour for serious online gaming including voice chatting. So 20GB equates to about 136 hours of online gaming per month which I believe is more than excessive. So the 1GB is quite capable of at least 6 hours of serious online gaming; or perhaps a whole month of online Sudoku.

In its submissions to ICASA, Telkom clearly stated that "Telkom's ADSL service was never intended for bandwidth-hungry applications, such as gaming or online trading."

This I find highly amusing to read. Telkom has clearly been caught out in its statements. Its time for the left hand to start talking to the right hand, and oh, while they figure that out, can they sort out the service delivery issues etcetera etcetera...

Cross-posted from CraigN.NET.

New blog - CraigN.NET

Craig Nicholson — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 14:08:28 GMT

A little while back I decided I needed my own space to blog about development, gaming, life and everything that goes along with it. Up until now I've been maintaining two blogs, a primary development one and a gaming one. So here it is, my new blog Craig.NET, make sure you add it to your feed reader and update your blogroll.

Oh and if anyone knows a graphic designer that knows how to make magic with WordPress, let me know.

Cross posted from http://xboxbloggers.net/CraigN/.

Building data interfaces for .NET

Craig Nicholson — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 10:23:00 GMT

Just a quick reminder for the free SA Developer .NET event tomorrow, the 8th September 2007, on building .NET data interfaces. The talk will be held in the Microsoft auditorium in Bryanston and presented by André van Rensburg.

There are tons of resources available on how to access data from a .net application. How is it that this is still really difficult to get right? The myriad of options and requirements often makes it difficult to map the two extremes effectively – to choose the right option for a given requirement. I will discuss some practical approaches to accessing data with ADO.net that focus on fast and effective ways to get up and running without sacrificing flexibility and maintainability. I will include discussions on DAL-BLL generators, data object verses data sets, usage scenarios, presentation integration, and if time permits, how to 'Linq' it all together.

If you haven't done so already, please RSVP and let us know you are coming on the forum here.

Cross-posted from http://craign.net/.