Development

15 November, 2023 at 9:45 AM 0 words

117 entries. 44,829 words.

May, 2005

Exclusive First Peek!. 2005-05-02 3:35 AM.
- Blog
- thomaskrehbiel.com
[…]Here’s an exclusive peek at my Genealogy program. I’m writing it for the same reason I write all my other programs; I don’t like everything else that’s out there. I wanted something that’s easy to navigate in, and something that looks spiffy. 134 words.

September, 2005

Why I Like PHP. 2005-09-27 8:26 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Most programmers at my level of genius and experience scoff at the PHP language for web development. So why do I use it on my web page? 230 words.

October, 2005

Avoiding That Screen Flicker. 2005-10-28 2:54 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I went to the Richmond.NET User Group meeting tonight. The main topic was AJAX and how Microsoft is implementing it in ASP.NET 2.0 with Callbacks and Atlas and whatnot. 305 words.

December, 2005

Photo Organization And Me. 2005-12-12 8:25 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Why is it so hard to find decent digital photo organization software? 795 words.

May, 2006

Meet The New Reports, Same As The Old Reports. 2006-05-17 10:13 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
At work we’re planning to use SQL Server 2005’s Reporting Services for future reporting needs. (It’s main attraction is the free-ness of it compared with Crystal Reports.) We can do everything the customers need with DataGrids on web pages, but everyone thinks Report Services are cool. I’m pretty indifferent about it. 199 words.
SSIS. 2006-05-31 5:34 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
At work, I’ve been playing with SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) for use in an upcoming project. (“Integration” is one of those fancy “enterprise” terms that means “getting information from different places and organizing it into something useful.”) There’s some value in SSIS, but overall I’m not terribly impressed. In fact, it’s a bit of a pain. 193 words.

June, 2006

Avoiding SSIS query timeouts. 2006-06-07 12:36 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Just so I have a record of this: In SSIS, I was trying to pull data from a SQL Server database with a complex, slow SELECT query (written by someone else) which took a good 15 minutes to run. 90 words.

September, 2006

Removing Collection Elements During Enumeration. 2006-09-05 5:52 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Another in a series of random programming tips by Thomas Krehbiel, mostly to help me remember them in the future. 270 words.
StringBuilder vs. Concatenation. 2006-09-11 6:08 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Another in a series of random programming tips by Thomas Krehbiel, mostly to help me remember them in the future. 226 words.
String Constants. 2006-09-21 3:02 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Another in a series of random programming tips by Thomas Krehbiel, mostly to help me remember them in the future. 638 words.
Debugging Custom SSIS Components. 2006-09-22 8:00 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Another in a series of random programming tips by Thomas Krehbiel, mostly to help me remember them in the future. 210 words.
Easy SSIS Package Deployment. 2006-09-29 4:38 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Another in a series of random programming tips by Thomas Krehbiel, mostly to help me remember them in the future. 121 words.
Agile Manifesto Not So Bad After All. 2006-09-29 5:12 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I read (most of) Steve Yegge’s blog post on Bad Agile, and thought it was great to hear someone ranting against Agile Development for a change. (Unfortunately, it quickly devolved into a “golly, Google is such a fun playground for programmers, it’s the greatest place to work ever!” rant.) 955 words.

October, 2006

Remember, One Class Per File. 2006-10-04 7:14 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Another in a series of random programming tips by Thomas Krehbiel, mostly to help me remember them in the future. 268 words.
My Implementation Of Active Records. 2006-10-10 5:30 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I was somewhat gratified to see that the method I had come up with to wrap database rows inside objects has a name: The Active Record Design Pattern. Furthermore, someone else (namely, Castleproject’s ActiveRecord) thought of using .NET attributes to markup the row class just like I did (though chronologically they thought of it after I had finished my first version). It’s always fun to see myself inventing the same things that the so-called “industry leaders” invent. 136 words.
Don’t Use A Lookup Component To Find Duplicate Rows. 2006-10-19 5:30 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Another in a series of random programming tips by Thomas Krehbiel, mostly to help me remember them in the future. 299 words.

January, 2007

uvBlog. 2007-01-19 2:28 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I’ve started working on a more streamlined PHP blogging platform, which I’m creatively dubbing “uvBlog.” You might be wondering why I don’t just get one of the millions of free, open source blog platforms out there. It’s mainly because I’m really, really picky, and frankly it’s more fun and instructional to develop my own. Also I don’t want to lose any of my content. 355 words.
Moving .NET Web Projects. 2007-01-30 8:54 PM.
- Commentary
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I’ve had some annoying problems opening other people’s ASP.NET web projects from Visual SourceSafe. By default, it sets up the local IIS directory in C:\Inetpub\wwwroot regardless of the location of the solution directory. I prefer setting up a virtual directory that points to the actual project location, which for me is on the D: drive. 636 words.

March, 2007

uvBlog March Update. 2007-03-13 11:01 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I thought it would be good to sit down and evaluate where I am with uvBlog in comparison to my stated goals. Points in italics below were my original goals. 331 words.
No Redirection For Data Destination Errors?. 2007-03-16 12:07 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I had the “opportunity” to fix someone else’s SSIS package that was failing because of a data overflow on a date column at one of the data destination components. 261 words.
Mystery Date Crisis Solved. 2007-03-16 8:59 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
To follow up on yesterday’s mystery date problem: It turned out that one of the incoming dates had been erroneously entered with the year “1007” instead of “2007.” The date was valid on the Oracle data source, and it was valid within the SSIS data flow. However, SQL Server 2000 can’t store a date prior to the year 1753, so the data destination failed. I put in a script component to test for dates earlier than 1753, set them to “1/1/1753”, and flagged the row with an error. 98 words.
Moving .NET Web Projects. 2007-03-23 11:26 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I’ve had some annoying problems opening other people’s ASP.NET web projects from Visual SourceSafe. By default, it sets up the local IIS directory in C:\Inetpub\wwwroot regardless of the location of the solution directory. I prefer setting up a virtual directory that points to the actual project location, which for me is on the D: drive. 664 words.
Looking Back: PopFuncs. 2007-03-28 1:47 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I thought it might be fun to review some of my earlier programming projects on this blog. 1,275 words.
Escaping {{Braces}} For String.Format. 2007-03-28 9:33 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Amazingly enough, I hadn’t run across this situation before. I was writing a quick utility to generate a C# class from a database table today, and I discovered that the following code failed. 153 words.
The DTEXEC /DECRYPT option. 2007-03-31 9:50 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Today’s lesson is about how to avoid those annoying messages that SSIS gives you about being unable to decrypt sensitive data in a package. 421 words.

April, 2007

Please Don’t Do This. 2007-04-04 10:52 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Over the last couple weeks I’ve been enjoying a lovely little application that repeatedly polls for xml data from a web service. The main loop of this application looks something like this. 307 words.
UvMoney: Home Banking For Mad Scientists. 2007-04-09 2:04 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
My latest mad-scientist software project idea involves home banking. 596 words.
A Brief Look At SourceGrid 4.x. 2007-04-28 5:44 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
To implement an interface that somewhat resembles a check register for UvMoney, I’m going to need a list or grid control. I wrote a semi-usable grid control for .NET 1.1 a few years back, but I wanted to test drive a more mature grid for this project. 686 words.

May, 2007

Exploring Scraping Methods. 2007-05-03 11:16 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I’ve got a working prototype of the UvMoney system now. It’s pretty rough around the edges (especially in the user-interface department), but it works. I’m at a natural stopping point, so this seems like a good time to take a step back and ruminate on it. 557 words.
Easy Bot Blocking. 2007-05-07 10:34 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I’m sure this is well-documented already – in fact I’m almost positive I’ve read this somewhere else, and I’m completely positive that I’ve seen web sites using this technique – but here is a quick and easy way to keep simple bots from posting data to your web site: Add a Javascript “onclick” event to your submit button which sets a hidden form field. Verify that the hidden form field is set correctly and viola, you have a simple test for human vs. bot. 131 words.
DOM Manipulation Woes In Firefox and IE. 2007-05-21 11:57 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I realize that most programmers like puzzles, but I, for one, am growing very tired of the continual “find the code combination that works” puzzles that occur when trying to write cross-browser compatible Javascript. I mean, this kind of thing has been going on since the mid-1990s. Are we EVER going to get any standards?? 361 words.
Parsing Date Strings. 2007-05-23 2:16 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Very handy information if you ever need to go beyond DateTime.Parse(): Parsing Dates and Times in .NET. 17 words.

June, 2007

SQL Server 2005 Migration. 2007-06-30 5:34 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
We recently completed a migration from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005 at work. Here are some of the issues I’ve had to deal with from an application perspective. 369 words.

July, 2007

UvMoney Goes AJAX. 2007-07-27 12:45 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
It’s time for an exciting update on my UvMoney home accounting project. 641 words.

August, 2007

GhostDoc. 2007-08-15 11:11 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I’ve been experimenting with GhostDoc for a while at work. I saw it mentioned somewhere on CodeBetter.com, and I figured if the cool kids were using it, it must be cool. At first I thought it was really cool to be able to drop comments into my source code with one click. 282 words.

September, 2007

MySQL charset parameter. 2007-09-10 10:36 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Just in case you don’t know, in order to store UTF8 characters in a MySQL database, you have to add a “charset=utf8;” parameter to the connection string when using the MySQL .NET Connector. Otherwise you will get very frustrated. Also don’t forget to set the field’s character set and collation to utf8 too. 53 words.
Software Entropy. 2007-09-25 1:31 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I learned a new gimmicky programming phrase today: Software Entropy. 71 words.
Expressing 10.Seconds. 2007-09-25 1:36 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Regarding Extension Method Practices. The author wrote, “I can use this method [C# 3.0 extension methods] to express 10.Seconds.” I’m all for improving a programming language, but I’m sorry – if you need to write “10.Seconds” in a C# program, you are in the wrong language. Go back to Ruby, you damn hippy. 61 words.
Suntrust On Notice. 2007-09-27 2:22 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I would just like to state for the record that Suntrust’s web developers SUCK. They’ve added a “Please wait while we validate your sign-on information” page that comes up after the login form. It advances from there to the main page only after some kind of mysterious Javascript redirect (yes, Javascript is apparently now required to login to Suntrust banking) that is buried in a series of hopelessly convoluted spaghetti libraries. 102 words.

November, 2007

String Comparison. 2007-11-22 8:58 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
There are a bunch of different ways to compare two strings in .NET. Periodically I ponder which one is “the best.” As with most things in programming, it’s largely a personal preference. 437 words.

December, 2007

Exceptions. 2007-12-07 6:03 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
This short article on Devlicio.us about the wrong way to catch exceptions is pretty funny. 52 words.
Build Scripts. 2007-12-07 6:06 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Coding Horror advises, “So, if you don’t have a build script on your project, what are you waiting for?” 251 words.
Named Pipes. 2007-12-08 5:15 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
At work we have a Windows Service that runs continuously, doing important stuff. I wanted to write a lightweight WinForm monitor that I could run independently from the service (on the same machine) to watch what it’s doing in real time, without the hassle of continually re-loading a plain text log file. Performance Monitor was not sufficient because I wanted actual text messages. 682 words.
UvMoney Status Report. 2007-12-08 5:16 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
When I last reported on UvMoney, I had just created a web interface for entering transactions. Since then, I’m pleased to report that all five of my bank readers now use direct HTML access instead of AutoHotKey scripts, and they have been working more-or-less happily for months. (Every now and then banks will upgrade their web sites, though, which is a pain.) The system works pretty well, but now I’m starting to make some more changes. 725 words.

January, 2008

Excel Spreadsheet Table Names. 2008-01-08 1:30 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
If you have the unfortunate need to use an Execute SQL Task SSIS component on an Excel spreadsheet, make sure you specify the worksheet name as “[Your Sheet 1$]” in the FROM clause of your SQL statement. 84 words.
Stepping Into The Framework. 2008-01-18 12:57 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Recently I learned that you can debug into the Microsoft .NET Framework. Other than idle curiousity, I can’t think of any reason why I’d want to do that, except to confirm or deny that there is a bug in the Framework. This suggests to me that Microsoft is basically trying to outsource analysis of framework bugs onto the community, and I’m guessing there won’t be too many payments for that service forthcoming. 84 words.
What’s Not To Understand?. 2008-01-18 10:46 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Consider this post: Syntactical Molasses. The author claims that his test method is “syntactical molasses” which “makes the intention of the code so much more difficult to understand:” 178 words.
My First Look At WWF. 2008-01-22 11:45 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
So out of curiousity I started trying to figure out what “Windows Workflow Foundation” is and why Microsoft thinks we need to re-write all of our applications for it. Here’s the introductory paragraph that I found on MSDN. 235 words.
That Mysterious requirePermission Attribute. 2008-01-25 12:38 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I started upgrading an ASP.NET 1.1 project to 2.0, and I got this error: “Unrecognized attribute ‘requirePermission’ (C:WINDOWSMicrosoft.NETFrameworkv2.0.50727Configmachine.config line 14)” 77 words.
Where I Am With TDD. 2008-01-25 12:54 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Test Driven Development is one of the buzzwordy things that Agile and Extreme programmers like to push as the most important programming advancement since sliced bread. (Although, recently, TDD seems to be losing out in favor of a new thing called Behavior Driven Development (BDD), which as far as I can tell is the exact same thing as TDD, except instead of naming your tests “TestWidgetProperty,” you name your tests “Determine_if_the_widget_property_is_working_correctly.” (That is a humorous observation not meant to be taken seriously.)) 536 words.
UvMoney Back to XML. 2008-01-27 3:17 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Note: This has been sitting in my drafts for months. 322 words.
MVPs Should Not Publish Bad Code Samples. 2008-01-27 4:41 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Some programming blogs are informative and trustworthy. Unfortunately, most aren’t. For example, in an otherwise good post explaining new features in C# 3.0, I found this shocking sample C# 3.0 extension method among the blogs at the popular site ASP.NET Weblogs. 314 words.
Keep It Simple. 2008-01-31 2:03 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Ran into another post from our MVP friend Dan Wahlen: How Would You Refactor this Code? #1. I don’t normally respond to these kinds of things because it always devolves into a my-code-is-bigger-than-your-code conversation (if you know what I mean, wink, wink, nudge, nudge). 228 words.

February, 2008

Interview Questions. 2008-02-02 11:57 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I was asked recently to sit in on an interview to evaluate a candidate’s .NET experience. I thought about what kinds of questions I could ask, did some Googling, and thought back to some of the technical interviews I’d been through. 590 words.
UvMoney Concurrency. 2008-02-03 12:07 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I’ve been thinking more about concurrency issues in UvMoney. The last time I posted about UvMoney, I was switching over to a database back-end mainly to handle concurrency. Then I decided that was pretty silly, considering that in my current “production” environment, there are only two people that can possibly use the data at the same time. 773 words.
NuSphere PhpEd. 2008-02-03 9:14 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I’m trying out NuSphere’s PhpEd. For lo these many years, my PHP IDE has been a text editor and a web browser. Yep, that’s it. 199 words.
Developing vs. Communicating. 2008-02-06 11:50 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
In response to Caio Proiete’s How to be a better developer? (Which is, in turn, a response to Rodrigo DÃaz Concha’s How to be a better developer?) 212 words.
Visual Studio 2008 and WPF. 2008-02-15 1:08 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I’ve started migrating to Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 for my home projects, for whatever that’s worth. (We aren’t allowed to use it at work.) Nothing in my projects actually require .NET 3.5 features, mind you, so it’s not that great of an experiment, but hey, it’s a start. 430 words.
WPF: Skinning a TreeView with Resources. 2008-02-16 12:09 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
In my first WPF project (a port of a WinForms picture viewer), I needed to create a TreeView with icons on each node. It doesn’t take long to realize that the WPF TreeView doesn’t have this functionality built-in anymore. 420 words.
WPF: Finicky About JPEGs. 2008-02-17 9:15 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Gah! I’ve found that WPF’s BitmapImage is quite finicky about the kind of JPEG files it will load. 293 words.
Sharing Files Between ASP.NET Projects. 2008-02-25 3:09 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
These rambling thoughts document my search for a way to share files between Visual Studio web projects. 485 words.
Shell Schmell. 2008-02-29 12:29 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I’m reading The Pragmatic Programmer, supposedly one of the Bibles for modern programmers. It came highly recommended by one of my favorite blogs, Coding Horror. (Well, it used to be highly recommended… I’d swear there were only two books on his recommended reading list before.) Anyway, it’s a good book so far. 407 words.

March, 2008

Text Manipulation Languages. 2008-03-07 2:07 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I said before that The Pragmatic Programmer seems biased toward Unix environments and lacks much real-world experience with Microsoft environments. Here’s another example of that. 208 words.
Design By Contract and Spec#. 2008-03-07 2:17 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I’ve ragged a bit on The Pragmatic Programmer lately, but I wanted to mention one concept in the book that I really liked: Design By Contract. 240 words.
NAnt MissingManifestResourceException Tip. 2008-03-09 3:57 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
With NAnt 0.86 Beta 1, I found that I couldn’t use the element to include *.resx files in my task. For example, this didn’t work. 140 words.
Open Source Licenses. 2008-03-19 2:02 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I’ve been thinking about releasing some open source stuff, so I’ve been reading up on Open Source licenses. They all seem to have a significant hole in them: It looks to me like a nefarious person could slap any GPL software onto a CD and sell it to the nearest gullible corporation for $5000. Granted, anyone could get the software from non-nefarious sources for free, but still, the nefarious person would probably be able to con a few people into handing over money for the free software, which is bad, but it’s even worse that the actual author – the person who did all the work, in other words – gets absolutely nothing out of the transaction. 464 words.
Company Smell. 2008-03-20 1:42 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I found this recent post on ASP.NET Weblogs sort of funny: Please question the need for whitespace. This person is actually suggesting that blank lines in your source code (which, for most normal people, are used to improve readability) could be a “code smell.” Then at the bottom of the post we learn that they are hiring. Hrm. 62 words.
Close But No Cigar. 2008-03-22 10:20 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I just got a 71% on a Microsoft 70-536 practice test (80% is required to pass). I got creamed in Globalization and Security topics (things I’ve never had an occasion to use before). I guess I should probably read over the material before I take the tests for real. 69 words.

April, 2008

C++/CLI Properties. 2008-04-11 12:11 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Properties in C++/CLI are great and all, but, um, what if I want to put my class implementation in a different file from the class definition? You know, like, oh, every C++ program ever made in the entire history of the world. Microsoft even encourages the separation of definition from implementation by creating a .cpp and a .h file when you make the new managed class. 178 words.
UvSignalProcessor. 2008-04-14 10:37 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I’m calling my latest .NET project UvSignalProcessor. This follows UvMoney and UvNotes, if you’re keeping track, and neither one of those is anywhere near finished, so yes, I’m skipping around. But hey, nobody’s paying me for this stuff, so (insert Cartman impersonation) I can do what I want. 234 words.
Best Practices. 2008-04-23 9:13 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Rescued from my Drafts folder… 186 words.

June, 2008

Programming Goals Revised. 2008-06-30 11:00 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
At this halfway point of the year, I thought it would behoove me to examine how I’m doing on my programming goals for this year. Back in January, I wrote down some things I wanted to work on this year. I didn’t publish it, so you’ll just have to trust me when I say that those things were. 395 words.

August, 2008

LINQ query syntax. 2008-08-26 1:47 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I’m starting to learn a little bit about LINQ. I am only doing this because I was starting to learn a little bit about the forthcoming ASP.NET MVC Framework by watching some handy screencasts, and the authors of the framework seem to think that we should all be using LINQ, too, so amidst the discussion of the MVC Framework they throw in quite a lot of tutorials about LINQ. 726 words.
GhostDoc Redux. 2008-08-27 3:35 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I had previously written that I tried GhostDoc but removed it because it didn’t write very useful comments. Well I re-loaded it today because it does have one very handy feature: Adding comments to classes that implement interfaces. It’s incredibly tedious to copy comments from the interface code to the class code, but with GhostDoc you just have to right-click on the class member and hit “Document This” and it will automatically bring the comment from the interface to the class. 83 words.
Agile Wall. 2008-08-29 8:52 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I learned a new software development term the other day: “Agile Wall.” For those of you who aren’t into renaming things that already have names just to sound more important, it is: “A bulletin board with project notes all over it.” Okay, okay, the notes are supposed to be arranged into three columns for “todo,” “in progress,” and “done.” Yeah, I can see how it’s a totally different concept now. 70 words.

September, 2008

Finally != Inevitable. 2008-09-19 12:29 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
For future reference: I had always heard that there were cases where finally blocks were not run. The other day I actually witnessed one of those situations: In a .NET console app, if you hit CTRL-C to exit the application, finally blocks are not executed. Fortunately garbage collection will still handle standard cleanup of objects for you (at least I assume so). 142 words.

October, 2008

Sitemap.xml and Google Webmaster Tools. 2008-10-14 10:04 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I just read about Sitemap.xml on Coding Horror. I’d never heard of it before (yeah, I’m not exactly wired into the whole SEO thing). Anyway, I just implemented a site map for my page, for what it’s worth. 70 words.
Me vs. the MMO Engine. 2008-10-16 10:54 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
So I decided to write an MMO game engine*. 322 words.
New Collection vs. Collection.Clear. 2008-10-18 4:38 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Quick, which one of the following implementations is faster to use in a time-critical section of code. 320 words.
Evaluating MMO Engines. 2008-10-18 4:53 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Before I embark too far on the insane idea of writing my own MMO engine, I thought it would be instructive to peek at some open source engines out there (gathered from the first few pages of a Google search). 619 words.
Moving C++/CLI Properties Out Of Headers. 2008-10-18 8:54 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
A while back I railed against C++/CLI for its nonsensical inability to separate property implementations from the header file. Well, it turns out you can do it – it’s just not widely reported. Almost every example of a C++/CLI property shows it implemented in the header file. 164 words.
MMO Prototype Progress. 2008-10-20 3:14 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Here’s the progress I made on my MMO engine this weekend. 30 words.

November, 2008

Disabling Pluralization in Visual Studio. 2008-11-11 10:51 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I noticed with some concern that the Visual Studio 2008 designer puts an “s” on the end of table names when it builds LINQ to SQL classes. If you want to disable that, open Tools/Options, go to the Database Tools O/R Designer page, and change “Pluralization of names” option to false. 108 words.
CookieContainer, HttpWebRequest and Secure Cookies. 2008-11-20 2:27 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I ran across a troublesome problem that took several evenings to debug. I couldn’t find a solution with Google so maybe somebody else will benefit from this. 287 words.
LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework Classes. 2008-11-21 11:15 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I’ve been starting to work a little bit with LINQ to SQL and now the ADO.NET Entity Framework* (to implement ORM** for UvMoney, my home banking system). There’s something that troubles me about both frameworks. Both require you to build a “model” of your database with a designer, from which strongly-typed classes are generated, which you can then use in your LINQ queries. 218 words.
When It’s Okay To Use C# 3.0 var. 2008-11-21 11:29 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I ragged a little bit on “var” a while ago, but there are some cases where I think it’s a handy shortcut. Those being when it’s abundantly clear what the underlying type is, like when creating new objects. For example, it makes perfect sense to change this. 373 words.

December, 2008

New Blog Platform for 2009. 2008-12-26 4:17 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
As I’ve hinted, I decided to rewrite my PHP blog platform again. I’ve been working too hard to shoehorn features I want into the old code, so it’s time for a re-imagining. Besides, it’s just fun to write new code. 461 words.

February, 2009

Get Microsoft Virtual PC. 2009-02-16 12:01 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I’ve heard about “virtualization” for years, but I never thought it was anything I needed to worry about. I just thought it was something for network engineers to tinker with in big, expensive data centers. It turns out there are plenty of handy uses for virtualization, using Microsoft’s Virtual PC, in your everyday computing life. 377 words.
Recent Aggravator Updates. 2009-02-16 10:48 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
In case anyone uses it, there’s been some minor changes to the Aggravator lately. 197 words.
How to Rename a Windows Service. 2009-02-17 10:27 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I came across a situation where I wanted to rename a Windows service that had already been installed. (In this case I wasn’t able to rebuild the application to alter the service installation properties, which would of course be the ideal solution.) Google was spectacularly unhelpful, so this is how you do it. 164 words.

March, 2009

Development Software I Use Now. 2009-03-01 2:55 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I’ve setup a new development PC, so I thought it was time once again to review the software I normally install and use for development (I last did this in December 2007). 254 words.
Comment Model. 2009-03-13 1:36 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Just so there’s a record of it, here’s how I’m planning to implement comments in the new blog platform. It’s geared toward a small community size. 413 words.
Eclipse and PDT for PHP Development. 2009-03-20 12:39 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I started looking for a PHP IDE again to replace the venerable TextPad. Last year I looked at NuSphere’s PhpEd, which was actually not bad but I couldn’t bring myself to spend $100+ on it just to get a little Intellisense. Now I’m looking at Eclipse with PHP Development Tools (PDT), which is free and open source. 1,782 words.
uvBlog 2.0 Code Released. 2009-03-23 2:42 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I posted uvBlog 2.0 (the PHP code that runs thomaskrehbiel.com) on Google Code under the GPL3 license. That basically means you can use it as long as you release the source code, too. 129 words.
My URL Shortening Service. 2009-03-26 9:53 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
As part of my continuing effort to take over the world, I’ve created my own personal url-shortening service: http://uvurl.net. 80 words.

April, 2009

Setting Up CruiseControl.NET. 2009-04-22 12:59 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
As an experiment, I’ve been working on setting up CruiseControl.NET at work, but I’ve run into a few annoying snags. 359 words.

May, 2009

Lessons Learned from the New Blog Platform. 2009-05-04 12:21 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Recently I upgraded the software running my home page. I spent a fair amount of time adding a feature I called “nano posting,” which was essentially a way to insert Twitter-style updates into the stream of posts. In the intervening time I’ve discovered that I don’t much like my implementation of that feature. 236 words.
Incorrect usage of SUBQUERY and feature is disabled. 2009-05-09 10:32 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I just looked at my home page to find it reporting a database error. “Incorrect usage of SUBQUERY and feature is disabled by allow_view_trigger_sp_subquery in /etc/my.cnf”. 115 words.

June, 2009

What We Didn’t Have For Amiga Development. 2009-06-29 1:38 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
While using Cloanto’s Amiga Forever to massage the source code for Rend24 into something that actually compiles*, I was amazed at the basic functionality we had to live without during the time I did Amiga development. 285 words.

August, 2009

Aggravator 3.0 Plans. 2009-08-20 2:07 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I’ve started working on a major update to my RSS feed aggregator. With this new 3.0 version, I hope to resolve a lot of outstanding problems and polish things up. 76 words.

September, 2009

Windows Live Writer, Remember Password and Atom Authentication. 2009-09-26 1:25 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I was working on an Atom publishing API for my blog, since I want to use more secure authentication than is possible with the MetaWeblog API. But I had no luck getting Windows Live Writer to authenticate against my API even though it tested out correctly in every other way. I finally discovered it was a quirk of Windows Live Writer. 410 words.
Silverlight 3: Web App Development That Doesn’t Suck?. 2009-09-30 2:15 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I’ve had some ideas for a more, let’s say, “animated” web site, but frankly large-scale Javascript development is tiresome and the thought of delving into Adobe Flash or Flex or AIR or whatever they call it now is too depressing to contemplate. With the release of Silverlight 3, I figured it was a good time to take a hard look at the Silverlight platform to see what it can do. 310 words.

October, 2009

Exploring Java Web Development, Part 1. 2009-10-25 3:39 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Out of curiosity and recent disgruntlement with ASP.NET I decided to look into Java web development. I haven’t done this since around 2002, so of course I’ve forgotten everything I ever knew about it. Herein I will attempt to document the knowledge I uncover. 480 words.
Exploring Java Web Development, Part 2. 2009-10-26 12:28 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
Day two of reacquainting myself with JSP development, wherein we learn that IDEs are powerful tools but they are not very friendly to newcomers. 422 words.
GridView, UpdatePanel and PopupControlExtender. 2009-10-26 10:56 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
This is a nightmarish combination to deal with in ASP.NET 3.5. I will attempt to document what I learned today about how to get this combination working. 690 words.
Exploring Java Web Development, Part 3. 2009-10-29 10:32 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I’m happy to report that I’ve completed resurrecting JWebTrack, the terribly feature-incomplete bug tracking project I did for a Java class oh so long ago. After building an appropriate database and populating it with some data, the app worked like a charm. 167 words.

November, 2009

A Peek at Google Web Toolkit. 2009-11-01 1:20 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
So I’m looking over this Google Web Toolkit thing since someone around here thinks it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. I hate to disappoint but it’s conceptually the same as the much-hated ASP.NET WebForms - it’s a framework to abstract HTML and Javascript away from the programmer. But instead of .NET and Visual Studio, Google’s version is based on Java and Eclipse. 250 words.

January, 2010

Looking Back at 2009 Goals. 2010-01-24 3:42 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
A look back at how I did on my goals for 2009. 452 words.

April, 2010

NoSQL is Coming. 2010-04-03 12:11 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
There has been an explosion of talk about “NoSQL” lately (ie. I’ve seen a few posts about it), and since it is every blogger’s obligation to follow the crowd and re-write what everyone else is saying, I shall now present my thoughts on NoSQL. 752 words.

July, 2010

Thoughts on Diaspora and Distributed Social Networks. 2010-07-09 2:16 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
[…]Like many people, I read about Diaspora a while back and thought it was a great idea. It’s one of the few open-source projects I could see myself contributing to. Unfortunately, it’s not “open” in the sense that the technical architecture is open to discussion - it will only become open after they define the architecture, good, bad or indifferent*. 690 words.

September, 2010

The Importance Of The Robots NoIndex Meta Tag, Or: What’s The Opposite of SEO?. 2010-09-16 11:59 PM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I’m not much into SEO (search engine optimization). It’s a booming industry for some, but I still have this crazily naive idea that good content will just naturally rise to the top of search results. That said, there are a some basic SEO guidelines that I try to follow on my site. 480 words.
A Diaspora Code Review. 2010-09-20 12:20 AM.
- Technology
- thomaskrehbiel.com
I was curious to see the Diaspora code base when it was released on September 15. Ever since I heard about Diaspora, I – like many other developers before me – have been pondering how I might architect a distributed social network myself, so I was curious to see how they had solved certain problems I was running into. The short answer is: They didn’t. 926 words.

July, 2023

Sunday Bits 7/30/2023. 2023-07-31 4:00 AM.
- Microblog
Eight microblogging bits from Sunday. #development #blog #homeowner 638 words.
The Imminent Blaugust - July 2023. 2023-07-31 8:00 AM.
- Blog
Blaugust 2023, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, blog site updates and microblogging, a nutritional reset, and more, in the summer heat. 2,606 words.

August, 2023

Wednesday Bits. 2023-08-03 4:00 AM.
- Microblog
Introducing myself, and a git blunder at work. Four microblogging bits from Wednesday. #activitypub #development 356 words.
Tuesday Bits. 2023-08-09 4:00 AM.
- Microblog
Tales of Baldur’s Gate 3, Java versus Golang, phone news. Seven microblogging bits from Tuesday. #blog #development #baldursgate3 #pathfinderkingmaker 658 words.

November, 2023

Autumn Leaves - November 2023 Part 1. 2023-11-15 9:45 AM.
- Blog
Snowrunner, voting, blog work, audiobooks, and more. Well, not much more than that, really. 2,395 words.