Thanks to Barry Gervin for pointing out the Loki site to me.

Loki is a free location based search and browser add-on allowing users to easily update their whereabouts. Loki uses the WIFI on your device and triangulation to determine the location of the device. Yes you heard me it uses WIFI. That's pretty cool. Loki can automatically update FaceBook, RSS Feeds or badges to let subscribers know your whereabouts.

Currently Loki uses Google maps to display the location. I thought it would be great to integrate Loki with Virtual Earth using the RSS feed they make available.

Basically a small (200 by 200 pixel) map is displayed centred on the Loki location from the RSS feed. The map also displays an icon at the centre. Hovering over the icon displays a small tool tip like window where an image and some text is displayed. If you want a larger map, just click the map and a new window is displayed with the same map but with a 600 by 600 pixel size.

If you are interested in seeing this in action visit my home page.

Guess the movie

I woke up. The pain and sickness all over me like an animal. Then I realized what it was. The music coming up from the floor was our old friend, Ludwig Van, and the dreaded Ninth Symphony.

We certainly don't get enough of it. And we need it with all the new technologies MS is throwing at us, LINQ, ASP.NET MVC, SQL Server 2008, VS 2008, AJAX, WCF, WF, WPF and SilverLight, to name a few. The list goes on and on. Not to mention all the wonderful third party products. How does one keep up with all of it? The plain answer is you can't but you can prepare yourself. Learn relevant technologies. Read blogs on a daily basis. Watch a webcast or two per week. Watch DNRTV and listen to .NET Rocks.

But sometimes nothing beats hands on training, the kind with an instructor. Today I'm at ObjectSharp taking a course called Effective LINQ, taught by Barry Gervin. Barry is the Toronto Microsoft Regional Director and frequently speaks at user groups and conferences. He is an expert in LINQ and I am fortunate to be attending one of his courses, learning hands on.

Keep up the training!

Guess the movie

Welcome to the desert of the real. 

I'm a bit of a do-it-yourself-er. I've wired up complete basements. Installed kitchen sinks, plumbing and all. Sometimes I have the correct tools, other times not. When I don't have the correct tools I sometimes improvise using tools that were not necessarily designed for the work at hand. Almost invariably it ends up taking more time than if I went out and purchased the tool or even worse the job gets completed on time but is of poor quality.

The same can be said of programming, the right tool for the job at hand is invaluable. Take for example LINQPad. This SQL Management Console like tool but for LINQ allows you to construct LINQ queries and run them directly in the LINQPad IDE. I've tried simple LINQ queries and it works great! Thanks Joseph Albahari, another tool to add to our Toolbox.

Guess the movie

I killed two people. One was... yesterday? He was just a boy and I led him into quicksand. The other was... well, before Aqaba. I had to execute him with my pistol, and there was something about it that I didn't like... I enjoyed it.

Back in October of 2007 I was working on an ASP.NET application for a large financial firm. It was a standard textbook ASP.NET site. Master page, site map, Data Adapters and Data Grids and so on. I had a prototype complete and running on my dev box and decided to deploy it on a staging server and perform some integration tests. For some peculiar reason it stop working. I know, I know we've all heard it before; but it works on my computer! But that is exactly what was happening, it worked perfectly well on the dev box but behaved differently on the server. Upon further investigation it appeared as though session state was being lost. But what could be causing this. I went through the check list; web.config, IIS config and so on.

After some searching on Google I found a posting suggesting that an underscore in the computer name will cause session to be lost. The server in question did have an underscore in it's name. At first I didn't believe the posting and went looking elsewhere. After spending an hour or so on Google I found another independent posting suggesting that an underscore would clobber session state.

I then used the IP address rather than the computer name and eureka it worked. We later changed the server name so it no longer contained any underscores. Problem solved.

Sometimes it's the small things that get us. Thank's to Google, a developer's best friend! 

Guess the movie

You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? Then who the hell else are you talking... you talking to me? Well I'm the only one here.

Contrary to popular belief .NET programmers do not live and breath all things .NET. Occasionally, we get up for a glass of water, leave for a bio-break, or go for a cup of Tim Horton's coffee (or in Jean-Luc's case 5 or 6 cups). Heck we have even been known to visit the local watering hole and have a pint or two.

Every Saturday morning, rain, snow or shine, a group of us get together for a game of football (the kind with quarterbacks). It's an opportunity to get away from the computer and enjoy some sunshine. Here are some photos of us;

Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.