I love this presentation by Jesper Johansson. I saw it at the ICE Conference here in Edmonton last year. The ironic part was that a teacher of mine was sitting right beside me and had taught me to use the exact same bad code as Jesper used to bring down the whole system in his demo.

J. Ambrose Little has posted a great article over on CoDe Magazine's website about why using Dataset and data driven designs are a bad idea.

To expand on his article a little bit try this exercise. Go to any one of your customers and ask them to describe any business process that they currently use, now take note of how your customer describes the process. They will describe behaviours, responsibilities, and even the actual objects themselves to you.

If the customer sounds something like this then the solution that you design and model for them may be a great candidate for data driven design:

"We take all of our documents that need to be shipped to headquarters, and staple the related documents together (because we need to maintain the relationships between them), next we put them into a generic box and write "documents" on it with a marker (because the box needs a name silly). 

After they are in the box we send them using ground mail (because air mail is too fast and expensive) to corporate headquarters. Someone at corporate headquarters then takes the documents and does something with them, we hope that they make it to the right department and that they are used correctly."

Wow, I missed this over the holidays but Nikhil announced that a new CTP of Atlas has been released. From what I hear Atlas is going to have a GoLive license from Microsoft in 2006 but it won't be fully released until .NET 3.0.

Some of the changes look really good. The new and improved Atlas scriptmanager control renders out the Atlas script references so you no longer need a bunch of <Atlas:Script> tags on your page.

Also there is going to be better debugging help in this CTP (with even more debugging help coming in the future). Apparently, the script manager is going to detect whether or not debug is set to true in the web.config and run Atlas in release or debug mode based on that configuration setting.

There is a lot more cool stuff but Nikhil does a better job at explaining it than me. In the 2 months since I have looked at it, Microsoft has come a long way in developing Atlas into a better product so check it out and play around with it.

I forgot to mention that Wilco Bauwer has a handy Atlas class browser which is already updated to show the new CTP.

I was distracted from making some screencasts this evening by this article.

What an odd pair.

Update: Canada won 5-1!!!! I have to say watching international hockey is a great experience! Going to the rink and seeing 15,000 people cheering for the same team was awesome!

We managed to wrangle 3 tickets to the 2005 World Junior Canada vs. Finland game tomorrow! Hopefully Canada can put on a good performance for us. I got a cool Team Canada hoodie from Catherine's parents that I can wear to the game.

I have been walking my dog around the block and I noticed that Team Canada is staying in the hotel beside the condo. There are a bunch of Team Canada vans escorting the players and the coaching staff back and forth between the arenas.

Today I added the dasBlogExtraMacros.aspx">extra macros that Vasanth Dharmaraj created (thanks Vasanth!). They include links to Delicious, Technorati, and Bloglines so you can see who is linking to your posts (which is pretty much nobody for me but what the heck it's still fun to add them).

He provides instructions but I thought I would provide a little bit more information just to help people out who might get lost.

1 - Download the ExtraMacros zip file that contains the ExtraMacros.dll file. Upload this dll to your bin directory.

2 - Follow Vasanth's instructions to uncomment the snippets in the web.cofing file (located in your root Dasblog directory).

3 - Add the macros to your itemTemplate.blogtemplate file located in the themes directory (if your main theme is blogXP like mine you will have to add it to that file. I added my macros to the <div class="itemFooterStyle"> tag just above the <br clear="all"> tag and below the <%enclosure%> tag.

You should now be able to see which blogs are linking to your post.

Despite rain, sleet, snow, ice, multiple road closures due to accidents and road closures due to avalanche patrol we finally made it safely in just under 17 hours. As a bonus I got to see East Hastings street.....good times. We could've flown 4 times back and forth between Edmonton and Vancouver.

The weather is nice here so it was probably worth it. I am going to try and go see the World Jrs. Apparently I can get seats to USA vs. Norway on boxing day.

I have to get going now and have some beers and go check in at the hotel.

I just noticed today that NHL.com has a section on their website called blogs. My favorite blog so far is the stats blog.

Today is Christmas Eve for me. This year we are going to Catherine's parent's house on the 25th for Christmas so my family is celebrating Christmas tomorrow at our house tomorrow. 

Some things about this year's Christmas worked in my favour:

- I finished my Christmas shopping last Monday, this beats my old record by about 10 days.

- This year I wasn't allowed to wrap any presents because, to put it bluntly, I suck at wrapping presents. My technique usually involves a lot more wrapping paper than I really need and way too much hockey tape that holds everything together. I do think however, that my Chirstmas present wrapping technique makes Christmas last longer because getting into presents that are from me often involves a knife, a bottle of whiskey and some gumption.

This year because we are going to Vancouver I am going to be missing Christmas with my Dad's side of the family. This is both good and a bad.

The bad thing about missing Christmas on my Dad's side is that this year is my Grandma and Grandpa's 60th wedding anniversary and I am going to miss it. Catherine and I will have to make a special trip to visit them in January.

The good thing about missing Christmas on my Dad's side is that last year my Grandma decided to serve fruitcake that was from 1984 (I am not kidding), this prompted the best line of Christmas 2004 to come from my Grandpa "fruit cake is like a good scotch, the older it is the better it gets". I coudln't have said it better myself.

Sick of moving your eyes over all those "words" on my blog?  Well now you don't have to!  All of my blog posts are now automatically podcasted (read to you for the non-nerds in the crowd) using Feed2Podcast.  Now you can listen to me on your commute to work, school or on long road trips.

The Feed2Podcast service is free and I am impressed with how they slip their ad in at the end of the post, very casual.

Subscribe to the feed here. Or using the link in the Links section on this webpage. 

This morning I got up early and decided to head down to the big craft sale at the University of Alberta. It was a good thing I went because I found some cool creatures made from old tools. They were created by a farmer from Craik, Saskatchewan named Jim Nodge. He joked that when he quits farming he's not going to have an auction to sell of his equipment he is just going to cut up his old machinery and make these sculptures.

I bought the wrench pen holder, check it out:

Catherine posted some pictures of our condo (warning sign not included) on her blog. We got a letter the other day asking us to pick out our options.

Tonight I am a motivated blogging tech machine, it is probably due to the fact I am still hung over from a Christmas party last night. I successfully got my CVS One Time Use Camcorder working. Here are the steps I took to get it working with my computer. Here is a sample movie I took of my dog Daisy sniffing my CVS camcorder.

1 - I downloaded and installed CVS Cam Quickinstall from here.

2 - I plugged my camcorder into my USB port.

3 - The found new hardware wizard pops up saying it found new hardware named "saturn".

4 - I selected the option "Search for files in the directory I specify" and pointed the file path to "C:\Program Files\CVS Camcorder Quickinstall 2.13\libusb-win32-device-bin-0.1.10.1\bin" and clicked the next button. After awhile of searching the new hardware wizard finds the inf file and installs the camcorder.

Note: There is no need to use libusb-win32-filter and libusb-win32-device to create your inf file. The inf file provided in by CVS Camcorder Quickinstall should work fine. This step confuses a lot of people.

5 - I downloaded and installed OPS.

6 - After OPS is installed you need to click the Open Camcorder button and then the Unlock button. After that you can download movies off of the camcorder and change the camcorder settings among other cool things.

I think I could listen to Mark Miller talk about Object Oriented Development all day and i'm not sure if that is something that I should be concerned about or not.  

Mark's appearances on .Net Rocks are a must listen for software developers. I wish he had a blog!

Put these on your MP3 player of choice:

http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showID=156

http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showID=137

http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showID=102

http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showID=81

If you haven't noticed, Apress has not included any of their books in the Google Book Search. Today I received the Apress newsletter and they announced that they have created the Apress Superindex. Here is an excerpt from their newsletter:

If you've ever kicked yourself for not book marking that PDF or turning down the corner of the book with that cool code, stress no longer. Apress has built SuperIndex, an index capable of finding that keyword or code snippet that will make your life much easier.

Very nice! Bookmarked. Go check it out.

Yesterday I got my cheque in the mail for doing a survey on Windows Mobile. It was a very nice holiday surprise as I wasn't expecting to ever see the cheque.

I recommend signing up and trying it out because unfortunately I am no longer eligible.

Over the past week and a half I have really tried to get into Digg.com and I am having a hard time. Most of the stories that make it to the front page are stories that I am not really interested in.

Maybe it is because the site is run by the users who are mostly made up of the Slashdot crowd. I don't find I have much in common with them. I don't find it interesting that (insert latest Linux distro here) was released today. Or Apple has a new product out that all the Apple fanboys are going to swoon over for around 10 days until Apple releases another product.

I'm too attention deficit to be much of a gamer. I can play about 3 races of Forza and then I get bored and have to do something else. So a lot of the posts on video games don't interest me.

Let me take 5 headlines from today:

See a CPU explode! - What is interesting about this? Not a lot too me. Thanks for wasting my time Digg.

Apple's New Cheap Laptop - Great but is it going to be as good as the cheap Linux laptop from MIT? Debate amongst yourselves for hours Digg users!

Apple's Mac OS X and Safari web browser gain market share - This one is a huge waste of everyone's time. When Apple has 50% of the market share in both departments then it is news.

If you're not using Firefox, start now - Great thanks for the 100 articles on Firefox and how great it is per day. If I am already using Firefox what is your point? I think everyone that goes to Digg is alreeady using Firefox.

Apple G4 and G5 processors optimized Firefox 1.5 builds. - At least the Digg user here was smart enough to combine both Apple and Firefox into one article so he actually saved me time by not having 2 seperate articles on how haxorz L33T Firefox and Apple are.

I think there are some stories that are cool but a lot of stories just plain suck. There must be some kind of Firefox extension that causes people to vote on Apple, Linux, Firefox each time a story on one of them is posted to Digg.

U2 and Arcade Fire played together in Montreal last Monday and the covered Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division. Check it out

Here are some great places to find more information on Atlas:

If you find more please post in the comments or email me and I will add them to this list.

Atlas Webpages and Articles:

Nikhil Kothari's Blog: http://www.nikhilk.net Great resource for information on The Atlas Architecture, The Atlas Programming Model, Atlas XML Script, he also has some sample Atlas applications and debugging tools.

Shankun Niyogi's Blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/shankun

Wilco Bauwer's Blog the Atlas Section: http://www.wilcob.com/Wilco/Atlas.aspx

The Official Atlas Homepage: http://shrinkster.com/9k7 Enough said.

PDC 2005 Presentations: http://shrinkster.com/9k8 Watch presentations on Atlas that are better than mine! It also looks like the webpage was written using Atlas. To find the presentations search for "Atlas" (duh).

Atlas Hands on Labs: http://atlas.asp.net/docs/default.aspx When you are bored to death with Atlas theory you gotta get your hands dirty and try it out.

Atlas Quickstart Tutorials: http://atlas.asp.net/quickstart/default.aspx Read these and see how Microsoft is making JavaScript easier.

Atlas Class Browser: http://atlas.asp.net/quickstart/util/classbrowser.aspx 

Why Atlas there is no Synchronous Support in Atlas: http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/archive/2005/12/01/432031.aspx

Scott Guthrie's Description on Atlas: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/06/28/416185.aspx

Atlas Announcements: http://weblogs.asp.net/atlas

Atlas Forums: http://forums.asp.net/default.aspx?GroupID=34

Atlas Applications:

Virtual Places an Atlas Application in Action: http://apps.nikhilk.net/VirtualPlaces/ made by Nikhil

Atlas Wiki: http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/info/future/atlas_wiki/ 

Atlas Screencasts:

Atlas Screencast by XMLForASP: http://xmlforasp.net/codeSection.aspx?csID=116 Cool screencast of an application that utilizes the Northwind database and an Atlas virtual earth map control.

My Atlas Screencast of the Atlas Hands on Labs: http://www.stevenrockarts.com/videos/AtlasHelloWorldDemo.wmv

http://www.stevenrockarts.com/videos/AtlasDeclarativeDemo.wmv

My Atlas Presentation Slides and Source Code: http://www.stevenrockarts.com/Atlas%20Presentation.zip

Podcasts:

Introduction to Atlas by the Polymorphic Podcast: http://polymorphicpodcast.com/2005/11/10/

Wally McClure's Atlas Talk: http://aspnetpodcast.com/CS11/blogs/asp.net_podcast/archive/2005/12/02/55.aspx

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