First Silverlight Facebook App - My City

I have just added this First Silverlight Facebook application - My City. Unfortunately you can add only one citizen a day. So, yep, here is my city with one factory worker!

.NET User Group 5 - Introduction to the ASP.NET MVC (Model-View Controller) Framework

Presented by John-Daniel Trask from Mindscape

Date: 19/03/2008
Gather at 5:45pm, starting at 6:00pm
Catering: Pizza & Drinks (we will have non-pork but non-vege pizzas this time!)
Venue: Olympic Software, 10 Cawley Street, Ellerslie, Auckland
Register here: Ellerslie DNUG or Dot Net NZ

John-Daniel will be introducing the ASP.NET MVC framework from Microsoft which allows developers to create ASP.NET solutions without using standard web forms that they're used to.

This new framework empowers developers to more easily create robust solutions based on solid design patterns.

This talk will start by introducing the MVC pattern and then dive into the specifics of the framework so even if are new to using the MVC design pattern you will be able to understand what is being discussed. Finally, he will cover unit testing and mocking to validate your solutions.

See Scott Gutherie's blog for ASP .NET MVC Framework.

Introduction to .NET Framework Programming PowerPoint Slides

Rodney has put up his power point slides, go here to downalod it. :)

Post-.NET User Group 4 - Introduction of .NET Framework Programming

 

This is Rodney Lake, our speaker last night. We have 56 people with different level of expertise here last night and Rodney sure has done a very good job. I believe everyone (including myself) has got something out from the presentation.

 

 

The presentation was really good. I think it has given people a good introduction about .NET and what .NET Framework can do without overwhelming them with too much technical information. Quite a number of people come talk to me and ask some questions after the presentation, showing that people are inspired by all the information presented by Rodney! It's good to see people are happy about the meeting.

 

We have ordered 28 pizzas. Maybe not all the girls eat like me (who have ate 4 pieces, i.e. half of a pizza), we do have some pizzas left. Things I've learnt from this are: 1. We need chicken and beef pizzas, not just vegetarian! 2. We should count half for guys and a quarter for girls. 3. People are more into fizzy drinks and juice than beer (well myself don't drink beer too). Anyway, see me carrying these empty pizza boxes, that's still quite a lot!

P.S. I told my Java friends last night that once I have started developing in .NET framework, I think I can never go back to Java again. Of course Java people can disagree with me since I do not have industrial experience with Java (but 4 years University experience, developing Java everyday...).

Manually remove Trojan algssl.exe

Open your Task Manager, if you see a "Form 1" application running all the time, and it is algssl.exe process. Yes, it is a Trojan. Apparently it is a Chinese community thingy. I am not sure how did I get it, but apparently Norton and other anti-virus thing cannot remove it completely. So you have to do it manually.

Most of the online explanation is in Chinese, so I am writing an English one, for people who don't know Chinese but got this Chinese Trojan on their computer.

Step 1:
Kill the algssl.exe process

Step2:
Go to C:\Windows\System32\
Delete algssl.exe, msime80.exe, and msfir80.exe

Step 3:
Edit Registry (run regedit)
Go to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\
SOFTWARE\
Microsoft\
Windows\
CurrentVersion\
Explorer\
Advanced\
Folder\
Hidden\
SHOWALL

Delete CheckedValue
Recreate a DWORD CheckedValue with Value = 1

Step 4:
If you are using XP, you probably can turn on "show hidden files" and search for autorun.inf, tel.xls.exe (or sal.xls.exe). All located at the top level of the hard drive (i.e. C:\, D:\, E:\, F:\, G:\...so on) should be removed. Note that your external/pluggable hard drives maybe affected as well, so plug in and do the search and delete for them.

If you are using Vista, unfortunately "show hidden files" is not doing the trick. What I did was using command prompt. You can list hidden files with
C:\>dir /AH
and delete them with
C:\>del /AH autorun.inf
C:\>del /AH sal.xls.exe

*If any of your hard drive was not cleared with these files, when you double click the drive to explore it, the same Trojan would be installed again. So when you switch between drivers, do not double click to explore. You can type E: for example in your explorer bar.

Step 5:
Go back to regedit, go to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\
SOFTWARE\
Microsoft\
Windows\
CurrentVersion\
Run

and

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\
Software\
Microsoft\
Windows\
CurrentVersion\
Run

to remove anything with msime80.exe or msfir80.exe.

Step 6:
I don't have to do this step but apparently some people do. Run msconfig, go to Start Up and remove anything with msime80.exe or msfir80.exe.

Restart your machine, everything should be OK now.

Alter Column to become Case Sensitive

SQL Server 2000 (or above) allows individual columns become case sensitive by identifying collation. For example:

ALTER TABLE TblName 
ALTER COLUMN ColName VARCHAR(100) COLLATE Latin1_General_CS_AS NULL

Where _CS_ indicates it is a Case Sensitive column.

New Olympic Software Website

http://www.olympic.co.nz/


We have redesigned the website. It's simple and clean. I helped Warner in the flash stuff! :)

Blah 4 - Girls

Right, it's good to see familiar and unfamiliar faces in the summer road trip event. Among all these faces, one obvious observation I made was the number of girls comparing to the number of guys is still low. Alex and I had been discussing why most of the girls go into industries like accounting and finance. Back in University, 25% of our software engineering class were girls. However it's much less than this percentage in yesterday event.

Last week I had been chatting with Amanda (who organises the Girl Geek Dinners in New Zealand over emails. I didn't go to these dinners before because there's no one (girl) from my company would like to go. Amanda told me that actually a lot of girls didn't come with friends. Umm... although i don't want to be named "geek", but I may consider going to the next one, just to see how many girls in the community, haha. :D

2008 Summer Road Trip - Auckland - Done (Yay yay!)

The weather wasn't so great yesterday, but the event made the day special. Yes, it's the first day of the 2008 Summer Road Trip and they were here in Auckland. It's a good experience for me as this is the first time (after at least 10 years) for me to MC in an event with about 200 people. I was quite nervous and actually I had left out something in the Intro and Outro but I think it wasn't too bad.

We had a very little unexpected problem about the venue (see Darryl's blog) but we sort ourselves out. We started the show at 1:30pm. Chris, Jeremy and Alex had given us very informative presentations. They have a very interesting showcase and everyone seems to be impressed. We have pretty good feedback (as far as I can see from the evaluation forms), except, ah, apparently everyone wants a toilet break like me.

It's good to see familiar and unfamiliar faces in the event. I really hope to see all these faces again in our Ellerslie User Group events and have a chance to talk to each. Yesterday was a bit rush and I didn't even have a chance to say hi and bye to my own colleagues (from Olympic Software and friends. So, look forward to meet and talk to everyone in the near future! :)