I could have paid over $1500 for a .NET plugin for Adobe. Or I could use this inside my loop that processes the files.

string pdfText = File.ReadAllText(file.FullName);

Regex rx1 = new Regex(@"/Type\s*/Page[^s]");

MatchCollection matches = rx1.Matches(pdfText);

loandoc.page_count = matches.Count.ToString();

I thought it might be terribly slow because it’s reading each file, but for our needs, it worked great. Well-worth the savings in money on the plug-in just to get the page counts.

Now if I could just get page counts on Word docs without COM…any tips from the peanut gallery?  =)

In order to get the string results of the procedure into an untyped DataSet, I used ReadXml and a StringReader.

DataSet dataset = new DataSet();

dataset.ReadXml(new StringReader(xmlString));

You can grab a sample XML file called books.xml from Microsoft’s website here if you want to play and see how to work with what comes from ReadXml into an untyped, plain DataSet. A word of caution, though — books.xml is a well-formed and structured file and may be easier to work with than is typical of other people’s files.

There are other options, of course, depending on what works best for your application and data. You could read it into an XmlDocument and use XML methods (XPath and such), you could define a strongly typed dataset and read it into that, or you could use XmlDataSource. Play with your data and see what works best for it and your situation. Remember the rule — keep it simple. If it seems like what you’re doing is far more complicated than it needs to be, it probably is.

Ennui:

1. boredom: the feeling of being bored by something tedious
2. listlessness, boredom; melancholia, depression
3. the French word for boredom

It’s a fancy way of saying that you’re so bored, you might just gouge out your own eyeballs for pure entertainment value.

So, since I love my job and don’t plan on going anywhere soon, I figured I wouldn’t be given a chance to mess with anyone over these, so I posted my responses instead. Enjoy.

“If you could be any character in fiction, whom would you be?”

Harry Potter, of course. He gets the coolest broomstick.

“If Hollywood made a movie about your life, whom would you like to see play the lead role as you?”

Hands down, it would have to be Seth Green. You don’t get a cooler geek than Seth. We’d have to give him a wig and dress him in drag, but he wouldn’t mind, would he? He probably makes a prettier girl than me, anyway.

“If you had to be shipwrecked on a deserted island, but all your human needs — such as food and water — were taken care of, what two items would you want to have with you?”

A vibrator and a book. A long book. Oh, wait, scratch the book, I need a carton of batteries. Enough batteries and I won’t have time to read, anyway.

“If you were a type of food, what type of food would you be?”

Chocolate. After all, who doesn’t love chocolate? Only the mentally insane don’t like chocolate, folks.

“How do I rate as an interviewer?”

Do you really want me to answer that after you asked me questions like those?

Anyone care to tackle any more of these fun and interesting questions? Share with us in the comments!

I just want to thank all of you for your educational emails over the past year.

Thanks to you, I no longer open a public bathroom door without using a paper towel.

I can’t use the remote in a hotel room because I don’t know what the last person was doing while flipping through the channels.

I can’t sit down on the hotel bedspread because I can only imagine what has happened on it since it was last washed.

I can’t enjoy lemon slices in my tea or on my seafood anymore because lemon peels have been found to contain all kinds of nasty germs including feces.

I have trouble shaking hands with someone who has been driving because the number one pastime while driving alone is picking your nose.

Eating a Little Debbie sends me on a guilt trip because I can only imagine how many gallons of trans fats I have consumed over the years.

I can’t touch any woman’s purse for fear she has placed it on the floor of a public bathroom.

I must send my special thanks to whoever sent me the one about poop in the glue on envelopes because I now have to use a wet sponge with every envelope that needs sealing.

Also, now I have to scrub the top of every can I open for the same reason.

I no longer have any savings because I gave it to a sick girl (Penny Brown) who is about to die in the hospital for the 1,387,258th time.

I no longer have any money at all, but that will change once I receive the $15,000 that Bill Gates/Microsoft and AOL are sending me for participating in their special e-mail program …

I no longer worry about my soul because I have 363,214 angels looking out for me, and St.Theresa’s novena has granted my every wish.

I no longer eat KFC because their chickens are actually horrible mutant freaks with no eyes or feathers.

I no longer use cancer-causing deodorants even though I smell like a water buffalo on a hot day.

Thanks to you, I have learned that my prayers only get answered if I forward an e-mail to seven of my friends and make a wish within five minutes.

Because of your concern I no longer drink Coca Cola because it can remove toilet stains.

I no longer can buy gasoline without taking someone along to watch the car so a serial killer won’t crawl in my back seat when I’ m p umping gas.

I no longer drink Pepsi or Dr Pepper since the people who make these products are atheists who refuse to put ‘Under God’ on their cans.

I no longer use Saran wrap in the microwave because it causes cancer.

And thanks for letting me know I can’t boil a cup of water in the microwave anymore because it will blow up in my face…disfiguring me for life.

I no longer check the coin return on pay phones because I could be pricked with a needle infected with AIDS.

I no longer go to shopping malls because someone will drug me with a perfume sample and rob me.

I no longer receive packages from UPS or FedEx since they are actually Al Qaeda in disguise.

I no longer shop at Target since they are French and don’t support our American troops or the Salvation Army.

I no longer answer the phone because someone will ask me to dial a number for or which I will get a phone bill with calls to Jamaica , Uganda , Singapore and Uzbekistan .

I no longer buy expensive cookies from Neiman-Marcus since I now have their recipe.

Thanks to you, I can’t use anyone’s toilet but mine because a big brown African spider is lurking under the seat to cause me instant death when it bites my butt.

And thanks to your great advice, I can’t ever pick up $5.00 dropped in the parking lot because it probably was placed there by a rapist waiting underneath my car to grab my leg.

If you don’t send this e-mail to at least 144,000 people in the next 70 minutes, a large dove with diarrhea will land on your head at 5:00 PM this afternoon and the fleas from 12 camels will infest your back, causing you to grow a hairy hump. I know this will occur because it actually happened to a friend of my next door neighbor’s ex-mother-in-law’s second husband’s cousin’s beautician..

Have a wonderful day..

RESTful Web services: The basics

Relative vs. Absolute References in Formulas

Excel Basics: How to add drop down list to validate data

What the IF? - learn 6 cool things you can do with excel if() functions

10 Terrible Tech Ads

How to Beat the Plague of Limiting Beliefs

using System;
namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
   class Program
   {
      static void Main(string[] args)
      {
      // fun with DateTime
      // right now, including the time
      Console.WriteLine(DateTime.Now);

      // today's date, no time (midnite)
      Console.WriteLine(DateTime.Today);

      // stripping a time off a DateTime (so it's midnite, useful for database queries)
      DateTime startDate = DateTime.Parse("10/31/2008 5:25 pm"); // pretend this came from a database or something
      Console.WriteLine(startDate); // see the time displayed
      startDate = startDate.Date; // this is just the date portion with no time
      Console.WriteLine(startDate); // see, just has the date now

      // difference, in number of days, between two dates, human-logic, that is, the 5th is 2 days after the 3rd, no matter what time it was
      DateTime endDate = DateTime.Parse("11/03/2008 4:25 pm"); // pretend this came from a database or something, too
      int days = (startDate.Date - endDate.Date).Duration().Days; // absolute value, order of start and end dates is not important
      Console.WriteLine(days);
      int days2 = (startDate.Date - endDate.Date).Days; // real value, order of start and end dates IS important
      Console.WriteLine(days2);

      // difference between dates with time portion, such as .25 hours (time and attendance, payroll)
      startDate = DateTime.Parse("11/17/2008 8:00 am");
      endDate = DateTime.Parse("11/17/2008 4:45 pm");
      TimeSpan interval = endDate - startDate; // order matters
      Console.WriteLine(interval);

      // hey, don't we get a lunch break?
      DateTime startLunch = DateTime.Parse("11/17/2008 12:00 pm");
      DateTime endLunch = DateTime.Parse("11/17/2008 12:25 pm");
      TimeSpan lunchInterval = endLunch - startLunch; 
      Console.WriteLine(interval - lunchInterval); // 20 minutes of overtime! (yeah, right)

      Console.Read();
      }
   }
}

Excel error leaves Barclays with more Lehman assets than it bargained for

October 14, 2008 (Computerworld) A reformatting error in an Excel spreadsheet has cropped up in the largest bankruptcy case in U.S. history, prompting a legal motion by Barclays Capital Inc. to amend its deal to buy some of the assets of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

…

one of its first-year law associates had unknowingly added the contracts when reformatting a spreadsheet in Excel.

Going on to read the rest of the article, it seems the real error here was that someone was in a hurry and didn’t pay enough attention to what he was doing. He was trying to export contents of Excel to a PDF.

However, contracts that had been marked as “hidden” in the spreadsheet when it was received by the law firm were added to the purchase offer during the reformatting process, according to the motion. Those contracts weren’t supposed to be part of the deal; they also were marked with an “N” for “No” in the original version of the spreadsheet, Cleary Gottlieb said in the motion.

That doesn’t seem like a “reformatting” error to me. That seems like an ID1OT error. We all do dumb things when we’re rushing to complete a task. That’s why I try very hard NOT to be in a hurry. It just leads to screw-ups. In this poor guy’s case, though, his mistake was very costly to both him and his company.

I have made some mistakes when rushing that have taught me the extreme value of simply taking that extra time to proof-read, and to breathe. I’ve used the wrong set of primary keys to update a database. I’ve forgotten a very crucial piece of a where clause. These mistakes have taught me to step back, take a little extra time, and don’t stress, or I might be spending a lot MORE time cleaning up my mess.

What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made when you’re trying to rush to complete a task? What did it teach you? Did you take responsibility, or try to blame the tools you used? How did it work out for you?

An old country preacher had a teenage son, and it was getting time the boy should give some thought to choosing a profession. Like many young men his age, the boy didn’t really know what he wanted to do, and he didn’t seem too concerned about it. One day, while the boy was away at school, his father decided to try an experiment. He went into the boy’s room and placed on his study table four objects.

1. A bible.

2. A silver dollar.

3. A bottle of whiskey.

4. And a Playboy magazine.

“I’ll just hide behind the door”, the old preacher said to himself. “When he comes home from school today, I’ll see which object he picks up.

If it’s the bible, he’s going to be a preacher like me, and what a blessing that would be! If he picks up the dollar, he’s going to be a business man, and that would be okay, too. But if he picks up the bottle, he’s going to be a no-good drunken bum, and Lord, what a shame that would be. And worst of all if he picks up that magazine he’s going to be a skirt-chasing womanizer.”
The old man waited anxiously, and soon heard his son’s foot-steps as he entered the house whistling and headed for his room.

The boy tossed his books on the bed, and as he turned to leave the room he spotted the objects on the table. With curiosity in his eye, he walked over to inspect them.

Finally, he picked up the Bible and placed it under his arm. He picked up the silver dollar and dropped into his pocket. He uncorked the bottle and took a big drink, while he admired this month’s centerfold.

“Lord have mercy!”, the old preacher whispered disgustedly .. “He’s gonna run for Congress!”

I’ve seen this question posed in a few different forms. One guy wanted to have the user click on a GridView row and have a new window open with an external URL. Another wanted the click to pass a bound ID to the new window. Someone else wanted to have the click fire off a third party script.

You can either wait until the whole thing is loaded, then iterate through the rows, or you can attach a script during the binding. Most GridViews are databound at some point, and it’s quicker to just use that event than to iterate through who knows how many rows after the fact.

Here is an example ASP.NET GridView and SqlDataSource (using Northwind).

<asp:GridView ID="GridView1" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="False" DataKeyNames="CategoryID"
 DataSourceID="SqlDataSource1" OnRowDataBound="GridView1_RowDataBound">
 <Columns>
 <asp:BoundField DataField="CategoryID" HeaderText="CategoryID" InsertVisible="False"
 ReadOnly="True" SortExpression="CategoryID" />
 <asp:BoundField DataField="CategoryName" HeaderText="CategoryName" SortExpression="CategoryName" />
 <asp:BoundField DataField="Description" HeaderText="Description" SortExpression="Description" />
 </Columns>
</asp:GridView>
<asp:SqlDataSource ID="SqlDataSource1" runat="server" ConnectionString="<%$ ConnectionStrings:NorthwindConnectionString %>"
 SelectCommand="SELECT [CategoryID], [CategoryName], [Description] FROM [Categories]">
</asp:SqlDataSource>

Here is how you could attach a script that opens an arbitrary URL when the user clicks the row. My example passes the (data bound) category name to Google as a search.

protected void GridView1_RowDataBound(object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e)
{
 if (e.Row.RowType == DataControlRowType.DataRow)
 {
 string script = String.Format("window.open('http://www.google.com/search?q={0}')", ((DataRowView)e.Row.DataItem)["CategoryName"]);
 e.Row.Attributes.Add("onclick", script);
 }
}

Here is how you could open a new window and pass the GridView row’s DataKey to it. This example has just the one key, CategoryId.

protected void GridView1_RowDataBound(object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e)
{
 if (e.Row.RowType == DataControlRowType.DataRow)
 {
 string url = System.Web.VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute("~/Default9.aspx") + "?CategoryId=" +
 Server.UrlEncode(Convert.ToString(GridView1.DataKeys[e.Row.DataItemIndex].Value));
 string script = "window.open('" + url + "')";
 e.Row.Attributes.Add("onclick", script);
 }
}

“Can I touch them?”

“You can touch them.”

“No.”   *kid changes his mind*

Too cute.

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more animals

I can’t copy and paste text, my right-click is broken, I can’t use the arrow keys to navigate, the tab key doesn’t tab form elements properly, and the enter key doesn’t submit forms. The modal windows render IE tabs useless. So we end up opening this particular application in its own MSIE window and open a different instance for everything else.

Every time I mention that something is “broken”, I am told it is by design to help our poor newbie users not break anything.

The design completely violates any semblance of usability, standards, and sanity. Experienced users are frustrated to the point of wanting to bash someone’s skull in. So, when I’m surfing the internet and see posts like this one, detailing how to break your application on purpose because you don’t feel like training users, it makes me want to scream.

If people are “accidentally submitting” the form, it’s a lot better, at least in my opinion, to force a confirmation than to break the form. Even better, try TRAINING people. I know, that’s just nonsense, isn’t it?

The tab key moves between fields, not the enter key. If you need to allow carriage returns in input, then use the correct form element to allow it, such as textarea.

As far as I’m concerned, as a user, the form is SUPPOSED TO SUBMIT WHEN I HIT THE ENTER KEY. A simple google search shows I am not alone — people consider the thing broken if that doesn’t happen.

Breaking expected GUI behavior to cater to your inexperienced users is like saying you have a subset of people who drive cars who prefer the gas pedal to be on the left side and the brake pedal on the right, so that’s how you’re going to design YOUR car. That’s just great. Now, I’m used to the gas pedal being on the right, but when I get in YOUR car, it’s on the left. Thanks for confusing the hell out of me and making me think your car is broken.

Standards exist for a reason. In a car, the steering wheel steers it, the pedals are in the same spots, and other controls work similarly enough that a person should be able to get in the car and drive it with little fuss, as long as they already know how to drive another car. For computer applications, Mac applications, Linux applications, and Windows applications all have conventions so that a person learns which keys tend to do which actions. An example of this is the control+c key combination on Windows. That should copy things to my clipboard. If it did something else, I’d be confused and peeved. You wouldn’t hijack that key combination for your winforms app (unless you enjoy frustrated users), so why would you hijack the enter key for a web form?

Am I alone in getting this annoyed? Do you think there is ever a good reason to choose to break a form for experienced users in the interests of inexperienced ones? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Edited to add: Due to the comments left, I want to be very clear here. It’s the CLIENTS I am pissed at, most of all the people who requested the abomination I have to use every day. I fail at English.

Learn CSS Positioning In 10 Steps

I’m really mostly a server-side chick, so while I like CSS in theory, I don’t use it a lot beyond the most basic things like setting colors, fonts, and maybe styling the occasional list item set into a menu. I don’t really deal with front-end design on my day job. My CSS experience is pretty much limited to hacking other people’s CSS in themes I’m trying to use.

So CSS positioning is still a bit confuzzling for me. I liked the 10 steps of this tutorial because I could go back and forth to step 1 to compare easily and SEE the difference.

Hope this helps someone else, too!

upside down dog

http://upsidedowndogs.com/

Enjoy!

So I finally got around to looking it up.

A behavior that I take for granted in C# is the result of using the conditional operators (two pipe symbols ||  or 2 ampersand symbols && ) with boolean expressions. For an OR, the first expression that evaluates to true stops the evaluations. For AND, the first one that evaluates to false stops them.

This makes a big difference when doing checking for nulls or other conditions that would cause runtime exceptions without having to nest the checks.

This code runs fine, even with no dataset.

DataSet ds = null;
// code here to load dataset, etc

if (ds != null && 
    ds.Tables != null &&
    ds.Tables[0] != null &&
    ds.Tables.Count > 0)
{
   //do something with the table
}

This code throws a runtime exception, because ds is null, so you get a NullReferenceException when it proceeds to go on and hit ds.Tables.

DataSet ds = null;
// code here to load dataset, etc
if (ds != null & 
   ds.Tables != null &
   ds.Tables[0] != null &
   ds.Tables.Count > 0)
{
  //do something with the table
}

As an aside, I believe the default for VB.NET OR and AND is to evaluate all sides all the time as Boolean Inclusive, since I’ve been flummoxed by null reference exceptions I didn’t expect when trying similar coding. One of these days I’ll look that up, too.  =)

Got more tips or goodies for us? Please share them in the comments!

“The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, the education, the money, than circumstances, than failure, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company… a church… a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past… we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude. I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. And so it is with you… we are in charge of our Attitudes.”

– Charles R. Swindoll

From the article:

“The new law imposes strict standards on commercial kennels, including at least twice-a-year veterinary exams, larger cages and exercise requirements.”

I applaud their efforts, and I hope Iowa and the other puppy mill states follow suit with similar laws.

My worry is that despite the laws, unscrupulous commercial kennels will not change their ways. Let’s face it, it costs a lot more money to provide veterinary care, space, good food, exercise, and a clean environment for a large number of dogs. You have to pay more vet bills, and you have to pay more employees. You have to pay for lighting, air conditioning, and heating for the kennels. It’s going to cost a kennel money to bring up their care standard. Will the cost of violating the law be higher than the cost of complying with it?

Fines only punish a business if the amount they have to pay is greater than the amount they would pay for complying. A true punishment would be a 3 strikes variety — after 3 violations, they lose their license. PERMANENTLY. The article didn’t mention what the punishment is for violations, but if it’s the usual fines, it’s not going to be harsh enough.

Also, where will they get the people to enforce the law? Will they have twice yearly inspections of every licensed kennel in the state? All (according to the article) 2600 of them? There are around 260 working days in the year for a typical Monday-Friday job. How could they possibly manage that many inspections? On whose tax dollar? No, I’m betting they will rely heavily on complaints and required paperwork submissions. Any idiot can hire an unethical veterinarian who is short on cash to that for them.

Having the law is certainly a step forward, but puppy mills will never cease to exist until people stop buying their puppies. Please support your local ethical breeder. Don’t buy a dog from a pet store. Your dog will live for 8, 10, even 15 years or more. You don’t want a ton of health and behavioral problems to have to contend with. Choose your breeder carefully.

What do you think? Will the new law make any difference? Is it worth taxpayer cash to stop puppymills, or should we concentrate on educating the public and let the free market put an end to it?  Share your thoughts in the comments.

From the article:

“SAN FRANCISCO - A federal judge has kept in place a temporary prohibition on RealNetworks Inc.’s distribution of software that lets consumers copy and store DVD movies on their personal computers and portable hard drives.”

Apparently, the judge must not surf the internet very often, or he or she would know that there is ALREADY software available that copies movies from DVDs to your hard drive. Xilisoft DVD Ripper, DVD Rip, and AOA DVD Ripper come to mind. There are more, of course.

I’m pretty peeved that I have to resort to “illegal” software to rip my OWN DVDS to my computer.

“The movie studios contend that the software allows pirating. RealNetwork argues it is legal.”

Dear studios,

Newsflash!!! - if I wanted to pirate your videos, I already have software to do so. Stop being morons so I can get software that works better to copy movies I legally own so I can watch them anywhere I wish on my laptop without having to tote 16 DVDs with me on vacation. Welcome to the year 2008. Please join us. Thanks.

Crocs - this is how stupid you look

Dear everyone who wears this travesty,

I have never found Crocs to be in the least bit appealing, and I will never cease to be surprised when you decide to show yourself in public wearing a pair. I will also never cease to laugh at you for doing so.

PLEASE LET THE CROC THING DIE NOW. And for the love of all that’s holy, they are NOT APPROPRIATE FOR WORKING IN A BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT. You look like you just finished your weekly Wal*Mart trip. You do not look like someone to take seriously, especially when you are wearing bright purple Crocs with your suit (true story, my friends, true and sad).

Thank you for your cooperation.

Scott says

“I’m excited today to announce that Microsoft will be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio going forward. We will distribute the jQuery JavaScript library as-is, and will not be forking or changing the source from the main jQuery branch. The files will continue to use and ship under the existing jQuery MIT license.”

This is exciting news for developers, as jQuery will help fill the noticable gap in ASP.NET to be truly client rich. I know things I’d like to do, such as supporting dragging and dropping of elements in a grid (a la Netflix queue), are not possible with the out-of-the-box version of Studio / ASP.NET.

I’ve played with ASP.NET AJAX, but found the performance to suck, and the component set to be ugly and difficult to style. At work, we use a popular third party component set called Infragistics, and their components do perform well, but they are not free. I’m excited to hear about jQuery support because I think it will really open up the playing field for those who can’t afford third-party component sets.

Do you use jQuery? What do you think of it? Does it perform well? Do you think it will take off for the .NET world?

There is so much to know and there are so many sources of knowledge, that it can seem like a daunting task to jump in and start doing useful things. Your mind might spin, and you don’t know where to start. No worries, there is a method to the madness. Grab an IDE, a practice database, and start reading…

Getting an IDE

Get Visual Studio (costs money, sometimes provided by your company) or Visual Web Developer Express (free download here from Microsoft). I don’t know any serious ASP.NET developer who isn’t using one of those tools, so anyone offering you help will assume you have one. I’m sorry, but Dreamweaver sucks for .NET development. If you were using it for classic ASP, you’ll want to ditch it for ASP.NET.

When you get Studio or Web Developer Express, you’ll be prompted to download and install the .NET Framework if you haven’t yet done so.

Get a database to query

You can download SQL Server Express edition from Microsoft for free. Grab the AdventureWorks database as well as the older Northwind database. While Northwind was written for SQL Server 2000, it mounts just fine for 2005, and its data structure is far simpler and easier for a new person to work with.

Actually, I’m not new and I still prefer Northwind for its simplicity, as I usually use it for testing and learning .NET things, not database things. If you want to be a DBA, use AdventureWorks. If you want to learn to code .NET, use Northwind.

Learning the .NET platform

Now that you have the basic developer tools, you’re ready to dive in and learn to code.

1. Read the basic tutorials on the ASP.NET QuickStart guide. Read it all at a high level first and let it sink in. After reading and digesting, go back through them again and actually follow with Visual Studio or Visual Web Developer Express to make them work.
2. Check out the beginner tutorials on w3schools.com
3. Get familiar with the MSDN documentation. You should know how to check out members, methods, properties, and events for the objects you use. For example, if you need to know how to get a record count when you’re using SqlDataReader, you pop over to the documentation and look up the class. If you look under Members, you will see a RecordsAffected member; click on that link and scroll down to Remarks, you will see details on how it works, and a caveat that it only works after all rows are read and the reader has been closed.
   I believe that learning to read and use the MSDN documentation is the single most important skill you will need in order to develop with .NET.
4. Visit the walkthroughs on MSDN. There are thousands of walkthroughs, so you’re sure to find some that apply to what you need to do. Nearly all ASP.NET sites deal with CRUD operations with a database, so be sure to check out the Basic Data Access in Web Pages walkthrough.
   If you find yourself thinking that a particular task you’re trying to accomplish is far too complicated you’re probably doing it wrong. Check these walkthroughs to make sure you’re Keeping It Simple.
5. Start lurking on forums.asp.net. The forums are a GREAT place to learn. I don’t know about you, but I have a hell of a time coming up with problems to solve, especially since I know how to do the basics already. I learn by doing, so I need a task to complete. As you lurk, see how many of the questions you can figure out the answers to. Try to solve the problems yourself, even if you never post a thing. Follow the answers given by others.
6. Get RSS feeds / bookmarks of your favorite developer sites. Some of my favorites, in no particular order: Code Junkies, The Daily WTF, DevX, CodingHorror, StackOverflow, Digg.com Programming, ITToolbox,  and C# Corner.

Do you have any more pointers to share with us? Sites that helped you learn and grow as a developer? Share them in the comments! Did you find this article helpful? I write these in order to help my fellow developers, so if you found it helpful, I’d love it if you shared it and passed it along. Thanks!

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I licked a funny stamp

Kitten discovers a mirror:

Mean Rottweiler Plays With Kitten - Watch more free videos

“It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.”

– Nathaniel Borenstein

Yep. I wouldn’t write it, either. If I had to, I’d write DestroyCity, and pacify someone with a DestroyBaghdad procedure, which internally just called DestroyCity(”Baghdad”)…

Anyone who has been using WordPress knows what a pain in the butt trying to get videos into your post can be. The WordPress WYSIWYG editor strips essential tags from the code when you go into code view, paste the code, then go back into the visual view.

Past versions of Wordpress didn’t behave nicely no matter what you did, and people needed plugins that did interesting workarounds to get embeds to work properly.

While WordPress 2.6 support for videos using its editor still bites, there is a far easier workaround to getting the videos to embed and not break when you go back to Visual view.

To get a YouTube or other video into your post, do the following.

1. Copy the code that the site lists as its embed code. That code will look something like this.

<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/YLDbGqJ2KYk&hl=en&fs=1″></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/YLDbGqJ2KYk&hl=en&fs=1″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>

2. Go to your blog post and pop into the HTML view.

3. Paste the copied embed code.

4. Remove everything that isn’t part of the actual embed tag. You’ll end up with this.

<embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/YLDbGqJ2KYk&hl=en&fs=1″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed>

Now when you switch into Visual view, you’ll see a little yellow box that appears to