Ben Scott's Blog

When is software done?

Ben Scott — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 11:51:00 GMT

The company I'm working for at the moment is suffering from a bad case of "everyone's a software engineer". The reasons why this is such a bad idea are all over the net, so rather than sit quietly, content with my enlightened understanding...(read more)

Pair Programming - Day Two

Ben Scott — Thu, 29 May 2008 04:56:00 GMT

Our pairing approach was to enforce pairs between the hours of 10am and 4pm, with an hour for lunch in between. I'm an early starter, so at about 7:30am I started working through the list of things I noted down from yesterday. I refactored method...(read more)

Pair Programming - Day One

Ben Scott — Wed, 28 May 2008 03:50:25 GMT

I've always been keen to try pair programming on a project but haven't had the chance until now. Our project is a "waterfall" project that employs a number of agile practices, but this is a big leap toward a much more agile approach...(read more)

My new run

Ben Scott — Sat, 17 May 2008 06:53:00 GMT

Just discovered www.mapmyrun.com. River Run...(read more)

MSDTC, .Net 2.0, DB2 and Heuristic Processing continued...

Ben Scott — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 12:39:48 GMT

In my previous post , I mentioned how to change to the OLEDB connection pooling defaults after receiving the heuristic processing error below: [IBM][CLI Driver][DB2] SQL0998N Error occurred during transaction or heuristic processing. Reason Code = "16"...(read more)

Changing the OLEDB_SERVICES Registry Key in Vista

Ben Scott — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 10:45:15 GMT

The change to the OLEDB connection pooling defaults between ADO 2.0 and 2.1 has been causing the following exception in the application I've been working on [IBM][CLI Driver][DB2] SQL0998N Error occurred during transaction or heuristic processing...(read more)

Upgrade to Community Server 2007

Ben Scott — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 01:14:25 GMT

This site has just been upgraded to Community Server 2007. If this post works, then the core now contains the add-ins for the MetaBlog API that allow posting from Microsoft Live Writer. The upgrade process went smoothly. I only had to run a single database...(read more)

Getting uTorrent to work with Microsoft Live OneCare on Vista

Ben Scott — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 03:59:00 GMT

I've just spent 4 hours trying to get open a port for uTorrent to up my download speed. Now, I'm no network engineer but I understand enough to configure port forwarding. My environment consists of an ADSL 2+ router and a Netgear wireless router. I configured...(read more)

ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Released

Ben Scott — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 07:54:19 GMT

ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 has been officially released. Source code for the Control Toolkit, client-side JavaScript library and the server controls has also been released....(read more)

Hiding a Row in a GridView

Ben Scott — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 10:29:00 GMT

To hide an entire row in a GridView control consists of two steps. First, you need to override the OnRowCreated event of the GridView. This event has a GridViewEventArgs parameter that will give you access to the underlying Row.DataItem, enabling you...(read more)

Running IBM DB2 9 Express Edition on Vista

Ben Scott — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 04:26:57 GMT

Although the installation went smoothly (with runas Administrator), there are a number of permissions issues that I have encountered. The one that's really getting to me at the moment is a result of the Visual Studio.NET 2005 DB2 add-in. The error message...(read more)

WCF Proxy Generation without Types

Ben Scott — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 04:21:10 GMT

On a previous project (.Net 1.1 Web Services) I spent hours if not days manually removing all of the proxy generated types from the Visual Studio.NET generated proxy class in order to use my Data Transfer Objects on the client tier. To the best of my...(read more)

Installing Vista RTM on ASUS F3JV

Ben Scott — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 09:30:46 GMT

I took the plunge on the weekend and installed Vista Ultimate on my new ASUS F3Jv laptop. The installation went smoothly with no hassles whatsoever. Installing software and finding drivers was a different experience. Some pieces installed, others installed...(read more)

ReSharper 2.0.2 Released

Ben Scott — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 21:54:49 GMT

JetBrains have released an incremental update to ReSharper for VS.NET 2..3 and 2005. Check out the release notes...(read more)

Mounting ISO images e.t.c in Vista

Ben Scott — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 09:16:47 GMT

I've been using the Virtual CD extensions for Windows XP in order to mount ISO volumes. Needless to say, this doesn't work in Vista. The best alternative I've found is the free CloneDrive by Elby (Elaborate Bytes). It lets you mount most images of CD...(read more)