Keith Rull

I had a pretty laidback today because one of my projects was halted due some requirements issue(we have just finished phase 1 and the client already wants to start phase 2 but they dont know what the want yet) so i was assigned to help one of my colleagues in a problem that they were having in their project. The problem was that they were trying to merge multiple Microsoft Word Documents into one file and for some reason the solution that they have implemented was not doing the job. They had this function that reads bits and bytes of the document and then combines those bytes into a single file. Yikes!

This is weird but everytime I go to a conference and somebody speaks about Web Apps they always talk about why people should use custom errors instead of throwing the Yellow Page of Death. Just this morning I went to the ASP.NET website to check on the forums and this is what was displayed on my screen:

Huh? No custom errors? Hmmm.. seems like they are breaking their own rules.

Anyway, A friend of mine had this joke exception code that slipped to their production and one of the accountants called him and was very scared because she thought she made a huge mistake.

Yikes! It was mean. Even if its a joke it is really mean. Striking fear to your users is not a good thing at all. If they had a custom error page then this would not have happened.

This reminded me of the IKEA incident I saw from D'Arcy Lussier a few days ago.

Custom errors gives the easy feeling to the users. It doesn't scare them to death and it makes them more comfortable with your system knowing that it can recover from such a fatal crash.

Oh well, I'm just glad I got this baby showing up at devpinoy ;)

I saw this news today courtesy of Migz Paraz about a 12 year-old kid who is starting his own company and I was amaze about his idea. I think its great idea and with the right UI and advertising i'm pretty sure it will go up, way up where everybody who has a "Making IT big in IT" dream would want to go. I salute you.

I always say to people who ask me advice about how to start their own company "If you can't invent, Innovate" ;) Believe me, there are alot of opportunities out there right now... If might not a new idea.. it could something that can make an existing app better and transform it into the "killer app". Just this morning i woke up with another idea.. did my research the whole day if it already exist and found out that it is still an untap market. I don't have the resource yet to start on this new endeavor but i do see myself working on it pretty soon(i have atleast 5 startup ideas brewing and 2 of them are currently in the works).

Life is like the game of chess... its an equal playing field where anybody can be a pawn all his life tied with living from paycheck to paycheck or work hard and climb to the top until he becomes the king. I don't want to be a pawn all my life that's why i'm dreaming big and I believe each and everyone of us should do the same way.

I want this dreams to happen and I want it to happen now.

Sucessful people dont dream the dreamers dream.. they make it a reality. The cool thing about it is that all of us can dream and all of us can make it a reality. With the right mindset, the drive to succeed and faith in God i think anyone can be somebody someday but it takes patience and alot of effort to accomplish your goals so be prepared to handle it.

Thanks for the inspiration Luke and God Bless to your startup. As for me, I'll go back to my machine... think... pray.. code... then believe that someday my simple idea can bring me to my promise land.

Man, oh Man, oh Man! Another timesaver to add in my development toolbox. Jerry Jarell has just released NStub which is a Unit Test Generator for .NET Assemblies and man it looks really promising.

I saw this while doing a research about .NET components and I find it really weird...

I was writing an application today that needed a date dimension table and this was the script that i built. I don't know if this going to be useful to anybody.. anyway, my main purpose of putting it in my blog is so that i can just go to my site and do a copy-and-paste when the time comes that I need to use this script again.

I think the guys in the .NET Framework team has this thing about vanity. Yeah! I call it code vanity. Not that its bad.. but its just funny how code has been getting beautiful. more beautiful and even more beautiful as the evolution of .NET goes forward. And it's a great thing too!

I remember seeing this last year when i was trying to put my hands wet with WPF. It's a pretty good five day course courtesy of Karsten Januszewski which you can complete just by reading and applying the things that you can find out from his set of useful links. A pretty good primer to WPF if you ask me(although i think there are sveral new articles in the past few months that i believe should be added to the list).

Learn from Karsten Januszewski here.

Hahaha! I did it! It took me 2 years to beat the Nobel prize winner with the same lastname as mine in the google search results for the keyword Rull but i finally did it :P

btw, the 3rd site on the list the site of my uncle ;)

I've been working with alot of Ajax lately(this includes code and laundry :P) and just realized that i've been doing some unecessary code after reading this article. I think I got hooked so much with the Ajax-hoopla that I forgot that not everything should be done via Ajax.

Below is an outline of what Jack Herrington suggested.

• Polling on a timer when you don't need to
• Not inspecting the return results in the callback
• Passing complex XML when HTML would be better
• Passing XML when you should pass JavaScript code
• Doing too much on the server

Read more about this article here.

*Update: I did some research and found out that Michael Schwarz, the creator of Ajax.NET has also a great list of things to avoid in his article Top 10 Mistakes When Using Ajax. Great read.