Absolute BS

I recently bought an iPhone and I absolutely love it except for one thing: AT&T service. I’m not the type of person who makes a lot of phone calls anyway (apparently this is normal), but it would still be nice to be able to make a phone call in my house which is located barely a mile from 2 major freeways (60, I-10) in the heart of Tempe, AZ. I get dropped calls probably 40% of the time I call from inside my house and 10% while I’m outside. You don’t know how inconvenient it is to have to run outside and pray as I answer the rare important phone call.

Today I it was particularly bad, so I went to check their coverage map, which is a great web 1.5 app. I was only mildly surprised to see AT&T acknowledgement that I reside only in an area of “Good” coverage:

My house is right in the middle of that orange splotch, across the street from the park with the lake. And the coverage is supposed to be “Good,” right? Sure, if you take the time to read AT&Ts own definition of “Good,” which says that at best, I get possibly some in building-coverage. And that’s GOOD. Maybe I need to stand in the street, where the signal strength should be sufficient.

Mary Bridget used TurboTax online again this year, and I’ve always thought it was bad, but this takes the cake. Usually TurboTax uses a “wizard” style, asking simple questions and then using the answers to fill in the right boxes. It has some problems though, like asking if MB was “Materially involved in the operation of her business,” which is an easy question for a tax professional, but is met only with “What business?” by a normal person.

While filling out her Wisconsin tax return (which it turns out she is not even required to file), TurboxTax presented her with this page, which is nothing more than a reformatted word-for-word copy of the actual form. I truly don’t see how this could possible be construed as being worth $30. Not to mention that this particular schedule was unnecessary as MB did not itemize her federal deductions, and also that TurboTax had her fill out the regular Wisconsin “Form 1″ and not the “Form 1NPR” for non or part-year residents. The entire issue is moot, however, because I looked it up on a friend’s advice and she isn’t even required to file a return at all, a fact that was mysteriously absent from the TurboTax site.

DotNetNuke 4 is written for ASP.NET 2.0 using Visual Basic. I’m not a big fan of VB, so I do all my .NET development in C#. Luckily, Microsoft has made these languages play very well together, so you can write C# classes that extend classes in assemblies compiled from VB. However the DotNetNuke guys don’t have a lot of documentation about using C#. Their tutorials for writing modules are also very “in-the-box” that assume you want to write modules that work in a very specific way, especially when it comes to the database.

Their module development is very structured, including an MVC-type of framework that feels very forced. They have good ideas about the number of abstraction layers in the data access, but it seems far too complex for, say, a simple guestbook module, and the process assumes that you are creating a new kind of object that will require persistance. It also requires you to slop code all over your DNN installation, where I wanted to package a up the module a little more cleanly. So I started thinking, “what about the Hello World?” So I wrote one in C#.

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I ran into a problem today developing a web app that uses XML/XSLT for the display. This particular widget is designed to run as a custom control and it compiles to a .dll, so I had to embed my XSL files. This wasn’t a problem until I tried to clean up the XSLs by dividing them into smaller pieces and using xsl:include from between them.

The problem turned out to have a quick solution that took about an hour. Write a Custom XmlResolver. Now the one on the Microsoft Website is pretty extensive if you want to learn all about it. But if you want to just drop a class file in your project you can use mine. It resolves everything relative to the namespace that you put it in, so be sure to change that to something appropriate, espeically if you have your default namespace set in Visual Studio.

Note this is quick and dirty and doesn’t do anything with credentials, which I figure is OK since you probably have permission to get to your embedded resources.

Click below to see the full code:
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The company I work for just launched a new product the this week that I absolutely love. It’s called AllSport GPS, and it’s a really cool application for your cell phone that tracks your work outs. I use it everytime I ride my bike.

The coolest part of it is that it uploads your workout data to the website when you are done, so I can show off my new top speed on my way home, or my hilarious wrong turn going to retreive my car from the night before.

Updated on 8/12/2008 — It has come to my attention this solution stopped working with DotNetNuke 4.8. I believe it should work with 4.5 - 4.7. I don’t work with DNN anymore so I probably can’t be very helpful, but if someone else has written a newer post on the topic, I’d be happy to link there.

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So I’ve been working with DotNetNuke as our portal solution at work. My first task was to plug in to the authentication scheme to make it use our existing user database. This seems like a simple request, and in the end it was.

My big problem was the lack of documentation. First of all there is very little experience out there with DNN4. Secondly, the other providers of SSO are either commercial or very confusing, especially for a Java-turned-C# developer like myself. So I thought I’d lay it out, because it’s not very hard.
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Big surprise: I play games on the internet.

I play set game pretty much every day and its awesome.

Also I was playing this other cool 3d puzzle game yesterday and it was a lot of fun. Levels 16, 19, and 23 I thought were real tough but you can beat them.