Made pretty good progress over the past few weeks.

• Converted to MVC2 with no major headaches.
• Reduced scope from all-purpose content management system to basic blog engine that works with webcomics as first class citizens
• Refactored to use Repository pattern for model access.
• Implemented several Repositories using Entity Framework
• Got tired of Entity Framework (the current, shipping version)
• Re-did all Repositories with Linq To SQL
• Got main bits of the blog functionality working
• Create blog entries
• Editor or Admin must approve before display
• Display blog
• Admin settings to display Extract or Full Content (for most recent post or for older posts)
• Paging of archive
• Working on Basic Page functionality
• Began working on import functionality

Once I finish the Basic Page functionality, I will add the Comic functionality. When that reaches an adequate state I’ll set up an Alpha test website.

During the Alpha phase I will continue to add functionality and refine the UI.

Once I reach Beta status, I’ll begin to convert existing sites to use the new blog engine.

When things are looking good I’ll release the code as an open source project, probably on Codeplex.

Just reading an entertaining article about dumb tech trends of the '00s (find it here).

When I got to the Youtube video promoting the Segway I was surprised to see that they shot it in the city of Atlanta. I always find it strange to see familiar places on movies and videos.

The bold predictions for the Segway make it comical to see how the "future" has played out for the UBER-ADVANCED FUTURE-SCOOTER.

Since I work in Atlanta (near most of the shots in the video) I find it interesting to examine where you actually do see Segways in Atlanta today.

We have "The Ambassador Force" who sound like a super-hero team, but actually just ride Segways around (at least before budget cuts) bedecked in uniforms that make them look like postal workers on safari. They hand out advice to bewildered tourists who DO want to see CNN Center, Centennial Olympic Park, The World Of Coca-Cola and the Aquarium but DO NOT want to deal with panhandlers, drug dealers, street performers, hippies, Martians, zombies, etc, etc.

Of course the OTHER place you see Segways in Atlanta is underneath tourists. At least the ones who were willing to shell out a few bucks to rent a Segway.

Where you do NOT see Segways is on MARTA (our bus and rail system shown in the video). You don't see them in virtually ANY office building. You don't see them out riding trails either.

That was my favorite bit. It's JUST LIKE MOUNTAIN BIKING WITHOUT THAT NASTY EXERCISE!!! Of course trail-riding a motorcycle is like mountain biking without the nasty excercise too, just WAY cooler than riding a Segway.

In FACT I'd go out on a limb and guess that to the average HUMAN a Venn Diagram of the words "cool" and "Segway Rider" would look like this:

If only George W. Bush hadn't fallen off that Segway, we would ALL be riding them around everywhere as predicted before their release. 

OK, after all that build up, here you can see the video for yourself:

New book: Microsoft Application Architecture Guide, Second Edition

Microsoft has just released the second edition of their Application Architecture Guide and you Learn More Here.

The eBook version is a free download, but you can also buy a printed copy if you like.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Powershell is worth a look if you haven’t used it before.

It is Microsoft’s new command line that operates in an object-oriented way.

There are still Unix commands that I think work better (like Tail, but we won’t go there yet).

Today’s tip is about getting a list of processes that are running.

For folks who have used Unix, this is similar to the PS command. For purely Windows folks, this is like the process list in Task Manager.

This is a quick-tip, so I won’t belabor the point:

Get-Process

That’s it. You will get a listing of processes that are running and info about how much CPU and memory they are consuming.

Want to see see just instances of Internet Explorer? Get-Process iexplore

Want to see Internet Explorer and Outlook? Get-Process iexplore, OUTLOOK

For more info, plus lots of other info about Powershell go to http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee176855.aspx.

If you want to get the top 5 CPU using processes try this:

Get-Process | Sort-Object cpu -descending | Select-Object -first 5

As you can see you are piping the results of Get-Process through Sort-Object and then Select-Object. 

Here’s a fun one to try from that page:

Get-Process | Select-Object name,fileversion,productversion,company

I won’t tell you what it does; go try it!

MVC 2 Beta was released today (read about it here) and I've decided to upgrade my blog engine work-in-progress to the new bits.

Cross your fingers!

Now that the Go-Live license is available I don't have to worry that I'll be ready to publish before it is allowed.

Another quickie tip post.

Task Manager has been around a LOOOOONG time, and everyone know it and loves it, right? Well now it has some new abilities. OK, some of these may have slipped into Vista, but everyone hates Vista and loves 7, right?

First Tip: Shortcut Keys

Now this might break your hand, BUT if you can manage a CTRL + SHIFT + ESC, you can pop Task Manager right up.

Second Tip: Threads ‘n More

Hit the View menu item and then “Select Columns”

You can add the following to your Task Manager Processes display:

• PID (Process Identifier)
• User Name
• Session ID
• CPU Usage
• CPU Time
• Memory – Working Set
• Memory – Peak Working Set
• Memory – Working Set Delta
• Memory – Private Working Set
• Memory – Commit Size
• Memory – Paged Pool
• Memory – Non-paged pool
• Page Faults
• Page Fault Delta
• Base Priority
• Handles
• Threads
• USER Objects
• GDI Objects
• I/O Reads
• I/O Writes
• I/O Other
• I/O Read Bytes
• I/O Write Bytes
• I/O Other Bytes
• Image Path Name
• Command Line
• User Account Control (UAC) Virtualization
• Description
• Data Execution Prevention

Yowza! That’s a lot of info right at your fingertips.

Lunchtime is over, so that’s if for today!

I had a really good time at the Augusta, GA, Codecamp.

Big thanks to the organizers, especially Pete Mourfield and Dr. Todd Schultz. Good job guys!

Also thanks to everyone who came to my talk “ASP.net MVC In A Web Hosted World.” Click here for my slide deck. I hope you guys enjoyed it as much I did!

I’ll be blogging in more depth about the topics covered.

I also want to thank everyone from GGMUG who came down to Augusta for Codecamp. Glad you guys made it down!

How many times have you wanted to add a directory that already exists to your project only to have to create the directory (and any subdirectories) and then Add Existing Files (one directory at a time)?

Annoying isn’t it? (Almost as annoying as someone who uses too many parentheses.)

Why, oh why, isn’t there an Add Existing Directory function?

Because it isn’t needed.

What? You’re crazy!

If you copy the directory and all its subdirectories into the project (into the directory you want them) with File Explorer (or xcopy from the command line), then go into VS and click the little Show All Files icon at the top of the Solution Explorer pane (second icon from the right for me), voila! There are the directories that you want to add.

Now just highlight the grey little directory and right click. Next pick the menu item that says “Include In Project”.

Bam! You just kicked it up a notch! (Man that’s a tired catch-phrase, isn’t it?)

Does that ever save some time.

Today I needed to include Tiny MCE in my scripts folder in jeffaBlogger (MVC blog engine I’m working on). It finally was annoying enough to go Google up a solution.

Thanks to NitriqBlog for that little life-saver.

Had a great time at SQL Saturday.

Big thanks to Stuart and Allison Ainsworth for the hard work they put into making this day a big success.

Special thanks to Gainesville State College and their Institute for Environmental and Spatial Analysis for hosting the event.

Thanks also to all the speakers.

I’m posting my slide deck for anyone who attended my session Data Persistence In A Web Hosted World.

The following links will grab the deck in either PowerPoint 2003 or 2007 format:

2007: Slide Deck

2003: Slide Deck

I hope the attendees enjoyed the session as much as I did.

I apologize in advance to anyone who wasn’t in the session who downloads the slides and finds the Dr. Zoidberg from Futurama joke to be un-funny. Possibly double plus un-funny. I’ve already apologized to the people who were in the session and made my peace with God and Dr. Zoidberg.