Percy's Posts

Attitude

scott.percy@logicspeak.com — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 21:18:00 GMT

Sarah and I were on vacation this past weekend in Charleson, SC. We stopped in at this local seafood resteraunt called Hyman's Seafood for a bit of lunch (it's a great place, and if you're in the area you should go). In the sweetner tray at your table, there are these little cards that have different things on them. Most of them are pretty funny - a woman-speak translation guide for men, definitions of success at different stages of your life, etc. The one that really caught both of our attention was one which taked about attitude. Basically, it said that attitude is the most important quality in a person. It affects everything you do and say, and (more importantly) how you handle different situations.

I never really considered it, but I believe this is true. In business (and in life, really), your attitude says a lot about you. If you've got a defeatest attitude, then you're never going to get anywhere (and it will never be your fault). However, if you have a "go get 'em" attitude, you'll get places. I think you can probably tie the success or failure of a business directly to the attitudes of the employees - especially the ones in charge. Luckily, here at LogicSpeak, everyone has a understanding and winning attitude. We all have our opinions and disagreements, but we also know that we are all on the same team with the same goal in mind. So, there's a good bit of understanding and cooperation that is fostered here.

As developers, it's easy to get in the mind set of "my way is always the right way". While there are instances where that might well be true, there are probably just as many instances where other people have better ideas. If you are willing to listen and work through them, you'll get much further in the long run. I've found that if you have a learning attitude, you can do some pretty cool stuff.

Anyways, that's all I have for now. Who knew such wisdom could be found next to the Splenda in a seafood resteraunt? Oh well, until next time...

If you don't like it...

scott.percy@logicspeak.com — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:49:00 GMT

...change it. Technically, I'm talking about Visual Studio templates, but apply that sentiment however you see fit.

I'm a big fan of adding some common comments to my code when I create class files, and up until now, I've just been adding them manually. I knew the VS had templates that it was using, but I didn't quite know how to use them properly, let alone find them. That is, until I ran across this article:

http://www.dev102.com/c/how-to-get-visual-studio-to-create-new-classes-public-by-default/

The point of the article is changing the templates to make classes public by default, which is definatly a good change. However, once you're in the template directory, the sky is the limit.

That's all for now. Have a safe and happy 4th! Until next time...

Version Madness

scott.percy@logicspeak.com — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:14:00 GMT

As Gordon and I were working on a project together, we noticed that the version of an assembly we had set up was not the one that was being used in the application. We use a number of third party assemblies and controls, so keeping track of a specific version is crucial (especially, when that assembly references specific versions of other assemblies). Apparently, when you set up a reference to an assembly by selecting a file on your file system, Visual Studio may not choose that file when building. Actually, it only looks for that file based on the path as a second to last resort (the last being looking in the GAC). In fact, if you look at the properties of a referenced assembly, you'll see the "Path", but if you look at the XML of the project file, the property is called "HintPath". So, it's basically saying, "if you really can't find this file anywhere else, look here" instead of (what I thought it meant) "this is exactly where the file is". I found this article which talks about the issue, and what the resolution is:

http://blogs.msdn.com/irenak/archive/2005/12/13/503105.aspx

Basically, for any file referenced assembly, you should be sure to change the "Specific Version" value to true, because it defaults to false. That way, you are assured that you will be including the proper verion in your builds. The good thing is that once this value is set, the version that it looks for is the actual version of the file. So, in our case, we have a "Dependancies" or "References" folder in our solutions. If we simply update the assembly in that folder, it works like a charm.

Just some bit of "wonky-ness" to note. Until next time...

Hello world!

scott.percy@logicspeak.com — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:39:00 GMT

Welcome to my "professional" blog. I'm going to make a concerted effort to actually blog things here. So, stay tuned for some more interesting content.

If you're interested, you can check out my "personal" blog at www.scottlpercy.com.

I use "professional" and "personal", since the two usually mix and can be interchangeable. :)

Anyways, until next time...