Joseph Fluckiger's Blog

Stackoverflow.com is a fantastic online resource for answers to technical questions. There are several reasons that Stackoverflow.com is better than other sites. Jeff Atwood, who is the founder of stack overflow described the site succinctly as "expertsexchange.com without the evil. :)" The Webster's type definition would be: Stack Overflow is a programming Q & A site collaboratively built and maintained by your fellow programmers. It is unique in that it uses aspects of wikis, blogs, digg, and forums to allow the best answers float to the top rather than stay buried somewhere among other less useful answers. I loved experts exchange . It was the site that helped me get started in programming back when I was learning Perl. I was amazed at how quickly people would give of their time to answer my questions. Now I am glad to see an even better resource called stack overflow. Give it a try. You'll find higher quality answers than any other online Q&A site...

  This is amazing. You can embed a Silverlight app in your blog using Windows Live Writer and this plug-in . For example, here is the Silverlight showcase application from the home page of http://silverlight.net .

The biggest announcement about TFS 2010: "Price – We’re not quite ready to announce the pricing and licensing for 2010 yet but I can tell you that it will be at least as easy and cost effective to get as SourceSafe has been.  Stay tuned for more info on this." great post . That means that instead of $20,000 for licensing (current cost of TFS for a small development team), I am speculating that it might be included with license of Visual Studio/MSDN Universal License. Visual Source safe was the most popular source control system in the world in the 90s. Now it is the most hated source control system in the world (for good reasons.) I hate it when VSS asks me: "Would you like to run the analyze utility to make sure your files are not corrupt?" But the one thing that VSS had/has is it is easy to set up and use. TFS 2010 Basic aims to make setup easy (no SharePoint dependency). Screenshot of  TFS Basic Configuration Wizard (easy easy): TFS is awe...

  Some interesting statistics about the popularity of JQuery from the JQuery conference . - Microsoft.com uses Jquery! - 21% of all sites on the Internet use JQuery!   This research is done by Google: graph

  The DataGeneral class provides access to the most often used features of ADO.NET in a simple-to-use class boosting developer productivity. DataGeneral is lightweight for maximum performance. It employs Microsoft best practices. DataGeneral provides the best features of Enterprise Libraries Data Application block. In my experience, I like the Enterprise libraries Application Blocks to learn what features of the .NET framework are available , and best practice coding techniques (hence the name patterns and practices). But I don't like the weight of the enterprise libraries, and the random errors I get when versions are out of sync across environments. That is why I wrote DataGeneral which is just a single wrapper class. With DataGeneral you will have less lines of code to debug. DataGeneral is specific to Microsoft Sql Server. For example, one of the features of the Data Access Block is stated as: "By changing the settings in the configuration file, developers can use th...

It’s the little things that are big. I found a new feature in Windows 7 that I really like: Sticky Notes . They look and behave a lot like real sticky notes. I used to use real sticky notes like crazy. At the beginning of each day I would write all my tasks down on those notes helping me, as Stephen Covey would say: keep first things first. Lately I've been using OneNote and/or notepad. OneNote is a great app but like any good thing, too much of it is bad. I'll still keep using OneNote every day, but for task lists and quick notes, Windows 7 Sticky Notes is definitely my new friend.    The leap to Windows 7 A month ago I took a risk and installed Windows 7 as my primary OS. Installing a beta version of an OS on a laptop which is critically important for my job is not something I usually do but fortunately it has paid off. My favorite Windows 7 features: The performance is good (even though my laptop hardware is seriously lacking for a developer). Reboot time ...

I work for a consulting company which is big on providing a great place to work. Catapult Systems was ranked #2 best place to work in all of Texas last year and also received the same impressive rank in 2006. Examples: Last weekend we had a Catapult kids day when all the employees got to bring their kids into work. My 4 year old son had a blast. Granted, now his impression is that I play mini-golf, watch movies, and shoot Nerf guns all day. My son is the one in front making the funny face. I so proud of my little goofball :).