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Friend Photosaver for Facebook |
Starin' at the Wall
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By JD Conley on
6/20/2007 5:26 PM
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I had a bit of a realization yesterday. I hadn't written code for the sheer fun of it in a really long time. Don't get me wrong, I love the stuff I do (almost) every day. We're coding cutting edge stuff here and it's a blast. But, I wanted to do something for me! So I wrote a screensaver.
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XMPP Presence Priority |
Starin' at the Wall
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By JD Conley on
5/8/2007 7:02 PM
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In XMPP (the messaging and presence protocol SoapBox uses) you can log in simultaneouslyon multiple systems. How your contat list is displayed and how messages are routed are based on hints the client software provides to the server. These are my thoughts on how to improve XMPP user experience with regards to presence priority.
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SoapBox Communicator 2007 Beta 2 (Build 3.1.0.76) / Auto Update Oopsie |
Starin' at the Wall
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By JD Conley on
5/7/2007 10:48 AM
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About an hour ago we posted build 76 as a beta release. This is an exciting release for us as it includes many man-months of development with useability being our primary focus. Of course, we couldn't resist throwing in a few great features along the way. I'd like to say thanks to all those on the "Bleeding Edge" (aka daily) build reporting bugs. As is to be expected, during our testing we encountered a couple major outstanding issues. I'll address those first.
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YouTube Getter |
Starin' at the Wall
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By JD Conley on
4/5/2007 6:13 PM
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Every once and a while you just gotta have a little fun! Here's some C# code to get the Flash Video URI from a YouTube watch link.
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Installing Coversant Products On Vista |
Starin' at the Wall
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By JD Conley on
12/14/2006 6:32 PM
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Due to the enhanced security in Windows Vista, not all Coversant products are able to be installed out of the box. Luckily, this is really easy to work around and, rest assured, future version of our installation packages will not suffer from these issues.
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XSLT For MSDN Product Keys |
Starin' at the Wall
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By JD Conley on
11/21/2006 3:00 PM
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Here at Coversant we're Microsoft partners. We have MSDN subscriptions for all our developers/testers, and we share the same set of license keys. Rather than give everyone willy-nilly access to the MSDN download web site (ick, lots of bandwidth suck) we setup an internal file share for MSDN installation files, CD images, etc. We used to have all the product keys in there just saved as html from Microsoft's web site. However, that's no fun!
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Compact Framework WaitHandle.WaitOne Gotcha |
Starin' at the Wall
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By JD Conley on
11/8/2006 2:32 PM
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I ran into a behavior in the 2.0 Compact Framework today that was most vexing. It
wasn't hard to find like a subtle race condition. It wasn't an issue that only duplicated
with a certain system configuration, under a full moon, on Wednesday. No, it duplicated every single
time the code was ran. But, it wasn't documented anywhere
I could find.
One of my favorite new features in the Compact Framework is the availability of the
WaitHandle.WaitOne(int, bool) overload. That's something we use quite a bit in our test code
and here and there in the actual SoapBox Framework. We used to have our own ManualResetEvent
implementation for the Compact Framework that P/Invoked out to Windows CE. But Micrsoft was
nice enough to add this into the 2.0 ...
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SoapBox Platform Possibilities |
Starin' at the Wall
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By JD Conley on
9/16/2006 9:38 AM
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We have many ISV's, students, VAR's, and other customers using our platform for much more than just instant messaging. I'm going to share some of those applications as they're very exciting to me! It's nice to see people harnessing the power of XMPP and the SoapBox platform.
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Using the MySql Command Line from C#/.NET |
Starin' at the Wall
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By JD Conley on
8/1/2006 5:24 PM
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We have added two new data access providers to the upcoming SoapBox Server 2007 release. We now support PostgreSql and MySql
as well as Microsoft SQL and Oracle. The code for these databases have been in our server and test libraries for a couple of months
and this last week it was time to add them into our post installation configuration wizard. We strive to make our setup process
as simple as possible. You'll notice many improvements over the 2005 wizard. We have better auto-configuration and fewer
wizard screens. . .
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More on Interop |
Starin' at the Wall
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By JD Conley on
7/26/2006 9:00 PM
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I'm sitting on a plane on my way back to Sacramento (a whopping 1 hour flight) and I thought I'd try to
give a little more information about the interop event. After two days of testing it appears as though, without any previous official testing, we're actually very close to having quite a few fully interoperable XMPP implementations.
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Fun Installing Vista Beta 2 on AMD x64 |
Starin' at the Wall
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By JD Conley on
6/2/2006 12:50 PM
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As a self proclaimed geek and MSDN subscriber I feel as though it's my duty to explore all the new software that Microsoft comes out with. This last week I have been embarking on one such journey. Working with beta software is always a bit trying, but tack on a beta driver model and a "new" hardware platform (x64) and things get really interesting.
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.net 2.0 web service hair puller |
Starin' at the Wall
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By JD Conley on
5/12/2006 3:02 PM
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Every couple of weeks I spend four hours doing something that should take five minutes. It just happened, and now I feel compelled to take another few minutes and explain so it doesn't happen to you. Not only did I waste my time, but the time of another one of our developers. What might waste four hours, you say? We recently migrated our entire web site to .NET 2.0 and a new portal. Since we were building a new web site anyway we thought, "What the heck, let's re-factor the licensing subsystem. The database was hacked together over three years and we don't want no stinkin' .NET 1.1 code running on our shiny new site!" Well, this didn't turn out exactly as planned. The SoapBox licensing web service is quite simple. There's a single method called "Activate" that takes in a unique hash of some information on the user's computer (so we can track duplicate usages) and the serial number. It returns an XML document containing all the license inf ...
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from the trenches of my first software startup |
Starin' at the Wall
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By JD Conley on
5/9/2006 2:53 PM
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I was born and raised an entrepreneur (I'm pretty sure that's how you speel that). During my lifetime my dad never had a single "real job". He has always been a small business owner. From a carpet cleaning business, to a trucking company, to a coffee shop, he was always working on something he could call his own. Every time we get together we end up talking about businesses we'd like to start. If only I had the time. . . Somehow, after seeing him (and my mom) constantly working at least 80 hour weeks, stressed out, and exhausted, I still decided I wanted to start a company.
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FakeOutTheUserToThinkWeDontUseAnyMemory |
Starin' at the Wall
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By JD Conley on
5/8/2006 3:28 PM
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There comes a time in every project where the developers realize we are building software for the users, rather than for ourselves. A user's perception can be the difference between a good and a bad reference, and we all know how detrimental bad word of mouth can be. This unfortunate reality hit me square in the face recently when I was told by a customer that "your application is bloatware".
Any desktop application with a user interface, written in .NET, that does anything interesting, can easily be mistaken for bloatware. It's quite easy to create a super elegant application with no memory leaks that appears to use 50MB or more of memory. I say appears, because the figure everyone sees in Task Manager is the "Working Set" size. Users (myself included, up until recently) see large working set sizes as a sign of bloatware and poor programming.
This is simply not the case. The working set is more along the lines of the amount of physical memo ...
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Blogging... Who's got the time? |
Jason's Blog
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By Jason Frankel on
5/6/2006 12:40 PM
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Well here we go... I'm going to take the plung and try to do a blog. I've never understood where people find the time to spend so much time writing in their blogs...
I guess now I'll see :-)
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