OCDProgrammer.com

At my current employer, I am the round One interview.  I don’t negotiate or care about salary.  I just talk about .NET.  I have 20 standard questions I ask each and every person, then I throw in a few question specific to their resume. 

Now keep in mind these aren’t hard questions to answer.

What is the difference between session state and viewstate? 

What is the life cycle of an ASP.NET page? 

I don’t go into these interviews looking for a person to know every one of the answers, but there are a few that I consider critical.  I just want to measure their depth and breadth of knowledge of the .NET framework.  What I’ve come to realize is finding talent is hard.  So when I browsed to FoxNews.com and saw this article, I know exactly what they are talking about.  You’d think with unemployment hovering around 10% that talented people would be available.

Then when you do find somebody worth hiring, its not a done deal.  Due to the extremely tight market when you find a developer you want, you are battling with other companies.  Even meeting salary expectations isn’t enough, because of the market the employee can pick and choose which company they want to work for, with little risk of letting a good opportunity pass them by. 

Now just so this post isn’t one big rant I want to throw my thoughts out on a few aspects of this topic.

What does this mean for companies?

1. It means you need to be willing to pay top dollar.  This isn’t a market where you can negotiate down a persons salary.  If they say it is going to take 80K to get them on board, then you need to be prepared to pay 80K.

2. It means you better pay the employees you have.  I’m new to my job, and while money was far from the primary or only factor, it was a factor.  Companies need to pay the employees they don’t want to lose top dollar.  This, surprisingly, isn’t a market where a 5% raise guarantees an employee sticking around.

3. The cost of development has gone up.  The out-sourcing movement has had its affect on the market and there is no India to turn to to drive cost down.  Talented workers are expensive workers.

What can be done about it?

1. Training must be encouraged.  As the previous article stated in another way, you aren’t going to take the factory worker and plug them into these jobs.  People like me have been constantly learning for years to get to where we are.  They need to understand that just because they were a lead worker on their factory line, they will have to be the follower in their new line of work.

2. Government incentives.  I think this is a place where a focused tax benefit could come in handy.  Give companies a significant tax break for hiring entry level workers for these positions.  It cost money to train them and their newbie mistakes cost money.  Give companies a reason to hire relatively new people.

3. College for all.  Yep, the small government Republican just said that.  We need to find a way to get more people into college.  We can’t compete if we don’t have the skills to compete.

What does this mean for the worker?

1. Don’t be afraid to look around.  One of the big causes of the tight job market is that people are afraid to switch jobs.  I’ve never been one to play into this fear much.  I know that with some risk comes reward. 

2. Don’t be afraid to ask for more money.  Lets be real here when I say, they don’t have much of a choice in the matter.

3. Stay up to date on your skills.  This is why there is an allusion of age discrimination in the IT field.  People get comfortable in what they are doing and when technology moves on, they can’t find a job when they need one. 

With all of that being said, my employer is still looking to hire several .NET developers.  If you are interested contact me and let me know.  Going through me, does offer some incentive as I do get a referral bonus.  Not that I’d take it any easier on you in the phone interview, but it sure does make me like you more :-).

[Referenced article in PDF form]

I've done some odd things in life, but this may be the oddest!  However, I am proud to say, "I AM A PC".

Unless you've been living in a cave you have seen the ads by Microsoft. Many different kinds of people stating how they are a PC, this ad campaign is certainly in retaliation to the Mac vs. PC ad campaign. 

A buddy of mine and I go out to lunch pretty much daily (as he is a co-worker, and fellow programmer).  He was talking about his Halloween costume, dressing up as the PC guy.  And the topic of custom plates came up due to one of the owners of the company we working for recently getting a custom plate of his own.  We determined that when we got back to the office we were going to see if personalized tags were available.  Sure enough we found a few variations of the tag line that we could register.  Since it was his idea I gave him the choice of the primary one "I AM A PC" or a secondary one "IM A PC 2".  He graciously let me have the primary one, and he registered the other.  So here we are with our custom plates!

Here this week we are going to take a photo of both of us side by side and send it into Microsoft's ad campaign.

When I started at my employer I inherited a bit of code that was poor at best.  Over the year I've been working with it, I've been refactoring the code significantly. 

Then we hired another developer and this process sped up a bit and I needed to mark some classes as deprecated.  So over time old code could be replaced with the new code.  I've done this before, but had to do a quick search and as an FYI here is the answer:

[Obsolete("Deprecated: Use GetCustomerID", false)]
public int GetCustomer(int custId)
{
           .... code in here

}

The first parameter is the warning/error message to show in the compiler.  The second option is whether or not to cause an error.  So basically you can say, this is broke don't use it.  Or this is old, use something else.  The first breaks the code, the second allows it to go on for a bit.

HT: Karpach.com

Last week we upgraded our company from Sybase to SQL Server 2005.  All of a sudden one of our web applications started throwing this error:

'.', hexadecimal value 0x00, is an invalid character. Line 1, position 198128.

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.Xml.XmlException: '.', hexadecimal value 0x00, is an invalid character. Line 1, position 198128.

This was happening when I was calling a .NET web service via an ASPX page.  The web service call returned a serialized object:

For understanding, I have a class similar to this:

Model.Customer cust = new Customer();
cust.Id = 1;
cust.Name = "CK IN CINCY";

Now for the code that gave me this error (ie the ASPX code behind):

Model.Customer cust = new Customer();
WebSvc.GetCustomer(1, out cust);

This would blow up.

The web service looked like this:

[WebMethod]
public int GetCustomer(int Id, out Model.Customer cust)
{
     // Fill cust object from database
     return 1;
}

The problem was the data in the database contained null characters.  This is to understood as different than null records.  A null record is self explanitory and can be deal with inside the sql with an isnull call.  The problem was that the record existed but somehow has a null character.  CK IN [NULL CHARACTER] CINCY.  In this case, isnull won't solve the problem.  So after about five hours of searching I found this post.  Which contained this function, which did the trick for me.  Hopefully this saves you 5 hours of your time :-).

/// <summary>
/// Removes control characters and other non-UTF-8 characters
/// </summary>
/// <param name="inString">The string to process</param>
/// <returns>A string with no control characters or entities above 0x00FD</returns>
public static string RemoveTroublesomeCharacters(string inString)
{
    if (inString == null) return null;

    StringBuilder newString = new StringBuilder();
    char ch;

    for (int i = 0; i < inString.Length; i++)
    {

        ch = inString[i];
        // remove any characters outside the valid UTF-8 range as well as all control characters
        // except tabs and new lines
        if ((ch < 0x00FD && ch > 0x001F) || ch == '\t' || ch == '\n' || ch == '\r')
        {
            newString.Append(ch);
        }
    }
    return newString.ToString();

}

At work we've recently hired a few new developers and they got this error.

Having worked at setting up many development boxes in the past I knew what the issue was, but honestly I need to post about it so I have a quick reference to the fix... and I figured it may help you as well.

The problem?  .NET framework was installed before IIS.  The fix is pretty easy, you need to 'reinstall' the .NET framework.  Thankfully Microsoft makes it fairly easy.

Open up a command line and type the following and you will be good to go.

c:\windows\microsoft.net\framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis.exe -i

Which will look something like this after the fact:

More info here.

Recently I needed to display all Session Variables when a crash would happen.  A crash would happen and I have this website I was working on send me an email with the stack trace and now the session variables.  However I wasn't aware of how to list all session variables, so I went to my friend Google and came up with the following code:

string strSessions;
for(int i=0;i<Session.Count;i++)
{
       strSessions += Session.Keys[i].ToString() + " - " + Session[i].ToString() + Environment.NewLine;
}

Works like a champ!

HT: davidj.org

After recently launching a website, I had some built in error reporting in it.  Starting seeing a few 'Thread is being Aborted' errors.  I remembered dealing with this at my previous job and that it was related to the Response.Redirect call.

So hopefully with the help of a few of my readers we can put a list of issues related to the various calls that you can make to redirect a user to another page.

Response.Redirect
Response.Redirect was something I first used in classic ASP.  now due to the nature of that platform I didn't see any issues with it.  But in .NET its a different story.  Microsoft gives us a few versions of this call.

1. Response.Redirect("URL")  - The parameter is just the URL that you want the user sent to.  Pretty strait forward.
2. Response.Redirect("URL", true/false) - The second parameter is what causes the error above.  By default version one of this call sets the second parameter to true.  However what that does is 'abort the thread' so as your page goes down to the next call it will see that the page is being aborted.  By setting this to false, you fix the issue.  However this is not idea because by setting it to true you are getting a bit more overhead on your HTTP traffic because you are telling the server to continue the request. Even though you have moved on.

Server.Transfer
Server.Transfer is a lot like Response.Redirect in that you have two versions to call.

1. Server.Transfer("URL")
2. Server.Transfer("URL", True/False) - The second parameter determines whether or not you can use the objects (like text boxes) on the original page.  If it is set to true, you can use the objects.  If it is set to false, you can't.  Those items expire when the new page loads.

Comparisons
Now from my reading there are a few other distinct differences between the two.

1. Response.Redirect allows you to redirect to pages external to your site. The Server.Transfer HAS to be on your server.
2. Server.Transfer is just like Response.Redirect with a true passed in.  Except it doesn't throw the original error.  This allows you to save server resources as you transfer from page to page.

Well do you have anything to add?  Did I miss anything?

HT: Microsoft
HT: Karl Moore

When I started at my new job I inherited a website that was, to put it mildly, written poorly.  Unfortunately due to the nature of a fast paced business you can't always take the time to make code right.  You have to just pile bad on top of bad because it works.

However recently I took the time to refactor a page.  Before starting it had 2,411 lines of code... after I was done, 649!!!  What used to be a pain to add onto or edit, is now a breeze. 

So when the time is write, refactor.  It makes life a lot better.  Better yet... write it right to begin with!

Many times when programming in .NET you need your DateTime variable to display in various formats:

08/22/2006
Tuesday, 22 August 2006
etc...

This is thankfully made pretty trivial with the ToString() function.  Just pass in the appropriate format string and you will get what you need.

You can find a great list of these here.

Recently I was working on a project that required me to unzip a file and process its contents.

But I needed to first figure out how to unzip a file.  To the rescue came the SharpZipLib.  This is under the GPL but is specifically released for personal and commercial use.

In my very basic use it worked like a champ.