Once again, I've been bitten by the IT engineer that decided to patch my system in the middle of the day and reboot it without warning.

Hear me, engineers! If you are ever told to just reboot a system and ignore the warning thing that comes up and says "Are you sure? Other users are logged into this system and might lose their work!" then STOP. Do NOT ignore that warning (unless you happen to personally know exactly who those other users are and that they don't mind).

Instead, use an Update Service or something. I tried finding a Powershell script that did this, but only got as far as a couple of scripts that show the logged-on users, including those using Remote Desktop (like I do). I didn't find anything that does a toaster popup or a countdown message box. But I may come back to that.

I'm struggling a little in that my work environment has a very high security wall, so to speak. I'm certainly not interested in revealing any secrets or sensitive information, but I'm doing and learning a lot of things that are probably useful to other people, and are useful for me to remember that I did later on.

Beginning now, I plan to log all that I'm up to, good or bad.

Couple of things going on today.

First, we have a lot of architectural information going on, but I'm having a very difficult time finding it and figuring out how it is supposed to be useful to me. I'm reaching out to our CTO staff for some information and pointers on how they want things done and where, because I plan to start documenting our systems with a little more rigor now.

Part of my inspiration is that I've been reading this book [ROZA11]: ...

A snippet I use frequently.

I'm a believer in creating unit tests for systems, to a point. For example, most of my systems have a data access layer, and a model (aka "domain" or "business") layer, which often follows the Repository pattern. (I'm not sure I see the value of always separating the Repository from the model, but that's another blog post.)

Lately, my data access layers use ADO.NET Entity Frameworks. I feel that there is very little point to writing unit tests for EF libraries. However, I need to test my Repository layer, without complicating my data access layer by trying to force EF to cooperate with some dependency injection framework (typically Unity).

To this end, I've been pleased to discover and use NDbUnit. This package can be fetched using NuGet.

This is how NDbUnit works,...

I discovered that I got unintentional double data-binding by leaving the AutoDataBind property of the WebFormsMvp.MvpUserControl set to True. I explain why I think this happened, and how to fix it.

As given to the Sacramento .NET Users Group meeting on Oct 28, 2011

This is crazy! I'm trying to uninstall Microsoft Expression Studio 3 from my VMWare. It's been running for nearly three hours! Most of that time it has been in the Kernel. What's up with this? I don't remember it taking this long to install in the first place… :-(

I can’t recommend volunteering enough. It was just a small amount of extra work, but the payoff was the best. There was a shorter registration line for volunteers. But the dinner this evening was what tipped the balance. I’ll get to that.

Coffee: there was plenty of it, but they seemed to have a sweetener shortage. A couple of sugar packets were procured, through means I wish not to know.

Big lines in front of the vendors tents with the coolest stuff and bigger giveaways. Unsurprising and unavoidable. One must collect ALL THE THINGS.

First session of the day for me: How to Break Into Mobile App Development. Delivered quite well, this talk would have been better titled How to Break Into a Mobile App Development Job. The course description made that clear. Why did I take this instead of The Best HTML5 Tools You're Not Using? I don’t...

I put some thoughts about justifying the adoption of good architecture into a comment on LinkedIn, in the .NET Professional group. You may have to join the group to read it.

How is your VB6/.NET code going to "hack it" when you need a web/mobile/cloud app?

I have updated some snippets that I use quite a lot when I want to add an event to a class.

You can download the VSI file from CodeCharm.com.