My friend Jeremy (no blog) pointed me to these two useful articles on how to perform dynamic WHERE clauses and ORDER BY clauses without using dynamic SQL. These were written long ago, but I had never thought to use COALESCE in this way. Very cool!

This is part 3 in this series on copyright law and open source licensing. If you haven’t already, consider reading Part 1 and Part 2 of this series for background before tackling this topic.

If Visual Studio .NET 2003 completely crashes during one more debug session in the next hour (I need to be reasonable here), I am going to throw my freaking computer through the window (figuratively speaking).

This is part 1 in a three-part series on copyright law and open source licensing. After this, continue onto Part 2 and Part 3 of the series.

This is part 2 in my three-part series on copyright law and software licensing. Part 1 covered the basics of copyright law. With the background knowledge from that post, we are ready to tackle software licensing in more depth. After this, continue onto Part 3 of the series.

Well today completes my 31^st^ trip around the Sun and what a Birthday weekend it has been! Every now and then I like to buy a Super Lotto ticket just for the fun of it. I have a solid understanding of math (I did major in it) and I know that the odds are pretty much zilch, but it is fun to think about what I would do should I win.

I know I am a bit late to this, but seriously, I have to link to this. This is the best blonde joke ever.

The key purpose of my last post was to demonstrate how the ASP.NET web controls follow the Decorator pattern when it comes to rendering and how developers can hook into that to customize the rendered HTML.

Every open source project has its own procedures for granting the all-important commit access to developers. Some require a set number of submitted patches (which Fogel, author of Producing Open Source Software, warns against). Others do not have any clear process and rely on the whims of those with the ability to add other committers. Whichever procedure your project chooses, it is important make sure make sure it is clearly published in a visible location such as in the developer guidelines.

Man! What a mouthful of a title, but I think it succinctly describes what this post is about. I will demonstrate how to hook into the rendering of a control that inherits from System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebControl using a Decorator. In particular, I am going to hook into the rendering of a Button control to stop it from emitting the language="javascript" attribute.

If you are going to talk about a product named “Microsoft Money” you had better make sure your comment spam filter doesn’t barf on the word “money”. That just wouldn’t be nice to the helpful people with legitimate comments.

One key component of open source projects is getting others involved in code review. In fact, that has always been one of the promises of open source software that with the hundreds and thousands of eyeballs looking at the code, the quality will be higher. In practice this doesn’t necessarily work out because the majority of open source projects only have a few eyeballs at work.

I really appreciate how Microsoft has really opened up many of its internal developer groups. I only wish this also applied to more of their consumer products.

I just finished reading the book “Producing Open Source Software - How to Run a Successful Free Software Project” by Karl Fogel (pdf available). CollabNet has employed Karl Fogel for the past five years to work on Subversion. Prior to that he has been involved with GNU Emacs and CVS development.

Tim Bray writes to correct misperceptions of what “Open Source” is about.

Consider this a more advanced followup to my Quickstart Guide to Open Source Development With CVS and SourceForge.

From reading other blogs, it seems many developers are unimpressed with the sheen of Windows Vista, the next version of the Microsoft operating system. There is definitely appreciation for all the improvements under the hood, but the out-of-box experience (at least in the betas), leaves much to be desired.

A while ago I wrote up a Quick and Dirty Guide to Configuring Log4Net for Web Applications. Today I received an email asking how to set up logging for a web application that also consists of a business layer and a data access layer.

On a recent project, my team pursued a CSS based design as we had two sites to build that were similar in layout, but different in look and feel. We were brought in after the schematics and design had pretty much been worked out, but we felt we could work with the agreed upon design.

Can’t use your favorite IM tool because of a pesky firewall at your place of work? Kyle points me to this web app, Meebo which appears to be in the alpha phase, but worked fine for me. It allows you to sign in to one of several popular IM services and use a rich web-based client.