UPDATE: As a commenter pointed out, the original code example did not properly demonstrate the problem with locking on the this keyword within a normal method. I have corrected this example and wrote a better example that demonstrates that this problem still exists even in a “normal” method.

This is a bug fix release. Check out Dare’s list of fixes to find out more.

In T-SQL, you can use the @@IDENTITY keyword to obtain the value of the identity column when you insert a new record. For example, the following query inserts a record into an imaginary table and returns a result set containing the ID of the inserted column.

This is old news, but I am so glad that the Family Guy is “uncancelled”. It truly is of “The Simpsons” caliber of humor.

I’m feeling a little uninspired to write anything interesting because my hands are hurting from the keyboard pounding I’ve been doing. Instead, I thought I’d dig up this really simple (and hopefully useful) AddressInfo class for you. The code is extremely basic, but it might save you the hassle of typing all fifty states (and some territories and the District of Columbia) and their two letter postal codes into your own class because I did it for you! Free of charge!

UPDATE: 2014/05/13 I lost it when I migrated it and honestly i don’t feel the need to have it up at the moment.

Brian had some sort of conference to attend, so I didn’t get to see much of him. But last Thursday he was at Venice Beach so I took a break from my work and drove out there. Soon enough, we got to doing that which all brothers must do when they haven’t seen each other in a while.

For some reason, I’ve always wanted to write a book. It started off as a desire to write the next Lord of the Rings classic, but has morphed into writing a reasonably useful technical book.

So I spent a bit of time today to “refresh” the look of my site. On the face of it, it’s not a dramatic change, but under the hood, I tore out the table driven layout and replaced it with a CSS driven layout.

As part of my site’s redesign, I wanted to keep the drop shadow effect on the left and right borders of my main content area. No problem I naively thought, I’ll simply add two background elements to the main div. I named the div “background” like so:

In case you wanted to see my neighborhood, you can check out this photograph. Then take your mouse and drag it around to see the surrounding area.

Yeahronimo, which owns the rights to the Commodore brand announced that they are nearing the release of a Commodore tablet PC called the Commodore 256, simply because that’s twice the number of the last Commodore 128.

Ok, I’m in nerdvana. I got my 2 x 1GB PC 3200 DDR 400 cards today and my machine is noticeably snappier today. On a lark, I decided to open every application on my machine just for kicks. Ok, maybe not. But doing DotNetNuke development is no longer a pain for me.

I’m sure you’re constantly asking yourself this, because I certainly wake up every morning in a cold sweat wondering. When you add a new project in Visual Studio.NET 2003 (friends call her VS.NET), you get the following dialog

I will neither confirm nor deny that this is where I used to work before going independent. I’ll only say that they’ll be doing some interesting work with .NET and it’s worth checking out.

In my post entitled Drinking From an RSS Fire Hose I dealt with some of the issues surrounding the flood of incoming RSS entries within an RSS aggregator raised by Dare’s post “Nightcrawler Thoughts: Thums Up, Thumbs Down and Attention.xml”.

Did you read about the Chinese online gamer who stabbed a competitor after the competitor sold his borrowed virtual sword?

This guy isn’t half bad.

Forgive me, but I really need to rant about shitty customer service. I’ve been burned bad by misinformation from ignorant and/or misleading reps. This time however, it involves our credit card company, Bank of America.