Patrick Steele's .NET Blog

Steve Smith has developed a unit test to make sure your .NET enums (used during coding) match up wth their corresponding lookup tables (used for RI checking). Nice safety net.

I have a DB2 database giving me a date in GMT format and I need to convert it to my local timezone. The .NET TimeZone class makes this sooooo easy:

Most of you reading this post already know this, but Microsoft will not send you a personal email with a critical update. I've been flooded with about 20 of these today. They are very authentic looking -- they resemble the Microsoft home page, same layout, fonts, trademark and copyright notices, the works. But the attachment is just another virus/worm.

Had a great GANG meeting tonight. Bob Crosley from Wise Solutions discussed "Deployment nightmares: How poor software deployments destroy schedules, projects and your customer's computer". He also demo'd Wise for Visual Studio.NET and it looked slick! It integrates directly into the IDE as a new project type and has a ton of nice point-and-click options. It also supports some complex stuff like database installs, virtual directory creation, GAC install and even nGen on the client. Nice.

Roy challenges you to ask the developer next to you: Have you ever done unit testing?

David McNamee has a great preview of some of the changes coming in the Whibey version of VB.NET. It's great to see some of these things now being demo'd to the public. I've seen many of the things he posted about previously, but was under NDA and couldn't discuss. Since it's now been shown publically, I'd like to add a quick comment to one of David's observations on aligning controls:

From a DOTNET-CLR post: An interesting feature of MSIL that is not currently exposed in any of the languages -- "method overload based on return type only." Very interesting!

This just in: Buffer Overrun In RPCSS Service Could Allow Code Execution