Development

Visual Studio Fail -- How not to debug .NET exception handling

spoulson — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 09:57:47 -0500

...no matter what try/catch I put in my user code, I couldn't catch this exception with the debugger. Visual Studio would halt execution every time with "Exception unhandled by user code"...

Programmatically updating Outlook's address book options with a command line tool

spoulson — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 10:01:54 -0400

I recently found the need to configure Outlook 2003 for thousands of corporate users to use preferred address book settings instead of the defaults. As anyone in a large corporate environment may know, the defaults are set such that when composing an email, name resolution checks all address lists in Exchange in alphabetical order by list, then name. When an organization is many tens of thousands large, resolving "Smith" will inevitably find conflicts.

What is Old is New Again: Functional Programming

spoulson — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 11:42:14 -0400

One of the greatest ideals of high level programming is the idea of code reuse. In the old days, this was only ever done using functions or subroutines, depending on the language. In later days, this was performed as object oriented design. Every language seems to accomplish these ideals in various ways to accomplish a similar goal.

Live demos of some simple web tools I developed

spoulson — Sat, 31 May 2008 22:06:47 -0400

As an IT guy, I look to using computers to solve some of my day to day problems. I say computers in plural because I readily use two at home and one at work, and I could also be in the internet cafe near my work. For instance, I store my personal passwords and other sensitive information in Crypt File Manager. It stays secure by encryption in such a way that not even my web host provider can access the data and the password is not stored anywhere on the web server or browser. This solution works great because I can access it wherever I want with only a web browser.

MMCd Datalogger project

spoulson — Thu, 01 May 2008 09:27:23 -0400

MMCd is an open source solution for realtime datalogging of ECU parameters on certain year Mitsubishi vehicles using a Palm handheld.
I am not the author, but a contributor to the MMCd project. However, I have authored the MMCd Tools add-on, used for datalog conversion to Excel on PC platform during HotSync.
Read more at the MMCd homepage.

Heroes Happen Here Launch Event

spoulson — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 11:58:48 -0500

Start: 04/03/2008 - 7:00am

End: 04/03/2008 - 5:00pm

Timezone: Etc/GMT-5

Microsoft event: Heroes Happen Here

spoulson — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 11:28:24 -0500

Microsoft recently launched a new event in cities across the US to showcase Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Visual Studio 2008 with tracks geared towards developers and admins. The event is free and you get free eval copies of the stuff. So, why the hell wouldn't you want to take a day off and go?

http://www.microsoft.com/heroeshappenhere/register/default.mspx