Author Archives: Robert S. Robbins

Utility To Troubleshoot SQL INSERT Statements

Posted on 6/14/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

Today I wrote a Windows application in C# to help me troubleshoot SQL INSERT statements which do not have an equal number of columns and values. Unfortunately, SQL Server does not provide very informative error messages. It can be difficult … Continue reading →

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Things That Are Consuming My Time

Posted on 6/5/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

I’ve been very busy the past few months and can’t seem to make much progress in getting things done to reduce my work load. Therefore a blog is in order to explain why. First, the USPS changed their shipping rates … Continue reading →

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Web Service Security

Posted on 5/22/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

Most web service tutorials only show you how to return a simple string value and they don’t address security at all. All of the web services you create based on the tutorials will allow anonymous access over the Internet. Anonymous … Continue reading →

Posted in ASP.NET, General | Leave a comment

ASP.NET 2.0 Health Monitoring

Posted on 5/20/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

In addition to trace listeners, ASP.NET 2.0 has added a health monitoring system to log web events for a web application. Health Monitoring is similar to trace listeners with the additional option of logging the events to a SQL Server … Continue reading →

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log4net With ASP.NET 1.1

Posted on 5/19/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

log4net provides the same sort of debug and trace logging capabilities as the trace listeners in ASP.NET 2.0 but it can be used in ASP.NET 1.1. Therefore if you like trace listeners in ASP.NET 2.0 but have some ASP.NET 1.1 … Continue reading →

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ASP.NET 2.0 Trace Listeners

Posted on 5/17/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

I have been spending a lot of time exploring Visual Studio’s debugging options because I deal with a lot of large projects and web applications that require me to search through thousands of lines of code. Web applications are especially … Continue reading →

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dot.bomb: My Days and Nights at an Internet Goliath

Posted on 5/1/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

I’ve been too busy to blog much lately. This blog gets over 100 spam comments a day and I don’t have time to read them all to find legitimate comments. If you want to leave a legitimate comment please send … Continue reading →

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Integrating Custom Help Into Visual Studio

Posted on 4/1/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

I have figured out how to convert my Notes.chm HTML Help file into the new Help 2.0 format and how to add it to the The Visual Studio .NET Combined Help Collection. First you need to download the Visual Studio … Continue reading →

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I Have A New Job

Posted on 3/27/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

This blog post is for my clients who may be wondering what I’m doing. I was recently hired by a local company for what may turn out to be a full time job. I needed to find a full time … Continue reading →

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Expertise Greed

Posted on 3/25/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

I am quite greedy for expertise. I am always looking to increase my knowledge and improve upon my skills. It is surprising how rarely career advice mentions the importance of gaining expertise. Maybe they just assume you have the expertise … Continue reading →

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Netvibe’s Universal Widget API

Posted on 3/15/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

Netvibes has developed an Universal Widget API which can be used to create widgets that work on multiple platforms. Currently a widget using their API will work on Google IG or the Netvibes mashup site. You can find the documentation … Continue reading →

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ASP.NET Mastery – Expanding My ASP.NET Expertise

Posted on 3/7/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

It can take a long time to learn a programming language. After the initial period of study during which you learn the language syntax, there is a long period of learning how to do various useful tasks. For a programming … Continue reading →

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SQL Server Data Import – How To Preserve Primary Keys and Identity Fields

Posted on 3/6/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

One of my biggest problems working with SQL Server databases is preserving my primary keys and identity fields when I try to copy tables from one database to another. The SQL Server Import and Export Wizard likes to remove primary … Continue reading →

Posted in Databases | 8 Comments

Philadelphia YouTube Gathering

Posted on 3/6/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

I’ve just watched Mr. Safety’s video about the next As One Gathering which will be held in Philadelphia on August 4th. I was in a Stickam chat with Nalts and Podcasting101 as they discussed their gathering in NYC on 7/7/07. … Continue reading →

Posted in Video Production | Leave a comment

Windows Server 2003 and Sharepoint

Posted on 3/5/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

Today I got another 250 GB Western Digital hard drive that I bought on eBay. I have installed Windows Server 2003 on it in order to run Sharepoint. You cannot install Sharepoint on Windows XP. Sharepoint interests me because it … Continue reading →

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Web Developers – Freelance VS Firms

Posted on 2/28/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

Now that I’ve worked as a freelance web developer and as a web developer working for a small company that does a variety of Internet consulting and I.T. related work I have some thoughts on choosing one over the other. … Continue reading →

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Joomla And botMosXslt – XML Feeds In Portals

Posted on 2/25/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

Last night I installed the Joomla open source content management system on my local web server and explored its ability to consume XML data feeds (web services, developer APIs, and RSS news feeds). The News Feed module did not allow … Continue reading →

Posted in General | 2 Comments

What Technology I Am Studying

Posted on 2/24/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

I devote a lot of time each week to studying new technology. It is very important for a web developer to keep up his skill set because his expertise is his major asset. I prefer to learn incrementally because most programming languages … Continue reading →

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DotNetNuke 4 News Module and Web Parts Synergy

Posted on 2/23/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

Tonight I tried to use some of the XSL stylesheets I created for my ASP.NET 2.0 web parts mashup in the DotNetNuke 4 web portal. I was very pleased to find that most of them work when used with the … Continue reading →

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RegexBuddy And xmlns:media

Posted on 2/22/2007 by Robert S. Robbins

Today I purchased RegexBuddy, a tool for creating and testing regular expressions. Regular expressions are strings that describe or match a set of strings, according to certain syntax rules. In other words, a regular expression is a complex syntax for … Continue reading →

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