Shannon Braun's Weblog

I stumbled across the fact that they released a new editor font for Visual Studio .NET which is supposed to be more compressed and easier to read.  I had been using Lucida Console forever and really liked that, but I like Consolas even better.

You can download it at the Microsoft Download Center.  Beware it will install as the default font for your Visual Studio environment.

I have solved this problem a number of times using recursion on the client and have always wanted to better solution for handling on the server side.  Handling it on the client requires that you bring back all of the data and recurse through it. Again I was faced with the problem this week... and I thought I would poke around to see if there was a better way to solve the problem.  It looks SQL Server 2005 now supports Common Table Expressions, which allows for recursion.  Here are a couple of articles I found explaining how to do it:

SQL Server 2005 Recursion Functions

Hierarchical Queries in SQL Server 2005

Looks like some of the folks on the Microsoft Patterns & Practices team is looking at what it will take to build a requirements tool.  As far as I can tell they are just playing with a concept application and are looking for feedback.  The tool doesn't look like it is geared to any specific process and is very basic at this point.  I downloaded it and after removing some references that I didn't have on my box ( you will need CAB, Enterprise Library and SQL Compact edition - formally SQL Everywhere) was able to get it to compile and running.  It nothing special at this point.  It handles creating hierarchical requirements and linking.  With the most recent release it also look like they have built a module to sync with Team System.  It also is using has some example code in how they plan on handling the occasionally connected scenario. It's just a POC right now, but if you are interested you can take a look at it here.

.NET 3.0 framework was released a couple of days ago.  I downloaded it today and try to install it and ran into the following. 

I tried it on another computer... basically the same messaging only differening by the drive letter.  That drive happens to be my NAS... which I didn't choose but rather the install package choose when unpacking the files to a temporary location.  Thinking this was not good... I detached my NAS and ran the install with no problem.

The other Required installs (.Net 3.0 SDK for example) allowed me to install with the NAS attached.

I thought this site was kind of cool.  It demos the the Yahoo UI Library to build a blog.

This is one of the better implementations I have found (although very slow) using google maps to layout the "L" routes in Chicago. 

http://www.tastypopsicle.com/maps/cta.asp

I had always written my own include for Xml with out knowing there is an actual standard.  You can find information on the standard and a library built by the Xml MVP's.