For the past year, I have been spending more and more of my daily commuting time listening to podcasts and audio books. In the past few months, it has been almost 100% of the time. It really is a great way to regain some value from the time. I’ve been able to listen to books I’ve wanted to read as well as gain helpful news and information in my specific areas of focus through podcasts.

Below is the list of podcasts I currently am subscribed to:

HanselMinutes
HanselMinutes is far and away my favorite podcast to date. Scott Hanselman has an amazing breadth of knowledge in the areas of technology and development. Each week, along with host Carl Franklin, Scott brings us 30 minutes of great information usually focused on a particular topic. The depth of the material is just about perfect for a podcast where you can’t give the material 100% of your attention. The production quality is excellent and it is a joy to listen to. This is the only podcast I get excited to listen to before it arrives.

Marketplace Takeout
NPR Technology
Before I went to almost 100% iPod listening in the car, NPR was the main thing I listened to. The two things I enjoyed the most where the stories on Technology and Marketplace which is focused on business, usually cutting edge business news. It seemed natural to subscribe to these programs as they take the best stories from the week and put them in a weekly podcast. Each podcast is roughly 30 minutes and again the production quality is excellent.

.NET Rocks!
This was the first podcast I ever listened to and it is still in my subscribe list. Each week, Carl Franklin and Richard Campbill interview someone in the .NET development world. The program is roughly an hour and the content is not nearly tightly packed as the other podcasts I listen to. This has advantages and disadvantages. I will admit I do not listen to every show. I read the title/guest and if it strikes me I usually listen to it right away. Otherwise, it piles up and I listen to them when I’ve run out of other things to listen to. While that might sound negative, I hope it doesn’t come across that way. I enjoy it, but don’t get as much out of it as other things. The production quality is again excellent.

Polymorphic Podcast
Craig’s show is fairly new to me, but since I have 4 episodes under my belt I’ll share my initial thoughts. Craig’s show is similar to .NET Rocks in focus area and the interviewing concept, but it is a shorter show and a little more in depth. Craig keeps the host around 30 minutes and cuts out the fluff for the most part. After the opening stuff, it is really kept on target and keeps the chit-chat to a minimum. The production quality is a bit lower than the others listed here, but it is unpleasant to listen to.

I have a few others I’m still new too, but I’ll reserve much comment until I’ve heard a few more episodes of each.

ASP.NET Podcast
This is another in the style of .NET Rocks. I’ve listened to 2 episodes so far.

Audible Ajax
This is a show that is focused on news in the Ajax community. Again, I’m 2 episodes in.

TWiT (This week in technology)
I’ve got a few loaded up, but I just haven’t given it a go. I’ve heard good things about it however.

I finished reading Eric Sink's new book this weekend, "Eric Sink on the Business of Software". I've been enjoying Eric's weblog for a long time so I figured I'd splurge on this book as I'm a book person at heart.

This book is actually a printing of 27 articles (or blog posts) from his web site, many of which were released on MSDN. I believe there might be a few small changes, but nothing major. I had read many of these articles previously and I knew what to expect going into the book. If I had been expecting new work, I would have left very disappointed.

Eric has organized the book into 4 sections, Entrepreneurship, People, Marketing and Sales. Each of the articles is now a chapter and he has written an introduction for each one, similar to what Joel Spolsky did in his Joel on Software book. Eric's book does flow together very well considering each article was written without the book in mind.

Eric's focus is on the small software shop or "Micro ISV" has he refers to them. Eric has lots of experiences in the software business and is a great communicator of his ideas. He shares his insights in a very personable, humorous tone which makes for easy reading.

Having had some experience in my own small businesses, a lot of his advice rings true. Some of his ideas didn't really apply, some I'm a bit skeptical of, and some I really wished I had thought of.

The book is recommended reading if you have interest in starting a "Micro ISV" or just like to dream about it. I will readily admit, the weblog archives will give you basically the same content, but you won’t be able to enjoy them as comfortably as a book.

I ran into an oddity while converting an ASP.NET 1.1 project to ASP.NET 2.0 today. The conversion when was going along way too smoothly when I started testing some Crystal Reports that are processed in the web site.

This particular site runs reports based on user input, exports them to PDF format, and then displays the PDF for the users. In running them after the update, I was getting an argument exception when the program executed the export method of the Crystal Report Document object, "Missing Parameters".

Now, to paint the picture properly, I had just listened to the latest Hanselminutes podcast on the way in to work which covered a fairly major debugging process. I had this in the back of my mind the whole time I'm trying to figure out what was going on.

My report does have a parameter so I checked my syntax to make sure the new object model still supported my method. It appeared fine, but since there are a few ways to add parameters I decided to try the method explained on in the MSDN documentation. Same result.

After a bit more head scratching and a third method of adding a parameter value, I finally discovered, that my report document was flushing the parameter I set when I connected my data source.

As I mentioned before, the process worked fine in 1.1 setting the parameter values and then attaching the data source, but in 2.0, that is no longer the case. Setting the parameters (any of the 3 ways) after connecting the data source worked great.

Since we have started using Visual Studio 2005, all new projects have been placed in Subversion for our version control. We have been very pleased with the switch away from Visual SourceSafe so far.

Today, we took steps to move all active development to Subversion and I moved two current 1.1 projects out of SourceSafe and into Subversion. Of course, we have all old versions in SourceSafe where they will continue to be for the time being, along with other projects.

Anyway, I was a little surprised at all the VSS (Visual SourceSafe) hooks created in my solutions. First, there seemed to be an abundance of files in my folders that ended with "scc". I knew there were a few but it seemed I deleted at least a dozen of those buggers. I also have to make all the files writeable, so I removed the read only tag in the properties.

Then the fun began. I opened the project only to get messages about the missing scc files. I closed VS 2003 down and found that a few new scc files were created for me. :)

I immediately opened up my project file (csproj) in a text editor and found a bunch of VSS hooks in there. 4 to be exact. In the header, there are 4 items that begin with Scc. I removed these and saved the project file. I did this for all project files.

Then I checked my solution file (sln). Sure enough, there was an entire section labeled for SourceCodeControl. I, of course, removed these too. Then after clean up the newly created "scc" files, I was ready to try again.

This time it worked like a champ.

One of the interesting features of ASP.NET 2.0 is the fact that the site, by default, is dynamically compiled and managed by the ASP.NET runtime. The standard method I've read most about for installing your web site is to just copy your code and assemblies to your web server and let the runtime handle the rest. If you need to update a page or class, just update the file and the ASP.NET runtime will handle the update for you.

However, you can also precompile your sites to protect your code and to avoid the first hit compile delay (which was negligable for me in my testing). Interestingly, I was unable to find a way to do it inside Visual Studio 2005. It is done from the command line. The command is aspnet_compiler and it is in your 2.0 framework folder (C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.xxxxx). You run it with the -v virtualPath and a targetPath.

aspnet_compiler -v /samplesite c:\temp\samplesite

This will compile all your code into assemblies and place them in your target (c:\temp\samplesite).

Upon inspecting your compiled code, you notice that all the aspx pages are still there, but they are all 1 KB in size. All the code files are gone and replaced with dll files in the bin folder.

The 1 KB aspx files all contain the following text:

This is a marker file generated by the precompilation tool, and should not be deleted!

I thought it was pretty cool that all the code in the aspx files was compiled as well and removed.