Wednesday January 4, 2006
AACS Meeting Time: 6:00 pm
Location: IT Zone Launch Pad.  330 E. Liberty, Ann Arbor MI

Join me tomorrow at the Northwest Ohio .NET Users Group at 333 N Summit St, Toledo, OH 43604 at 6:00 to hear about Data Binding and Caching in ASP.NET 2.0.

I thought that http://www.barcodesinc.com/ was a pretty
cool site (). I needed a couple of sample bar codes to use in some testing so
created them on this site and printed them off.

Josh Holmes as
a bar code

I was reminded of log4net today when working on a project. The client asked a logging framework and the cool part is that it’s a Compact Framework application. Sure enough log4net supports the Compact Framework.

There are a couple of minor differences that you should be aware of if you are interested in using log4net on the Compact Framework. First of all, not all of the appenders make sense – like the RemotingAppender, the EventLogAppender and the OracleAppender. Secondly, there is no mechanism for retrieving assembly level attributes so you have to explicitly initialize and shut down the log4net engine.

static void Main()

{

      try

      {

            //This line configures the log4net engine.

log4net.Config.DOMConfigurator.Configure(

new FileInfo(@”\log4net.config”));

            frmLogin loginForm = new frmLogin ();

            loginForm.ShowDialog();

                  Application.Run(new frmMain());

            }

      }

      catch (System.Exception e)

      {

            _log.Error(“Main“, e);

      }

      finally

      {

            //This line shuts down the log4net engine

            log4net.LogManager.Shutdown();

      }

}

The other thing that was interesting is that the online help on http://logging.apache.org/log4net showed conversion patterns with %message%newline to print the message and then put a newline in the file. I had to use %m%n because the first one there printed as

My stringessage

ewline

which was not quite what was expected.

Have fun with log4net, it’s a great lightweight logging framework for the compact framework.

Since Andrew Duthie fired off his rendition of “Love Shack”, Drew Robbins had to come back with his Karaoke rendition of this MC Hammer Song.

MC Hammer he’s not but I gotta say that he’s learned a step or two since TechEd (The origional Dancing DE). Maybe I should start trying those dancing machines…

I’m not sure who that is singing in the background but they are not bad – not up to Duthie standards (remember that he’s damn good) – but trust me there were worse performances at the Karaoke bar at the MVP party at the Science Fiction Museum.

Picture of the Dancing DEs: Andrew Duthie on the Left and Drew Robbins on the right.

So far the count is:

1 to Andrew Duthie for the singing
0.5 to Drew for attempting to Dance
1 to Drew for dancing the second time

Gotta Vote for who’s the best – use the comments to vote for your favorite!

So it’s Drew up by half a point. Any other contestants out there? Gotta great Dancing DE moment on video that you’d love to share with the world? Let me know and I’ll make sure that it’s posted!

	Drew Robbin’s Encore Video Performance
	https://joshholmes.com/images/DancingDE2.wmv
	Drew Robbin’s Blog

If you attend the VS.NET Launch in November you’ll get a free copy of VS.NET 2005 and a free copy of SQL Server 2005!

Oh yeah – and you’ll get some great content on how to use those two products.

Bill Steele, our Microsoft Developer Community Championin the “Heartland District”, did something very cool. He’s a private pilot and donates his time to Angel Flight and the Air Care Alliance.

He took off on his own time to fly 45 trips down to the hardest hit places to take down 17,500 MREs and other stuff. I think that’s cool and that it should be commended.

Now, it costs a lot of money to do all of that flying. According to Bill’s post, it’s between $200-$400 per flight. That tells me that it was between $9,000 and $18,000 for Bill to deliver all of that food and supplies. Really, that’s reasonable because about a dollar or less for each of those meals to be delivered. If that’s all that you tipped the pizza guy – he’d be pissed. In the mean time, we need to help out by visiting the links below and donating.

	Bill Steele’s post
	http://blogs.msdn.com/wsteele/archive/2005/09/08/462752.aspx
	Angel Flight
	Visit to learn more or donate
	http://www.angelflightamerica.org/
	Air Care Alliance
	Visit to learn more or donate
	http://aircareall.org/

Microsoft has a loaded RV that they are taking to Grand Rapids on August 2nd
from 8:30 to 5:00. There’s a free lunch. It’s a free event, but you should RSVP.

When it came to Ann Arbor, it was mostly stuff like Exchange, Mappoint,
Licensing, Small Business Server and so on. However, it was really good
information and it was worth the trip to see the RV. It’s got highspeed
everywhere because of the really solid satelite system. It’s loaded with
computers, networks and everything else I’d love to have in a completely mobile
office…

Bill Wagner, my business partner and author of Effective
C#, is doing a web cast on Monday, July 11, at 2:00 Eastern Time.