Posts by Jeff Prosise

Readers submit some great e-mails to my Wicked Code column in MSDN Magazine, but every now and then I get one that makes me wonder whether to laugh or cry. Here’s one that arrived today: hi cna u help me how 2 hack on to someones msn acount with out downloading anythink cause i need…

I’m in San Francisco for Microsoft’s worldwide Whidbey launch event, which took place today. Wintellect built a lot of the content for the launch–the slides and demos that the presenters used–and we were here to make sure everything went smoothly. Rich Hundhausen, Steve Borg, Jason Clark, and I poured a lot of blood into this…

No, I’m not talking about Jeffrey Richter. “Heavenly Body” is my R/C B-25, which is finally finished and is almost ready for its test flight. The paint scheme comes from the real Heavenly Body, a B-25 manufactured near the end of WWII that still flies today. Mine has a wingspan of 85”, so while it’s tiny…

Well, I found out tonight that Notepad won’t open a 929MB text file. SQL Server 2005 Management Studio won’t, either, which leaves me in a pickle. Here’s the story. A while back, I installed a beta build of SQL Server 2005 on my desktop PC. It converted my SQL Server 2000 databases into SQL Server…

ASP.NET’s GridView control suffers from an irritating design flaw. When a GridView contains a ButtonField and one of the buttons in the column is clicked, there’s no obvious way to determine WHICH button was clicked–that is, to get a reference to the row containing the clicked button. I’ve seen all kinds of work-arounds, some better…

I spent several weeks this summer writing an ASP.NET 2.0 provider toolkit under contract for Microsoft. The centerpiece of the toolkit is a 120-page whitepaper documenting the provider model and offering lots of samples. It’s now online (in 10 parts) on MSDN at the following locations: Introduction to the Provider Model Membership Providers Role Providers…

I’m working on an ASP.NET 2.0 project that uses CSS to stylize the UI. I needed to include <COLGROUP> elements in the output from GridView controls, but alas, GridView doesn’t support <COLGROUP>. (The ASP.NET team is aware of this, and a future version of GridView will, in all likelihood, support <COLGROUP>.) So I built a quick-and-dirty…

I just came across an excellent article by Andrew Duthie on new caching features in ASP.NET 2.0. Everybody’s heard about SQL cache dependencies, but post-cache substitution is one of ASP.NET 2.0 best-kept secrets. Andrew offers lucid discourse on custom cache dependencies as well.

Years ago, it was a curiosity about (and passion for) computer graphics that got me into the computer business. I bought a Commodore 64 (remember those?) and set out to write a flight simulator. Much to my chagrin, I found that Commodore BASIC had no graphics commands, so before I could write a flight simulator,…