Big Debate

Tonight is the night that the world will change. Because tonight is the night the Party Party 08 has been given the opportunity yo participate in a public debate.

unfortunately the big guys, McCain and Obama will not debate us, however some conservative bloggers took up the challenge.

the debate starts at 9:30 and will be held at Papa's Social club. It will be entertaining to say the least. So come out and support Mike and I as we push our campaign to the white house.

Success

What a great party.
Papa Palozza was a huge success. They raised 1300 for The Penfield Children Center. Countless raffles and even a chance at a Harley was all won by the spectators.

As for the music all four bands did a really great job. It was a really good mix of music.

What more can I say than if you were not there you missed a great time.

Papapalooza is Here

That is right! This Saturday from 7:00 pm to close, four bands all playing for charity. Who are these bands you ask.

1. Single Barrel
2. Black Frog
3. Upside Groove Coalition
4. Radio Doctors

What Charity are they playing for you ask.

• Penfield Children Center

Plus on top of all that some lucky person will win a 1 in 80 chance for a Harley Davidson Motorcycle, or maybe some brewers, bucks, or packers swag as part of the many many raffles.

Then you ask how much does this all cost. That answer my friend is free. There is no cover to get in, if you want to partake in the raffles then you will need to buy tickets.

So please come on down to Papas Social Club on 77 and Burleigh and party with the Papa's crew and all the band members, oh and did I mention yours truly will be playing cow bell?

Toga! Toga! Toga!

So one of my favorite Bars in Milwaukee and one of my favorite Bands in Milwaukee are getting together to throw a toga party Saturday.

Papa's Social Club and Single Barrel are getting together along with yours truly working the door and making a guest appearance to play cow bell to bring you this party all for a small $5.00 fee at the door. If you come in a toga you will also receive drink specials.

for more details check out the Single Barrel website for times and what not.

Midwest Flooding

As many of you know the Midwest has been hit hard by rain and floods the last couple of weeks. In fact an entire lake was drained when the lake bed gave way. Many people have been displaced and have lost homes. some pics and video of the disaster are here. Please support the red cross and other charities to help the victims.

Website update

So I started doing some things with the new software factory and like it, but decided I wanted to actually check out MVC and Unity. So going forward that is what I am going to be doing.

Home Page Re-Write

So I was looking at my home page and I decided it was time for an update. My home site served me well, but it has become outdated and needs a fresh look and feel along with some updated functionality.

So I have decided to Re-Write the whole thing, but I am going to use it as a learning experience. I am going to use ASP.Net and C# as the base technology, but will be trying some new stuff out as well. What I plan on using:

• Web Client Software Factory (Re-vist and check out new updates)
• Silverlight 2.0 Beta (Somewhat New to Me)
• AJAX.Net (good feel for it but want to look deeper into it)
• NHibernate(good feel for it If I use a db....)
• XML to LINQ (New to me)
• MigratorDotNet (Great DB utility if I use a db.....)
  

I will be adding to this list as I work on the site.

I really don't have a time frame for when I want to be complete. I plan on working on it as I find time. So please check back as often as you can to catch the updates. Also I have not decided if I am going to use a data store. It will cost me $100 to use Sql Server at my provider, or I could use MySql for $10. I am not a big fan of MySql so I am not sure what I will decide. Maybe I will jump providers..... just a thought.

Anyways that is my update for the week.

AJAX.Net

In the past I have talked about some of the frameworks being used on the current website I am working on uses. I have mostly talked about NHibernate. Well this post will be different since I am going to talk about a UI Framework called AJAX.Net and the AJAX Tool Kit. These frameworks come from Microsoft.

On our website we use the UpdatePanel quite a bit. It provides a simple async call back mechanism so we only have to post back parts of pages. This comes in handy when u want to update a part of a web page with new information or data without having to interrupt the user from reading or investigation other parts of the web page. The control is very easy to use and can really save developers lots of times in implementing this type of functionality.

I could talk all day about the update panel, but I want to really talk about a control found in the AJAX toolkit called ModalPopupExtender. We use the ModalPopupExtender control on our project to notify the customer that then still have work to do in filling out their data. Since user input is gathered in multiple steps it guides the user to what they need to do next. Of course we give the user the option to close out of it and move forward on their own. We added data checking so that the modal pop ups only display when needed.



As you can see the background get grayed out and you can style the pop up to look like the rest of your website. You can put any HTML, ASP.NET control, or other control in the modal.

If you haven't already checked out the AJAX.NET or AJAX toolkit from microsoft, you can fin them here.

NHibernate Odds and Ends

I have blogged about NHibernate in the past, and am going to talk about some odds and ends I have learned while using the tool on my current project.

First for the most part I love working with Nhibernate. Every time I have needed to add data access support it has been super simple to add. Everything is based off your Object Model so getting the data needed is a snap. Just open a session create a criteria, return your data, and close the session.

NHibernate logging works very well as well. it was easy to go in the log files and see what the tool really is doing. The one think to note is it can be very verbose and really slow down your application the more you log. For Production I would recommend ERROR only, otherwise you might find you app writing 100's of MB per page request.

One area I found a problem was in Like Querying. I was able to get Like working for smaller varchar columns Like city. An example would be Expression.Like(property, keyword, MatchMode.Anywhere). The problem I ran into for larger fields like say a comments field, it would not work. It could not match the keyword charming in a large varchar field even if charming was the only word. it was rather odd behavior and I was forced to write the SQL by hand and use the ISQLQuery created off the NHibernate session.

Just a side note, we are also using spring.net with our application and that is handling a lot of our configuration.

Again I cant talk about how much I enjoy working for the most part with NHibernate. It really does save development time when building applications.

Trip to Philly

So last weekend I went to Philadelphia. My girlfriend and I spent the weekend there together and we had a blast. I really enjoy seeing the history of the city and country for that matter. We stayed in a hotel a block from Independence Hall.


This is a picture of the front of Independence Hall. In the clock tower is where the Liberty Bell used to hang before they took it down and put it in its own building.


As everyone knows Philly is the place for cheese steak sandwiches. Pat's was first and Geno's I think is better. It is a little nerve racking ordering a steak in Philly. Pat's has a nice sign helping those who are not from there to order properly. I had a wiz wit.

Finally Everyone has been asking me for a photo of Lisa and I so here you go.....



The first picture is in Independence Hall court yard. The second picture is in a park across from the hotel.

In the next few posts I will be adding more Philadelphia pictures and the stories that go with them.

Party Party 08 (Update)

My friend Mike Anderson and I have been working hard on our political party. Our membership has been growing and so we begun looking into what it takes to get on to the Wisconsin presidential ballot. It turns out that u need 10,000 signatures from people in the state. Along with that at least 1,000 of them needs to come from 3 separate voting districts. That doesn't seem so tough so we are going to start collecting signatures. We have to file all the papers by June 2nd.

So this leads me to wonder what does it take to get on the ballot in other states?

Party Party 08

About a month ago I was havening a few beers with my friend Mike Anderson and we were talking about the state of politics. After deciding that both main parties are stupid and don't get anything done we decided to start our own.

We called it the Party Party. Mike won our parties nomination for President, and he chose me to run for Vice President.

In the next few days I will be outlining our platform and what we stand for. Also I will list some of the people who are currently endorsing us in the coming election.

Mix 08

Yes I am going to Mix 08. The conference is hosted by Microsoft and held at the Venetian Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. The dates of the conference are March 5th, 6th and 7th.

Last year I went to Mix 07 and had a lot of fun. There they released SilverLight, and had many sessions on the coming release of VS2008. I also met some PM's from microsoft, had drinks at Pure with some of the MySpace IT people, and saw the Las Vegas Pussycat Dolls.

So Mix is billed as "The Next Web Now". This year Mix is focusing on VS2008, SilverLight, MVC, Dynamic Languages, LINQ and much more.

Check out the Mix08 website, ad remember I will be blogging from the show on anything interesting that is discussed, and will try to remember to take some pictures and post those too.