Leon Zandman’s Blog

I laughed out loud when I read this quote from Scott Hanselman’s latest blog post:

I googled with Bing

How will Microsoft ever win this…

I remember reading this funny text several years ago. I just stumbled on it again and decided to archive it here. I think it’s pretty funny

Woman are like computers, because:

1. No one but their creator understands their internal logic.
2. The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else.
3. Even the smallest mistakes are stored in long term memory for possible later review.
4. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.

Men are like computers, because:

1. In order to do anything with them, you have to turn them on.
2. They have a lot of data but still can’t think for themselves.
3. They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they ARE the problem.
4. As soon as you commit to one, you realize that if you had waited a little longer you could have gotten a better model.

I’m planning on doing some posts about frustrating things I have encountered (and still do!) during my SharePoint development efforts. Here’s the first one:

Last year while working on a MOSS 2007 project for one of our customers I stumbled on what I thought was a bug in SharePoint 2007. I had created a custom list that was filled with Electronic Program Guide (EPG) information for the streaming video media that that site contained. I then created a Webpart that used ASP.Net AJAX to continually show the actual EPG information below the video stream.

In order to obtain the EPG items I used a CAML query to query the EPG list. The list was simply a custom list containing amongst others a column of type DateTime that was called "ProgramEnd". As the name suggests it contained the time the program ended. I then used the following code to create a query that was supposed to obtain the currently broadcasted item and all future items.

   1: const string EPG_QUERY_TEMPLATE = @"

   2: <Where>

   3:  <Geq>

   4:   <FieldRef Name='ProgramEnd' />

   5:   <Value Type='DateTime'>{0}</Value>

   6:  </Geq>

   7: </Where>"; 

   8:  

   9: SPQuery query = new SPQuery();

  10: query.Query = String.Format(EPG_QUERY_TEMPLATE,

  11:     SPUtility.CreateISO8601DateTimeFromSystemDateTime(DateTime.Now)); 

  12: // ...

To my surprise this query always returned too many items. Further investigation showed that time part of the query seemed to be ignored completely, so it returned the items as if no time was specified! So instead of getting the current item and all future items it returned all items broadcasted for that day.

After wasting a lot of time debugging, using the U2U Caml Query Builder and looking for an answer / solution on the internet I gave up and wrote a quick hack around it, which fortunately wasn’t very difficult. It would just run the query and run the results through some additional code that checked the ProgramEnd DateTime field and filter out the wrong items, like this:

   1: SPListItemCollection results = ...; // The results from the query mentioned above

   2: // Trim the results to only include the current and future items

   3: List<SPListItem> trimmedItems = new List<SPListItem>();

   4: foreach (SPListItem result in results)

   5: {

   6:     DateTime programEnd = (DateTime)result["ProgramEnd"];

   7:     if (programEnd >= DateTime.Now)

   8:         trimmedItems.Add(result);

   9: } 

Fortunately this worked just fine and the customer was happy. I was not…

Today while surfing the Net I stumbled on this entry in the MSDN forums, from which I learned it wasn’t a bug, but that you need to included the "IncludeTimeValue" attribute to the CAML query, like this:

   1: <Where>

   2:  <Eq>

   3:   <FieldRef Name='programEnd' />

   4:   <Value Type='DateTime' IncludeTimeValue='TRUE'>

   5:    2008-07-30T12:00:00Z

   6:   </Value>

   7:  </Eq>

   8: </Where> 

If only I had known it was this simple… What bothers me is that this little, but very important attribute seems to be totally undocumented. I couldn’t find any information about it in the WSS / SharePoint SDKs.

Ofcourse once I knew what to look for I found some other blogs and forums mentioning this issue. It turns out the UCSharp blog had already blogged about this way back in October 2007, only a few months after I searched for it. Even Karine Bosch, U2U’s "CAML Girl" and author of the famous U2U CAML Query Builder, says she only recently found out about this. Fortunately she has included support for the "IncludeTimeValue" attribute in her latest version of the U2U Caml Query Builder, which I know a lot of SharePoint developers use to construct and test their CAML queries.

I also noticed that someone called puneetspeed has added some Community Content to the online SharePoint SDK’s SPQuery docs explaining this issue. So hopefully Microsoft will add information about the "IncludeTimeValue" attribute to the official SDK text in the near future.

I might have happened to you too: make some error in a Windows virtual machine and your system will *BEEP* out loud. Not some nice and fancy WAV/MP3 sample, but a raw *BEEP* coming straight from your system’s motherboard. This *BEEP* does not respect your speaker volume and mute settings. And it will probably irritate most people who sit near you.

Fortunately getting the beep to shut up forever is relatively simple. Here’s how to do it:

1. Open a Command Prompt window (in Vista make sure you open it using the “Run as administrator” option).
2. Use the following commands:
• To stop the Windows Beep Service:
  net stop beep
• To make sure it never gets started again:
  sc config beep start= disabled

That should take care of them BEEPs

A while ago I did some proofreading for Teun Duynstee’s e-book The Web Part Infrastructure Uncovered. I found it a very good read. In fact I think it is one of the most thorough books available on the subject, even though it only has 135 pages. This e-book has been available for some months now, but since I just recently started blogging I thought I might spend a blog entry to it. With SharePoint 2007 now using the .NET Framework 2.0 Web Part technology as one of its core technologies, knowledge about this framework has become more and more important.

Teun sells his book online through Lulu.com. The price is €14.00 (ca. $17) for the printed book (+ shipping & handling) or €9.00 for the downloaded PDF (ca. $11) which is peanuts considering the book’s useful content.

I recommend this e-book to every .NET developer that’s working with or interested in Web Parts. You can check out some sample chapters here and here.