To Dev or not to Dev

We live in an era of information overload. I previously blogged about how easy it is to get information online,however I have come up with another interesting question. How valid is the information we read and find online ?

After 12+ years online I have a system that I follow when I rate information I find online. I use this analyse and determine the accuracy of the information that I find especially when troubleshooting or looking for advise.

Does the information make logical/technical sense ?

This is sometimes an immediate give away. Any source of information should contain a high level of common sense to be applied. I am often amazed by how often statements are made without any logical following of any kind. This is often highlighted in online debated about hardware, software or technology. In design I often find this point being illustrated by a problem or solution being overcomplicated or over designed.

Is the information successfully backed up with facts ?

This goes hand in hand with the first statement. If you are going to make statements, especially regarding a solution, problem or a fact is there relevant information elsewhere that can validate your statements or information.

In example: Simply stating that Vista is an expensive operating system is not necessarily true. There are various versions of Vista which have a sliding scale for pricing, available from various online sources. However the first statement is often made and the first impression created. Possibly not the best example but the most recent one Ican think of.

Is the online source (website/forum/chatroom) trustworthy ?

Is the site that the information is located trustworthy. This is simple really, by sticking to the Vista example, I would rate the feature guide for Vista on the Microsoft Website higher then reading it from a local newsgroup specialising in Linux.

Is this person experienced/expert in his/her field ?

When dealing with forums I rate people's answers based on their profile. I take into account a person's age, the way in which he answers the question, and any additional information I can find about a particular person.This also includes whether the solution actually works, and furthermore if the person has actually read the question correctly.

This brings me to a few of my pet hates online:

Reading Disability & Grammar

Before replying to a question read it at least twice and ensure you understand it! I very often read replies and posts that have not addressed the question directly or have no relevance to the person's question.

Also I tend to raise my eyebrows when someone uses slang or acronyms more then once when it is not required.

Self promotion

When a answer contains statements that are not referring to your own experience, but rather trying to promote your own skills or achievements!

Fictional or False Information

Thumb-sucking in short. When statements or claims are made that cannot be backed up by fact or can be easily proved to be false. However most people tend to believe it since they read it online.

So after a fairly lengthy post, the question to me is, how do you rate the value of the information you receive online ? Or do you just assume everything you read is true ?

I have never been a big fan of Crystal Reports. I admit it is an extremely powerful tool and once you understand how to use and implement the solution it works well. However the costs in running it has never been a create drawing card for me.

There has been a lot of hype around the Microsoft SQL Reporting Services and one of the neat features of the RDL reporting system is the ability to do client side reporting without the need of Reporting Services. By creating RDLC reports the Microsoft Report Viewer can be used to run reports locally and provides powerful functionality including Graphs, Paging and PDF/Excel exports.

There seems to be a gap in finding information for it, until I came across a brilliant resource here.

I highly recommended looking into a RDLC solution for those that need to implement reports and don't want the overhead of using Crystal Reports. Visual Studio offers a full RDLC designer and there is also plug-ins available to implement it in Visual Studio Express Edition available at the above link.

There is also a third party project to support RDL in Framework 1.1 available here.

Microsoft has released Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2.

A list of the changes are available here

Links to the downloads are available here

One of the features of dasBlog I was very intrigued with was it's ability to use gzip compression to serve pages. After doing a bit of research I realized that IIS by default does not enable compression and the setup is not entirely straight forward. I came across the following brilliant article on how to enable compression on IIS and tested it on two of my servers, an absolutely amazing difference in performance overall.

Have a look here

While working with a client recently I noticed he was running some interesting desktop widgets. He pointed me to the Yahoo Widgets website and I've been hooked ever since. There is a few sidebar and widgets systems out there and I am not sure how I missed this particular one, as I have never been a big fun of Yahoo's software, however the Widget Engine is in short quite brilliant.

The Yahoo Widget engine has a very small memory footprint, and each widget is highly configurable. All widgets can be locked to the desktop and it also allows for transparency to be set independently on each widget. Another nice feature is the F8 hotkey which allows all the widgets to come to the front, and a widget can also be set to only display when the F8 is pressed.

Each widget runs as a separate application, and therefore does not stop the widget engine or other widget from running when it "crashes". In testing one or two of the older widgets this turned out to be a very useful feature. Another neat feature of the widget engine is that it runs on both Mac and Windows. It also support Windows Vista, and althought I prefer the Desktop Sidebar, noticing the memory usage on it recently I am considering trying the Widget engine as a replacement for a few days.

So if your anything like me and like gadgets on your desktop or something different, head over to the Yahoo Widget website and begin playing with the 3800+ widgets already available.

Microsoft has launched a Beginner's Developer Learning centre aimed at the beginner programmers with information on how to start your first Web or Windows application in .Net using any of the Express Editions. Not to sure if this is a good or bad thing for hard core developers out there and an industry already overrun by junior developers, however it's a brilliant idea from Microsoft.

More about this site here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/beginner/

Information at your fingertips. Not more then 10 years ago if I needed an answer to a problem I had to visit the local library and look through encyclopedia's and reference books or find someone with experience to answer the question. When you started an application on your computer and it came up with an error message, you prayed that someone out there has had a similar experience, or that some manual or reference book has got it well documented.

Today it's simple. Open up Google. Type in the error. Browse through a few hundred pages of results. 90% of the problems I have I solve by following these steps. We have a wealth of information at our fingertips, free of charge, and we don't always even realise just how simple it is. I solve other peoples problems by following the same exact scenario. Most of these people have access to the internet, however still does not grasp the concept of instant information access.

So my question, simple and straighforward, is this:

Have you actually tried googling for your question ?