Why is it that every time I start on a new project I get a database diagram dropped on my desk? What am I supposed to do with it? How about the rest of the stuff the application is supposed to do, beside persist it's data? Would you like a command prompt with that? Or fries? I dislike the mind set that the data model is the most important thing in an application. It's not a data warehouse we're building, it's a simple staff management application. Let's write up a use case or two for a change, figure out what we're building before we start building it.

I promised myself I was going to blog more, post some original material as opposed to the link stuff and announcements I usually do. Unfortunately my backlog of things to do caught up with me and I can barely catch my breath lately. Right now I'm working on getting the content for Calgary Tech Fest 2007 into the site. I guess the cat is out of the bag now, Daniel announced yesterday at the Developer Night in Canada. Feel free to check it out even though the content is not all in there yet. I'm still looking for a nice (and free) DNN skin to use on the site. If anyone knows one please drop me a line.

Which brings me to the brutal installation experience DNN provides. Not the mention it's one of the most bloated applications I've seen; slow too, there's a bizillion things running before even the first byte is served. "ideal for creating Enterprise Web Applications"? I think not! No it's not like me to bash an open source project but seriously since when is "module creation, module packaging, debugging methods, etc" development best practice or cutting edge? And don't get me started on this pearl right here "well-researched user interface allow universal ease-of-operation". Wow, who writes this stuff! For an open source project I'm growing fond of check out DotNetBlogEngine or Castle Project.

Back to the Calgary Tech Fest 2007 - we have some interesting sessions lined up so far. I'm looking forward to find out all I can about the NHibernate Mafia, particularly since I'm lobbying hard to use Castle project's Active Record (this makes your domain persistence aware) for some projects at work. There are a couple of sessions on AJAX and Silverlight as well so it's probably worth attending.

Closing the window from JavaScript should be easy. However if the window was not opened using script the user will be prompted for permission to close the window. This can be irritating for the user end so a request you frequently encounter is to close the window without prompting for permission. I came across two interesting articles today, one that provides a technique for IE 6 and the other for IE 7. So here are the two posts:

IE 6 and IE 7

I've tested the IE 7 and it seems to work well.

This one keep coming up once in a blue moon and I have no idea what it's all about. The message doesn't say much.

Matt Berseth has an interesting post on exporting a GridView to Excel. Find the post and the code here.