Today was my last day at Friday-Ad, my first .NET contract. I've done lots of ASP.NET, C# and SQL Server, wrote a web service, improved my CSS skills, learnt some SEO techniques and met some really great people.

Tomorrow I start 3 weeks freelance work for my favourite football team, then I'll go away with the family for the bank holiday, and hopefully start another contract on Tuesday 28th August. If you're looking to hire a .NET contractor in the Mid-Sussex area, please get in touch.

Normally I live by the mantra "I don't do hardware", but tonight I broke it. As I've got three weeks' work for my favourite football team coming up which requires me using my tablet PC, I thought I'd upgrade the RAM from an inadequate 512MB to a fully-loaded 2GB*.

The first 1GB went in easily; there's a panel on the bottom with an empty space in it. The second one was harder. I had to take the keyboard off. This took quite a while, even with following the instructions.

After tentatively prising off the keyboard (which turned out to be glued as well as screwed), I put the other 1GB in, put everything back together again and switched it on.

Nothing happened.

Well, a light came on, but there was no beep, and no prompt for the BIOS password. Must be a problem with the RAM. I took it all apart again, and put the old RAM back in again.

Nothing happened.

Now this is why I don't do hardware. I got a horrible feeling somewhere in my chest as I realised that I had just broken my laptop, and I had no way of getting it back. There was no Ctrl-Z, no "undo checkout", not even a re-install Windows from the CD like there is with software. Just broken. Horrid, horrid.

So I phoned a friend who does do hardware, and he asked what happened if I took the RAM out altogether. I tried it, and exactly the same thing happened. He suggested that I hadn't put the RAM in properly, so I should try pushing it in further.

I did, and it worked! I was overjoyed. The relief was amazing, and relaxing like having a general anesthetic (well, the few seconds before passing out).

Everything works so much faster now, so it was fifty odd quid well spent. Even so, I still don't do hardware.


* or 1.99GB as Windows XP tells me it is.

[Tags: tc4200 RAM upgrade]

Does anyone else find themselves humming a Fatboy Slim track after using SourceSafe?

Another bug landed on my foot. This time, some AJAX combo boxes weren't updating on the development server, but worked fine on my machine. Fiddler showed that the ScriptResource.axd "files" were 404ing, so it looked like a problem with the application setup.

There was also a script error: "Sys is undefined".

It turned out that the AJAX settings were missing from web.config. Adding them in made the scripts run correctly.

I've been assigned a bug concerning a combo box. When the combo box is changed by the user, a secondary combo box has its values reloaded. This is done by calling a web service. The bug is that "Method Error 500" is displayed as the only item on occasion.

After some rooting around, it turns out that this is caused by too much data being returned in the SQL query behind the web service call, so the web service returns an error. A simple change to the web.config file can increase the size limit of data returned:

<system.web.extensions>
  <scripting>
    <webServices>
       <jsonSerialization maxJsonLength="5000000" />
    </webServices>
  </scripting>
</system.web.extensions>

Yesterday's developer day was really good. I saw some excellent presentations about things I wouldn't have looked at otherwise. The session about evolutionary algorithms was particularly good, as was making two telephones ring with one line of code.

The multi-threading at the end was quite hard going - it could have done with some demos. Actually, there might have been some later on; I left early to go to a party. This meant I missed the geek dinner too, which was a shame.

I bought a book - Steve McConnell's book on software estimation. I keep finding myself being asked to estimate how long coding will take, and I'm rubbish at it. This book should make more difference to me than one on .NET 3 or something.

I had a brief chat to Dave McMahon at lunch, and found myself on his podcast. I've not been on a podcast before, so I hope I don't sound like an eejit.

Big thanks to the team who organise DDD. They're really good at following up on feedback, so each DDD is better than the last. This time I noticed that the grok talks had a microphone and a bigger screen. Next time I hope I won't have to sit on the floor to watch them...

[Tags: DDD5]