After spending a good amount of time playing with WiX I have decided to start a GUI installation designer project for it.  It's called (creatively enough) WiXGUI, and can be found on SourceForge.

If anyone is interested in helping out, feel free to contact me via here or my SourceForge contact page.

Right now I am just compiling a  list of examples and usages to try and nail down the specifics.  If anyone notices anything cool please let me know.

I will post updates to my progress as the tool evolves.

"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." -- Pablo Picasso

Note to self:

When you install MSDE2000a and specify mixed mode authentication during setup it does not remember your choice.  You have to go in manually:

SQL Server Enterprise Manager -> Console Root - > Microsoft SQL Servers -> SQL Server Group -> Properties -> Security Tab. Verify that the authentication mode is "SQL Server and Windows".

Just a minor annoyance, but I figured I might save someone the 5 minutes if they ever run into it.

It is a very sad day for geekdom...

Slashdot is reporting that Lego is terminating production of it's Mindstorms product line.  I have had the pleasure of working with these products (including a bit of work with .NET) and I must say that these things are COOL. 

Now it will be even harder for me to bring myself to relenquish control of the set that I have borrowed from my advisor at school.

I just noticed that SpamNet has blocked a very large number of messages...

It's only been 28 days since my reformat.

Just gives me the creeps.

I just completed the incredibly painless process of porting my web site from ASP.NET v1.1 and Wilson.MasterPages to ASP.NET v1.2 and it's integrated MasterPages. 

All I can say is WOW. 

I trimmed my 7 page site down from 57 files in 2 directories to an astounding 9 files (none of these figures are counting images of course).  While most of the deprecated files were CodeBehind pages and .resx files, I'm still impressed.  No more fooling around with UserControls at all when trying to seperate code from UI!!

While I'm on the topic I must also say that I really like inline code.  I guess it's because of all of my classic ASP experience, but I find it easier to have everything right there in front of me. 

Anyway, major kudos to the whole ASP.NET team! 

Grr.  Robert pointed out to me that there is no GoLive license for v1.2 yet, so until I get any clarification on this I went ahead and switched back to the 1.1 version of my site. I am interested to hear any clarification of this though, so I would appreciate any comments from anyone with more knowledge of this.  I certianly don't want to upset anyone...

A picture says more than words...

Now if only it would reflect against the current database and list all available tables...

Also, my more attainable wish:  The ability to select a block of text in the workbench and comment/uncomment it via a menu or toolbar like VS.NET...

I must admit that I was a bit hasty in my dismissal of the PDC Framework bits on my Windows 2003 Server box.  I finally reinstalled everything after having repaved the box 2 weeks ago and everything is now running splendedly.  In fact, my site (yeah, all 5 pages of it) seems a bit snappier after the first hit than it did with 1.1, but surely this is just my imagination.

Now I would like to ask the community of PDC'ers to recommend some of your favorite examples, labs, or basically anything at all that I can read/learn from about ASP.NET Whidbey.  Since I don't actually have VS.NET Whidbey (working from the Yukon beta bits) I will be going about this the hard way (oh IntelliSense, I miss you already).

When I went to the Windows Messenger site tonight to download Windows Messenger 5 (MSN Messenger is a bit to fluffy for me, and Trillian stopped working... more on this in a sec) I found that the download link there is for WM4.7.  Now why would I want to download an old version that doesn't even work anymore?!

So after a bit of digging around I found the real link to get WM5, and I now see that my friends actually ARE online. 

Could it be that Microsoft finally locked out all of the third-party clients who haven't taken the red pill?

Well we're back from regionals...  We actually did better than I feared we might, but the Virgina Tech. teams pretty much showed us how it's supposed to be done.  I want to congratulate all of the teams involved and thank UVa for hosting this years competition.

On the homefront, I have finally forced myself to redesign my personal web site.  My two previous designs (read: MasterPage templates) were just barebones HTML with CSS for decoration.  This time I decided to spend a few hours working on the presentation side, and (for now) I am quite happy with the results.

On a side note:  In the process of changing my template (and playing with my Single-User Vault source control provider) I managed to break debugging on my web server.  I want to thank Roy for his great ASP.NET debugging FAQ, which had me back up and running in all of 2 minutes.

It seems that I am not the only one who had a less-than-desirable experiance with the Longhorn bits.  I was running this on my main machine, a P4 3.0Ghz 800Mhz FSB with a gig of ram, 512 of which I had given to VPC.  It was horribly slow.

Whats worse, I had installed the 1.2 framework on my main machine, only to find that it took somewhere between 5-30 seconds for IIS to serve up any .NET content at all.  This was only compounded if accessed remotely.

So now here I sit, typing from a freshly repaved machine...  That will teach me to play with the bleeding edge.  I can't wait until I get my other motherboard back so I can set up a testing server without frustraiting myself to death.