Archives
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MSBuild 3.5 just made my day
While doing some troubleshooting on a project I needed to manually copy some debug assemblies around after every build. But there were a lot of them, and whenever I need to do something repeatedly I try automate it with a script of some sort...because I'm lazy of course. There are a lot of choices today for a little quick and dirty script like this, Batch files, VBScript, Powershell, NAnt, but I thought I'd give MSBuild a try because I figured it would be the least amount of hassle, since moving files around is one of it's main duties during a build. The script was simple to write, but I hit a snag...the destination files were read only, and the copy errored out. MSBuild 2.0's copy task doesn't have an option to overwrite read only files. But MSBuild 3.5 does, so I learned a couple of tricks.
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Two things I learned tonight moving an ASP.NET site from IIS6 to IIS7
Tonight I moved moved an ASP.NET site from IIS6 to IIS7. Things seemed broken pretty badly at first, and I wondered if I was making a mistake to leave the comfort of IIS6. However, it turned out to be minor changes to the web.config. I'm sure they're already well known and well documented, but I figured I would scribble them down in case I ever need to do it again.
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Just for fun, controlling a Lego Mindstorms NXT robot with Windows Workflow Foundation
Recently I was asked to give a presentation on Windows Workflow Foundation to some developers. Unfortunately I had never worked with it. So last week while I was reading an article about workflow, it occurred to me that the designer seemed very similar to the NXT-G programming environment my kids use to program their Lego (R) Mindstorms (R) NXT robot. There's no better way to learn something than to actually try to do something real with it, so I decided to try to write my own custom activities to control a robot through Bluetooth connection.