I am using the excellent Sourcegear Vault product for version control and I was surprised that it would not work after I installed the Visual Studio Express beta products. The database seemed to be ok but I would get an error message if I tried to connect the Valut client or admin applications. It was strange as everything looked ok but it just would not function.
The problem turned out to be very simple, which you install the vs express betas they change the framework version for all you existing ASP.NET applications. Of course Vault has a web services interface and now that Framework version for that ASP.NET application is incorrectly set to v2 rather than v1.1.
The solution is simple open up the Internet Services Manager and change the ASP.Net version for "VaultService" and "VaultShadowFolder". This can be done by right clicking on the web application in the tree view, selecting properties and the ASP.NET tab.
VS team place maintain the ASP.NET version information for all existing web applications and only set it to v2 for new web applications. That way existing applications continue to work.
Recently I had discussion with a friend about a project he was working on. He said he was converting a J2EE application to a .Net application. Naturally my first question was why ?? I was glad to hear that someone was doing commercial .Net development but I was curious what the ROI would possibly be. If you have already written an application and it works why rewrite it ?
The answer was interesting. The reason they had gone with J2EE was that they thought they wanted to have a thin client and no client install.
However, the users wanted integration with Office and the whole user experience just did not work with them having to go into one application, saving a document and then starting the web application. He said that .Net provided the office integration and a faster development time.
I said why not wrap the existing application and add a new rich client frontend ? He said the problem was the application was poorly written and slow. So instead of trying to put a new face on the existing application they are rewriting it.
I found the whole story very interesting. The fact that is a story of a migration from a Java application to a .Net application is really just a side issue. For me it shows that users still need rich client applications that integrate with their existing applications. Also that bad design and architecture now means that when your users requirements change or you find you have misinterpreted them you may well find yourself back at the drawing board with a lot of explaining to do.
I was speaking with one of my collegues today about XP SP2 and he noticed the security centre and said that he expected that eventually MS will come out with their own anti virus software. He then said,: "Even though I am an MSCE, I would not trust MS and I would still install 3rd party anti virus software." I thought this was an interesting point of view because when you think about it the anti virus software companies have a vested interest that there are lots of viruses, as the more virues there are the more software they sell. On the other hand MS suffers an image problem when ever a virus causes problems. So Microsoft has a vested interest to ensure that the number of virius problems is minimal and the anti viruses companies have an interest that there are more viruses. On that basis why trust MS anti virus software less than software from a 3rd party ?
Silly question, but interesting if you are writing a program and you want to return the months based on the culture of the user.
Instead of having to hand code all the month names all you have to do is write the following piece of code:
string
[] _monthNames = System.Globalization.DateTimeFormatInfo.CurrentInfo.MonthNames;so question is what is the length of _monthNames ?
You would expect 12 as there are normally 12 months in the year, but you would be wrong it is 13 !!
_monthNames[12] returns a blank string.
This is great if you are simply using _monthNames as a look for the names of the month but a bit of pain if you use it as the data source of a combo box.
I assume there must be cultures out there which have 13 months but why isn't the return string array dimensioned based on the current culture ?
Why is Indigo such a hard sell to a lot of people ?
If you go to a set of presentations on Longhorn, people want to see the stuff about Avalon and Winfs but Indigo seems to a bit too theoretical for people and they are not sure why they would need it. Of course if you look at the very small proportion of the developer community who visit the PDC then they will soak it all up and say great that is what I need. Try and talk about it to a more general audience and you will get a bemused look.
I went to a presentation yesterday by a well known speaker who presented SOA and talked a little bit about Indigo. There were about 60 people in the audience, all of whom were architects for major companies in Switzerland. One reaction I heard was: isn't that stuff already in the framework ? Another comment was if this stuff already works why do I need something new. Ok, it might not be a clean unified model but I don't see why I need it.
People know there is plumbing in their houses but very few people get excited about it. All most people are interested in is that they get a hot shower or bath when they want one.
Maybe a better approach it show a real world problem where using Indigo makes development simpler. First explain the problem you are trying to solve in terms of a business case and then talk about the technology.
The problem is that people only use stuff if they know it exists and understand why to use it and what the benefits are.
I started to subscribe to a few of the reuters rss feeds(http://www.reuters.com/newsrss.jhtml) and I noticed that some of them pointed to www.feedroom.com. I had never heard of this site so I decided to investigate. It turns out that feedroom has a large number of rss feeds (http://www.feedroom.com/rssmain.jsp) Each of these feeds contain links to video feeds. See something you like in the feed and click on it and the video plays.
Now that XP SP2 has been pushed back. Why can't there be a simple patch which enables the XP firewall for all connections ?? Make sure all the media knows that the patch is there and get people protected. That should help all the home users who seem to vunerable to all the viruses.
Just a thought, as I amazed that worms like this are still able to cause so much havoc over 3 weeks after the patch has been released.
Just for clarity, I always run winupdate, and keep my system up to date. The firewall issue I am talking about is merely, that it is ridiculous that XP has a tool to stop a lot these attacks but by default is not enabled.
I installed Suse 9 under VMWARE, check for updates resulted in 55mb of downloads !!
If you are a good developer you know that you should layer your application, however, Visual Studio uses the "old Visual Basic" approach to rich client development. In other words, you create a windows form application. What does Visual Studio do, it creates a main function in the form you create first. Already that means the form is doing more than presentation. Potentially people will also write application initialisation code in this function. Ok I add a button to the form and click on it and the idea opens up the associated event routines. So far I could be writing all my business logic etc within the form.
Of course no one would do this ??? Well, how many prototypes that become production systems are written this way, it is seductive to less skilled developers.
Wouldn't it better if the tools tried to lead people to develop applications using a layed approach. It would certainly help with migration later on to Avalon.
I just saw this business week article being discused on slashdot and thought it illustrates that difficult decisions are starting to made around Longhorn. In other words what features are going to be in the product and which ones will be left out. This is good news as means it will possible to start looking again at the PDC stuff and deciding which bits are worth learning. The trouble about the article is that really does not tell you which bits are being dropped just some vague comments about WinFS.
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Happy holidays to everyone, it is great to not have to work again till Tuesday.<br/><br/>
Update: Thanks Drew, it looks like I made the mistake of reading the Business Week article and assuming it was reporting news. It seems like another piece of FUD
I finally found out what my problem was with my code that ran ok on 2000 but throws an exception on Windows XP. I have this piece of code
Application.EnableVisualStyles();
Application.Run(new mainForm());
Using the enablevisualstyles method XP visual styles are applied to your winforms when the application is running on Windows XP. Unfortunately there seems to be some bugs with enablevisualstyles. I got bitten by one of those bugs. My wizard control is displayed using ShowDialog() and this throws an exception on XP but none on Windows 2000. In order to solve the problem you must use the following code:
Application.EnableVisualStyles();
Application.DoEvents();
Application.Run(new mainForm());
There seems to be some other bugs with
enablevisualstyles and
from Code Project
Jeff I wish had remembered your blog entry last year about this problem. It would be so nice if this problem could be fixed in a service pack as it is a real pain.
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