February 2006 - Posts
Just tried to install AVG (Free) on the Feb CTP of Vista and it died on me. AVG itself complained that the HDD was locked or something and couldnt access it, and then it BSOD'd. Yes the bright blue, and ever so fun Blue Screen Of DEATH! Then it simply just would not boot into the GUI of Vista -didnt make it to the login screen. Just a plain black screen with the build info on the bottom right.
In order to fix this I booted into safe mode logged in as administrator and then uninstalled AVG. Oh I ran a few chkdisks on the way as well. It appears that for some reason my partition gets corrupted quite allot. Its a fairly new HDD, and a brand spanken new partition, with a new format so I cant see it being the HDD. Ive been running XP on the same HDD since Christmas without a single issue.
I noticed as well, when I used the boot disk to go into repair mode with the OS you can actually move the "Automatic Repair Wizard" to the side and access the previous menu items, such as the command prompt. I noticed that I could actuall launch stuff like notepad and tasklist. I tried to do a screen cap and dump it into mspaint but mspaint failed to load because of some obscure dll issue.
I did grab a copy of the Wizard results with it though...
Session Summary:
System Disk = \Device\Harddisk0
WinDir = D:\Windows
AutoChk Run = 0
Root causes = 1
Test Performed:
---------------------------
Name: Disk meta data test
Result: Completed successfully. Error code = 0x0
Time taken = 141 ms
Test Performed:
---------------------------
Name: Disk failure diagnosis
Result: Completed successfully. Error code = 0x0
Time taken = 234 ms
Test Performed:
---------------------------
Name: Boot manager log diagnosis
Result: Completed successfully. Error code = 0x0
Time taken = 0 ms
Test Performed:
---------------------------
Name: Determine target OS
Result: Completed successfully. Error code = 0x0
Time taken = 0 ms
Test Performed:
---------------------------
Name: Quick volume metadata test
Result: Completed successfully. Error code = 0x0
Time taken = 204 ms
Root cause found:
---------------------------
System volume on disk is corrupt.
Repair action: ChkDsk
Result: Completed successfully. Error code = 0x0
Time taken = 577812 ms
---------------------------
---------------------------
So I decided to simply break Vista and see how its recover options handled things. I figured that setting the owner and ACL’s for the root and recursive files to my disk might just do the trick. Once the recursive set was finished I rebooted. It booted into the OS but then just came up with a blank, black screen. Tried to reboot a few times, no luck. Even tried the last know good setting option. So in goes the setup disk and went into the recover options. Check disk was the first that scanned the drive and it seems to have found a bunch of issues, went by too quickly to really see the issues. Then, feeling and acting as a pretty novice user I went through the default recover stuff. At the end of it, it gave an option to review what it did, it seems that something was wrong with my System Partition or something. No option to actually save the report for later, that would be a nice to have.
In the end, I’m back up and running and it seems that some of the issues I was having previously have gone away. For example the Side Bar now works right, and general access to the file system isn’t locked down. I just tried to install the drivers for my audio card and modem. All installed fine. This is great!
Back to work…
A bunch of screenshots can be found here.
My comments…
So I decided to install the latest Vista CTP (5308) on my laptop. It’s going quite well so far, in fact I’m writing to you from it right now. For some reason the glass theme/UI isn’t working but I’m sure that’s either my video card doesn’t support it or I haven’t dug into the right setting.
Many big changes have happened in this release. The start menu is much more useable. The sidebar is back, even though you have to go hunting for it to turn it on.
Every so often when browsing around in the Control Panel it just stops working. None of the items are selectable anymore. Just close the window completely and go back in. At times even Explorer itself has some issues, no BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) though. Windows handles it quite nicely.
This was my second chance and using IE7. I wasn’t much impressed with it the first time, and the second time it seems to be a bit better, maybe I have just started to adapt. One thing I like with my tabbed browser is that it always forces you to stay in that browser, no “new windows” which pop-up and out of the browser itself. I believe FireFox handles it the same as IE7. Control-N for a new window, Control-T for a new tab in the current window. I think I could get used to this. Even though I prefer one single window at all times for my browsing there might be some advantages to having the ability to jump out of that single window. Time will tell.
The big thing I dislike about it is that you can’t actually close that last window. In my opinion Control-F4 or hitting the X on the tab itself, if it’s the last tab should close the current content and bring up about:blank. Its important for me sometime to completely get rid of all content on in that browser. To me it just feels cleaner and that task/duty is done and out of my face. I finally figured this one out. Simply click the new tab button and then close all others. The new blank page sits there all alone.
Also, it appears that clicking on the “Research” Add-in in the toolbar completely kills IE7. Avoid that one! In fact now that I have selected it, it tries to keep it open for each new instance, which means I have killed IE. Maybe if I just let it sit there for a while it will go a way and do what it needs to do on its own. No luck. So I killed the process. I noticed that if you right-click the IE shortcut you can actually start IE without the Add-in’s. Doesn’t help at all, other than locking up IE. So next I tried to open up the control panel, Network and Internet, Internet Options. In the Programs Tab, there is “Manage Add-ons” at the bottom. You cant actually delete the Research Add-on, but you can disable it. Of course this doesn’t help, so when all else fails reboot! I actually just logged off and back on again and it appears to be working. When IE first loaded it actually had the research bar come up. Must be a bug with the Add-ins, I guess.
Another big thing I noticed with all of Vista and IE7 is that it seems they want to get you away from the classic menu’s. The “File”, “Edit”, etc. menu system. You usually have to go hunting for them and turn them on.
The SideBar was something I was really looking forward to using. Back in the day when http://www.start.com initially gave developer geeks like me the ability to create our own gadgets I was probably the first non-MSFT to actually create a few gadgets. One was a google search gadget, and another a Flickr gadget. Well I haven’t actually kept them up to date and they have fallen off of the face of the earth so I cant test them, but I did manage to test some of the others at http://www.microsoftgadgets.com. The word on the street is that you can (will) be able to simply drag the gadget off of the IE7 browser window and onto the SideBar. I tried with no luck at all.
The really sucky thing now, is that once I got the SideBar going and logged off, when I log back in it complains about its setting file being read-only and it basically just falls down around me. I have no idea what’s going on with that. I went on a hunt for the settings file. Found it along with the actual SideBar application. “C:\Program Files\Windows Sidebar”. So I force ownership, make sure its not read-only and make sure my user has full rights to that file. Nothing works. It still complains. Time to move on.
I can’t seem to get the Search working for the local computer, not to mention the old Control-F pops up a window which just closes right away. Sort of strange. I feel I killed some setting in some obscure place which I cant recall at this moment.
Security really seems to be a big thing with the OS now. Every executable has to be authorized to run (where is the “I authorize this program always” checkbox?). The SideBar settings file issue I described above is simply the file, wherever it is, is locked up, has a different owner, or something. Some of the things I have placed on my desktop have faced the same fate. I also noticed that I cant installed drivers for my sound card, which is pretty annoying because now for sound events it uses the PC speaker, and the PC speaker on my laptop is a pretty annoying BEEP. I have turned off ALL sound events in the control panel, but that doesn’t change much.
I really like what they did with the Network Center. In my opinion it really clears up any confusion around the XP style of wireless and wired network connections. Gaining access, viewing your current setup etc, all has a really nice UI wrapped around it with the ability to get to the same level of detail as what was previously there.
I’ve installed Office 2003 Pro with no problems. I actually have pointed Outlook to pull my PST from my Windows XP partition, I can share the same folders between installations. Pretty handy if you ask me. The only issue I have is with the darn filters and how it forces it for the “other machine”. I think I might have to edit each filter and remove that constraint. Pretty annoying.
Gaim also works quite nicely, with the GTK support of course. I use Flickr.com as my online photo store, and its free upload tool works right out of the box, which means .NET must be installed on this machine. It appears that both v1.0.3705 and v2.0.50727 are installed with the OS.
More to come, when and if I have the time.
Wilco just posted a new Tool he is working on.
Take a look at the screen shot. Wicked cool. Reminds me of the php docs. (for example http://php.net/fopen)
My biggest gripe about MSFT’s MSDN library is that it really sucks for community contributions. Php.net has been doing this for years and is an excessively valuable part of their community. If your concerned about spammers or illegal/illicit comments you can limit those who can actually post/moderate submissions based on their community involvement, for example MVP’s and/or AspInsiders; or even MSFT employee's.
The second thing that I would like to see is nagivation urls which are user friendly. For example, hitting the url http://msdn.microsoft.com/DeleteValue should make a good guess as to what I want. Right now it just comes back as a 404, unacceptable. It should be able to search the entire framework (and other useful documentation libraries at MSFT) and return back a list of links related to that item. If there is a single item, just direct me to that page instead. (again, copy how php.net does it).
What about:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/net/DeleteValue Search’s just the .NET Framework section
http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/foo Limited to just DirectX section
and of course http://msdn.microsoft.com/System.Web.HttpContext would be smart enough to pick up the namespace/class regardless of the section.
So I decided to combine my two recent pet projects that I have been working on, CruiseControl.NET (Continuous Integration) with MSN (an AI Bot). I have given the Bot the ability to track CCNET server’s builds and send messages via MSN to subscribers when the build has been changed. Here is an example of the conversation:
I just checked in some code to my subversion repository and it triggered a build…
(2:07:40 PM) Anika (Now with CI): Project Changed: Unified
WAS: Unified : Success at 2/19/2006 6:46:04 PM (8,Running,Sleeping)
IS: Unified : Success at 2/19/2006 6:46:04 PM (8,Running,Building)
------------------------
(2:09:40 PM) Anika (Now with CI): Project Changed: Unified
WAS: Unified : Success at 2/19/2006 6:46:04 PM (8,Running,Building)
IS: Unified : Success at 2/22/2006 2:07:41 PM (9,Running,Sleeping)
------------------------
(2:12:12 PM) Rob Chartier (vancouvercodecamp.com): thanks
(2:12:13 PM) Anika (Now with CI): Don't mention it.
I can view the current status of all projects…
(2:12:20 PM) Rob Chartier (vancouvercodecamp.com): ccnet status
(2:12:21 PM) Anika (Now with CI): Looking up Build information.
(2:12:21 PM) Anika (Now with CI): AIMLBot : Success at 2/22/2006 1:15:09 PM (14,Running,Sleeping)
(2:12:21 PM) Anika (Now with CI): CruiseControl : Success at 2/19/2006 6:44:47 PM (46,Running,Sleeping)
(2:12:24 PM) Anika (Now with CI): Unified : Success at 2/22/2006 2:07:41 PM (9,Running,Sleeping)
Also, I added a quick trigger for the Bot to return back the MSN contact statistics:
(2:13:16 PM) Rob Chartier (vancouvercodecamp.com): msn count
(2:13:16 PM) Anika (Now with CI): Total:646
(2:13:16 PM) Anika (Now with CI): Online:41
(2:13:17 PM) Anika (Now with CI): Blocked:0
(2:13:17 PM) Anika (Now with CI): OnAllowedList:646
(2:13:18 PM) Anika (Now with CI): OnBlockedList:0
(2:13:19 PM) Anika (Now with CI): OnForwardList:203
(2:13:19 PM) Anika (Now with CI): OnReverseList:254
So many people ask about this, decided to bookmark the URL
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/cpguide/html/cpconcontrolexecutionlifecycle.asp
Initialize
Load view state
Process postback data
Load
Send postback change notifications
Handle postback events
Prerender
Save state
Render
Dispose
Unload
Edit:
The entire ASP.NET Lifecycle
"The topics in this section provide background information on how ASP.NET processes pages to produce dynamic output. Included is information on how the application itself and individual pages are instantiated and processed, and information about how ASP.NET compiles pages dynamically."
We had a quick discussion at work here about using the XmlSerializer on a Generic collection, so I threw together a quickie example.
Our "Business Entity":
[System.Serializable()]
public class Entity {
public string Name;
public DateTime DOB;
public Entity() { }
public Entity(string name, DateTime dob) {
Name = name;
DOB = dob;
}
}
Create a Generic list of our new Entity object:
System.Collections.Generic.List<Entity> ppl = new List<Entity>();
ppl.Add(new Entity("Rob", new DateTime(1974, 12, 16)));
ppl.Add(new Entity("Joe", new DateTime(1978, 12, 16)));
Now Serialize it, using the XmlSerializer:
System.Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializer xser =
new System.Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializer(typeof(List<Entity>));
System.Text.StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
System.IO.StringWriter sw = new System.IO.StringWriter(sb);
xser.Serialize(sw, ppl);
Console.Write(sb.ToString());
Now if we're trying to talk SOAP with the SoapSerializer then thats a different story, take this example:
System.IO.MemoryStream stm = new System.IO.MemoryStream();
System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Soap.SoapFormatter soapSer = new System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Soap.SoapFormatter();
soapSer.Serialize(stm, ppl);
stm.Position = 0;
Console.Write(System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetString(stm.ToArray()));
It wont even make it by the soapSer.Serialize() method. Thows a "Soap Serializer does not support serializing Generic Types" exception.
posted on: gmane.comp.windows.dotnet.ccnet.devel
by: Mike Roberts
---------------------------------------------------
Hi ccnet-devel,
Just thought some of you might be interested in knowing that both the Server and Dashboard now work in Mono! Graham Tackley did all the hard work in getting the server working, and there were just a couple of small changes to get the Dashboard working too (mostly around switching to a forked NVelocity DLL from the Castle project.)
I've run it successfully both with Mono on Mac (using Darwin Ports) and Mono on Ubuntu (using the standard Ubuntu packages). For the Dashboard, I've had it running using XSP, but haven't tried using mod mono yet.
Please note that it still needs some testing, and I'd definitely welcome any feedback (positive or negative) from anyone who tries it out. As of right now, the dashboard.config file needs to be changed to reference xsl files using '/' 's rather than '\' 's, but I'm hoping to change some of this stuff over the next couple of weeks anyway. Also, the Dashboard doesn't work in a 'root' context yet so if you use XSP then use something like '--applications /ccnet:.' when running XSP in the Dashboard directory.
Cheers, and here's to open source! :)
Mike
--
mike roberts | http://www.mikebroberts.com/
Snippet from their article:
Technology
Two tech jobs in high demand these days are .NET (dot net) developers and quality assurance analysts.
Developers who are expert users of Microsoft's software programming language .NET can make between $75,000 and $85,000 a year in major cities when they're starting out. If they pursue a job at a company that seeks someone with a background in a given field (say, a firm looking for a .NET developer experienced in using software related to derivatives) they might snag a salary hike of 15 percent or more when they switch jobs.
Read more: http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/03/pf/pay_hike_jobseeker/index.htm?cnn=yes
More Posts