Russell Pooley's .NET Blog

Oomix Technical Preview

2007-09-05T20:20:00Z

As the chief developer of the mixer for the Oomix site I feel I need to tell the world.

For anyone interested the mixer is written in C# and I plan to support third party plugins in the future but I don't want to run before I can walk. (Coming next is a shameless plug.)

At last! The doors of a new music revolution are open! Come on in, don't be shy!

We're only 2,499 other musicians to join us for our pre-launch and to help shape the future of the music industry! Our full launch is due for November this year. Leading up to this time we'll be asking for your opinions and ideas and we'll be getting feedback from other professional musicians, ensuring we can tailor the Oomix site to its maximum potential.

To recap, Oomix allows you to:

MEET OTHER MUSICIANS!
1. Find musicians, message them and add them to your friends or favourites.
2. Discuss all aspects of music and the music industry.
3. Listen to other musicians' music.
4. Tailor your micro-site and encourage others to make contact with you.

MAKE MONEY THROUGH YOUR MUSIC!
1. Upload your songs to sell on the site.
2. Upload tracks (single audio components) and allow others to make music with them. You'll all get paid an agreed amount each time the songs are sold.
3. Make music with other musician's tracks and publish them to the shop (they will have to agree first.)
4. Promote yourself and your music through our promotion tools.

MAKE MUSIC!
1. Use the free Mixer to make music.
2. Participate in 'Music Making Battles' for your chance to win prizes.
3. Contribute to 'Roundabout Songs' made by other musicians on the Oomix site.
4. Vote on songs and leave comments.

So join now: www.oomix.com/join.php

You can find out more about Oomix by viewing the Oovid here: www.oomix.com/studio.php?display=video

Be part of a new music revolution
www.oomix.com

Oomix - The Music Revolution

2007-06-06T22:40:00Z

It's been ages since I posted about the development of our collaborative music creation and sales website / application but we're now on the run-up to launch. The site's got numerous ways for developers of all sorts to connect in to it so I'd like to open up a forum to see if anyone has any ideas or would like to build a plugin.

You may ask why what this has to do with weblogs.asp.net and .NET, well the main component to the site is a free Mixer application for the collaboration, this has been produced in .NET 2.0 and I must say I am quite proud of the result. Once we have ironed out the final bugs and features I will post another link if you are interested. I'm quite excited about future extensions to the mixer and I will be thinking about ways to enable third party development.

Here's a video for you to watch about it in the meantime.

2.0 Web Service Problem with 1.1 Assembly Redirections (I challenge you)

2007-03-02T15:53:00Z

This is a problem I have been trying to resolve for over three weeks now with no success. I shall try to explain the problem as clearly as I can as it can get very confusing. I have a Visual Studio 2005 .NET 2.0 Web Service Project which has a single web service class called HelloService. This service has the following content: .code { BORDER-RIGHT: white 2px ridge; PADDING-RIGHT: 10px; BORDER-TOP: white 2px ridge; PADDING-LEFT: 10px; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; PADDING-BOTTOM: 10px; MARGIN: 10px; BORDER-LEFT...(read more)

The server failed to load application '/LM/W3SVC'. The error was 'The specified metadata was not found.'.

2007-01-07T17:28:00Z

I have spent probably 4 hours of my life trying to figure out why I keep getting a bizarre error message when I try to browse to a .NET 2.0 Framework Web Service, so after figuring it out I thought I would post this so I never forget it. The solution to the problem was so simple but it took a long time to find it. So what happened:

1. Browse to web service, get the following message: Server Application Error
2. Looked in the event log, which had the following message:

The server failed to load application '/LM/W3SVC'. The error was 'The specified metadata was not found.'.

3. Searched for that problem and found this: http://www.iis-resources.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=2579&forum=4
Now in this post they were talking about the MSDTC so I cheked that service and found that it wasn't started, so I try to start it, this fails to start with error message:

The Distributed Transaction Coordinator service terminated with service-specific error 3221229584 (0xC0001010).

4. Searched for that problem and found this: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/solution-microsoft-distributed-transaction-coordinator-fails-to-start-with-service-specific-error-3221229584/
Now this post says run msdtc -resetlog

5. Problem solved. Hopefully other people will find this helps them, it sure helped me.

What is oomix.com

2006-11-06T13:50:00Z

I have been working on a project for over 6 months and we are about to release it to the world, you may ask what has this got to do with weblogs.asp.net and .NET well read the introduction below and it will all make sense.

Oomix is a combination of:

25% social networking,
25% online music studio,
25% online record label,
25% distribution channel

In short a website where musicians can get together, engage in dialogue and manage their micro-site but also make music together and publish the resultant composition to the store.

Building on mashup culture and Web 2.0 I believe that the result is a new model for the music industry and will be a definitive site for both professional and amateur musicians alike to 'mingle' and create new music.

My personal involvement with this project has been to produce the back end services for producing final compositions and mixing the tracks. This is where the .NET comes in, the entire back end is written in .NET and I'm looking at opening it up in the future to allow custom plug ins and new features from developers.

Now if any of you are keen musicians or developers keen to tinker with a site that creates music then drop me an email or a comment and I'll see what I can do. I'm looking at implementing a managed sound effects library so any comments on that would be excellent.

At the moment I'm fighting with time stretching WAV samples. Ahhhh

www.oomix.com

New horizons with Web Methods Ltd

2006-06-12T20:32:00Z

Previously in the past I have found myself constrained to keeping certain posts to myself due to company policies and so forth. But now is very different, I have just started my own limited company providing development and consultancy services.

So I hope to post more in the future and if anyone is ever in need of help then post a comment and I hope to get back to you, if on the other hand you are looking for an experienced .NET developer then don't hesitate to contact me.

Thanks
Russell

DebuggerDisplay attribute. (To remind me)

2006-06-02T23:00:00Z

Having just read Kenny Kerr's blog on the Attributes Do Nothing post (http://weblogs.asp.net/kennykerr/archive/2006/06/02/Attributes-That-Do-Nothing.aspx) I have decided to partially repost the bit about the DebuggerDisplay attribute so I don't forget it.

Here we go:

[DebuggerDisplay("{Statement} Sarcasm: {Sarcasm}")]
class Quote
{
public string Statement;
public SarcasmLevel Sarcasm;
}

Will allow the watch window to show the properties you put in the attribute. Sweet!

Trying to debug Outlook 2003 addin, always getting 'cannot attach to process' error

2006-04-03T12:06:00Z

After trying to debug an addin for Outlook 2003 with no joy I turned to google for support, this on previous attempts had not come up with any good solutions but I managed to find the following post: http://www.analogousmember.com/archives/000394.html that resolves the solution.

It appears that outlook will try to load up the 2.0 framework when debugging thus would not allow .NET 2003 to debug it. The solution is to create an Outlook.exe.config and force it to use a 1.0 or 1.1 framework and then everything is fine, now I can get on with the job in hand.

MBR BootFX

2005-10-06T22:07:00Z

Since starting my new job at MBRIT Ltd (www.mbrit.com) I have been extensively working on BootFX our open source framework for .NET development.

The basis of the framework, like most frameworks, is to offer database connectivity. Virtually every business application needs to talk to a database, and virtually every time on Windows it’s SQL Server, Oracle or MySQL. Therefore most of the LOCs in BootFX are data access code. My preferred data access method has always been Object Relational Mapping, specifically with a data-first approach of mapping tables to objects, and so that’s the environment where BootFX runs best. BootFX also includes a tool for connecting to the database and generating code for you.

In addition, BootFX also includes some UI components and management functionality, such as logging and exception reporting and handling. All good stuff.

To those who may have already used it I have made some big changes to DBUtil, which is now a lot more polished. We've also been working on some AJAX/Web service stuff which is almost ready. There's some goo in the codebase to do some of it.

I'm keen to start pushing this a bit more in the community because I feel with this build it's a bit more "prime time", so if anyone is interested in helping me get a bit of a buzz around it please do let me know.

You can download the latest version from sourceforge at the following address: http://sourceforge.net/projects/bootfx/

Fiddler HTTP Debugger

2005-09-06T23:19:00Z

I have never heard of the Fiddler tool for http debugging until I looked at the latest AJAX professional posts, no doubt will come in useful.

Interested, goto http://www.fiddlertool.com/fiddler/

string.format and all that jazz

2005-08-17T17:24:00Z

Good blog entry about string.format at http://idunno.org/displayBlog.aspx/2004071401 the number of times I have spent hunting through MSDN to try and remember the differerent options.

Debugging with Visual Studio 2005 and Exceptions

2005-05-23T21:20:00Z

I don't know if anyone was aware but I found this gem in the new VS2005 debugger. First I will explain the original problem. If you were debugging in 2003 and your code hit an exception that was unhandled, your entire application would die and you would have to restart. In 2005 you do not need to restart, you can jump directly back to to the piece of code that created the original exception and run it again.

Wow, I love that (and I do like edit and continue).

SharePoint 2003 Help

2005-04-03T19:11:00Z

Hello, what follows is what I believe to be a good set of resources for using SharePoint 2003 with .NET:

The first thing I did when using sharepoint with .NET was to install the templates for visual studio, these can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/odc_SP2003_ta/html/sharepoint_webparttemplates.asp

Once you have installed the templates you can create WebParts from within Visual Studio. The following page shows how to create a simple webpart and deploy it onto a sharepoint portal server: http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/04/08/WebParts/toc.asp

The biggest pain I had when using web parts was security. SharePoint is quite a secure bugger and requires that all the assemblies you use be marked as secure, this way it stops dodgy web parts from being installed onto the server. The previous tutorial shows how to deploy and publish a web part and how to change the security but when you write your own web part it will probably whinge about security when you start accessing other objects. For example I had problems accessing a SQL Server, this is because the System.Data assembly isn’t by default secure so you have to add this onto the list of secure assemblies.

To ease the installation of web parts you can use the following page as a guide to creating installation packages that can be installed on the server. This helps by also applying any security configurations required for the web part to work: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/odc_SP2003_ta/html/sharepoint_deployingwebparts_msi.asp

The following url gives some nice webpart examples showing how to create connectable webparts, these are webparts that can be consumers or providers of data, this way different webparts can communicate with each other. It also shows how you can add custom properties onto the properties of a web part: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/spptsdk/html/SPPTWPFProgTasks_SV01072932.asp?frame=true

The following url shows the concept behind webparts and how they communicate: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/spptsdk/html/SPPTWPFConcepts_SV01072928.asp?frame=true

Useful debugging resources on MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/odc_SP2003_ta/html/sharepoint_debugwebparts.asp

SoftWire Free

2005-03-22T19:51:00Z

Was just looking at SoftWire, never used it but fancied having a look to see how it worked, and it appears they are now giving it away for free.

So if you fancy a try just pop over to the SoftWire website http://www.softwire.com/index.html

Useful XML serialization tutorials

2005-02-15T16:10:00Z

Very useful site for tutorials on serializing object to and from xml.

http://www.topxml.com/xmlserializer/default.asp