Archives
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Google "Month Long Vacation Spots" for a Laugh
I like to plan (and even dream) ahead, so I've been thinking about the second quarter of next year my current contract will probably come to a close. I haven't had a real vacation in a couple of years (longer by then), so I thought about going to a place (or places) well-suited for long stays.
Tonight I Googled "month long vacation spots" and got a nice laugh when something interesting showed up right on the first page of results:"George W. Bush: The War President is Missing in Action (External ...
"He begins a month-long vacation on his Texas ranch today, and by the time ... has spent 42 percent of his first eight months as president at vacation spots. . Actually, this was the third entry on the first page about our President's overly-long hiatuses. I thought this was a fitting result particularly given the recent election and the fact that his approval rating is quickly approaching the lowest presidential approval rating on record. -
Space Coast Dot Net User Group
This evening I had the extreme pleasure of speaking at the Space Coast Dot Net User Group in Melbourne, Florida. What a great group this is! Rarely have I ever seen so many members of a group take active part in the discussion (in this case "Introduction to ASP.NET Web Parts").
Some speakers prefer to do their presentation and take questions at the end. I tend to take questions as they arise, as long as they don't go off on too far of a tangent. Tonight it was almost as if the members helped create the session on the fly. We covered much more than was originally in the presentation and I feel that the attendees appreciated that.Many thanks go out to the members of the Space Coast Dot Net User Group. I appreciate your participation and your questions, and thanks for making this trip to Florida so memorable. -
Vista RC2 and Boot Camp 1.1.1
A few days ago I decided to create a new Parallels machine and install Vista build 5744. It installed fine and the OS works well, but unfortunately (as expected, since Parallels' support for Vista is "experimental" in their current RC build) the performance and feature set were far from where they could be. I deleted the whole virual machine immediately.
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Team System Source Control Structure
I have several clients, all of whom share a couple of class libraries that I created with a framework of functionality. I am attempting to add these clients to TFS source control, but I'm getting binding errors.
For example, suppose my first shared library is Romax.RealEstate and I have corporate intranets for Client 1 and Client 2. Both clients will also have their own class libraries with custom classes as well as classes that inherit from ones that exist in Romax.RealEstate.
What I've done is structure Client 1 the following way in my file system:
MainFolder
Romax.RealEstate
Client1
ClientLibrary
Website
Client1.sln
Client2
ClientLibrary
Website
Client2.sln
So basically, both solution files reference the shared class library which exists outside of their own folder.
Can anyone recommend a way that I can implement something like this without having Visual Studio complain about binding roots and the like? -
Post VSLive! New York City Report
I have just returned from speaking at VSLive! in New York City. The conference was far smaller than I expected. I would have thought there would be about twice as many attendees, but it was a very smooth-running, low-key conference. Although the conference hotel was in Brooklyn, it was only a ten-minute commute to get to lower Manhattan.
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The Missing Sync
For the past six months or so I have been making a "back-burner" effort to move my 350+ contacts from my Outlook over to my Address Book on my Mac. Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn't appear to support the vCard standard like many others (even in the latest beta of Office 2007, which is utterly shocking to me) when it comes to exporting. My only guess is that they don't want to make it easy for people to export all of their contacts to another application and stop using Outlook. It was painful until I very recently installed Thunderbird on an old Windows machine I was retiring. Thunderbird allows the easy import (and subsequent export) of your contacts to standard vCard format, which allowed me to easily import them into the Address Book application. While I never plan to use Thunderbird, I commend them on their cooperative skills.
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IE 7 RC1
I read a blog post today that said Internet Explorer RC1 was released and is available for download.
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Internal DNS Issues
I have a firewall appliance that has a built-in DHCP server. All of my internal boxes have internal (i.e. 10.0.0.x) IP addresses, some of which are static and some are DHCP'd.
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Speaking at VSLive!
I'm happy to be giving two sessions at VSLive! New York City in September this year. Please click here for details.
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Perfection at Last
I was reading a blog entry today that mentioned an installation of Parallels in order to run a virtualized instance of Windows on an Intel-based Mac. I had heard of Parallels but was hesitant to give it a try based on my terrible experience with Microsoft Virtual PC 7 for Mac.
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Team Build of Web Sites
I posted this a while ago but then received a message from the asp.net team about the comments issue in the new release, so here we go again with hopes that people will be able to reply this time :) .
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A New, Out-of-the-Blue Problem
Twice in the last three days my team has encountered the following error when attempting to set up a web site or virtual directory on a machine that has Team Foundation Server installed. After we copy our files to the directory and try to browse to the site, we see the following error. In addition to a huge curiosity as to how to solve this problem, I'm very curious as to why this only happens on our two "single-server" installations of Team Foundation Server. Any advice anyone can offer would be most appreciated. Server Error in '/VanillaCS' Application. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Security Exception Description: The application attempted to perform an operation not allowed by the security policy. To grant this application the required permission please contact your system administrator or change the application's trust level in the configuration file. Exception Details: System.Security.SecurityException: Request for the permission of type 'System.Security.Permissions.FileIOPermission, mscorlib, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089' failed. Source Error: An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below. Stack Trace: [SecurityException: Request for the permission of type 'System.Security.Permissions.FileIOPermission, mscorlib, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089' failed.] System.Security.CodeAccessSecurityEngine.Check(Object demand, StackCrawlMark& stackMark, Boolean isPermSet) +0 System.Security.CodeAccessPermission.Demand() +59 System.IO.Path.GetFullPath(String path) +98 System.Web.Util.FileUtil.IsSuspiciousPhysicalPath(String physicalPath, Boolean& pathTooLong) +50 System.Web.Util.FileUtil.IsSuspiciousPhysicalPath(String physicalPath) +23 System.Web.Configuration.MetabaseServerConfig.MapPathCaching(String siteID, VirtualPath path) +513 System.Web.Configuration.MetabaseServerConfig.System.Web.Configuration.IConfigMapPath.MapPath(String siteID, VirtualPath vpath) +9 System.Web.Hosting.HostingEnvironment.MapPathActual(VirtualPath virtualPath, Boolean permitNull) +163 System.Web.VirtualPath.MapPathInternal() +41 System.Web.HttpRequest.MapPath(VirtualPath virtualPath, VirtualPath baseVirtualDir, Boolean allowCrossAppMapping) +122 System.Web.HttpServerUtility.MapPath(String path) +60 CommunityServer.Configuration.CSConfiguration.GetConfig() +95 CommunityServer.Components.Jobs.Start() +104 CommunityServer.CSHttpModule.Init(HttpApplication application) +335 System.Web.HttpApplication.InitModules() +267 System.Web.HttpApplication.InitInternal(HttpContext context, HttpApplicationState state, MethodInfo[] handlers) +1251 System.Web.HttpApplicationFactory.GetNormalApplicationInstance(HttpContext context) +243 System.Web.HttpApplicationFactory.GetApplicationInstance(HttpContext context) +106 System.Web.HttpRuntime.ProcessRequestInternal(HttpWorkerRequest wr) +317 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.42; ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.62
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2 + 2 = 1
I have given 12 or 15 webcasts for MSDN in the past, but more importantly I have benefited from certain ones that were available when I needed help in what I was doing at a particular moment. This has happened three times in the past six months or so.
MSDN has made the webcasts available for offline viewing by the general public, which is how I was able to get the help I needed when I needed it. MSDN has also chosen to make these on-demand webcasts available in the Windows Media format. This is understandable since MSDN was the one who produced the webcasts. They should be able to make them available in whatever format they wish. I am a loyal proponent of that philosophy.
Unfortunately I was not able to play these on-demand webcasts using Windows Media Player. None of them. This seemed quite odd to me, since I had downloaded and installed the latest version of Windows Media Player and had viewed other WMV and WMA files without any problem.
In short order I discovered the problem. Instead of using Windows Media Player on my laptop, I was using it on my desktop. As I previously blogged, my desktop machine became a Mac five months ago. Apparently, Windows Media Player isn't the FULL Windows Media Player when it comes to the Mac like QuickTime is the FULL QuickTime when you install it on Windows.
I realize that there are business interests involved here, but my question is this:
If a company makes a webcast free to the public in WMV format, and they make a player (again, free to the public) whose job it is to play WMV and WMA files, and then the free player fails to play the free file, what's the point?
I'm quite proud to say that I make my living as a software architect, writer, speaker, and developer using nothing but Microsoft technologies. We have a LOT to be excited about, particularly with the recent release of .NET 2.0, VS 2005, TFS, Atlas, etc.
I'm also quite proud to say that I am a Macintosh user. OS X is simply amazing. The stability, the features, the attention to detail, the user experience, etc. are all beyond even the beta 2 of Vista I installed last month.
I enjoy the best of both worlds. It's unfortunate that the little things - things like not being able to play a Windows Media Video file in a program like Windows Media Player - really have to interfere in an otherwise happy equilibrium. -
Automatic Website Deployment with TFS
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am loving TFS. One of my most recent ventures has to do with scheduled build and continuous integration. I've gotten the project to build nightly based on a schedule (and would love some more info on the steps to set up CI) but the problem I'm running in to is that I can't figure out how to tell Team Build to deploy a particular web site within the project after the build as successfully completed.
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Team Foundation Server Woes
I have been a long-time fan (since December, actually) of the source control features offered to developers in the form of Microsoft's Team Foundation Server. Making the move from SourceSafe proved to be fruitful in countless ways, particularly speed with regard to off-site developers.
Unfortunately I have to say that I'm ready to throw my laptop out the window, then go down and stomp on it a few times.
I had a solution that contained 17 projects (including 14 class libraries, two web sites, and one windows service) in a Beta 3 Refresh installation of TFS. Everything went fine during the past six months with regard to feature set and dependability of TFS, so I am MUCH more than just simply satisfied.
This morning I began the process of setting up a new development server with the release bits of TFS, and as part of that task I am required to move my solution over. This is where my troubles began.
I unzipped the solution directory, which contained ALL of the projects, to a new folder on my hard drive. I then shut off the old TFS server and chose to "permanently remove" (as Visual Studio put it) my solution from source control. That part went fine. It was only when I attempted to add the solution to the new TFS
server that my headaches began.
For the past 4.5 hours I have been dealing with the error that talks about how the solution cannot be added to source control because my solution "overlaps a project that is already bound to source control at a lower root".
But I already went in and did an "Unbind" for all projects within the solution when it couldn't find my old TFS server. I already went through and deleted all the .vssscc files from all the directories. I already went in to each one of the .csproj files and removed the XML sections that dealt with source control.
Now I can safely say that NONE of the projects in the solution contain any reference whatsoever to the old source control - as far as I know. And I know the following: all .csproj files have all references to source control deleted - those four XML tags that normally appear right at the beginning of the file. In addition, the .sln file itself has all references removed.
It would be one thing if the error message that told me that there was an overlap told me WHERE the overlap was. But I guess that would simply be way too easy. Therefore, I am in the position of having to prevail upon someone who knows TFS a lot better than I do and ask why this thing doesn't work. I have to ask why that error message about overlapping doesn't even OFFER me the chance to cancel out any previous bindings. I have to ask why the message that seems to be smart enough to tell me there are overlaps can't tell me WHERE these overlaps are.
So, I'm left with this question.
Can anyone tell me how I can insure that no source control parameters, files, metadata, things, ideas, thoughts, feelings, etc. have ANYTHING to do with my solution so that I can FINALLY get it into the new TFS? Any help or advice anyone can offer would be HUGELY appreciated. -
HP OfficeJet 7310xi Installation
I recently had the extreme displeasure of installing Hewlett Packard's setup software for this great all-in-one unit that I've had for a while on my Mac G5 and I couldn't believe my eyes. When I launched the installer, it told me that I had no choice but to quit every single open application. It would NOT let me continue until I had complied with that requirement.
Isn't this the year 2006? Isn't the "you must close all applications" game something from the early 90's and Windows 3.11? This need for the installation program to close all open applications seems completely rediculous and obsene to me. Talk about your throw-backs to ancient times...
Grow up, HP software department. Grow up. -
Coaxial to DVI Conversion
I have an extra 19 inch LCD display and it occurred to me that I could use that as my office television. The thing is, I need to convert the coaxial signal coming from my TiVo to a DVI input or a VGA input. Does anyone know if this is even possible?
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Switching Back
The first computer I ever bought was a Macintosh LC while I was late in my freshman year of college in NYC. I used it for papers, CompuServe, and (of course) Flight Simulator. There was no Internet back then.
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Windows Live Messenger Beta
Today I downloaded and installed the Windows Live Messenger Beta and I have to say that I feel the team behind this product is really heading down the wrong road.