 Wednesday, June 30, 2004
MSDN Product Feedback Center
Yes! It is now public so we can talk about it and use it more widespread. The MSDN Product Feedback Center was announced today at TechEd EU, and was the official launch of the center to the public. You can check it out here:
http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/
Basically this will allow you to submit bug reports direct to the Microsoft Product Teams, track other bugs that have been reported, and get direct feedback on the problems you are having.
This is a great idea, I just hope it works. I don't envy the guys responsible on the product teams for managing this. I can't count the number of times I have people tell me they “found a bug” in some .NET technology, when the “bug” is really just their misunderstanding of how to use it correctly or wanting it to do something it was not designed to do. I just hope the signal to noise ratio is high enough to make it effective.
Monday, June 28, 2004
Sunday, June 27, 2004
Code Complete 2
I'm reading Code Complete 2, and loving it. The first edition was great on its own, and is still relevant. But having an updated version that includes more current language examples is even better, and the perspectives are brought up to date as well with lots of references to practices and processes like TDD, pair programming, XP, and so on. I have already found several quotable quotes that will be very useful when trying to articulate to customers why you should do this or that with respect to design and coding practices.
Even if you read the first edition, and think you know all this stuff, pick up a copy and refresh your convictions. Well worth the time and the cost is trivial compared to the value.
New tools weekend
I have had a number of tools on my “to-do” list for a while now that I wanted to check out and see if they are worthwhile. Let's just say that if I had got off my ass sooner and looked at those tools, I could have easily gotten to other things on my “to-do” list much quicker. I've seen most of these mentioned in various people's blogs, which is how they made it on my list of things to check out. But it really doesn't take hold until you try them out yourself.
First newest favorite tool : CodeRush. Yes, I heard the buzz at TechEd (thanks to a lot of evangelizing by Marc Miller and Scott Hansleman, but didn't get around to checking it out until now. What can I say. WOW. So many features and capabilities, I won't enumerate them here. Just go check it out. Makes your coding experience in VS.NET a whole different (and much more productive) thing.
Next favorite: CodeSmith. Freeware code generation tool, with lots of templates and community support. Way cool. I am so done writing tedious data access, stored procedure, and business object structure code.
Yet another: X1. I blogged about Lookout lst month, which is very cool, free, and does most of what X1 does. Basically it is a google-like search engine for stuff on your machine. X1 does an even better job, working by indexing emails, files, attachments, and contacts on your machine, and making it very fast and easy to find things that I used to spend an inordinate amount of time manually hunting for on my machine. Did I put that in a file, outlook message, or contact? Well, how about answering that in seconds instead of tens of minutes.
Another cool code gen tool: RapTier. If you just want to quickly generate a data access layer for your app, or stored procedures to wrap your tables and views, or generate database documentation, this tool will get you there quick. It too (like CodeSmith) is template driven and customizable, so if you don't like the default output, it is not real hard to customize. I haven't yet decided whether I will use this more than CodeSmith. Will have to see as I use it more on some real projects.
So a few hours invested this weekend playing with new toys is going to pay off handsomely in boosting my productivity. This is one of the things I am loving more and more about the .NET community - the constant growth of capabilities and tools to make the “out-of-the-box” benefits of .NET (which are HUGE compared to other dev platforms) get dwarfed by the benefits of the things you can use in that environment to do your job better, faster, cheaper, and funner.
Saturday, June 26, 2004
Saturday, June 19, 2004
Using Enterprise Services transaction for a TDD data access test base class
Roy had a great little epiphany on using Enterprise Services for a test fixture base class. Great use of ES and results in much cleaner test fixtures.
Nice job Roy!
 .NET | Architecture  Saturday, June 19, 2004 11:44:11 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)  |  Interesting new music discovery
Thanks to a link in Windows Media player “Now Playing” section this week, I stumbled onto a new-to-me group that I am really enjoying. The group name is Bond, and just released their third album.
My muscial tastes are all over the map and only really exclude Country and Opera. I lean towards hard rock stuff like Disturbed, Limp Bizkit, Godsmack, etc. (angry music as my wife calls it) for coding and working out, mellow stuff like Angelique Kidjo, Wasis Diop, Enigma, Deep Forest, Flamenco guitar, and so on for reading/relaxing, and enjoy a lot of stuff in between.
What I really like is finding new music with a unique sound. Bond is basically four (pretty hot) women who play classical string quartet instruments, but incorporate classical sound/riffs into pop/rock beats and tunes. They have stuff ranging from classical tunes with their strings overlaid on a pop sound, to pop/rock classics with classical sounds overlaid on their melody. I especially like Big Love Adogio from their Shine album, Explosive from their new Classified album, and Kashmir (yes, as in Zeppelin) from Shine. Of course they have a nice little rendition of the theme from Bond movies as well. All three of their albums are available on Rhapsody, which is the only way to enjoy/try/buy music for me now.
You can check out their video on WMP Now Playing music section right now for the “Explosive” track from their new album. These ladies are not at all hard on the eyes, and a good part of the video seems inspired by Victoria's Secret commercials. I think there is some sort of plot behind all the soldiers and russians running around, but I was... er... a little distracted by the... err... music, yeah that's it.
Tuesday, June 15, 2004
Sunday, June 13, 2004
Visual Studio 2003 Web Setup project uninstall debris in metabase
Visual Studio 2003 Setup and Deployment projects make it a snap to create an installer package to deploy your web app to a server and get all the files deployed and create a virtual directory in IIS. They even clean up and remove the virtual directory from IIS on uninstall.... or do they?
When you uninstall a VS created web installer using VS or the Add/Remove programs control panel, the files, folder, and vdir go away as you would expect. Unfortunately it apparently leaves some debris in the metabase for the virtual directory that sometimes creates problems for reinstalling the same application. A quick look with MetaEdit after doing an uninstall of one of these projects will reveal under the LM\W3SVC\1\ROOT that there is still vdir entries left around.
Anyone else encounter this or know a workaround, other than to first delete the vdir through IIS manager before running the uninstall? We could of course write a custom uninstall action to clean up the mess left by the VS setup project's uninstall step, but that kind of thing just makes me feel dirty all over.
Tuesday, June 8, 2004
Monday, June 7, 2004
Friday, June 4, 2004
Arrived at DevEssentials in Kansas City
I'm giving three sessions plus a speaker panel at the DevEssentials conference here in Kansas City over the next few days. Tomorrow is a talk on the Configuration Management Application Block + the speaker panel, Sunday is my Deploying .NET Applications talk that I gave at TechEd, and Monday is a talk on COM Interop. Should be a lot of fun.
Off to the welcome reception!
VS 2005 MSDN Library problem - downloading pages never goes away
Had a problem with the MSDN Library for Visual Studio 2005 May Community Tech Preview (CTP) where it would just shown downloading... in the status bar forever for any topic selected.
After some googling, discovered that the readme on the MSDN VS2005 site is newer than the one on the DVD and addresses the issue:
If you use the external Help viewer with the Visual Studio 2005 Community Technology Preview May 2004, the Help system appears to be frozen when you try to access a topic. (You see the "Downloading..." message in the status bar, the progress bar barely moves, and the Internet Explorer icon continues to spin.)
Workarounds:
In the "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\help whidbey\dexplore.exe.config" file, change the following lines:
<supportedRuntime version="v2.0.40507" safemode="true"/>
<requiredRuntime version="v2.0.40507" safemode="true"/>
to:
<supportedRuntime version="v2.0.40426" safemode="true"/>
<requiredRuntime version="v2.0.40426" safemode="true"/>
- or -
Switch the Help settings in Visual Studio to use internal, rather than external Help. To do this, select Options from the Tools menu in either the Visual Studio IDE or the external Help viewer. In the Options window that appears, expand the Help entry and select the General subentry. In the Show Help Using dropdown list, select Internal Help Viewer. Click the OK button.
I recommend you check out the latest readme online if you are encountering any other problems since it looks like that will continue to be a living document:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/currentreadme/default.aspx
Thursday, June 3, 2004
Extending ASP.NET MSDN Webcast demos
For those of you who joined me in the MSDN webcast today, thanks for your patience with the machine lock ups and not being able to complete the demos live for you. Hopefully the slides and discussion still made it worthwhile for you.
Here is a link to the demos that I was going to show. There are several in there and there is a readme that tells you what is there and how to get it running. If you have any problems getting it going just drop me a note or a comment to this post and I will help you out.
In case you know someone who didn't tune in and would like to be subjected to the same pain, I should be repeating this session on 13 August (and will work out the machine lock ups by then!!).
Thanks, Brian
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