Eric Pearson

aah, I'm finally comfortable typing at home.  I got the Microsoft 4000 keyboard at work a while ago and I finally got it at home.  It's like typing on butta. 

On ZipZoomFly with optical mouse for $42 here..
http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=211298

I'm sure SOMEONE at work (you know who you are) would disagree that this is the greatest keyboard on earth, but he secretly wants to be a transformer.  This is for humans!

 

 

(moving my blog to http://blog.ericpearson.org )

I have noticed one definate benefit Vista's UAC brings to developers: allowing them to work as an administrator, and explicitly notice everything their program does that a regular user can't do.

Often times, software won't run as a non-administrator because developers run on their own machine as administrator and see nothing wrong with the concept that their user would do the same.  Now, with UAC, the developer can still run as administrator, and if they leave UAC on as I have at work and at home, they can really appreciate how many actions a normal user simply cannot perform.  The result: vista has given a heightened awareness to some developers about the rights required by their code.

I thought of a really cool use for generic-like syntax for parameterizing variable declaration beyond types. It would be awesome if generics could be used to specify dimensions within a struct. My case, I wanted to implement a Vector struct with a parametric dimension. So if I was using a vector in R2, I could create the struct as Vector<2>. If in R3...

Well I’ve been using home VOIP service for about 3 months now, and figure it’s been long enough to share an opinion on it. I signed up for AT&T Callvantage service and was a little skeptical. I’d read about AT&T and Vonage and both had mixed reviews. I still decided to take the plunge with AT&T (click title for entire article...)

Well I was literally about to sit down and write about my disappointment in the November WinFX CTP's absense of a visual designer for XAML, when I saw Aaron Stebner's blog announcing the December CTP.  Too bad I just recently got the November CTP installed! (it's installer kept complaining about a CAB that wasn't properly signed, finally got it installed by deselecting the docs).

The December CTP boasts a visual designer, “Cider”, for XAML applications.  While I'm sure it won't be anything fancy like Sparkle promises, it'll be a very welcome preview.

Once I've had a chance to try it out I'll post more...

 

After unsuccessful attempts at installing Team Foundation Server Beta 3 Refresh, I ended up using the Release Candidate VPC with Virtual Server 2005. I couldn't stand the performance so I decided to move the virtual image to a physical drive. After a lot of unsuccessful attempts, I finally came up with a working solution.... (click title to view the rest)

update: Caleb pointed out that while they were using the RTM of VS2005, they were using the CTP of another product that ties in with VS so hopefully that was the problem

update #2: ok I've been using it quite extensively now, and havn't had much of those problems so it looks like those problems were from the other installed CTP.  .

Well I had a big feeling “Prison Break” would be a big let-down for their “fall finale”. As I suspected they would end with no real solution. I think 24 was the restart of (click title to view whole post)....

Man, this sure was a doozy.  My company's product exposes web services via a Cassini-like web server, the types are exposed to the runtime similar to the way remoting objects can be registered.

This was all fine and dandy, but on Windows Server 2003, asp.net libraries do not work if IIS is not installed.  We were about to lose a large business opportunity because this particular government entity required that IIS NOT be installed due to security policies. 

Turns out the ASP.Net component under add/remove programs, which requires the IIS component, uninstalls ASP.Net if not selected.  This can be reversed by running aspnet_regiis.exe -ir efrom the WINDIR\Microsoft.net\framework\v1.1.4322 directory.  This installs asp.net on the system, regardless of whether IIS is installed. 

Although the framework is built to be able to run asp.net outside of IIS, apparantly the creators of Windows Server 2003's component section didn't really care.  Plus, the aspnet_regiis executable is pretty confusing since it does much more than simply register script handlers in IIS.  But, problem solved.

I finally tried out SQL Server 2005 today.  I used the express edition, figure I'll get enough of the full featured versions at work and wanted to check out the express experience. 

It was MUCH easier to get up and running with a simple test.  The only roadblock was enabling the CLR, but after a few minutes I finally found the “Surface Area Configuration” tool. 

I started out with a simple user defined function.  Create a C# database project, click “Add User-Defined Function”, write the function body and click Deploy.  I was then able to use the function directly in my queries.

[Microsoft.SqlServer.Server.SqlFunction]
public static SqlString StringReverse(SqlString input)
{
   if (input.IsNull)
      return SqlString.Null;
   char[] chars = input.Value.ToCharArray();
   Array.Reverse(chars);
   return new SqlString(new String(chars));
}

So I was pretty surprised to see how quickly I could get this running.. I figured there would be several more hoops to run through. 

Next I think I'll try to determine how difficult deploying these assemblies via an installer will be. 

I had a problem I was debugging where the framework was throwing an exception about 15 levels deep into it's own stack, and my code calling it was perfectly valid.  I came accross this very useful entry on The Code Project by Sumeet Kumar
http://www.codeproject.com/dotnet/Debug_Framework_Classes.asp

Basically you're able to use ildasm to extract the framework's IL, recompile it in debug mode and gacutil it back into the GAC (although his post missed the fact that you need to use sn.exe to skip verification).  You now have a debuggable framework with source files, and are able to step into the framework's IL!

For anyone who frequently needs to know what's going on under the hood in real time, this is definately a useful tip.