July 2005 - Posts
After contracting with Telstra for almost two years, it is time to move on. I started my role as a SQL developer and then moved on to an applications development team. It has been a great experience and I have been able to work with fantastic people and continue to learn new things.
Today is my last day at Telstra. As of Monday, I will be working for Avanade. Can't wait!
For the last couple of weeks, I have found that my June CTP install of Whidbey has been performing so badly that I just can't continue to develop with it. Memory and CPU usage was peaking, it was taking 15 seconds to take each debug step and the IDE didn't even shut down anymore, but decided instead that it would take up all the system resources and just hang around.
This has been disappointing as it was a nightmare to install the June CTP in the first place and I wasn't looking forward to the same pain with the July CTP. After another set of crashes and poor performance, I restarted the IDE. What I noticed was the Refactor addin in the splash screen. Maybe, just maybe that is the cause of all my pain.
I uninstalled Refactor and now the June CTP is sweet again. Pity I didn't think of this a couple of weeks ago.
You may be asking where the July CTP of VSTS is? First I heard about the drop was that it was going to be coming out last week. I then heard sometime this week. Getting a little desperate for the new drop, I felt like kicking and screaming like a two year old because it hasn't been released yet. I just came across
Rob Caron's post with some info about what is happening. Looks like I might be able to continue playing again soon.
Geoff and his wife have just had
another baby. Geoff put up some
photos as well. Congrats to Geoff, Jordie and Issy.
Yahoo has just bought
Konfabulator. One of the interesting side-effects of this is that arguably the world’s most popular widget software is now free. The carton on their new site about their history is really cool too.
So I'm here at work, eating my lunch, and I hear Geoff moan. He had just come across
todays WTF. I was fortunate enough not to choke on my lunch, laugh and cry all at the same time. This entry goes above and beyond the call of SQL injection. This is more like SQL injection with a turbo, maybe afterburners too. The backyard mechanic on this job must have thought that armour plating wasn't important.
Looks like I am having problems with the CS htmlscrubber (and maybe other parts of CS). It is really stuffing up posts that contain non-standard tags and code samples. I have disabled those cs modules in communityserver.config but it doesn't seem to make any difference. Has anyone got around this?
I have been developing a feed reader application on the latest Whidbey CTP since it came out. I was developing it on Beta 2 before that, but gladly upgraded to get around really bad designer problems. While the July CTP comes out tomorrow, I wasn't going to install it because it took me a very long time getting the June CTP up and running with Yukon. It looks like my hand is forced now though because the June CTP is having serious problems.
The June CTP is taking up 360Mb of memory and most of the CPU, and that is without really doing anything. Running the application is incredibly slow and debugging it is even worse. For example, it is taking 15 seconds to step over a Try statement (not the block, just the opening Try statement so no, it's not just my poor performing code ![Smile [:)]](/emoticons/emotion-1.gif)
). Also, when I try to close the IDE, it takes up the system resources and doesn't close (digging in its heels like an application that knows it's about to be upgraded).
A few months ago, I found an issue when working with Whidbey Beta 2. I posted some
product feedback about it, but never got around to posting a follow up entry here.
The problem I encountered was when I entered comments at the end of blocks of code. At the end of End If, Select statements etc, I like to add comments to indicate what the block of code was about. It makes following code really easy, especially when there are many nested code blocks. At the end of the statement, I press Tab + ' + Space and then enter my comment.
Whidbey has support for snippets (which are really great BTW), but they were tripping me up in this case. One of the ways that snippets work is that the IDE looks at what has been typed before a tab character to see if it represents a snippet shortcut. If it finds a shortcut has been entered, it pastes in the snippet over the shortcut.
The snippet for the If statement for example, has the short set as
If. So when I create an If block and go to the end of it to enter my comment, the snippet kicks in to take my code from this
to this:
Because I want to continue with my commenting standards, I had to change the shortcut for the If statement snippet. I opened the snippet file located at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Vb\Snippets\1033\language\IfStatement.snippet and changed the value of the Shortcut element. Problem solved.
For the last couple of months, I have been building my own feed reader. Apart from giving me valuable experience with the Whidbey betas and CTP's, I am building it because I am not happy with any other readers. You know how the saying goes, if you want it done right (or your own way), then do it yourself.
Anyway, about four weeks ago, I did something in the IDE which had the effect of incorrectly rendering the form at runtime. I think what killed it was clicking the Synchronize button in My Project -> Settings. The design time render was still working correctly, only runtime was affected. The design time render of the form looked like this:
When the application was run, the form was rendered like this:
The display is a complete mix of themed and unthemed rendered controls and parts of controls. The statusbar, for example, renders the themed gripper, but the background colour is wrong, whereas the gripper and the colour is wrong in the toolbar. The buttons are a mixture of themed and unthemed colours and none of the buttons are shaped correctly. The scrollbar for the browser is also incorrect.
My initial thought was that the RenderMode property of these controls was changed as I have had heaps of problems with Beta 2 not rebuilding the designer file correctly. These were correct though. I thought that maybe it was something in the framework that might have gone funny. I started up a new solution and added the explorer winforms template. That project rendered correctly at runtime. So the framework looks good. My next test was to add a new explorer winforms template to the current project and solution. I set it as the startup form and it also rendered correctly. That leaves me to believe that there is something in the designer for my form that is not correct, but I had checked the designer code against the new forms designer and it all looked good.
Now things get a little weird. I deleted the new form from the project, then went to the project settings to change the startup form from Explorer1 to frmCapella. Just for kicks (actually it was to check nothing was broken) I ran the project. My form suddenly renders correctly again. Thankfully I am using VSS 2005 so I can do a diff of the files against source control. There were four files checked out in the project. Three of the files were identical to source control. The last file was the project file itself. The VSS diff tool highlighted the problem for me.
The Solution:
In the project file, there is an XML node called StartupObject. Source control (the buggy version) had a value of Capella.frmCapella. The new checked out file (the good version) had a value of Capella.My.MyApplication. In the project settings, frmCapella is still the startup form, but now the application is started with the application designer code instead of the main form directly.
The form at runtime now gets correctly rendered with this:
I have enjoyed building my own site over the last few years. It has come to the point though, where I don't have the time to achieve what I want with it. There were always little features and additions that I wanted to make to the site and my time is becoming increasingly scarce.
Now that I have deployed a few
Community Server installations, I have found that it had most of what I wanted in a site. Time to take the dive.
I have now converted the site to CS. This is a very customised CS deployment with a single blog, multiple gallery, a few custom controls here and there and common site skin. It is going to hurt when a new version of CS comes out. I have to spend a bit of time fixing up links and image references in posts from the old system, but it is going well. The photo gallery is also set up with photos from my old gallery. Most of the reference problems will be skins and applications which aren't accessible at the moment. Hopefully I will have these sorted tomorrow.
As far as the look and feel goes, I couldn't resist modifying the good looking
HabaHaba theme by Christian Nordbakk to be consistent across the site. I also used the
blog stats control by Dan Bartels to display stats at the blog level. Dan's stats control gave me the idea of displaying stats for a post. There wasn't a control out there, so I hacked one together this morning and it actually works!
Let me know what you think.
Last night we had another holiday Taekwondo session that was very similar to last week. We did circuit training instead of our normal program. When we do these crazy fitness sessions, I can't help but think along these lines:
At the end of this, I will feel know that I am either alive or dead. Regardless, I will also know that I'm not as young as I used to be.
I built a windows service application for work as a piece of my latest projects large puzzle. One of the annoying things about developing windows services is that debugging them as they start is a big problem. My windows service didn't suffer from this because it didn't do anything straight away which gave me time to get my fingers hooked into it. Other people at work however did get their service to start work immediately. Debugging their application caused them no small amount of grief.
Paul Ballard just posted an entry (following on from Mike Diehl's post) about how to debug windows services from the start. Well worth the read if you have been bitten by this.
An old Mexican man lived alone in East Los Angeles. He wanted to spade his garden, but it was very hard work for him. His only son, Jose, who used to help him was in prison. The old man wrote a letter to his son and described his predicament.....
Dear Jose,
I am feeling pretty bad because it looks like I won't be able to plant my garden this year. I'm just too old to be digging up a garden. If you were here, all my troubles would be over. I know you would dig the garden for me.
Tu Padre
A few days later, he received a letter from his son.....
Dear Papa,
Por Dios, Papa, don't dig up the garden. That's where I buried all my drugs and money.
Tu Hijo, Jose
At 6 a.m. the next morning, the L.A. Sheriffs Department showed up and dug up the entire area without finding any drugs or money. They apologized to the old man and left. That same day, the old man received another letter from his son.....
Dear Papa,
Go ahead and plant your garden now, Papa. It's the best I could do under the circumstances.
XOXOXOXOXOXO
Love,
Jose
More Posts
Next page »