May 2006 - Posts
Yesterday, I posted about how being good with patches didn't go my way. The result was that my site was not available for a day or so. This little tidbit of info caught the attention of the Community Server daily newsletter. I can't figure if this makes them look bad or me (hopefully neither).
I didn't actually give any information about why the site was down for so long. The answer is that I didn't have the time to fix up the issues and errors on my server, such as application startup errors, have a habit of resolving themselves reasonably quickly. As for specific errors, I did get an exception for the constructor of Qgyen.ExtendedUrlMapping, but it was probably a combination of problems that were in play. I got the unpatched site back up and running by refreshing the web.config and then uploading all the original assemblies again.
To prove to myself that I am not a complete gumby, I have just successfully applied the patch to the site. There were a few errors starting the application again, but it all seems to be humming along nicely now. BTW Geoff, I got mine done in 3 minutes. 
On a side note, I was having a look through the exceptions report. I came across this one:
User Agent: msnbot/0.9 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
Path: /user/EmailForgottenPassword.aspx as HTTP GET
Referrer
Message Request timed out.
System.Web.HttpException: Request timed out.
What a shame, a bot couldn't get to the forgotten password page. To bad...
I have been emailing Frank recently with some questions around the latest Vista Beta. One of the things he put into an email was a list of the latest betas put out by Microsoft. It look me a minute to get the joke (the bolding didn't show up too well in my email client).
Longhorn Server
Office 2007
Vista
Exchange 12
I just read Jenna's post about changes around the Microsoft Seattle campus. Free Starbucks. Seriously???? I am definitely working in the wrong place.
My friend Simon pointed me to this post this morning. It was an interesting read about some common complaints about the rates at which contractors get charged out to employers.
I can't say that my contacting arrangement is the same as this as I am not sure what amount my agency takes (I certainly don't think it is exorbitant), but I think there may be other significant price hikes elsewhere. In my contract, my employer has me deployed out to a client's site. Between myself and the end client, there are several companies (agency, management company, employer, and my employers parent company). They will all be taking their cut, but I wonder how much.
I have recently talked to some internal people who believe that the rate at which the client ultimately pays for contractors is around three times as much as what I get. Someone is earning a healthy living.
If you want to find out more or tell us your coming, then head over to the Sleet Geek forum.
So Telligent put out a
security notice the other day. Being the security aware person that I am, I dutifully applied the patch. After about a day of down time, I've been able to get the site back up and running again. I wonder how the next attempt will go...
Thanks to Darren and Martin, I have been handed the keys to a whole new playground.
This is absolutely sweet! I have already downloaded Vista Ultimate Beta 2 and Office 2007 Beta 2 to use as my laptop build. Now I just need to test the waters with VS2005.
I just saw Dave saying his bit about representation of geeks in movies and TV. Overall, I think geeks get displayed in a way that is very unlike the majority of the geek population. While I agree with Dave, I think that some of the ideas in movies can also be the kind of things that geeks will want to use or build, no matter how impractical they are or difficult they would be to get.
Two things spring immediately to mind. The cool data searching tool used in Minority Report and the GUI compiler in Swordfish. While the GUI compiler offers no benefit at all, I just can't go past a great UI no matter what it does or doesn't do.
What's your favorite piece of fictional movie/TV software?
I put out a blatant teaser a couple of weeks ago for an idea that came out of a chat Dave and I had at CodeCamp last month. With some prodding from Dave and now Frank, I have finally made my ideas public.
Sleet Geek 2006 has now officially been born.
If you are a geek (even if you're not, we still might let you come along) and you love the snow, then join us for this community event. It will be two days packed with snow action with some community dinner and pub time on Saturday night.
Check out the Sleet Geek 2006 forum for more info. If you want to provide feedback or want to indicate your interest in coming along, then put some posts into the forum or contact me directly.
Scott Guthrie posted some ASP.Net tips several weeks ago. There were heaps of great ideas that he put into his presentation, one of which was about registering controls for aspx pages.
User controls and custom controls that are used on a page need to be registered. The control registration allows a tag prefix to be defined and identifies the location where the control can be found. These control registrations are normally placed at the top of the aspx markup along with the page directive. If you drag and drop an unregistered control onto the page, the registration will be added for you (with the exception of dragging user controls onto the markup view).
If you happen to come across a situation where controls change location, assembly or namespace, then every registration for the controls affected will need to be changed. This means that, when using the typical control registration method, each aspx page that uses those controls needs to be changed. This maintenance problem is mostly solved by Scott's tip of putting the control registrations into the web.config file by adding add elements under system.web/pages/controls.
Edit - Removed comment about this not working for master pages. Something must have gone wrong with my build as it was throwing compile errors with registrations missing from the master page. After emailing Scott and retesting this, I have found that it is fine and works with master pages as expected.
Last week, a colleague told me how to get intellisense support in xml documents in the VS2005 IDE. It is really easy, although there are some interesting quirks in the process.
To pull this off, you first need to get an xsd file that defines your xml file. The IDE uses the xsd file to know what elements and attributes are available for a specified location in the document.
The next step is to get at the property grid for your xml file. Just selecting the file in Solution Explorer and then displaying the Properties window doesn't give you the property grid contents that you need. This property grid view just displays the generic properties for a file, rather than being more specific to the xml file type. To get at the property that needs to be changed, open the xml file and show the Properties window. You should now see that a Schema property is available.
Set the Schemas property value to the file path to your xsd file. I have found that the editor for the Schemas property is quite broken. The Add button doesn't work and also has a few other issues. It's easiest to just copy and paste the file path from explorer to the property grid rather than fighting with the editor dialog.
Enjoy.
Just a couple of days ago, I went to the Perisher Blue site to see how the snow was going. There was nothing but grass apart from a light dusting at the top of the high mountains.
It's a little different now.
Sweet!
<subliminalAdvertising>Sleet Geek 06</subliminalAdversting>
One thing that has always been a little annoying about downloading files is when there is no direct link available on a web page to a file that I want to get. This means that I can't right-click on a link and select where I want the file to be downloaded to.
I have just put Lima together. It is a very simple file download utility which makes getting file references in html downloaded without having them load into the browser or any other application.
Lima is written in VB on the .Net 2.0 framework. You will need to install the 2.0 .Net framework before installing Lima.
Download Lima 1.0 Beta 1
Lima 1.0 Help
If you have any issues with this version, please let me know.
Just came across TaskbarEx via Blizzle. I've always wanted to be able to reorder the items on my taskbar so this little app rocks! It is a little buggy and should have a few extra features (like dragging buttons back onto the taskbar), but TaskbarEx is a really cool app. Oh, and the great thing is that the source is available.
Yesterday I installed the new Consolas font for Visual Studio 2005. It is a very nice font to code with. Grab it here.
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