Bryant Likes

GDN is still down, but I was able to get a copy of EntLib 2.0 from my fellow Avanadian Tim Shakirian. I'm using the data access portion and it is working in my application, but I was unable to turn on instrumentation. In the docs it says:

To install the instrumentation schema you can run InstallInstrumentation.bat. This installs or uninstalls the instrumentation schema. When launched with no parameters it installs the instrumentation schema. It accepts one parameter, /u, that indicates that the instrumentation schema should be uninstalled

However, I could not find the InstallInstrumentation.bat file. I didn't see anything about this in the release notes “what's missing” section and since I can't hit GDN there is no way for me to provide feedback on this issue. Anyone know where I can get this file? For now I just turned off instrumentation.

From Patrick:

VPC images are saving my life as a trainer. Managing your VPC images however can be a daunting task if you don't know all of its capabilities. Andrew has an extremely well-documented process & strategy for using Virtual PC and how to optimize and manage disks to (1) maximize my disk space and (2) facilitate rapid creation of new Virtual PC’s when needed for testing/kicking the tires. Thank you very much Andrew for sharing this with all of us.

I've been doing my development on using Virtual PC for the last six months and the tips in this post are very useful. My setup is much simpler, but I can see some of the advantages this type of setup can give. However, I'm curious as to the drawbacks.

• Is there a performance hit for using that many disks instead of a single disk? If so, how much are we talking about?
• If you need to make a change to the base OS, can you make the change on the base disk or will this wipe out all your machines?

For my dev work I've just been creating a base VPC image with the OS and common tools and then setting the file to read-only and making a copy of it for each VPC I need to create. I've even been using fixed disk size in an attempt to eek out every last bit of performance that I can get. I have to pay for it with a larger hard drive, but that isn't too much of a price to pay.

So you want to use Enterprise Library 2.0? You'll have to download it first. And where do you download it?

<rant>
How long will Microsoft allow the .NET name to be dragged in the mud by the GotDotNet site? How much longer do we have to tolerate this site? Wasn't it just “redone”? Sheesh. Everytime I go to use the site I end up being frustrated.
</rant>

Anyone know of another (reliable) place where I can download the bits?

Update: Six hours later and I'm still waiting to make my download. You would think that they could at least post something more meaningful.

Update2: 24 hours and counting. Andrew posted a link to GDN manager's Korby Parnell's blog below. Korby says that it should be a couple of hours, but that was at 11:30 last night. So I'm still looking for a EntLib 2.0 download...

Update3: 2 days and counting. The GDN party is tomorrow so it will interesting to see if they can fix this before the party.

Last christmas my wife bought me this cool self-setting project clock by Oregon Scientific.

It sets itself so you never have to set it and it has worked great for the last year. However, this morning it decided to change the time to be two hours earlier! Thankfully the first thing I do when I wake up is make the coffee, so I noticed that the coffee maker thought it was 4:00 am instead of 6:00 am.  At first I thought I had just accidentally changed the time zone, but that wasn't the problem. I reset it and it seems to be working just fine now.

I don't know what technology these clocks use to set themselves, but that would be an interesting prank to play on a neighborhood. Reset all their clocks to some other time. :)

 

via Greg:

The very cool Daemon Tools is now at v4.0...

Their server is getting slammed with the release of this, so give it a bit if you can't get through.

One thing they make very clear is that this version includes optional ad-ware. During the install you can decide to install the ad-ware to help support them or opt-out.

Download it here. When I ran the install, I didn't see anything about opting out of some ad-ware. Hopefully the upgrade doesn't have the ad-ware.

Update: I realized after the reboot that I had only run the uninstall of the 3.47 version. In the 4.0 install there is a checkbox for a daemon tools search bar add-in. So I unchecked it and I see to be ad-ware free so far.

via Sam Gentile:

We use CC.NET on our project so we are going to need to upgrade. You should too if you are using it.

Read the Release Notes here and download from here

Cool! I'll have to see if they fixed their stylesheet bugs, but if not you can get my custom stylesheets here.

I'm trying to get up to speed on ASP.Net 2.0 and Alex Lowe posted a nice list of reading items for me. Here are the ones I'm interested in:

• Introducing the ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts Framework
• GridView Examples for ASP.NET 2.0
• Building ASP.NET 2.0 Web Sites Using Web Standards
• Understanding and Extending the Site Navigation System in ASP.NET 2.0
• ASP.NET 2.0 Provider Toolkit

See the post for the full list...

Update: I missed that the original list was actually created by Brian Goldfarb.

via ScottGu:

Several people have asked why the built-in URL Mapper in ASP.NET 2.0 doesn't support regular expressions...

Christopher has built one you can use in the meantime with ASP.NET 2.0 though.  You can learn about it here.

Very nice! I was disappointed when I saw this post pointing out the fact that the URL mapping doesn't support regex out of the box. If you've moving from 1.1 to 2.0, then you will probably need something like this to migrate your site.

Just started working on a new Visual Studio 2005 project and one of the first things I realized I needed was the 2005 version of the Visual Studio Command Prompt here shortcut. After doing a quick Google search I found that Scott had already posted links to both versions back in July (that means I'm about 4 months behind)!

As I mentioned in my last post, we have relied heavily on CCNet on our project along with other open source tools. A couple other tools we use are NCover and FxCop. Both of these tools run as part of our NAnt build script along with NUnit. We display the results of these in our CCNet build report using custom XSL stylesheets. The stylesheets are all based on the NUnit stylesheet that comes with CCNet (which I also modified to correct a bug that happens when you have two methods with the same name) .

• tests.xsl - NUnit Details XSL
• ncover.xsl - NCover Details XSL
• ncover-summary.xsl - NCover Summary XSL
• fxcop.xsl - FxCop Details XSL
• fxcop-summary.xsl - FxCop Summary XSL

We also had to do some post processing on the NCover report to weed out some duplicate (and invalid) coverage details. I created another custom xsl which I used with msxsl.exe to transform the report into something more useful. If you run into this bug let me know and I'll post that stylesheet as well.

 

 

Last night we released the version 1.0 of the software I've been working on for the last six months. Hopefully that means I'll have more time for blogging and more time to explore all the new stuff that has been released recently. One of the things that has been essential to the success of our project has been continuous integration via CruiseControl.Net. We have a couple of build servers running CCNet and the feedback on developer check-ins (through Subversion) has been key.

When a developer breaks the build with a bad check-in, the scary guy comes and hangs out on their monitor until they get it fixed:

We try to have fun. :)

I've also set up CCTray to run on my development box. You can specify sound files to play for the different cruise control events. There are 7 other developers in the room with me (also known as lounge A) so when someone breaks the build they all know (lounge B had their own sounds). Below are the Napolean sound bytes we used which were great fun. I found them all on the movie wavs site.

• Successful Build
• Fixed Build
• Broken Build
• Still Failing

We still have more work to do, more releases to come, but we managed to hit all our dates thanks in part to test-driven development with freeware tools: nant, ccnet, subversion, and nunit.