Chris May

When I try to edit some of my Macros I get this nice little message:

Microsoft Visual Studio Macros: An Add-In has caused an access violation while sinking on 'ProjectAdded'.

Google turns up nothing on this guy.

Does anyone out there have any idea how to fix this?

I recently ran into an interesting problem... my webservice application seemed unable to read info from the web.config file.

I tried adding some invalid < marks to the config file and the app still ran w/o any error (but still wouldn't read the web.config appSettings or connectionString sections).

So I created another IIS application and it worked as expected.

So I deleted the troubled IIS App and recreated it.  Still broken!

The solution was to clear out the ASP.NET Temporarly Files folder in c:\windows\...\...

Once that was gone, and I restarted IIS, everything went back to normal.

 

Last nigiht before I went to bed, I was working on a bunch of stuff.

Lots of files, tons of programs, all open to serve the task at hand.

So, at 3am, I was kinda up for some reason, but luck for me, that meant that I got to hear the sound of my laptop rebooting.

I almost got up to go check on it and make sure I wasn't dreaming, but sure enough in the morning I came down to find a login prompt.

Windows Updates on my new laptop. was set to automatically download and install updates at 3am.  Which is a good thing, unless the updates require a restart, which it will do wheather you want it or not.

So I had to turn off automatic updates for this reason, but this brings me to a bigger question.  Couldn't microsoft see this possability and give you and option to download/install but NOT reboot?

They already have a "feature" that is annoying as hell, that bugs you ever 15 minutes when you have installed a windows udpate that requires a reboot, but haven't rebooted yet.  They could just use that to make sure you DO reboot at some time.

Frustrating.

Update: Windows update rebooted my friend Mike's work desktop, even though he had it set to only download and not install updates.  So all those SQL Jobs that were running at the time.... yea they all got screwed up. 

 

You've probably seen this one.

Whenever you do one of the following:

Response.End()
Response.Redirect("page.aspx")
Server.Transfer("page.aspx")

You end up with a ThreadAbortException, "Thread was being aborted".

I had previously dealt with this by swallowing the ThreadAbortException, which of course isn't a great method, but it worked.

Well today I came across a better way for all of these.

Replace This	With This
Response.End	HttpContext.Current.ApplicationInstance.CompleteRequest
Response.Redirect("page.aspx")	Response.Redirect("page.aspx",false)
Server.Transfer("page.aspx")	Server.Execute("page.aspx")

Awk is a tool for processing text files, or data that is treated as text.

For some stuff I have been working on, I tend to use Awk a lot to filter down text being returned from another program (like a ls command).

Here is a nice tutorial on Awk.

Also, when using regular expressions (regexp, or regex) with Awk, here are a few helpful reminders and links.

.	matches any character
*	zero or more repetitions of the previous character or expression
?	zero or one occurrence of the previous expression
+	one or more occurrences of the previous expression

Regexp cheat sheet.

Test regular expressions.

Regexp website (tutorials and more)

Another Regexp tutorial

I was having problems getting streaming media to play on my old messed up laptop.

So now that I am finally on my new machine, I can again listen to launchcast (music.yahoo.com).

Launchcast was doing what Pandora Radio is doing, way before Pandora became popular.

Launchcast learns from your ratings and plays music it thinks you would like.  In addition, you can setup other users as "Influencers," which I have done with my brother who also users Launchcast.

So for example, when my brother ranks a song up, eventurally it will play on my station.

See this image for example:

Pretty sweet.

I love this service.  I have found so much music this way. 

 

I have been wanting to try a dark theme for vs.net, but I couldn't quit find one I liked.

So I took bits from here and from Scott Hanselman and created my own.

Take a look at some screen shots, and you can download the settings file at the bottom.

 

 

 

Here is my settings file:
Dark-Theme.vssettings (32.85 KB)

If you like this, please leave a comment!  Thanks.

 

Here are some site statistics for the last 12 months. Over a quater million visitors and almost 750,000 page views. Not bad.

Hits
Total Hits	1,607,524
Average Hits per Day	4,380
Average Hits per Visitor	5.87
Cached Requests	132,924
Failed Requests	157,190
Page Views
Total Page Views	737,197
Average Page Views per Day	2,008
Average Page Views per Visitor	2.69
Visitors
Total Visitors	273,988
Average Visitors per Day	746
Total Unique IPs	49,647

It looks like my previous pagerank of 4 has been dropped to 3.

This kinda stinks. I would rather be going up than down, but it isn't that big of a deal.

Ironically, one of my other websites that was getting a lot less traffic than this one just jumped from a 3 up to a 4.  Go figure.

Google frequently tinkers with their settings, so I'm sure these numbers will not be static.

In a recent gathering of the ALT.NET group, ScottGu gave a demo of the upcoming MVC framework for asp.net.

The article (and video) can be found here.

Lots of people in the ALT community have been working with asp.net and MVC by using one of the OS frameworks out there like Monorail, but I am glad to see that MS is not sitting around waiting on this issue.

Hopefully this will make testing even easier. 

This article from MSDN shows just about every type of format string you can use on a date:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/az4se3k1.aspx

 

If you are using the NOT IN clause with a SQL Select statement with SQL Server it will not work if there is a null value in the list.  Say for example you want to do:

SELECT * FROM 
Employees 
Where 
Employee.Id NOT IN 
(  
   Select EmployeeId from 
   Salaries 
   where Salary < 100000
)

If the inner select returns a null value then the outer select statement will return no rows.

To try it, just run these 2 SQL statments against any table in your DB.

-- will return rows
SELECT * FROM 
sometable
WHERE ID NOT IN (1,2,3)

-- will return nothing
SELECT * FROM 
sometable
WHERE ID NOT IN (1,2,3, null)

Ok so the other night I was working late, and thought to myself... hey, I have some new music on my iphone, why don't I make use of my Klipsch iGroove speakers (as I had heard that most ipod accessories work with the iphone).

So I walked over to the speakers and dropped in my iphone. It fit perfect, as expected. I hit the power button... nothing. Ok, maybe I need to turn on the iphone. Nothing. Ok, maybe I need to hit the menu button... nothing.

I take the iphone out and try to power it up... nothing. I hold down each button for 10 seconds, and then try holding down both for 30 seconds. Nothing.

The iphone starts to get really really hot (almost too hot to hold) and I realize I am screwed.

So that is the bad part. The good part is that I was able to make an appt with the local Apple store within an hour, and they replaced my iphone with a new one.

So as stupid as it is that you could plug in an iphone into some ipod speakers and it would destroy the unit, it was nice that I was able to get a new phone as quickly as I did.

I will not be using any more ipod accessories with my iphone.

I am about 90% happy with my iPhone, but in order to sync it I have to use iTunes, so I have moved my podcasts and a small subset of my 450GB of mp3s into iTunes to sync it with the iPhone, and I just have to say.... what an awful piece of software.

I mean, it DOES a few things that are nice, like trying to find album art for you, but the usability of this piece of junk is about as bad as any piece of software I have ever used.

I won't go into it, but it really ticks me off when I am trying to do something sooooo simple and it takes me 15 minutes of screwing around and a few trips to google in order to find a way to do it.

So, in conclusion, iTunes sucks.  Oh, and I hate pretty much all the software on my wife's new Mac. 

That is all. 

I am about 90% happy with my iPhone, but in order to sync it I have to use iTunes, so I have moved my podcasts and a small subset of my 450GB of mp3s into iTunes to sync it with the iPhone, and I just have to say.... what an awful piece of software.

I mean, it DOES a few things that are nice, like trying to find album art for you, but the usability of this piece of junk is about as bad as any piece of software I have ever used.

I won't go into it, but it really ticks me off when I am trying to do something sooooo simple and it takes me 15 minutes of screwing around and a few trips to google in order to find a way to do it.

So, in conclusion, iTunes sucks.  Oh, and I hate pretty much all the software on my wife's new Mac. 

That is all. 

Here is a little dos script I wrote to rename all files in the current and subdirectories to have a different extension.

for /f "tokens=1 delims=" %a in ('dir /s /b /ad') do if exist "%a\*.old" ren "%a\*.old" *.new

If you run this from a bat file you will need to replace % with %%.

Too many to list.

Some of my favs are on this list, like Launchy and SnippetCompiler.

From CodePlex:

patterns & practices Team Development with TFS Guide (Final Release)

Welcome to the patterns & practices Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server project site! This guide shows you how to make the most of Team Foundation Server. It starts with the end in mind, but shows you how to incrementally adopt TFS for your organization. It's a collaborative effort between patterns & practices, Team System team members, and industry experts. This guide is related to our Visual Studio Team System Guidance Project.

Download the Guide

Final release is available! Start using the guide today, while we continue to make improvements.

• Download the Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Guide

Download the Diagrams

Download the Visio diagrams we used in the guide so that you can modify them and use them to document your own particular environment.

• Download the Team Foundation Server Guide Visio Diagrams

 

Yahoo has released a tool called YSlow that helps developers identify why a specific website is loading slow.

Take a look at this screen cap (click to enlarge):

 

Now that I am using an iPhone, I am kinda forced to use iTunes, which I happen to think is a total piece of junk.

The only redeeming quality of iTunes is that it downloads your album art.  I'm sure it does other stuff nice too, but it does so many things poorly that I try to avoid it at all costs.

But now that I am forced to use it, it was really really really ticking me off that it was not grouping songs from the same album into same album group.

These are not some random collection of MP3s, these are all songs from the same single RIP of a single CD, with all the same information in the ID3, and still iTunes can't figure it out.

See this picture for a good example of this.  Feel Good Hit of the Summer should be grouped with all the other ones.  Click the image to see a larger view:

So after screwing around with this for a period (way too long), I finally figured a way to get it to work.

Warning: this is dumb.

Edit the song that is not getting merged (the first one).  Change the album title to something stupid like "X".  Save it, then change it back to what it should be.

Then iTunes will finally merge the songs into 1 album.