Disclaimer, I'm mid-research. Don't believe anything I say, or even read this post. :)

So we needed to deploy a new codeline for testing to our QA environment. I'm the "buildmaster", so it falls on me to setup all the build goo, and actually deploy to QA. Once the team in charge of the branch gave me the green light, I went about my merry way. I added the new site, set everything up, deployed, smokescreen tested (logged in), and sent out my notice. It's not 10 minutes later, and I get an IM... help, the client side validators don't work!

Not a problem, I've been through this before, in fact it was around sp1 time. Of course I forget that, but that other dev had sent this link also. After reading, and remembering, I ran the aspnet_regiis -ea and then -c, and magically everything worked. Good enough, let me know when you need another push.

Welp, a few bug fixes later, the team asks me deploy a new QA version. Good enough, I let ccnet do it's thing, delete the old site, replace it, all done. Come in today to a new email about the client side validators not working. Hmm.. I guess I could run aspnet_regiis -ea/-c again, but something doesn't feel right about that. They need the site now, so I run the command, and start my research.

First thing I notice is I have an aspnet_client folder in the site that was not working, but a long time site does not have the aspnet_client folder, yet both work. Hmm. The only logical explanation at this point is there must be something in the metabase. I find Metabase explorer to take a peek inside. Sure enough, here is the difference between the listings in the metabase.

Site with aspnet_client in metabase


Site with aspnet_client installed from aspnet_regiis -c

So, my question is how did those metabase bindings get on the old vdir, and how do I get them on the new vdirs and sites without manually editing it. I have searched a ton on this, and it seems like everyone's solution is aspnet_regiis -c. Does no one else agree that maintaining a local copy of these files in each site/vdir is not only bad practice, but prone to deployment/version control errors? Why doesn't aspnet_regiis -c do the metabase mapping by default, or how can I get those metabase mappings without manually editing the metabase each time? Am I think only that sees this as a problem?!

Koders, the code search engine, has recently released a number of search bar plugins for firefox. If you code, and use firefox, then what are you waiting for?

Back in the BBS days I was hooked on BRE and SRE. I remember playing on like 3 or 4 different boards. I've thought about trying to clone it a couple times, and figured I would search around today to see what was already out there. Then I found Amit Patel's (Author of SRE) site, where he links to New Kingdoms, which seems to fit the bill very well. I've already setup my account and used my 7 turns for the day, and anxiously waiting for my 7 tomorrow. If you use to play check it out, and send an alliance over to krustyland.

I said I would post a picture of myself, I just didn't say it would be 2 months later. With teched 3 weeks out, I wanted to get a mugshot out here so anyone that wants to track me down has a chance. I really look forward to meeting some of my readers, as well as the other bloggers I read. It's not a good picture, but a picture nonetheless. :)

Mug Shot

Man am I excited for this one. Richard Hale Shaw is coming to CT on July 5th for a special CT .net Developers Group presentation. RHS will be presenting on new language features in c# 2.0. If you have never seen him speak, you have to come, as he is a fantastic and engaging speaker. Thanks SBC and RHS for setting this up!

Depressed by the initial cost estimates of Team System Server? Well, MS has responded, and the new model makes it much more approachable for organizations of any size. In fact, organizations with less then 5 members looking to use the TFS server and an MSDN universal subscription are already all set to go. Read more details here.

Metasapiens has released PageMethods 1.0.0.1 which promises to clean up your urls, giving a more object oriented approach to mapping entities to urls. I haven't tried it out yet, but I'm very anxious to.

From metasapiens.com :

PageMethods provides a solution for the limitations of the standard way of handling pages, URLs and parameters. The usual way to proceed is not structured. With PageMethods, the code of your pages is simpler, cleaner and more reliable. The approach is based on strict page inputs and declarative parameter binding. With PageMethods, each page exposes a set of methods that represent the different ways to call the page. All you have to do to start benefiting from sharp URLs is to add methods to your pages, and mark these methods with attributes provided by PageMethods.

I picked this up from one of the Boston area blogs, I forget which one though since there are so many of them. Although not really related to .net in CT, it's certainly close enough to post. The Western Mass .net SAPS (Software Architects and Programmers) is a local .net usergroup in based in North Hampton. I had no idea they were up there, and hope to find time to get to some of their meetings. The next meeting sound very good, Steve Hawley speaking on reflection, and automating unit testing, and its being held on June 1st at 6:00 PM.

Being the fan of del.icio.us I am, I had to plug the fact that Joshua Schachter started the del.icio.us blog back up. Subscribed!

I've been trying to knock back a few more books before teched, since I know after teched I'll probably be too immersed in 2.0 to really think about anything else. One of the favorite topics right now is Ruby. For those that don't know, Ruby is a dynamicly typed, fully OO interpreted language, with an ever growing community pumping out great libraries. I'm really enjoying learning how to do things the ruby way, and trying to grok all of Rails. On that front, I have been reading everything here, the pragmatic "pickaxe 2", and four days on rails. The pickaxe is a pretty big book (think almost tome), but is written in a very easy to read and follow manner, making it a cover to appendix read. Expect more and more on Ruby as I learn enough to actually speak intelligently on it.

The other book I've been reading is Head First Design Patterns. I've read a number of design patterns books, and although I've always felt I knew them pretty well, I never fully groked many of the patterns as far as the whys and whens. This book covers the whys and whens, and does so in a very fun and easy to follow manner. The book was written for Java, but I have had no issues following along so far. I think this may end up being one of my favorite books of all time, right behind Applied .net, and I'm sure I'll be scouting out more Head First books.

Hopefully I'll get more posts up here soon. I find it hard to post when I'm in a learning cycle since I don't want to post half baked concepts or ideas, but maybe I should as it may help others down the paths I'm heading. Maybe I'll post up some of my Ruby tests later this week and start a Ruby for .neters column. In any case, expect full book reviews of those two coming soon, as well as Zeldman's designing with web standards, which I also recently finished up.

Haven't had a chance to find all the details yet and report a bug, but if you use vs.net 2003 database projects, and planning on upgrading to the CTP, I would suggest doing a SxS install. At least the Generate Script portion of the DB project no longer works, and states a dependancy on the 2k client tools. I'll do more research, and submit a bug, but wanted to get this up on the blog so I don't forget to do the research, and others may get early warning.

It really feels like the internet is coming alive again. It's tough to keep up with all of the fantastic tools and hacks that are showing up an a daily basis now. I try to catch them all, and lately O'reilly Radar has really been on top of them. It has also quickly become one of my favorite blogs. The radar came through again posting a link to a yahoo traffic + google maps mash up. As they state, it probably won't be around too long so get your fill now. Now if google would just partner with metro-networks to provide the same service.

Once I had tried to setup the associations in vs.net just right so double clicking on a build file would run nant, but quickly realized I was barking up the wrong tree. Looks like someone was barking up the right tree and created a NantRunner plugin, which TestingReflections.com points out recently got an update. After installing, the plugin quickly analyzed the build file I had as a sln item, and displayed all of the public (targets with desc) and private (targets without desc) in the IDE. After telling the plugin where nant was, the plugin ran my target first try. After some quick testing, I think this plugin just became a perm tool in my toolbox.

The only complaint I would have is the mapping to nant. I currently maintain nant with my projects, so each project has its own copy of nant. The plugin uses a central install. Not a big deal while they are all on 0.85rc2, but we'll see what happens when the next version comes out. If nothing else, it will force me to check compatibility sooner. Either way, if you use nant at all, I would highly suggest this plugin. Nice and easy, and you never have to leave the IDE to run any of your targets.

[Edit] URL Updated

I was thinking about how I was going to schedule my week at teched a couple weeks ago, and yesterday I saw a post from Julia Lerman about the same thing. Fantastic, glad to see others are thinking along the same lines, and with an RSS feed it should be easy (Hell, I could even bring all the items into rssbandit, and delete the ones I don't want).

Then, I saw last night that Christopher Bowen had pointed to the official "schedule my week" teched link from MS. Fantastic. I'm the guy at code camp with the sheet of all the sessions and colors outlined for my first second and third choice, so this will be a great way for me to indecisivly stare at the screen for hours.

Looks like things are finally back in order on the server here. Between last night, and this morning I was able to fix the wiki, fix iceglue.com, restore svn (thanks #svn on irc.freenode.net), finish setting up my backups, and release del.icio.us.net. (needed svn back up ;). If you notice any issues with my sites, or anything I forgot to put back up, please let me know.

I am releasing the current version of my .net del.icio.us wrapper. It is coded in c#, and is currently running my linkblog on the right hand side of my blog. I wanted to clean it up a bit, maybe even create some documentation about it, but I can never seem to find the time, so I'm releasing it as is for the first version.

This version includes a core dll that is a wrapper around del.icio.us RSS feeds, and most of the del.icio.us user api. This version also includes a poor excuse for a winforms app that hardly does anything (that will be the first thing I update for the next release), and a web project that has a basic page, and a ascx to display output from the core dll. There is also a test project with a number of tests, and the usual nant build gook.

With the core dll, any .net developer should be able to integrate del.icio.us feeds in no time into any .net app. To do this, create an instance of the links collection, set the username and or tags, and then call GetLinks(). The links collection derives from CollectionBase, so binding should be cake (as seen in the web and winforms examples).

This may be the only release to target the 1.1 framework unless I get enough feedback to continue to support 1.1. I'm probably going to use this project as my guinea pig for 2.0, so expect newer releases to target 2.0. If people are interested, though, I will continue to maintain the 1.1 release.

Todo :

• Make the winforms app useful
• Finish implementing the API
• Enhance the winforms app to manage links
• Whatever you find would be useful

Source Link

Binary Link

Edit : I started a homepage for deliciousnet. This will serve as a wiki for it, plus explain how to integrate del.icio.us into your own c# or vb.net app. I also hope to keep the release history here. It's just begining, but should keep grow as the wrapper grows. Official site for del.icio.us .net wrapper in c#

Today is a sad day for blogs. As I read through bloglines this morning, I'm finding feeds with ads from google. When feedburner added ads it was annoying, but now that google is on the bandwagon it will be overwhelming. I think adsense is a wonderful program (hence the adsense links below), but I will NOT subject my subscribers to ads. So far I have been greeted with "I make 4k$ a week off taking surveys" on a .net blog, irrelevant ads that z-index over images on a gadget blog, and general ADD tendencies to not even read a post because the ad caught my attention instead (which means the ad works, but at the expense of the blog). Maybe I'm being a little too critical on what seems like the first day, and just generally pissed that I now have to look at more ads. The funny part of all this is when I see a post I want to really read, I usually open it up outside bloglines. If I found value in the post it, I almost always click on at least 1 ad to support the site. I will NOT click on an RSS ad, though... stay the hell outta my aggregator.

/me hopes bloglines implements some type of ad blocking

/me starts looking for another aggregator thinking AskJeeves prolly isn't interested in that

Edit : Who needs askjeeves when you've got greasemonkey. Sam Ruby points out a GreaseMonkey js file that will block google's rss ads. Fantastic, and thank you

I'll have to find the official place to submit this request tonight. For now, I'll complain on the blog. When I drag a SQL script on an open query window, I wish SQL Management Studio would either open a new window connected to the same DB, or open in the existing window. Currently, the default behaviour is to pop-up the connect dialog box, which allows you to connect to a server, you then still have to choose the database. My guess, I'll run way too many scripts on Master, so I'll either have to change my workstyle, or hope this gets changed. Anyone else drag SQL scripts alot?

Also, speaking of SQL 2K5, go listen to this weeks DotNetRocks with Kimberly Tripp. As always, Kimberly brings tons of great info to the table, and the whole episode is filled with great tidbits on SQL 2K5. HIGHLY recommenced.