Noticed over on The Bit Bucket that SQLDownUnder, a new sql server podcast has started up. mmmm more nerd noise for the drive. Downloading the first one now, and gotta subscribe to the feed when I get home.

Last night Michael Stiefel from Reliable Software presented on Securing Service Oriented Architecture with WSE 2 to the CT .net Developers group. Being in the midst of some major SOA/SO research, this presentation was very timely for me. Micheal's presentation was a great mix of high level concepts, and actual digging through WSE code. He is a very energetic speaker, who was extremely knowledgeable on the topic of SOA.

I really appreciated his vendor neutral/realistic approach to SOA, since much of the material you find on SOA is perched high up on the ivory tower. He had too many good quotes to list them all, but one of my favorite quotes from the evening came when he was discussing the migration path to indigo. "We automate what we did yesterday to create solutions for tomorrow". Classic, and that quote alone has changed some of my thoughts on the service design we are working on right now.

Thank you Michael for presenting to our local group, and if you get a chance to see him present, I would not miss the chance. I know I won't be.

Levi Rosol points out that svn 1.2 was released. Not alot of earth new shattering features, but one that many people have been waiting for, exclusive locks, has been added. I may never use exclusive locking again, but for those of you that have been waiting to try svn because you're just too used to exclsuive locks in VSS, now you have no excuse.

TDD/Agile extraordinaire Darrell Norton has pointed out Mark McFadden has released c# samples for the fantastic book Head First Design Patterns. I'm enjoying seeing the samples in java, maybe even learning a thing or two (mostly about how similar the languages are :) , but I will definitely pick up the c# version so I can feel more at home while reading. Looks like it even comes with a test suite. Sweet...

Congrats to Wallace McClure for launching his new ASP.Net podcast. I listened today on the way to work, and its definitely a great start. I really liked the mix of interview and technical content, and can't wait to hear the new show. Check it out here.

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.

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