rwandering.net
The blogged wandering of Robert W. Anderson
December 16, 2005 at 11:00 am · Filed under .NET
Our source-control server crashed on Wednesday. The repository itself was unharmed (and we had good backups, too), but we have had to reinstall everything from scratch. Since the developers didn’t have access to source control for a day anyway, I decided to go ahead and install Visual SourceSafe 8 (we’ll be upgrading to Team Foundation Server at a later date). I’ve found little online about people actually making this transition, so I thought I’d blog about it. By the way, we also use SourceAnywhere for remote access so I had to install this too.
Since the OS had been loaded from scratch, this was a clean VSS install. I have read people saying it is OK to upgrade over VSS6; however, the included documentation says you must uninstall previous versions of VSS first (emphasis theirs).
After the install (which went without a hitch), I attached to our existing repository with the VSS Admin tool. That asked me to run an “Analyze” since it had been more than 30 days since it was last run. This is a nice new feature. It found a few minor errors. At the end it suggested I run it again from the command-line with the -f command to actually fix the errors. I really wish it could just offer to do that for me, but that is a minor complaint.
Interestingly, the database hasn’t changed format leading me to believe that VSS is just as good (i.e., problematic) as it used to be.
Which might explain why nobody has blogged about this — migration itself isn’t so interesting if the DB hasn’t changed. VSS6 clients still can connect to it without trouble.
So, it worked fine — with no problems and as far as I can tell, no advantages either.
Tags: .NET, vs2005, vss6, vss8
December 13, 2005 at 2:06 pm · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing
Today Dan’l Lewin, Microsoft Corporate VP of .NET Business Development, highlights some startups using .NET (see Checked My List Twice). Of course, he included Digipede! About his list, he says:
I believe they are among the most creative, inventive (and yes, ‘innovative’ startups) that we follow. They are doing some amazing things — creating solutions and products that would definitely make it to Santa’s list (not that any of us actually make lists anymore.)
Thanks Dan’l!
Postscript: Robert Scoble and Don Dodge blogged about Dan’l’s list too.
Tags: .NET, Digipede, grid, SaaS
December 8, 2005 at 2:14 pm · Filed under .NET
Peter Coffee just reviewed Visual Studio 2005 in eWeek: Visual Studio 2005: Bright Lights and Shadows.
This article seems less a review and more a warning to developers to think hard about adopting the Microsoft development tools. The article is not exactly anti-Microsoft. Mr. Coffee has a good point when he says that the developer gets great productivity gains at the cost of adopting the entire Microsoft strategy; however, is this any different from the other major integrated environments?
In a related interview on AttentionTech (see Coffee Talk), Mr. Coffee points out that in their labs, they cannot test across a wide enough range of scenarios to verify stability issues reported by the user community. As a result, he cannot answer questions regarding the stability of VS 2005 and the greater question: was it ready to be released? While I accept this as a limitation, I do wonder what it means for the validity of the review. How was time spent in the lab?
Refactoring versus 400Mb files
For example, the review mentions that VS 2005 finally supports refactoring. It is a real productivity benefit for developers and is important for people evaluating the platform. This topic gets just a paragraph. Does it work well? The review doesn’t say. My experience is that it does not (as I write this post, I am also manually propagating a refactoring change across 15 different VS2005 projects).
Iimmediately preceding the re-factoring paragraph are three paragraphs about why developers shouldn’t expect a single IDE to do everything for them. The shining example here is that VS 2005 cannot open a 400Mb text file. It turns out that none of the major IDEs support files of the size. Is this a more useful test for a review than seeing how well refactoring works? I don’t think so.
VB6
About 20% of the article is devoted to issues for VB6 developers. Isn’t this old news? I can completely understand why the VB6 community feels slighted by Microsoft; however, the greater good for the development platform built upon a common framework has been proven. VB6 developers were always treated as second class citizens in terms of both development tools and resulting capabilities. While this is still the case for VB6, VB.NET developers don’t face this hurdle. This could not have (reasonably) been done without changes to the VB6 language. VB developers are second-class citizens no longer.
Strategy
I recommend the interview AttentionTech interview (see Coffee Talk). He discusses his review as well as the greater Microsoft strategy regarding integration of VS 2005 and SQL Server touching on the future with .NET 3.0 and LINQ. He does a good job of explaining this strategy as well as the value of these products for developers.
Tags: .NET, clr, eweek, linq, Microsoft, sql, sql2005, VB6, vs2005
December 1, 2005 at 7:39 am · Filed under .NET, Web 2.0
In his post, Off to go to Dublin, Disconnects between Blogosphere and Real World, Robert Scoble asks if there are disconnects between blogs and the real world.
He cites as an example the outpouring of enthusiasm for the Visual Studio / SQL Server / Biztalk launches and the lack of blogging about these products. I know I did it (VS drink menu, anyone?).
But Robert, there are easily hundreds of bloggers that have hyped up these launch events and blog about these products every single day.
Maybe these don’t appear on the general blogger “radar” because the vast majority of these Microsoft-focused bloggers are not tagging nor are they really interacting with the Web 2.0 blogosphere.
If I am right, Robert could do a great service to Microsoft and its Web 2.0 push by helping to better integrate the vast Microsoft blogging community with the rest of the blogosphere. For example, there are several siloed Microsoft-enthusiast blogger communities. Wouldn’t it be cool if those sites made it easy (or automatic) for their users to tag their blogs with Technorati tags? Couldn’t this increase the awareness of the general blogosphere about Microsoft and all their cool development tools?
Robert, what you think?
Tags: .NET, blog, Microsoft, Web2.0
November 29, 2005 at 9:25 am · Filed under Grid Computing
In Kill all screensavers, Nick Carr writes about a problem facing CIOs wanting to harness idle compute resources: graphic and compute-intensive corporate screensavers. We have all seen these screensavers either in our own companies or while visiting others. Depending on who you ask, these either encroach on the employee environment or they are a valuable conduit for employee education. They are also mistakingly considered a green alternative to employee communications versus paper-based communications as screensavers can cause enormous power consumption in aggregate. Nick Carr has some numbers supporting this view in his article.
Delivering employee messaging through screensavers is incredibly inefficient: aren’t employees either using their computers (i.e., there is no screensaver running), or doing something else (i.e., not looking at their screensavers)? But when the employee is out of the office, it runs 100% of the time. 16+ hours of employee communications directed at an empty chair.
Want a green alternative to employee messaging? Use e-mail.
Save your idle compute resources for applications that deliver real business value. That is one of the reasons we developed the Digipede Network: to deliver real business value on idle resources.
Aside from grid computing, the CIOs should be successful fighting the screensaver with the power savings argument.
Tags: .NET, green, grid, screensavers
November 22, 2005 at 7:36 am · Filed under .NET
I wrote a mini review of Framework Design Guidelines
, an excellent book by Krzysztof Cwalina and Brad Abrams.
You can read it here.
An excerpt of my review:
This is an excellent book. I recommend it to any and all .NET developers interested in improving the style, consistency, and maintainability of their class libraries — public or not. While it is certainly targeted at designers of public frameworks, there is a lot of good content here for everybody.
Tags: .NET
November 20, 2005 at 8:46 am · Filed under .NET, Web 2.0
One thing striking at Web 2.0 events is the absence of people using Microsoft software development tools. Of course, that isn’t news. Many of these startup companies go for the free tools and steer away from Microsoft. When we were starting out, we signed up for the Microsoft Empower program for startups. It is essentially free and provides all the Microsoft development tools. I suspect Microsoft needs to promote this program more. Free Express versions help, but it is too early to tell what the impact will be.
At the TechCrunch / Riya party, I did hear only one thing that made me bridle:
On the way to the ePlatform demo, we walked into the end of a Podcast of John Furrier of Podtech.net interviewing a fellow podcaster. She was pushing her site (I won’t mention it here). She said something like:
We are all buzz-word compliant. (list of terms), anti-Microsoft, (more terms) etc.
So “anti-Microsoft” is now a buzz word? It isn’t enough to be Java or Ruby on Rails or PHP or pro-Google or Sun, etc? Not liking Microsoft is one thing, but encapsulating that dislike into a buzz word is too simplistic for me. It is just another way people put blinders on isolating themselves and narrowing their view.
It isn’t about the hardware, software, OS, development tools . . . it is about what you create with them.
IMHO.
Update: I think I’m still not being clear on this: I would also bridle at “anti-Google” or “anti-Java” as attaining buzz-word status. It is just to cliqueish for me — am I alone on this?
Tags: .NET, Microsoft, Web2.0
November 11, 2005 at 11:00 pm · Filed under .NET
I just added an article on using UpdateVersion to update resource scripts for unmanaged code. You can read it here.
An excerpt:
At release build time, we update our version numbers using the UpdateVersion utility by Mike Gunderloy, Scott Hanselman, and Matt Griffith. This works fine for managed assemblies, but it doesn’t work for versioning unmanaged Win32 DLLs using the resource script.
I solved this problem while dealing with a completely different versioning issue (related to VS2005’s inadequacy regarding Win32 resources in managed assemblies).
Interestingly enough, just as I thought about posting this, I found on the MSBuild blog that a new MSBuild task similar to the UpdateVersion utility has just been posted to GotDotNet. If and when we migrate to MSBuild, this might just do the trick, but I suspect there will still be some extra work to get this to help with resource scripts.
Tags: .NET, vs2005, win32
November 6, 2005 at 11:27 pm · Filed under .NET
John Powers (the Digipede CEO) and I went to the Microsoft Partner Appreciation Party at Frisson in San Francisco as prep for the VSLaunch event at Moscone center tomorrow. John and I had a great talk about how the Digipede Network is a great fit for SaaS in general.
The party was fun. They had a custom drink menu for the event:
The “Visual Studio 05” wasn’t bad.
As we were heading out of the city, we found ourselves driving into a dead-end loading zone.
John said: “What we are doing here is slightly illegal.”
It became clear that If we continued we would have had to drive over a sidewalk.
I said: “No, what you are about to do is illegal. That is what makes you a visionary.”
And, no, we didn’t have too many drinks at the party!
Tags: .NET, vs2005
October 28, 2005 at 5:01 am · Filed under .NET
Now that I am finished with the port to VS2005 / .NET 2.0, I wanted to point out a few final issues I came across. Note that we use the Preemptive Dotfuscator v3.0 here, but the obfuscation issues likely apply to other obfuscators as well:
New files in ASP.NET 2.0
As the compilation model for ASP.NET has changed a great deal, there are also some new files that you must deploy. Of course, this is not an issue if you use VS2005 to deploy directory to a web site, but if you are packaging up all of your files into an installer then make sure you include these new files:
- *.resx
- *.compiled
- PrecompiledApp.config
In particular, I have found that if the *.compiled and PrecompiledApp.config file are not in place, your global events will not get raised.
Obfuscation Issue #1: Don’t rename __ASP
Exclude the __ASP namespace from the renamed. This is a new namespace that is generated by the compiler, so you need to exclude this in your Dotfuscator project file:
<renaming>
<excludelist>
. . .
<namespace name="__ASP" regex="false" />
. . .
</excludelist>
</renaming>
Note that there is also a new ASP namespace, but I did not have to exclude this one because I was already excluding class names that are automatically placed under this namespace. Obfuscation Issue #2: Don’t obfuscate multiple Web projects at once
Before ASP.NET 2.0, it was possible to obfuscate multiple Web projects at the same time (as long as all of the namespaces are unique across projects). The new namespaces that are generated by the compiler (i.e., ASP and __ASP) will cause a conflict during obfuscation. To solve this problem, you need to break up your obfuscations into multiple projects.
This last part is somewhat non-trivial (or at least a real hassle). I have written many nant scripts that take build output and assemble them into a directory for obfuscation, breaks up the Dotfuscator configuration file, runs multiple obfuscation runs, and finally reassembles the files into individual folders for release.
I am not going to blog on those specifics, but if you are interested in my solutions to these problems, feel free to contact me.
Tags: .NET, asp.net, dotfuscator, vs2005
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