I won't be updating this blog any longer. My new site should be live - http://www.hirlpoo.com. It needs a ton of work, but I should have some time to clean it up and get it running. I looked at migrating some content from here, but there really isn't a good way that was easy, so its a blank slate.
I'm also turning off comments here (since I won't really ever respond to them anymore). If you want to stop by and say hi on the new site, feel free to leave a comment on the hello world post there. You can point from friendly neighborhood RSS client here.
After three and a half years of supporting production developers, I’ve come to realize how much I miss actually writing production code. To that end, I’m heading back to my roots as a developer. I’ve taken a position with Northwoods Software in Brown Deer, WI.
This was not an easy decision to make. My dream when I was a college student at MSOE was to one day work for Microsoft and I got to live that dream for six and a half years I’ve had the chance to work with some of the smartest folks I’ve ever run into anywhere and working with them day to day will definitely be missed. I also got to work with a ton of great customers doing amazing things with Microsoft technology. It was actually these folks who planted the seeds of jealousy - they got to use the new tools and techniques to create real, living and breathing stuff while I had to settle for churning out sample code.
My options in the Microsoft field to get back in the game (so-to-speak) were limited. My choices were to go back to MCS (where I spent my first three years here), or look at getting a SDE job with a product group and move my family to Redmond. The MCS life is nice if you can hack the travel, but I'm not the spring chicken I used to be and it is nice to see the family at night. We've set down some pretty deep roots in the Milwaukee area, so heading west wasn't really an option either.
I’m around for the rest of the month mainly transitioning accounts and tying up loose ends. Going forward, this blog will move to a more permenant home at http://www.hirlpoo.com/ though for prosperity sake, the stuff here on MSDN will stay. That URL points back here for now, but I'll post a final entry once the new site is up and running so you can update your bookmarks and RSS feed.
I'm currently on infant care leave and may or may not be posting stuff over the next month or so.
At least now I have an excuse for a low post count.
I can't remember who turned me on to Ze Frank, but it is a welcome break once in a while. Today's episode's discussion of the Field Medal is hilarious.
Having spent the past few weeks assiting a customer on some Word Addin issues, I've come to like the development platform that is Office. You can do some pretty cool stuff with it, even in just the Macro language. I'm in the process of trying to fully implement GTD in my life (I've been a Mission Control devotee for about two years.) and have done some work on tweaking the Macros that Simon Guest posted for implementing GTD in Outlook 2007 (more on this later).
That said, this contest came accross an internal alias.
The contest is called Develop without Borders. It challenges developers around the world to design Office business applications that support non-profit organizations. It was developed as a joint effort between both the Information Worker and Developer Platform teams with support from HP and offers over $160,000 in prizes. I'm fairly sure I'm not eligilbe for the prizes, but seems like a cool way to help out.
Though hardly breaking news at this point, I'll point folks to the new Windows Live Writer blog posting tool. I've been playing with it for a couple weeks no (we were under quarantine about talking about it) and like it pretty much so far (though I still have a tendency to use the web interface Community Server gives you). The public seems to like it too. I'll be curious to see what folks do with the plugin API. Tim Heuer has already put together a Flickr plugin that eases inserting Flickr images. The photo below is a photo of my son that I've got up on Flickr:
Inserting that took a couple clicks, though on Flickr itself, getting the HTML to insert a photo elsewhere isn't too difficult.
BTW - the above shot is one of my first "keeper" photos I've taken using the awesome techniques outlined by David Hobby on the Strobist blog. David is a photojournalist for the Baltimore Sun and has been sharing load of techniques for doing off camera lighting (all for real cheap, assuming you already have a DSLR).
I've been using Office 2007 since sometime between Beta1 TR and Beta 2. (I'm currently on a post Beta 2 build.) I'm slowly finding some cool stuff, and recently discovered Melissa MacBeth's blog on Task and Time Management. A guest post by Hank Leukart covers a cool new feature for appointments - being able to specify start and end times in different time zones.
Since a fair number of my customers are in the Eastern Time Zone, and I'm in the Central, this could be handy. I've long used the "show additional time zone" on my calendar, which has been in the past few versions. (In the Outlook Calendar, right click the time bar, choose "Change Time Zone..." then tick the "Show Additional Time Zone" box and pick the time zone. I also add labels so I remember which is which.)
The cool thing with the feature Hank mentions, is for putting airline flights on you calendar. Flying home from somewhere like Grand Rapids, MI, I can leave at 3:15 local time, and arrive at 3:00 local time. Scheduling this is super easy now. Just enter the start and end times in local times, including time zones.
I just got my first rash of comment spam - now I feel like a real blogger.
I saw a lead photo for this article. A Dutch designer created a floating bed based on magnetic attraction/repulsion. It looks pretty nice. The article talks about folks with piercings not having issues, unless they go underneath it (say to dust or sweep or whatever).
Seems to me I'd probably want to lay off using a laptop in bed too. Any magentic field strong enough to hold my fat butt up in the air, let alone the matteress has got to be strong enought to affect the harddrive.
Dare posted on this last week, but I got my second email today where someone was "super excited" to be doing something and almost screamed. We really need to remove this from the venacular.
It has gotten to the point that I honestly tune out after either reading or hearing that phrase.
About a week ago I helped troubleshoot an issue where a customer wrote a WinForms User Control and she was trying to use it on a form she was developing. When she dragged it from the toolbox, she was getting the following error:
An exception occurred while trying to create an instance of Contoso.XP2.AuthorList. The exception was "Request for the permission of type System.Security.Permissions.FileIOPermission, mscorlib, Version=1.0.5000.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089 failed".
No one else in her group experienced this issue. Right off the bat it smelled like a CAS (code access security) issue, the VS IDE was trying to create an instance of the control to use in the designer and was failing to get some permission (File IO in this case). In this case, a quick scan of the code for the user control showed that in the contructor it was reading some configuration information from the local HD.
This was a bit confusing to the developer, as she hadn't written any code yet, but the constructor was getting run. How could this be?
At design time, when a control is put onto the form in the designer, the Visual Studio process (DEVENV.EXE) will create an instance of your control to be able to display it on the design surface. In doing this, stuff like the constructor gets run.
The majority CAS issues we see stem from loading an assembly from a network share. By default, an assembly loaded from the network is not trusted as much, therefore things like File IO get restricted. But in this case, the developer was working with everything local. The project and the file being read were on the C: drive. Time to look under the covers.
I had her run the (recently aquired) SysInternals FileMon tool and filter on only the DEVENV.EXE process. After she sent me the trace, the following line looked suspicious (I added the line breaks):
7120 10:01:24 AM devenv.exe:784 QUERY INFORMATION \\chi-fs01\UserAppData\Devlogon\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.1\ProjectAssemblies\ipgr1g-i01\Contoso.XP2.DataAccess.Settings.dll SUCCESS FileFsDeviceInformation
What is with this "ProjectAssemblies" directory? And why was it on a network share. The "chi-fs01" naming convention of the server made it sound like a file server in their Chicago office (thanks IT!) and after talking with the developer some more, it turns out her home directory was redirected to a file share for roaming purposes. After a bit of digging, KB825007 looked like the exact same problem we were seeing, except a different error was occuring.
As I mentioned, Visual Studio will complile a temporary copy of the control so it can run it for display in the designer. It will compile this temorary copy to a folder in %APPDATA%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.1\ProjectAssemblies. When %APPDATA% is re-directed to a network share, the compiled assemby won't be trusted the same as one on the local hard drive and may fail. The workaround is to explicity trust this directory in the code access security policy:
- Start the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 Configuration tool (located in Administrative Tools on the Control Panel). The .NET Configuration 1.1 window opens.
- In the left pane of the .NET Configuration 1.1 window, expand Runtime Security Policy, and then expand Machine.
- Expand Code Groups, and then expand All_Code.
- Right-click LocalIntranet_Zone, and then click New. The Create Code Group dialog box appears.
- Click to select the Create a new code group option.
- In the Name box, type MyCodeGroup, and then click Next.
- In the Choose the condition type for this code group box, click URL.
- To fully trust all files that are located in the ProjectAssemblies folder, type the following text in the URL box:
file:////FolderPath\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.1\ProjectAssemblies\*
Note: FolderPath is a placeholder for the path of the folder where the Application Data folder is redirected.
- Click Next.
- In the Use existing permission set box, click FullTrust, and then click Next.
- Click Finish.
After completing these steps, she retried dragging the control from the tool box and it showed up on the form surface this time.
Having explained this to a number of people in as many days, I thought I'd share this tip for working with long paths on the command line. The easist way to expalin this is to jump in feet first:
- Open a command line (<Windows Key>-R, CMD<Enter> is engrained in my hands at this point in my career)
- At the prompt, repeatedly hit tab
You will be cycling through all of the files and directories in your current directory. Now try this:
- At a clean command prompt, type "dir \P" then start hitting tab.
Now you'll be cycling through all the directories that start with "P" in the root of the current drive (in my case, it cycles through "Program Files" then Projects). You'll also notice that for files with embedded spaces, quotes are automatically added. This works for as many characters as you wish to type. After you cycle to the directory you want, type a backslash, then hit tab again and you'll cycle through the files and sub-directories in that directory, and so on. On my current machine, I can type the following to open my machine.config:
notepad \win<tab>\mic<tab>\<tab>\v1.1<tab>\con<tab>\m<tab><enter>
This results in the following command line, which would take considerably more keystrokes or mouse clicks:
notepad \WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\config\machine.config
This works at just about any point in a command, as long as you are starting from a space. It will also work on UNC paths staring at the share name (Assuming you can authenticate to that particular share):
dir \\fileserver\share\<tab>
There may be a delay as CMD goes an enumerates the items on the share, but if you are trying to get to something deep down in some huge directory structure with really long path names, this helps a ton.
Though this has been in CMD for some time, I don't think it was enabled by default untill Windows XP which may explain why it isn't well known. If you're stuck on a Windows 2000 box (or, gasp! NT4), you can edit the registry to enable this (Standard registry disclaimer applies - don't do this unless you know what you're doing since you can render a box un-bootable with sufficient registry tweaking.):
Set HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor\CompetionChar to 9
KB244407 covers this in detail.
I used to hate the command line becuase I'm lazy and didn't want to type out huge paths (which I would end up misspelling). No longer!
I needed a new AC adaptor for my Toshiba M4 and it arrived today. For a simple AC adapter (Toshiba Part Number PA3283U-3ACA), it came in a huge box.
Then when opening the box, the first sheet on top was:
In case the text is hard to read off of my Smartphone camera:
"WARNING: Handling the cord on this product will expose you to lead, a chemical known to the State of California to cause birth defects or other reproductive harm. Wash hands after handling."
WTF? I realize California has some regulations on the books that require everything that may in the slightest way cause you harm be labeled, but since when did an electrical adapter cord contain lead? The cord seems to be just plain ol electrical cord, covered in an insulator. I don't get it.
FWIW, there are two cords - the one that plugs into the wall has the following markings: "(PS)E JET HRS ICI VCTFK 2X0.75mm2 =F= 2006 CMC N.M (UL) W69167-2 TYPE NISPT-2 2X18AWG VW-1 HI-RISE CSA LL973391 TYPE SPT-2 2x18AWG FT2"
The side that plugs into the tablet says "EVERTOP (S)E117873 <some weird symbol> AWM STYLE IS71 16AWG VW-1 80º 30V CSA LL82009 AWM II A 80º 30V FTI =F= JACKET LM"
I know there is probably some way to look up these codes, I just don't have the patience. I always thought lead was a conductor and would have no place on the outside of a cable. I'll have to keep this thing away from my wife since our second child is due in a few weeks.
Cal Roach knows a ton about all kinds of music. Along with his girlfriend, Jennifer, they have exposed me to tons of great music over the past year or so - either by outright saying, "Here, check this out!" or slipping me a copy of the latest International Mixtape Project disc they've received.
Cal is blogging now and kicks things off with a HUGE review of his trip to Bonaroo. Lets hope he keeps it up! His reviews of albums are usually killer and always right on the mark.
