Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

Apparently there are some issues with getting the correct Microsoft.Web.Atlas.dll and other annoyances when downloading the December bits. Jonathan Hawkings has a good summary of what to do on the ASP.NET forums, and I reproduce it here: It looks like there is a replication issue with the ASP.NET ‘Atlas’ December ’05 release family on MS Download Center (download.microsoft.com). The December bits were originally released with the October release family (a download center deployment term) and they suspect this lead to the October bits continuing to be downloaded. The download center folks have since re-release the ‘Atlas’ December bits with a new release family. Please try the steps below to clear our prior ‘Atlas’ versions from the IE cache, VS project templates etc. 1. Make sure you are running ASP.NET 2.0 RTM, Visual Studio 2005 RTM or Visual Web Developer RTM … ASP.NET ‘Atlas’ will only run on the RTM releases. Beta2 ...

Richard Grimes has a very recent piece here about comparisons between managed and unmanaged code. He points out specifically: "The problem is that when most people think of .NET they think of other frameworks with a runtime, like Java or Visual Basic; or they may even think about interpreters. They do not think about applications, or what they do; they do not think about limiting factors like network or disk access; in short, they do not think. .NET is not like those frameworks. It has been well though out and Microsoft has put a lot of effort in making it work well. In this article I will present some code that performs some computationally intensive operation and I will compile it as both managed C++ and unmanaged C++. Then I will measure how each of these libraries perform. As you will see, .NET is not automatically much slower than unmanaged code, indeed, in some cases it is much faster." . Grimes presents FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) sample code for Unmanaged, Managed ...

The world is abuzz with acronyms. One that's getting a bit overheated IMO is Service Oriented Architecture -- "SOA". Why is it that architect - developer people get into this "Baffle 'em with Bullshit" mindset anyway? Let's keep it simple, folks! What is "SOA" anyway? I prefer the simple definition: "A service-oriented architecture is a collection of services that communicate with each other. The services are self-contained and do not depend on the context or state of the other service. They work within a distributed systems architecture." Now that's pretty simple; it doesn't baffle us with high-falutin whitepaper B.S., and we feel better since most of us are already doing this kind of stuff anyway . Note that it doesn't say "whose" system, or "what brand" or even what language / platform. SOA has been around for 20 years. The only real difference is that we have more interoperability in the form of...

A couple of people had an interesting conversation today. It went something like so: A: If a theory is presented as a theory, what is the harm in teaching it? The "theory" of evolution is taught. How is teaching Christian kids the theory of evolution ok but teaching the theory of intelligent design to non christian kids not ok? B: The theory of evolution is based on science. Einstein's theory of relativity was based on science, even though it took 51 years for it to be fully proven. Intelligent design is not based on science, it's based on the supernatural, which is not science, but religion. Astrology is based on the supernatural, not science. I'll defend Christian kids' right to learn about Intelligent design in church 100%, but not in the public school biology classroom. A: I went and read up on that case. They weren't simply asking to teach it in addition to Darwin, they wanted it to be a replacement for. It also appeared to be against a vast major...

I grew up in NYC. It's a tough town. Tough people, but they can also be very nice. One good thing I learned in NY is how to drive. You stick your nose out into traffic until somebody chickens out. Problem is, here in Florida they don't get that this is just etiquette, and they shoot you, or at least try to run you off the road! Idiots! Now look, transit strikes are illegal. In New York State, they have the Taylor Law, which unequivocally makes public transit strikes illegal. The City of New York went and got a court injunction against the union, barring them from going on strike. A judge fined them a million a day. And yet, after all this, Roger Toussaint, the president of the Transit Workers Union, had the unmitigated gall to stand up at a rally and yell to the crowd, "If Mayor Bloomberg wants to know what we think about this lawsuit, I'll show you," and he tore up the legal papers in front of them. If the Transit Workers Union defies a court injunction, bre...

Scott Guthrie has posted a mini-site with a download of the new Web Application Project "add-in" (the one that makes VS.NET 2005 act like VS.NET 2003 for ASP.NET Applications). The site is here. . At this point there is a C# Tutorial ready (link on the same page as above) and a VB.NET tutorial should be ready shortly. I'm going to spend a short amount of time on this and post some more, because I think it is an important step, er (forward?, or perhaps backward?). Scott informs on his blog that "This preview is not a feature-complete version of the functionality. There are several important features that are not yet implemented, as well as a set of bugs that are currently active", and that "Our goal with putting this first release out is to get early feedback from the community, as well as to provide a core feature-set that enables some developers to start using this project model option immediately (with workarounds for the missing functionality which wil...

Scientists analyzed the portrait of the Mona Lisa, a woman with famously mixed emotions, hoping to unlock her smile. They applied emotion recognition software that measures a person's mood by examining features such as the curve of the lips and the crinkles around the eyes. The findings? Mona Lisa was 83 percent happy, 9 percent disgusted, 6 percent fearful, and 2 percent angry, according to the British weekly "New Scientist." They also found out that she likes Fajita Burritos from Chipotle Grill, drives a Lamborghini, and likes to wear push-up designer bras by Verdissima. As can be seen here in the after-scan photo, Ms. Lisa did not take kindly to being "scanned". Many people are not aware that Mona was also an expert object - oriented programmer. The only problem is, nobody has ever been able to find her code... Ain't technology grand?

Back at the MVP Summit in Redmond in late September, I had a chance to talk at some length with my buddy and fellow MVP Daniel Cazzulino . Daniel was up to his eyeballs in the GAT, along with Victor Aprea and a bunch of other contract people working out of the Redmond campus. I asked a lot of questions, and Daniel and Victor responded, and at that time, since i realized GAT really hadn't been "born" yet, I kind of "tucked it away" in my head for later. Well, I'm happy to reveal that it's born, and developers should take note. GAT is a first, but a very big step into extensions to Visual Studio 2005 that allows architects to author integrated user experiences for reusable assets that include frameworks, components and patterns. The resulting Guidance Packages are composed of templates, wizards and what they call "recipes" (it ain't Martha Stewart, folks), that can help developers build solutions in a way consistent with the architecture ...

I came into the office this morning and my machine had been rebooted. "OK", I thought, and I looked in Event Viewer, and sure enough, at 3:00 AM just as expected, there had been some WIndows Updates installed. Then the bad news came. I brought up Internet Explorer and when I clicked on a link in my Favorites or tried to enter an address in the Address Bar, IE would freeze. The only way to kill it was to go into Task Mgr and kill the IExplore.exe process. At first I didn't think that a Microsoft update could have done this. So, I tried all the "Fixes" from the MVP Internet Explorer site and a couple of others. No dice. I had to use Firefox to go look for the fixes! To make a long story short, after a couple of frustrating hours and no relief, I did what any intelligent developer would do. I booted off the Windows XP CD, went through the entire installation sequence to the point where it identified my existing Windows XP installation, and chose the (R) repair opt...

Yup. They're finally getting around to it. W3C has its first set of Recommendations around the Binary XOP concept , which essentially takes the XML InfoSet and provides a standardized binary format encoding set of rules. Of course a lot of people are unhappy with how XML has evolved and with the involvement of organizations like the W3C. The fact remains that even though the transport cost of textual XML is untenable for a lot of devices, the cost of parsing of text-XML completely overshadows it. By having a BinaryXML standard, we would see XML adoption in areas where its use is not currently widespread and we would see increased communications over what we have today. This would be good for all of us. The only problem is, it needs to be "a" standard, not "twenty different" standards. I remember being on the SOAP list back in 2000. Dave Winer, Don Box and other luminaries did a lot of arguing and crying. But, they eventually gave birth, and it was "One S...

With this week's NYSE merger with electronic market operator Archipelago, the New York Stock Exchange has instantly become the world's top publicly listed stock exchange - and made a decisive plunge into electronic trading. They used a reverse-IPO listing process - Archipelago, whose stockholders now own 30 per cent of the combined $10 billion entity, was already a public company. Although 99 per cent of Big Board orders reach the NYSE electronically, only about 14 per cent are settled electronically. The remaining 86 per cent are executed using a technologically-updated, but still very recognizable version of the face-to-face trading floor that, in one form or another, has been used by the NYSE throughout its 213-year history. I know how archaic it is - as a rookie broker for Merrill Lynch, they let us on the NYSE Trading Floor one day right after the close during broker training school. There's paper everywhere, people yelling and bumping into each other, and you literall...

Steve Michelotti exposes an interesting limitation of polymorphism with Generics: In .NET 2.0, Generics is clearly the single most important language enhancement. However, to use generics to the full potential, developers should understand both the capabilities and limitations of generics as they relate specifically to polymorphism. In short, while generics do support some polymorphic behavior, the use of Interfaces should still be the preferred polymorphic mechanism in many cases. Here's my code take on this, as a little "exercise". This is pretty "linear" so it should be fairly easy to follow. The actual demo "test" code lines are in the "class program". You can paste this into a VS.NET 2005 Console app if you want to play around with it by uncommenting some lines: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Text; namespace GenericVsInterface { public abstract class Developer { public string FirstName; public st...

They've been making improvements over at gotdotnet.com, not the least of which is their new SCC plugin to use the GotDotNet Workspaces source control arrangement. Not only does it work very nicely in VS.NET 2005, it also works with VS.NET 2003! It's just like working in VSS; the only difference is that since you are working via WebServices, it's a bit slower. But everything works! Really a boon to developers who like the Gotdotnet Workspaces concept and have small groups of developers who work together on a project. The only downside is that when you want to get a project out of your regular VSS provider, IIT BREAKS and doesn't work! But there are several fixes, the best one I've found is Soenke Schau's Sourcecode Control Switcher . This little tray app tells you your current provider and let's you switch at will by changing the Registry entries for you. And, you don't need to leave it running. Just put a shortcut to the desktop and bring it up when you ...

As an aside to my recent link about how to fold a T-Shirt, I present for your viewing pleasure the official tutorial on how to Serialize a Dictionary: BTW, I don't usually do the "Me Too!" mentality thing of linking to other people's blogs since it tends to just muck-up the blogosphere. In this case Brian Johnston has a very funny and revealing poke at the JAVA vs. .NET space here . If you work with Microsoft technology for a living, maybe its time to just count your blessings... (Sorry like so many good things, apparently this went bye-bye. Thanks to Mr. Anonymous Coward commenter who brought it to my attention.).

Recently we got a frustrated post from somebody on our eggheadcafe.com forums to the effect that "VS2005 is a Piece of Garbage and is bug Ridden" -- rant, rant.. After I got over the initial amusement, I went back to the MS C# newsgroup and noticed the same guy was stirring it up over there too. In fact, a few people did chime in about their own problems. And, to be fair, at least a couple more chimed in with their happiness and warm fuzzy success stories. I mean, look. Everybody agrees this was an extremely ambitious release. And lots of people accused Microsoft of pushing it out the door too soon; these complaints started way before RTM. This particular developer was attempting to preserve work he had done in 2003 with SqlDataAdapter by bringing it onto the Component Designer from the Toolbox (its not even in the default list, they want you to use the new SqlDataSource - which is actually quite cool). So he had a legitimate beef, although I think it's really kind o...

Looks promising. Haven't tried it yet. Let me know if you have any feedback on it. http://www.componentworkshop.com/products.aspx How can I tell if my App Blew Up (Unhandled Exception) ("What?", you say, "I never have unhandled exceptions in my applications!") The AppDomain unloads when your app blows up because of an unhandled exception. But it also does this before everything goes into the Black Hole: AppDomain domain = System.AppDomain.CurrentDomain ; domain.UnhandledException+=new UnhandledExceptionEventHandler(domain_UnhandledException); private static void domain_UnhandledException(object sender, UnhandledExceptionEventArgs e) { EventLog evt = new EventLog() ; evt.WriteEntry(e.ExceptionObject.ToString() ) ; } Unfortunately, in CLR 1.X this doesn't fire in the same AppDomain. You can try code like this, however: AppDomain domain2 = AppDomain.CreateDomain("domain2"); domain2.CreateInstance("DomainLib", "YukkaPuk.ImaDwe...

Shafts of ancient ice pulled from Antarctica's frozen depths show that for at least 650,000 years three important heat-trapping greenhouse gases never reached recent atmospheric levels caused by human activities, scientists are reporting today. The measured gases were carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. Concentrations have risen over the last several centuries at a pace far beyond that seen before humans began intensively clearing forests and burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels, and the results are being published today in the journal Science. "CO2 and climate are like two people handcuffed to each other. Where one goes, the other must follow. Leadership may change, or they may march in step, but they are never far from each other. Our current CO2 levels appear to be far out of balance with climate when viewed through these results, reinforcing the idea that we have significant modern warming to go.", said James White, a geology professor at the University of ...

A new version has been released that extends the timeout of the software to July of 2006. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=321CD7A2-6A57-4C57-A8BD-DBF62EDA9671&displaylang=en Of course, you'll either need a "Genuine Windows" Product key on your OS or a good friend who does. (My "Genuine Windows" MSDN Universal Subscription Windows has always failed their little check, and I've never gotten an explanation for why, so go figure...) Automatic updates are supposed to be turned on next week. The AntiMalware team at Microsoft also has a blog here . Interesting reading.

Doc Searles has a very thought provoking, lengthy piece on Linux Journal entitled " Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes ". Just to give you a bit of insight, here's an excerpt from the letter Vint Cerf (Google's new guru, and author of the TCP/IP protocol) sent to the Committee on Energy and Commerce about new Internet legislation that's making its way around the Hill: "The remarkable social impact and economic success of the Internet is in many ways directly attributable to the architectural characteristics that were part of its design. The Internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services. The Internet is based on a layered, end-to-end model that allows people at each level of the network to innovate free of any central control. By placing intelligence at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network, the Internet has created a platform for innovation. This has led to an explosion o...

There is a lot of static on the dial right now about us being in Iraq. Invectives being tossed around, but I am not sure if there's a great deal of thinking behind them... Emotions, yes. The Intelligence was flawed, Not just US Intelligence. We all know that. That Bush manipulated it to enable us to go to war? Not likely. But even if he did, what's the point? We're there! We toppled the most ruthless dictator since Adolph Hitler . And now we need to stay and finish the job. It could take a while, too. Maybe five, maybe ten years. Not for the faint of heart. Maybe Bush should have laid the groundwork better on that score, I don't know. There are plenty of critics around, but with almost no exception, they seem to be long on criticism and short on quality ideas for better alternatives and real leadership. If we leave Iraq now, or even in the next year, there is a real likelihood of a civil war; the kind that could draw, at the least, Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia in, eit...

OK, So they came out with this on Monday and we set it up. After all, it looks pretty slick, right? So we wait, and we check, and we wait, and we check.... And we wait.... First their help page said "In about 12 hour". Now its Friday ( how many fingers do you have on one hand? FIve, right? FIVE DAYS.) and still no reports. But hey! They've conveniently revised the page to now say "In about 24 hours". You know what? I think Google's getting a little too big for it's goddamn britches. They're trying to do too much, too fast, and they're starting to FEWK UP, and this isn't the only example. Googlies, I think you guys would be well -served by slowing down a bit and refocusing on the execution and the quality.

Fear not! Installation guru extraordinaire, Aaron Stebner, has created a "central link" post that links to all his latest tips and tricks relating to installation issues: You can find it here. http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/articles/492809.aspx Incidentally, devil's advocate that I tend to be, I UnBlogged some time ago about ASP.NET 2.0 stress -testing based on an early MSDN article that was, well - let's say "ambitious", and heard back from Mr. ASP.NET himself, Scott Guthrie, whose only objective was to "be objective" and who was very helpful with my tests. I'm pleased to report Scott's latest: "A few interesting stats that the stress team shared while I was filming them: -- We run a total of 118 stress variations in the lab. Some do normal things like data access, standard page rendering, etc. Others simulate memory leaks, repeated app-domain restarts, crashes, and deadlocks (where the goal is to make sure the worker process recovers...

Subsequent to Microsoft's recent acquisition of FolderShare, the product is now completely free! Check it out at www.foldershare.com This is an app that you install on all of your computers and it lets you access all your files via the web. If you install Windows Desktop Search on your PC with it, FolderShare will let you search your computers remotely. You can also synchronize files between two computers, and even let others have access to your files. Basically the web interface allows you to select folders on the target machine that you want to share, and then send emails to anyone you want to be allowed to see it. You can set "permission levels" per user. Pretty slick, IMHO.

In an interview on NPR recently, a Sony executive, in response to the clamor about Sony's questionable actions and inadequate response regarding its CD rootkit deployment, suggested that since most people don't know what a rootkit is, they had little reason to care about it. I think this takes the cake for the most arrogant comment I have ever heard from a top technology company executive! Rootkits, by design, are virtually undetectable by anti-virus and anti-spam products. Even if they are detected, they integrate themselves so completely into the operating system that they are almost impossible to remove without going through a clean OS installation. Sony is already being sued on this, The California class-action suit ( PDF court copy ) is only one. There's another pending in New York, and another from abroad that I've read about so far. Don't be surprised to see more lawsuits. Sony, has in their arrogance and stupidity, created the classic Corporate Ethics 101...

The Vatican has issued a strong defense of Charles Darwin, voicing strong criticism of Christian Fundamentalists who reject his theory of evolution and interpret the biblical account of creation literally. Cardinal Paul Poupard, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture (yeesh, where do they come up with these names?), said the Genesis description of how God created the universe and Darwin's theory of evolution were "perfectly compatible" if the Bible were read correctly. His statement was a clear attack on creationist campaigners. "The fundamentalists want to give a scientific meaning to words that had no scientific aim," he said at a Vatican press conference. He said the real message in Genesis was that "the universe didn't make itself and had a creator". This idea was part of theology, Cardinal Poupard emphasised, while the precise details of how creation and the development of the species came about belonged to a different realm - science. Car...

The long awaited ASP.NET build tool add-in is here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/reference/infrastructure/wdp/default.aspx And Brian Goldfarb's blog item with additional links is here "Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment Projects provide additional functionality for building and deploying Web site applications that you create in ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005. This add-in includes a new tool that enables you to merge the assemblies created during ASP.NET 2.0 precompilation, and it provides a comprehensive UI within Visual Studio 2005 for managing build configurations, merging, and pre-build and post-build task using MSBuild." ... And the good news: IT REALLY WORKS!

Frans found a particularly nasty one . There are others: http://blogs.x2line.com/al/archive/2005/11/05/1299.aspx http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove/archive/2005/11/04/429455.aspx This is annoying stuff, the Bouma Bug is particularly nasty since the whole concept of a code editor is that you should be able to type anything into it, whether right or wrong. In this particular case it's Intellisense going into an endless loop. I had no difficulty reproducing this with Frans' sample code block; the instant I attempted to type in an opening brace, the entire IDE froze and I had to kill the process to get back my desktop. It was actually reported by a user, but it was so late in the RTM release process that they decided to let it go. Of course, there's a workaround for almost everything... You'll get two schools of thought on this type of thing. I believe that nobody releases perfect software and you have to pick a point at which you are going to release your product with the p...

William Safire, in his inimitable concise style, writes in his weekly Times Magazine column from this Sunday about "When was the lowercase i before an uppercase anything born, and what did it stand for?" He goes on to record that the first " i -product was the iMAc in 1998." This led to the iBook, followed by Apple's iPhoto, iTunes and of course the iPod. The meaning of i went beyond Internet, to be taken as "individual", "integrated", "interactive", or "what I want when I want it". Other companies jumped in. A furniture company calls its massage chair "iJoy". So keep on the lookout for the iBlogs. I'm sure they are coming. Mine shall remain an "UnBlog", which means, very simply, that it isn't one. Now of course since Miers has gone to the wolves, devoured by both Democrats and Republicans alike, we are presented with Alito, which suggests, as Safire laments, that it's back to "Gove...

And don't forget, READ THE INSTRUCTIONS FIRST! If you need help uninstalling beta versions, Aaron Stebner, MS Developer extraordinaire, has posted the latest versions of his "uninstall and cleanup tools" here . Really, these work better and faster than using "Add / Remove" from Control Panel anyway :-) Stebner has additional information that can be helpful in removing "unfound" versions of SQL Server 2005 Betas/ CTP's with the Cleanup Tool (that uses msizap) here .

Yup. I believe I have found a legitimate, really useful (a la "Thomas the Tank Engine") use for Visual Basic .NET! There are lots of scripts out there written primarily in VBScript that enable developers to do all kinds of cool things. If you aren't familiar with what I'm talking about, visit the TechNet Script Center and have yourself a look. Now the cool thing is, you can paste a lot of this stuff into a VB.NET Class Library project, and all you need to do is massage the "Set", "wscript" and other VBS script-generic statements to regular old VB.NET Objects and fix up the code until "It Just Works"! The key feature of this completely innovative and mind-blowing technique that most VB.NET afficionados will really like is that in order to make it really, really easy for yourself - you can Turn Off Option Strict and Option Explicit! ("What?", you say, "I already have them turned off...") My Gosh! I've already...

J.R. of Happy, TX reports he is using Ajax successfully on his SmartPhone. He says it "cleans up that small screen right nice". In other news, a woman from Newburgh, NY is reportedly suing the Colgate-Palmolive Company over a hot bottle of AJAX that spilled off her washing machine and ruined three dresses. Jack Spratt of Horse, IN reports that he uses AJAX every morning to clean his bathroom. Jack says that the product "doesn't mess up the UI of my bathroom mirror " and "there's no flicker or page reload when I flush the toilet." Meanwhile, blogger Don Hopkins reports "AJAX is like cocaine: it seems glamorous until you actually start using it, then the unintended consequences totally f**k you up." Hopkins posts the "Special Hazard Precautions for AJAX": INGESTION: NAUSEA, VOMITING, AND DIARRHEA. EYES: EYE IRRITANT UPON DIRECT CONTACT. SKIN: MAY CAUSE SKIN IRRITATION UPON PROLONGED CONTACT. INHALATION: NONE UNDER NORMAL USE. ...

Yup. Came up again. Other developers came to me with a classic engineering problem (One of those, "Uhh, we think we shot ourselves in the foot", how do we fix it" kind of deals). They were storing Xml documents that represent classes in the database in string form. Problem is, they didn't add a column to show the Version of the class / xml that was stored. And of course, one ambitous developer modified the class in their DAL, and now when they retrieve the Xml, deserialization fails. He didn't ask that magic four word question that developers should ALWAYS ask when making a code change: "WHAT DOES THIS AFFECT?". What's the answer? A simple answer is to add a column to the table that specfies the class version that is stored in the varchar or Text field of the table, and to mirror this in some sort of constant string field in the class that is to represent the deserialized xml string. So when you pull the xml out of the database, you will automati...

I just had to laugh this morning when I read about somebody finally hitting the winning number in the PowerBall lottery, which had gone for 20 rollovers without a winner. People do the silliest things: "Mary Neubauer, spokeswoman for the Iowa Lottery, said hundreds of ticket buyers had played a set of numbers from the ABC drama "Lost," which featured a character who won $156 million by playing a string of digits obtained from a patient in a mental institution: 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42." I'm getting the idea now. Television actually DOES reduce your IQ! By the way, the famous quote in the title is from Robert Coveyou, the noted physicist who was chief of the Manhattan Project that built the first atomic bombs.

Among my other travails in the .NET world, I've been serving as a Technical Review Editor for a couple of upcoming .NET related books. You see some interesting and occasionally VERY ANNOYING statements made by various authors when you get to review these chapters. It becomes obvious (especially with .NET 2.0 where authors are often "rewriting" their 1.1 books, and more often than not, they aren't adding much new value either) that we are making statements and proclamations out of habit, even when they are DEAD WRONG, simply because some tech reviewer from the previous book didn't catch it. I'm not naming names, because that's not the point. The point is, authors should take GREAT PAINS to get their facts straight. If I am a "noob" and I buy and read your book and accept information that you give me in the confidence that it is factual, and it turns out not to be so, you have done me an egregious disservice and hurt not only me, but yourself, y...

Just a thought that popped into my head after looking at the charts of NYMEX unleaded. No question that gas is in a new bull market, OPEC is even considering reducing oil output, although the real problem isn't crude, its refining capacity. If you own a gas-guzzlin' ESS YOO VEE and drive it to work and back every day, and you're the only person in the car (at least that's what I see from the vantage point of my 29mpg Camry every day) then maybe you are thinking about this? According to the experts, it's not that technology is an issue - it's your BOSS! From the Washington Post: "Ronald F. Kirby, transportation planning director of the council of governments, said the main obstacle to teleworking is that some bosses worry about supervising workers 100 miles away. "There is a strong level of resistance by middle managers," he said, even though studies have shown employees are more productive when teleworking." And more - - "Private compani...

It never ceases to amaze me what people can post on newgroups and messageboards and actually expect to receive an answer! I wouldn't exactly characterize this as a "pet peeve", since I usually don't even bother to read them any longer. You get tipped off to this when see things such as a post title that says "Please Help" (or, "URGENT" - in caps). DOH! Of course you are asking for help, isn't that why you made a post? How about putting some descriptive phrase in the title that tells people what subject area the post is about? In the C# newsgroup, Jon Skeet, whose work I particularly admire, even put together a posting netiquette piece on his web site entitled "Short but Complete" On eggheadcafe.com , we have a "posting netiquette" page that I often refer offenders to. Finally MVP Daniel Petri has successfully entered an MS KB Article on the same subject . Besides providing a useful and descriptive subject line to your p...

One of the most annoying things I've recently seen is that the August AND the September CTP of VS.NET 2005 do not correctly install the GUI Control Panel applet, "Microsoft .NET Configuration" for 64-bit platforms. I entered a Product Feedback bug on this for August and was told it was fixed and would appear in the next CTP or the RTM bits. Well, September CTP "RC0" came out, and its STILL BROKEN. The Product Feedback people seemed like they were more anxious to close my entry (in this particular case) than to provide any real help, such as "Try using CASPOL.EXE" -- which of course, I already knew I'd have to do. I hate caspol.exe , but that was my only other choice because I wanted to get the Windows Forms user control for Gotdotnet Workspaces source control working. So, after studying a bit, here's the code: caspol -q -machine -addgroup 1 -url http://www.gotdotnet.com/* FullTrust -name "GotDotNet_Workspaces" That will enable fulltr...

Not much else needed to say about this except here's the link ! It's been almost 2 1/2 years since Google picked up Pyra Labs, (Blogger publishing service), and Google has been promising blog search since. Google web search has allowed you to limit results to blog file types such as RSS and XML in web search results, they haven't offered a specialized tool to gather purely blog posts. Now that's changed. Google's new beta service is available both at google.com/blogsearch and search.blogger.com . Google blog search scans content posted to blogs and feeds in virtual real-time. Here's a sample search for " Peter Bromberg's UnBlog " in rss format, that you can actually plug into your feed reader. And, here is the same search in regular HTML format. I've already added this as a new "engine" in our eggheadcafe.com RSS multisearch app , that now searches up to 20 different engines simultaneously on a threadpool, removes duplicate links,...

Red squiggles correspond to validation errors such as a missing closing tag. Green squiggles correspond to validation warnings such as the use of deprecated tags. See how easy that was? Seriously, Stephen Walther, author and developer extraordinaire, has a new article at MSDN entitled, " Building ASP.NET 2.0 Web Sites Using Web Standards ." I say it should be required reading for EVERY developer who is using or getting ready to use ASP.NET 2.0 (including a few book authors I can think about). It's 53 pp printed out, and very well put together. On a side note, I notice this morning that Release Candidate RC0 is dropped at MSDN Subscriber Downloads in advance of PDC 2005. As one would expect, the Subscriber login is overloaded and doesn't work. And a further note on TDD and test coverage from a previous UnBlog post about test coverage, MS Press's new book by Newkirk on TDD is out :

Doesn't sound like the title of a short story by Hemingway at all, does it? Everybody wants a "full investigation". The Democratic "Blame-a-Tron" Wind Ensemble is cranked up, repeating its mantra of Let's Blame Bush, Let's Bash Bush. The problem is, they're dealing on emotions, not facts, and their little orchestra, while playing from the same old sad sheet music, doesn't have a conductor. Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, and the rest of the Democrat "wind" section all need to go home with their instruments and practice their scales. Look, this stuff has nothing to do with political parties. We don't really need to waste any time and money on investigations because it's already obvious to anybody possessing an above room temperature IQ what happened. It's about people who were incompetent, regardless of political affiliation: The Governor: After the crisis struck, Governor Blanco remained indecisive. A transcript f...