Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

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...

Peter Bromberg's UnBlog is my personal journal. It is not sponsored by, hosted by or related to Microsoft, my employer, or anybody else but me. I alone am responsible for the content on this journal. Most of my posts here revolve around my profession, which is that of being a professional sofware developer. I post technical and other helpful information,sometimes including my opinions, and other comments about unrelated topics such as politics or world affairs whenever I deem it appropriate to the times. I encourage responsible comments here, regardless of whether they agree with my opinions or not. I do not censor comments, even though a few could be considered by any respectful human being to be particularly insensitive and vulgar. Some of my recent posts, for some reason, seem to have been attracting Comment Spam. This is typically promulgated by people who make UnBlog comments here that really have very little to do with the subject of my post. Sometimes, they are comments ...

In my short happy life as a programmer I've noticed that most code seems to fall into the above three buckets. The biggest offenders in the Sloppy Code camp usually come from the VB.NET camp, simply because the language has become so distorted from efforts by Microsoft at giving it new life instead of a decent burial that they've perpetuated gobs of crutch and helper methods, most of which live in the non-CLS-Compliant Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace. (I see where in VS.NET 2005, this is actually marked as CLS-Compliant for the first time, but I'll need to see proof before I believe it). In order to do the things that .NET needed, Microsoft decided that they had to "break compatibility" with previous VB versions. VB programs had been mostly "upward compatible" from VB1 right up to VB6. A program written in the first version of VB would still compile and run in the next version. But with VB.NET, they found they just couldn't make the language complete...

I have a new article on eggheadcafe.com which details some of the basics of how to successfully uninstall older CTP's and BETA versions of Visual Studio.NET 2005, and to install the newest version which has the final .NET Framework version build number (the same as will be in RTM) . The only issue I still have, which has been submitted to the LadyBug Product Feedback Center site is that the Microsoft .NET Framework Configuration Control Panel applet for .NET Framework 2.0 fails with a "Snapin failed to initialize" error dialog. This is on Window Server 2003 64-bit x64 platform only. I have some ideas why this is happening, but I want to nail it down fast since I need to play around with gotdotnet workspaces configurations for their Windows Forms User Control for source control. Otherwise, I'm stuck with that crappy HTML interface (not to mention the frequent gotdotnet.com "outages", but that's another story). So, if you are familiar with this, have a...

Rescue worker: "One of the teams came in today after having been out for hours at a time. One particular rescuer went straight to a corner and collapsed into tears. I went directly to him and just held his hand. What else could I do? I said nothing. He said it all. They lowered him 26 times and he pulled 26 people to safety. He wants to be back out there but there are mandatory rest periods. His tears are tears of frustration." There are two disasters going on here, a natural disaster with what appears to be an almost incomprehensible lack of planning on the part of the localities, compounded by an equally incomprehensible lack of response by the Federal Government. And the second disaster is the National Disaster, and it's an equally big problem for us all: We're the richest country in the world, we have some of the smartest, best-educated people in the world. And we knew, and our government knew that New Orleans was essentially a huge bathtub just waiting for the ...