Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

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...