Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

I finally got around to the Entity Framework BETA 2, and I like it already. To play with this, you need these bits; Entity Framework Beta 2: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=f1adc5d1-a42e-40a6-a68c-a42ee11186f7&displaylang=en Tools, Aug 2007 CTP: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=09A36081-5ED1-4648-B995-6239D0B77CB5&displaylang=en There is also a nice "Getting Started" piece on codeplex: Getting Started: http://www.codeplex.com/adonetsamples/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=7792 I decided to brave it and just roll a quickie on my own from the Northwind database. All you do is Add New Item / ADO.NET Entity Data Model, which gives you a wizard to choose what database objects you want modeled, and then you get a nice class diagram: All your entity model code is built for you. So to say, get 10 products from the Products table via a nice little LINQ query: // Get 10 products via Entity LINQ query using (NorthwindMod...

"To the moon, Alice" -- Jackie Gleason (Ralph Kramden, The Honeymooners) The BlogOSphere has been buzzing the last couple of days since everybody discovered that the Googly-Bear decided to update it's PageRank algorithm (there had been hints for weeks before, to be sure -e.g., Danny Sullivan, Oct. 7 ). Ah, "poor little me", huh? Legions of very big blogging-related sites and commercial ventures -- Washingtonpost.com, Forbes.com, Engadget.com and SFGate.com noticed a downgrading in their PageRank. Some sites went up in PageRank. Our eggheadcafe.com site went from 5 to 6. One of my newest "playground sites", blogmetafinder.com , went from zero to a PageRank 3. This UnBlog remains unchanged, for now, at PR 5. Most experts agree that the key determinant was the practice of "buying links" such as text link ads and the like. Apparently, Google just decided to close up this last little loophole, and they did it with ample warning too. Now, this is ...

For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three. -- Alice Kahn This is due to some assembly redirects that are added to the devenv.exe.config file by installing the GAX (Guidance Automation Extensions). Here is the fix, and it's an easy one: 1) Navigate to: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE in Windows Explorer 2) Load devenv.exe.config in your favorite text editor. 3) Find this string: "Microsoft.VisualStudio.TemplateWizardInterface" 4) Comment out the element so it looks like this: <dependentAssembly> <!--assemblyIdentity name="Microsoft.VisualStudio.TemplateWizardInterface" publicKeyToken="b03f5f7f11d50a3a" culture="neutral" /--> <bindingRedirect oldVersion="0.0.0.0-8.9.9.9" newVersion="9.0.0.0" /> </dependentAssembly> 5) Restart Visual Studio 2008. All fixed!

With Microsoft (MSFT) buying a very minority share that values Facebook at $15 billion, it looks like "bubble or bust". A lot depends on whether you believe Facebook is just the latest online fad—or whether the social network is building the next, great computing "Thing". Facebook, which is closing in on 50 million members, theoretically promises to restore control to social networking—over privacy, unwanted email, and virtual contact— back to the user. If you divide the estimated valuation ($15 Billion) by the number of users that means each Facebook user is potentially monetized at about $300. Obviously, users aren't being monetized at that level now. I'm a Facebook user, and while it was kinda cool at first, seeing people that I know who have joined, and being invited to be "a friend" of some people that I respect or like, I already find that the bloom is off the face, if you will - and I really don't visit much at all anymore. So, how does ...

I've spent a bit of time working on alternative CAPTCHA techniques, mostly because I've found that the vast majority of CAPTCHA offerings are non-intuitive and even for people with excellent eyesight, don't always "make it" the first time around. I have pretty good vision, but I find myself constantly frustrated by stupid case-sensitive CAPTCHA requirements that I simply cannot pass the first, sometimes the second and even as many as three tries. Webmasters and site developers are like lemmings - they seen something that somebody promotes, they copy it, they use it, but they DON'T THINK! WTF?  All one needs to do is look at Jeff Attwood's blog and you can see that he requires the user to type in a clearly readable "ORANGE" every time - and it works perfectly! The Bots simply don't get it. It's easy to see, easy to read, and shows how UTTERLY RIDICULOUS  these various CAPTCHA images are to the user, and how they literally destroy the us...

If you have any experience installing Microsoft Beta or CTP offerings, then uninstalling to make way for a newer version, then with Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas) the above may be somewhat familiar. Surprisingly, the answer is to install the latest version of the Silverlight Tools here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b52aeb39-1f10-49a6-85fc-a0a19cac99af&DisplayLang=en That may not be the only answer, but it seems to have worked for a number of people including me. If you are having trouble uninstalling Visual Studio ORCAS because the MSI information got clobbered somehow, or it reports not being able to find some "network location" (DOH), one of the fastest ways to clean things up is to use some of the tools out there, many of which have been provided by installation guru Aaron Stebner. Here's a post by Brad Abrams that highlights two tools you can use. MSIInv takes an inventory of all your MSI-installed software (even stuff you cannot see in Ad...

I've seen a more or less constant stream of questions on the asp.net newsgroup and the asp.net site forum messageboard, all of which revolve around the problem of "Why am I losing Sessions?". (BTW that is "losing" with one o, not "loosing"! Your pants might be loose , but if your Session goes away you can bet that you are losing it!). Heres a summary of what I've learned about this; comments and additions are always welcome: If your ASP.NET application crashes, has an unhandled exception, hangs or otherwise becomes brain-dead, it will cause the application pool to recycle. Sometimes your application pool recycles for no obvious reason. This is usually a configuration issue or it may be caused by your app performing file system operations in the application directory. Many times developers incorrectly set up SqlConnections so that they aren't properly closed and returned to the connection pool, and this can also cause your AppPool to recycle un...

Is there such a thing as OverAJAXification? From the AJAX Sucks Department... Jeesh. Everybody and their brother is sticking AJAX into their "stuff" - whether it's appropriate or not. They just did it at Codeplex.com. The search facility was just fine. You'd click a "next" link and the page would postback and right away you would get to see the next page of results. Now, since they've supposedly "souped it up" with AJAX, what you get is a very long (sometimes 5 seconds or more) grey screen with an "updating" in-your-face graphic to look at, and then finally you get to see your next page of search results. To me, that's a lot more annoying and disruptive to the user experience than the slight flicker of a quick postback. But often, instead, you may just as well see the above Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManager exception dialog, which does absolutely NOTHING to improve the user experience. Oh, and while I'm ranting, here's anot...

The gods too are fond of a joke. - Aristotle Recently I upgraded XP Pro to Windows Vista Ultimate. It wasn't until sometime later that I found I had lost my DVD drive. The driver appeared in Device Manager but it had that familiar yellow exclamation mark indicating a problem loading the driver. After a bit of searching, I discovered that the culprit was Roxio CD/DVD software (e.g., "DLACDBHM.SYS" et. al.) which is not Vista - compatible, and thus blocks correct loading of the built in Vista CD/DVD drivers. The FIX: First step, in C:\Windows\System32 you need to find the DLA folder and delete it. That's their "Stuff". If you want to get sophisticated, you can search the registry for all keys that point to any of these .sys drivers and remove the entries. Next, run this Registry Fix script courtesy of Doug Knox: 'Restore CD-Roms and DVD's to Explorer 'xp_cd_dvd_fix.vbs '© Doug Knox - rev 04/14/2002 'Downloaded from www.dougknox.com 'ba...

Quick Repository Factory tutorial with a WebService data layer feeding an ObjectDataSource on a web page. Also shows how to use the ObjectDataSourceView class to insert a new row in your Gridview. read more | digg story

The P&P group has been listening to developers, and they've decoupled the Data Access Guidance Package from the WSSF etc. It really should have been available on its own from the git-go. The full source is available at codeplex.com here , and its called "Repository Factory". You need to be careful, though. They haven't produced a simple MSI Installer for this, even though the setup project is included in the downloadable "final" source code - so you'll need to build it. I have no idea why they do this, but hey- let's not look a gift horse, you know? The other issue is a bit more fragile - the "Final Source Code" download that was available today at the upper right link on the page did not build for me. I fiddled with missing references for at least 20 minutes, and no-go. Finally, I went to the Source Code section and downloaded the most recent checked in build, number 10107 - and that one built in Release mode without a hitch. Also, you...