Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would hire them away. - Ronald Reagan I was working with a partner on testing his MSI Installer for various operating systems, and on Windows Server 2008 x64 it was continuing to come up with this error: Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.SqlServer.BatchParser, Version=9.0.242.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. (Microsoft.SqlServer.ConnectionInfo) I checked the signature of the local assembly in the installation folder against the one in the GAC, and they were identical. So, go figure, right? It turns out that the solution is very simple: Unless you've installed the 64-bit verion of SQL Server 2005, you need to install the 64-bit version of SMO. It's not there by default. If it is not installed ,you can download the 64 bit version from http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/4/D/44DBDE61-B385-4FC2-A67D-48053B8F9F...

"The delivery boys have been displaced by Comcast and AT&T and Google and Yahoo, and there's no way newspapers will ever reclaim that role." -- Justin Fox, Time Our group at work needs desperately to have a CMS that is easy to work with for various clients -- especially clients that need to be able to "edit" their own corporate web sites. Basically, we needed to have a CMS with which we could just "plug in" a customizable pre-made CSS XHTML "skin" for a particular industry, and customize it to the client's desires. So, we all went out and started researching various offerings. Sharepoint was eliminated, it is simply too "high end" and expensive for what we need to be able to do. We looked at Joomla and Drupal, both had their plusses and minuses, but mainly they're interpreted PHP and though we've got PHP people, most of us are hard - core .NET developers. We looked at Umbraco, Rainbow, MojoPortal, Cuyahoga, and othe...

At work, our .NET development group more or less unanimously made the decision that now that Visual Studio 2008 is RTM, it is time to think about getting everything we do upgraded to the point where we simply don't need Visual Studio 2005 any longer. The only real issue we could find is that Compact Framework 2003 projects are no longer supported. Since we don't happen to have any, that takes care of that, doesn't it? So we decided that any existing projects would be migrated upwards to Visual Studio 2008. Everything in Team System is getting upgraded; if it doesn't support Visual Studio 2008, we'll let VS 2008 convert it and check all the revised stuff back in. Since 2008 solutions / projects can be set to target specific runtimes you will find that this is pretty much a no-brainer. If your stuff is .NET Framework 2.0 compliant, all you need to do is ensure that the target Framework is set and you can check your stuff in with a Visual Studio 2008 Solution file and ...

Believe it or not, I was never sure about this until this morning when another dev and I were discussing it. So, I searched the web and found the answer: Build means compile and link only the source files that have changed since the last build, while Rebuild means compile and link all source files regardless of whether they changed or not. Build is the normal thing to do and is faster. Sometimes the versions of project target components can get out of sync and rebuild is necessary to make the build successful. In practice, you never need to Clean. Build or Rebuild Solution builds or rebuilds all projects in the your solution, while Build or Rebuild <project name> builds or rebuilds the StartUp project. To set the StartUp project, right click on the desired project name in the Solution Explorer tab and select Set as StartUp project. The project name now appears in bold. Compile just compiles the source file currently being edited. Useful to quickly check for errors when the r...

With Beta 1 targeted for first half 2008, the folks at Microsoft are now saying that as of last week, IE8 reached a core milestone: IE8 in standards mode now correctly renders the “ Acid2 Browser Test ”. Acid2 is a test that determines how well a browser works with several different web standards. I posted about this earlier, mentioning that not even the current edition of Firefox handles the acid2 test correctly. Of course I was quickly reminded by commenters that it did a much better job than IE7, and that's true. But the best news (besides the obvious fact that Microsoft embraces and sees the need for standards) is that they are going to do it in a way that doesn't "break" existing pages written for IE5 or IE6, or for the standards mode of other browser brands: Modern browsers typically have two modes to render web pages, “quirks” and “standards.” MS says their experience with releasing IE7 taught them that many web sites today expect the browser to have IE6-compat...

"If I Dispose the Car, will my delegate references be garage collected?" -- newsgroup poster This provides new functionality to ASP.NET 3.5 and ADO.NET in 2008. The new features target MVC, Entity Framework, ADO.NET Data Services and dynamic data Supporting Test Driven Development - including a powerful and extensible MVC framework. Creating the best server for Rich Clients - including Ajax history support and Silverlight controls for ASP.NET. The Readme is here . The download of ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview is here . I did some early work with the Entity Framework and liked what I saw. Don't you just love those little installer messages, "The installation is taking longer than expected . . ."? And More Cool Stuff A couple of other items you might be interested in (at least, that I am interested in): 1) The FeedSync API. Formerly Ray Ozzie's "Simple Sharing Extensions". The easiest way to get into this is to download and play with the codeplex s...

"There is no shame in stating the obvious, as it may not actually be obvious to others." -- Me Newsgroups and forums are littered with well-intentioned but often moronic posts asking questions that could be easily answered - in a majority of cases - by simply typing the relevant search term into the Google search textbox and pressing the "SEARCH" button. Often these same posts are cluttered with replies from equally lazy people who offer opinions, advice and such --and who have not bothered to search either! A case in point: User posts a somewhat sarcastic item asking if there is an easy way to use Oracle for Session state, intimating that "not everybody uses SQL server". There are three replies, all of them more or less useless, because they didn't offer a real answer - which could easily have been determined with a 30 second search! So I did the search: http://www.google.com/search?q=ASP.NET+ORACLE+Session+provider Not exactly rocket science! And rig...

When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth. -- George Bernard Shaw Not long ago I wrote about what I call the " PageRank Crash of 2007 " where 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. I also proclaimed, "Now, this is big - you may not grok it right away, but it's going to change the entire complexion of the web, and pretty quick, too. Hopefully, for the better..." Confirmation comes via posts on Google's official WebMaster blog by Matt Cutts (as well as on his personal blog): "If, however, a webmaster chooses to buy or sell links for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings, we reserve the right to protect the quality of our index. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank violates our webmaster guidelines ." In fact, Cutts points out that as early as Feb 2003 Google stated "Don'...