Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

“Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining.” -- Judge Judy The new MSDN Code Gallery has gone live (although at the time of this original post it wasn't fully functional, e.g. I could not sign in or create a new resource, but as of now it seems to be OK). My take on this is that this is Microsoft's replacement for the User Samples section on the old Gotdotnet.com site. I hope it gears up, there are already some very nice code samples there. We will see what happens. You can download official Microsoft code samples, download user-submitted code, access tutorials and create your own "resource" page to upload your code samples or other offerings. I guess I'll have to read through the Terms of Service once this thing "really" goes live and all of it is working. Whereas Codeplex.com offers source control for real "projects" with multideveloper support, the idea of Code Gallery is to provide a simpler interface for the average develop...

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution. - Hannah Arendt CODEPLEX: Class Builder Wizard is a Microsoft Visual Studio wizard that generates data object classes and a full data layer implementation for Microsoft SQL Server database objects. It can also be used to quickly create custom classes (not necessarily based on a database object) by defining the structure of the class "manually." And, it works with Visual Studio 2008! If you've gotten frustrated waiting for updates to the Repository Factory and other GAT-based add-ins, then this is for you. It's simple, elegant and it gives you all the "DAL" code you need for your deal to work! All you do is "Add Item" and choose the template and follow the "Way of the Wizard"! It even generates a .SQL file with all the T-SQL Code to get your database in synch with the generated DAL code. OPENID: I've UnBlogged about OpenID before , intimating tha...

The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment. - Dorothy Nevill Economic wisdom's rule of thumb for a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. Problem is, by the time the data finally gets in so those pencil-head economists can draw the grey shaded area on the charts, its six months too late. The stock market is a better indicator - a 20% decline from the high being an indicator we're in a bear market, and a bear market being a pretty good indicator that we've entered a recession. We haven't quite reached the 20% mark yet, but it could be here in another week or so. In a Yahoo Finance poll I saw today, 67% of respondents felt the market would continue to go lower. That's not bearish enough for a bottom - you need to have something like 90% of the respondents throwing in the towel, and we are far from there yet. I don't want to sound alarmist...

Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian. - Robert Orben This was trumpeted several months ago mostly by Scott Guthrie, and now it is live (although not all sources and symbol files are available at present). None of this is rocket science, it's already built into Visual Studio. However, up until now there were no symbol files and sources for the BCL and related assemblies. Now there are. This is, in my opinion, not only a great debugging tool for any developer who is interested in "getting under the hood", but it is also a great learning tool. If you are not sure you understand what I'm talking about, just go ahead and "do it". The easiest way to get started with this is to follow the instructions on Shawn Burke's blog post here . Be sure to follow the instructions exactly - they are not difficult. It requires the download of a QFE to set up the debugger properly, the url is specified in Burke's post. There is...

Symptom: in Visual Studio 2008, you attempt to add a new WebContentForm and associate it with a MasterPage. You receive an error dialog "Requested Reqistry Access is not allowed". Don't ask me what caused this; I'm guessing that the registry keys involved had their access denied due to removal of a previous version of Visual Studio, leaving the new guy (Visual Studio 2008) in the lurch. Here's the fix: Download "subinacl" here . This is a command-line tool that enables administrators to obtain security information about files, registry keys, and services, and transfer this information from user to user, from local or global group to group, and from domain to domain. After installing subinacl.exe (it will be in the C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools folder.), drop to a command prompt and run the following batch file, which you have saved in the same folder with the filename "FIX.bat": subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudi...

I believe that people would be alive today if there were a death penalty. - Nancy Reagan When I first heard the Al Gore crowd talk about carbon credits as a solution to our purported climate problems, the first thought I had was to create a carbon credit trading web site and make a lot of money. Then I thought about it some more and I got a sense that something didn't compute. When supposed leaders, both scientific and political, believe that buying and selling what they call carbon credits will help solve the global warming problem (if it actually is a problem), then it is time to stop and question the whole shebang. Here’s the deal, in case you are curious. Let's say that Al Gore, with his private jets, mansions, etc., is afraid that people might call him a hypocrite for telling them to stop burning so much fuel while he is jetting around burning humongous amounts of it. He can assuage his conscience by taking a small sum of his money and buying what are called carbon credi...

For three days after death hair and fingernails continue to grow but phone calls taper off. - Johnny Carson I don't catch many viruses; on the rare occasion that I errantly click on some unknown executable, Avast jumps up and bellows. But today, I made a boo-boo and watched in horror as my friends, the two Avast bluecons in the notification area, silently disappeared! You might be saying to yourself, "Uh-Oh..." - and you'd be right. There are more than 188 variations of the Bagle virus loose on the Internet. The latest variations pack the means to hide new kinds of nastiness inside your computer, and current antivirus software cannot save you . In fact, not only does this little booger jump out from it's invisible rootkit and whisk away the Avast service executables before they can even be started during an installation, it also disables the Windows Defender service, among other anti-spyware and antivirus installations. That is correct. Traditional antivirus sof...