Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

  This was passed on to me by a good friend, and I found the analogy so compelling that I decided to share it: Heidi is the proprietor of a bar in Detroit . She realizes that virtually all of her customers  are unemployed alcoholics and, as such, can no longer afford to patronize her bar. To solve this problem, she comes up with new marketing plan that allows her customers to drink now, but pay later. She keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers loans). Word gets around about Heidi's "drink now, pay later" marketing strategy and, as a result, increasing numbers of customers flood into Heidi's bar. Soon she has the largest sales volume for any bar in Detroit. By providing her customers' freedom from immediate payment demands, Heidi gets no resistance when, at regular intervals, she substantially increases her prices for wine and beer, the most consumed beverages. Consequently, Heidi's gross sales volume increases ma...

The kind folks on the Silverlight and RIA Services teams have come out with v1.0 of RIA Services. However, the instructions they provide can be a bit misleading as to “What does what”. Here’s the skinny: 1) You can download the Silverlight 4 Tools installer, dated 5/13/2010 here . This will uninstall previous interim versions of the SDK, runtime and RIA Services – you do not have to uninstall anything before running it. 2) However, the above WILL NOT refresh the RIA Services Toolkit. That you must uninstall first, and then run the new Toolkit installer, dated 5/14/2010, which is here . I like the Web Platform Installer, but you can never be absolutely sure what exactly you are getting with it because the installation process is much more opaque than using an MSI installer file. If you use the above two steps, you are pretty much guaranteed to be 100% up to date! And don’t forget – you can run the tools installer from a DOS prompt with the /x option to extract everything to th...

GREEK CRISIS: A serious debt crisis in Greece has rattled global financial markets and raised worries about whether other countries will be able to repay their debts. LEHMAN REPLAY: Economists are worried that the Greek crisis, if not contained, could turn into a repeat of the cascading financial panic that occurred in the fall of 2008 after Lehman Brothers collapsed. DEBT RESCUE: European countries and the International Monetary Fund are racing to assemble a package of loans for Greece that will be sufficient to convince markets that the country will not default on its debt obligations. Concerns have already surfaced in Congress that the broad demands of the sovereign debt crisis will quickly exhaust the I.M.F.’s reserves and leave the United States, the fund’s largest shareholder, with the bill. Professor Nouriel Roubini, the New York-based academic who was one of the few to anticipate the scale of the US financial crisis, told a panel in California that the buildup of debt i...

Recently I tweeted a quote from John Stossel (who was quoting Michael Medved): "If you believe that when the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, then you believe that creating wealth causes poverty, and you're an idiot" This is the old zero-sum fallacy, which ignores that when two people engage in free exchange, both gain -- or they wouldn't have traded. That’s the way business works. I received a number of responses to that tweet, mostly espousing the leftist concept that Capitalism is bad and somehow that the concept of getting wealthy is “obscene” and it seems to occur “at the expense of others”. When does wealth (or the creation of wealth) become "obscene"? Is there some measuring stick we can hold against it with a red line on it that says "Obscenity Level"? Or is it just somebody's subjective, biased jugement? Other responses seemed to focus on the "deductive argument" logic of the statement, completely ignoring the point (and...

A couple of days ago I started having an issue where if I’d go to Youtube.com to look at a Flash movie, I’d get to see only a black screen in the movie area. A right – click on the movie and I’d see “Movie not loaded”. In addition, the browser status bar reports “1 item remaining” – basically meaning, “I’m waiting for this movie to load”. Of course, this never goes away. You might be tempted to uninstall the Flash plugin or try any number of fixes including changing your Internet Explorer security settings, among other "tricks". Don't do it. Try this first. Here’s how I fixed it: In Internet Explorer, choose “Tools / Internet Options”. In the Browsing History section, click the “Delete” button and you should see a dialog like the above. Note that I have checked the History and Temporary Internet files checkboxes. Click Delete at the bottom and that should fix it. If that doesn’t work, do it again but this time uncheck the “Preserve Favorite website data” Item and click D...

Have you ever installed a BETA or CTP or an RC build of some Microsoft product such as Visual Studio, and then been faced with the unhappy situation that it could not find the installation sources when you attempted to uninstall the product, or it just didn’t uninstall “cleanly” – leaving traces of Registry entries that prevented you from installing a later version? It’s certainly happened to me several times. But today I ran into a program called Perfect Uninstaller that, for $35, turned out to be one heck of a bargain. Perfect Uninstaller has three modes to completely and totally uninstall any program. It starts out using the regular Windows Installer, but it doesn’t stop there – even if the installer says “I can’t find the MSI source for this”, it doesn't give up like the Windows MSIEXEC installer would do -- it picks up all the Registry Entries by scanning the Registry, and then it picks up all file traces by scanning the filesystem. The result is a 100% complete and total un...

Recently a colleague remarked that if he got a List of some type out of the ASP.NET Cache, and changed an item, the Cache item would also change. That is correct. Session (InProc) , Cache and Application all return "live" references. A good writeup on this can be found by friend and fellow MVP Rick Strahl here: http://www.west-wind.com/Weblog/posts/1214.aspx If you do not want this behavior, you need to either delete the Session / Cache / Application object and replace it with what you want later, or store a clone by duplicating the object, doing your work on the original that you got out of Cache, then replacing the existing cached item with your clone that was not changed. for example: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; using System.Web.UI; using System.Web.UI.WebControls; namespace CachebyRef { public class Person { public String FirstName { get; set; } public String LastName { get; set; } } p...

The Department of Labor just reported that in February, employment fell by fewer-than-expected 36,000 jobs with the unemployment rate steady at 9.7%. While we may hear the Obama Administration or Harry Reid trying to spin this as some sort of economic victory for their stimulus or otherwise trying to put the best face on the economy, this is in reality not very good news. Let us remember that job growth needs to be around 125,000 jobs gained per month just to keep up with US population growth. To make up the roughly 10 million jobs it would take to get us to an employment situation about where we were near the peak of the economy, we'd have to see job growth of 350,000 per month for four years straight. Such a scenario seems unlikely while we live under the umbrella of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid cartel. The Obama Administration has quintupled, in just one year, the deficits that took its predecessor Bush eight years to create. Looking at the current stagnation in employment, in large pa...

I was reading up on this recently and a couple of interesting points came to light: myString = “” creates a new instance of type String. myString = String.Empty does not. The key item is doing comparisons. Here’s some sample test code: class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { String myString = ""; long a, b, c, d, e, f; Console.WriteLine("Method 1..."); a = DateTime.Now.Ticks; for (int index = 0; index { bool isEmpty = myString == ""; } b = DateTime.Now.Ticks; Console.WriteLine("Method 2..."); c = DateTime.Now.Ticks; for (int index = 0; index { bool isEmpty = myString.Length == 0; } d = DateTime.Now.Ticks; Console.WriteLine("Method 3..."); e = DateTime.Now.Ticks; for (int index = 0; index { bool isEmpty = String.IsNullOrEmpty(myString); } f = DateTime.Now.Ticks; var Method1 = b - a; var Method2 = d - c; var Method3 = f - e; Console.WriteLine("Method 1: bool isEmpty = myString == \...

Just a note to beta testers, MVPs and others who are “exercising” Visual Studio 2010 RC: This is the time to get your stuff in to Microsoft Connect (or other appropriate venues) – as quickly as possible . I’ve already submitted several issues (mostly minor ones) and I see that the C# Insiders listserv has been very active with discussions. The sooner you can identify an issue and give the appropriate dev team a heads –up so they can check it out, the better a product we’ll see at RTM release time. Visual Studio 2010 is going to be a really great product - and there is still time for us to help make it even better. Thanks!