Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

There’s no question we need new bridges and road infrastructure in the United States. But how about a new Internet? There is a massive project to redesign and rebuild the Internet from scratch that is  inching along with $12 million in National Science Foundation funding and donations of up to 40 gigabits of network capacity by the Internet2 organization and NationalLambdaRail. That's enough bandwidth to run 30 high-quality movies into your house -- simultaneously! Construction on "GENI" could start in about five years and cost $350 million - if Congress approves the funding. You could consider emailing your Senator / Congressperson telling them you think it’s a good idea. On Software Projects Have you ever been involved in a software development project that is simply, well -- dysfunctional?  I have, and it is not fun, especially when time starts to run out and then people start looking for somebody to blame. There are certain ingredients that ...

Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations. - Orson Welles I just have to shake my head at this absolutely moronic thread on the Silverlight Forums promoting a "petition" to bring back synchronous webrequests in Silverlight. Really, it has all the elements of the old VB6 flame wars… N.B. 8/18/2008: It looks like the moderators finally took the thread down; it was so full of hate posts and name-calling and ad-hominem attacks, its about time! They just don't understand: Have you ever had your browser freeze up when requesting a page somewhere which request (or even a subrequest in the page, such as for advertising or an image) doesn't come back right away? Your browser turns white, your whole damned desktop is frozen, and you may need to get rid of IEXPLORE.EXE from within Task Manager just to free up your system (in rare cases you may actually have to shut down and reboot). This is what happens when a developer who doesn't know how t...

If you got the original Silverlight 2 Beta 2 developer bits which became available around 9PM on the very last Friday of Tech-Ed 2008, you may have noticed that you just recently got a refresh in the form of KB955011 from Windows Update. It turns out that this is supposedly included in a newer version of the silverlight_chainer.exe consolidated installer, which was freshly updated on 7/11/2008. That is to say, the version up there now is NEWER than what you got right after Tech-Ed. I suspect there are some additional fixes in the Tools portion of this, and so I recommend downloading it and reinstalling.  In fact, when I did so, I was pointed to a .vbs script whose header comments are self-descriptive: ' Installation verification script for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 ' This script checks for KB949325 and reinstalls all Advertised features ' At no time should there be Advertised features for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 ' Any features in an Advertised state are an...

"Olim habeas eorum pecuniam, numquam eam reddis: prima regula quaesitus" (Once you have their money, you never give it back: the 1st rule of acquisition) The U.S. Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s was the failure of 747 savings and loan associations (S&L's) in the United States. The ultimate cost of the crisis is estimated to have totaled around USD$160.1 billion, about $124.6 billion of which was directly paid for by the U.S. government -- that is to say, by you and me, the U.S. taxpayers, either directly or through charges on our savings and loan accounts. This contributed in a major way to the large budget deficits of the early 1990s. The resulting taxpayer bailout ended up being even larger than it would have been because moral hazard and adverse-selection incentives compounded the system’s losses. Moral hazard is the prospect that a party insulated from risk may behave differently from the way it would behave if it were fully exposed to the risk....

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes Who shall keep watch over the guardians? Some may  think I write about this subject ( example ) too often, but frankly, I don't think I write about it often enough: Your server (or workstation) machine is important. Having it not boot up properly or operate normally  can often mean serious loss of income. That's real hard-earned dollars that you CANNOT GET BACK.  So why is it that so many Admins don't have a reliable backup and recovery strategy? Maybe we just think "it can't happen to me". Or maybe we're just plain stubborn and dumb! The single most important ingredient of a recovery strategy is the ability to restore a known good Registry.  Registry corruption often occurs when the machine is shutting down as OS changes are being written to the Registry. It can also occur if there is a network (TCP)  glitch or a power glitch. The bottom line is this: NOBODY IS IMMUNE TO REGISTRY CORRUPTION!  NOBODY! R...

If you shoot at mimes, should you use a silencer?   - Steven Wright This is kind of an interesting little exercise that came from our eggheadcafe.com forums and I thought I’d write it up for posterity: User has some sort of logging program (not a service) that depends on SQL Server being up and running in order to do it’s work. Problem is, the little proggie is starting to work before the SQL Server service does on bootup. So the user is asking how you can delay the start of the proggie. Being my helpful self, I advised him to write a .NET console app, have the app sleep the main thread for the specified time, and then use Process.Start to execute the real program. User responds that he doesn’t know what Sleep means; if only there was a way to do this with a batch file. Well, not to be daunted, I went out and did a bit of research. Turns out that there isn’t any native DOS command to “sleep” a batch file. The only way you could do it is to use something from one of the Window...

I’ve seen some discussion threads about doing things like putting VistaDb (a 100% managed code database) into a Silverlight app. Most of this was wishful thinking, IMHO. If you are going to put a database into a Silverlight app, obviously the data file(s) need to go in IsolatedStorage. So that’s one hurdle – handling file access. And VistaDb is kind of on the large side for inclusion in a Silverlight app that’s designed to download into the browser. I took a look at SharpHsql , which a much simpler managed – code database effort that has had its ups and downs since being ported from the JAVA implementation.  I tried ripping out the Provider (which depends on System.Data – not present in Silverlight Framework) and thought I was making progress, but then I saw that there were still too many other dependencies on stuff from the full Framework that just isn’t there in Silverlight, so I gave up for now. However, I still think this is an idea that has merit. Think of a notetaking app...

Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate. – Thomas Jones I’ve downloaded some very simple “one page” zipped or rar-ed Silverlight demos that were 1MB and larger. If you remove all the .dll and .pdb files from such a solution, you save about 2.5 MB before you compress it. If you use tools like Resharper, and you remove all the Resharper – related files, you’ll save even more.  Remember, not everybody uses Resharper! The last one I downloaded was a one -pager Silverlight .rar that weighed in at nearly 1 MB. It also had the Resharper files in it. After I did the above cleanups and re-rared it, it was only 43Kb! D00ds! Almost 1 MB vs only 43K after cleanup! When you load and build one of these  “cleaned up” demo or tutorial solutions like this, all of the assemblies and pdb files will be regenerated perfectly. You do not need to distribute all this baggage with your demo! Computers run on electricity. And electricity comes from coal, oil, or gas (and sometimes the hot ...

The "bottom line" (you can read all the gory details after this): 1) I DO NOT recommend installing Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta and / or .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. There are simply too many issues and fragile fixes. Just wait until all this stuff gets fixed and save yourself a lot of headaches and lost time. 2) I DO recommend installing Silverlight 2 Beta 2, the Tools, the documentation, and Blend June 2008 Preview. Just be very careful about the ServiceProxy assembly issue mentioned at the end of this post, as it seems to be able to occur whether or not you choose to try the Service Pack route. Well, 2 out of 3 ain’t so bad! I got SL2B2, the Visual Studio Tools and Blend June Preview on 2 out of 3 PCs and everything is working beautifully. On the third PC (the one at the office, which of course had to wait until Monday June 9, unless you stayed very late Friday night) however, I ran into the below issue: Method 'SelectSilverlightProject' in type 'Microsoft.VisuaS...

NOTE: Since this post has been a "work in progress", updated links are found starting at the nota bene number 2. You want "Silverlight_Chainer.exe". Jeesh! I don’t know why they seem to make this stuff so hard to find. Here they are, more later ( go to the bottom for more recent links, including the "chainer")   Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Download (4.66 MB) Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Documentation (50.3 MB) Have fun!   At this point I haven’t been able to locate links for the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Visual Studio Tools, or the June Preview of Expression Blend.  You would think what with Tech Ed and all that Microsoft would be scrambling to get these links up on the Silverlight.net site, but – hey, that’s progress, huh? if you happen to be reading this and you find the Tools or other links before I do and update this post, leave a comment with the hyperlink  so we can do a service to the .NET Developer community. N.B. – The latest from MS at the Silverlight.net...