Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

You talk to God, you're religious. God talks to you, you're psychotic.   - Doris Egan Catchy title, eh? I’m asking it because I think it’s a legitimate question. I’ve been working with ASP.NET MVC for a couple of reasons: 1) Peer pressure: Developers who I know and respect have been telling me its “very cool” and beats “classic” ASP.NET WebForms by a mile. Some of these people are pretty smart. Some of them are a lot smarter than I am. 2) I have no choice. The current project I’m working on for my “day job” uses ASP.NET MVC along with other “very cool” things like StructureMap, Castle.Validator and a few other alt.net type goodies. (Side note: alt.net may not be so cool . I tried to sign in at their site with my OpenID and it wouldn’t accept it. I got some bullshit about not having a valid email address… Folks, that’s the FIRST TIME I’ve ever been denied an OpenID login!) Correction: a commenter below  correctly stated that I needed to enable my email on my OpenId profil...

Don't you wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence? There's one marked 'Brightness,' but it doesn't work.   - Gallagher Wisdom. The “Wisdom of the Ages” -- wisdom  is an ideal that has been celebrated since antiquity as the knowledge needed to live a good life. What this means exactly depends on the various wisdom schools and traditions claiming to help foster wisdom. In general, these schools have emphasized various combinations of the following: knowledge, understanding, experience, discretion, and intuitive understanding, along with a capacity to apply these qualities well towards finding solutions to problems. These concepts, as one might guess,  apply equally  well to software developers. For a software developer, however,  wisdom is a much narrower concept that comes from learning from one’s mistakes, from studying what others have done, from learning accepted and proven patterns of good software design. And above all, from being wil...

  I stumbled across this fix via a web search in the Live Messenger Blog about a different error code. It worked for me on Windows Vista. 1.) Close Messenger. Go into Task Manager and ensure that the “msnmsgr.exe” process is not there. If it is, kill the process. 2.) Navigate to C:\Users\<YourUserName>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live Contacts and delete the entire contents of the folder. 3.) Restart Windows Live Messenger. Voila! There is another issue I found where the standalone installer for Messenger fails with a message like “could not open key…”. One fix for this is to navigate to the C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Messenger folder and DELETE the msnmsgr.exe executable if it is there. ReallyReallyDumb Exception Messages Department   I think it was Donn Felker who first tweeted about this, but I didn’t believe it until I got one myself:   Go Figure!

Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's St. Matthew's Passion on a ukulele.   - Bagdikian's Observation This is an issue I've come up against enough times to feel the need to gripe about it. You get the Windows Live installer to install the "new" Windows Live family of products (Messenger, Live Writer, Mail, Photo Gallery, etc.) and it fails. That's after you wait for everything to download (because the web installer is just a wrapper over what it downloads after you select which programs you want). So then you use the "Try Again" button which downloads a 135 MB WLSETUP_ALL.EXE installer. Boy, I sure hope you’ve got a high speed connection. So you run that and once again, after you've waited for it to go all the way through to the end, only then does it proceed to "roll back" everything - which takes almost as long as the supposed installation did! Now you’ve gone thro...

“Artificial Intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.” -- Unknown ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate 2 is out; it has no major identifiable changes in  features or in Visual Studio 2008 tooling from RC1.  That’s a good thing – it means it’s pretty much “baked”. There are changes to the installer in that it doesn't ship the System.Web.Routing.dll and System.Web.Abstractions.dll assemblies now since they are a part of  .NET 3.5 SP1. Consequently, set-up requires  .NET 3.5 SP1 to be installed. There is also a "server-only" install mode to install the MVC Framework. This is useful for hosted installations which install the MVC Framework on servers that do not have Visual Studio 2008 installed. There are also some deployment techniques that do not require the MVC assemblies in the GAC, making it easier to deploy an MVC application to a remote machine. Phil Haack has a good post on the release . You can download the installer here . Be sure to uninstall...

Some interesting observations I read recently from a Flash blogger: Flash was not intended for RIA applications. ActionScript was created for animated vector graphics; queuing messages on a single thread. It was hijacked to support Flex with complex content; but the threading model didn’t change. But Silverlight was built from the start for fully fledged applications. I’m looking forward to the MVP Summit and MIX to see what’s coming in Silverlight 3. Currently, I’m developing real – world application with Silverlight. I’m putting together pieces and utility classes that I expect to be able to use going forward. For me, the clear winner is having a feature – complete subset of the .NET Framework to code with, being able to share my creations in both Silverlight and the full .NET Framework, and not having to deal with the intricacies of the ActionScript learning curve to get what I want. I’ve been coding C# since 2001 and at this late stage of the game I feel prett...

Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.   - Herman Wouk I heard a good piece about “zombie banks” this morning on NPR. "Zombie banks" was the term for Japanese financial institutions propped up by government in the '90s despite their basic insolvency after their real-estate bubble. In a financial "revenge of the living dead", these unprofitable banks cast a decade-long pall over Japan. US banks like Citgroup, Bank of America and others are now in the realm of the living dead. US officials urged Japan to give up on failed institutions. Instead, it pumped 12 percent of its gross domestic product into saving the banks and received a "lost decade" of economic stagnation in return. Sound familiar? Economic analysts across the board agree that the Japanese example must not be repeated - even as our government proceeds to do precisely that! Members of the House Financial Services Committee grilled banking CEO's abou...

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.   - George Bernard Shaw Our new Administration has set a record:  it’s railroaded legislation through Congress that confers the mandate on Government to spend more in it’s first month of office than the previous Administration spent on all of the Iraq war since 2003 . Not a single House Republican voted for this legislation. Most all Senate Republicans held this line. I’m glad to read that Republicans seem to be sticking to their “small government” principles. It’s too bad that they waited until Mr. Obama got elected to have their epiphany —and suddenly find them again! Not only was the last Administration rampant with runaway spending and printing of money by government on both sides of the aisle, you can bet that the Obama-Pelosi cartel will expand this premise in the months ahead. This represents the biggest increase in the size of our Government’s reach in over 60 years, possibly the...

“The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously”   - Henry Kissinger I’ve got Internet Explorer 8 RC running on Windows VIsta x64 and occasionally it freezes up, usually when it is making a request. I have some ideas about why this may be happening, but there isn’t much I can do about it other than kill IE from Task Manager. However, there is an easier and faster way: Download KILL.EXE from Matt Kruse’s “Must Have Utilities” Listing. Put the executable in a folder (I have one called C:\MISC for just such “stuff”). Now make a batch file that looks like this: KILL.EXE -f IEXPLORE.EXE and save it in your folder right next to KILL.EXE as “KILLIE.BAT”. (The ‘-f’ switch means ‘force’, as in ‘DIE NOW, PROCESS, NO MATTER WHAT!’). Now, in Windows Explorer, right –click on KILLIE.BAT and choose “Send to Desktop”. You can change the icon to something meaningful, and you can even drag the shortcut down onto the TaskBar so it is even easier to get to. “Internet Exp...

So it looks like the “stimulus” bill is going to be $935 Billion. Divide by 133.9 million American taxpayers, and you get $6,983 per U.S. taxpayer. In my opinion, most all of this is throwing good money after bad. Not only will it not create any immediate economic stimulus, but a lot of it is simply growing the government way beyond it’s already enormous size and complexity. Truth is, we don’t need all these new laws and all these new programs. The consumer is 70 percent of the U.S. economy. If you want to stimulate the economy quickly, just have the Treasury Department send out the checks to all U.S. Taxpayers. More will get spent – and faster – than any other way. And it won’t grow government by one bit. I am not suggesting “send out the checks” is “the answer” to the problem. But it does shed light on part of the reason why we have the problem in the first place.