It took me a while, but in the end everything worked out and life’s good… Most important changes are I have my very own server now, containing all the general stuff like mail, music, development stuff and that kind of data.
My workstation received a small update (I was able to upgrade based on the ‘old’ machine of a friend) and is now running Vista quite smoothly. To be honest, I haven’t found any major issues yet.
Last week I ran into a variable called @continue in the sourcecode of a project I’m reviewing. At first I had to think a bit before I knew what the @ was for. Of course I knew it’s an escape character when used in front of a string value. But when used in front of a variable name? In that case, it is an escape character also, but this time for the name of your variable. This way you can use a reserved word as a variable name.
As I posted earlier we had some trouble with upgrading the UIPAB to be used in a ASP.NET 2.0 Web Application Project. Eventually, we solved the problem and life was good. Almost a week ago I received a mail through my blog from someone looking for the solution. So here we go…
I encountered his error for the first time today. A Web Application Project I’ve been working on for the last months started throwing this error today almost every time I wanted to debug the project. The assembly info changed from time to time, but the error was the same. Most of the time I could ‘repair’ it by closing the ASP.NET development server. But sometimes, even that didn’t work.
We all encountered them in the field somewhere along the way: pieces of code that are based on assumptions. There’s something fundamentally wrong in assuming when writing code. I can understand that, looking at the big picture, you sometimes have to make an assumption when developing software. Some things you just can’t know for sure. This might concern something simple like the resolution of the targeted audience. But most of the time these kinds of assumptions are based on experience or plain old common sense. When these assumptions fail to be true, most of the time a mitigation strategy is at hand. And the software usually keeps running.
Scott Guthrie announced it January 23rd: version 1.0 of the ASP.NET AJAX extensions has been released. Good news … !
Scott also added a post containing Links to ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 resources, and answers to some common questions. A good read for people who would like to get started on AJAX. It catches some of the common problems you might encounter when you get started with the ASP.NET AJAX extensions. I liked the addition 2.0 (ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX extensions), but that’s not used everywhere. Probably because it’s kinda weird using two (different) version numbers in a single products’ name after adding 1.0 for the version for the AJAX library… (full & difficult productname used here.)
We’re working to upgrade our current ASP.NET 1.1 project to an ASP.NET 2.0 Web Application project (so that’s not the new Visual Studio 2005 website model). We had some basic minor migration issues, which have all been addressed and are currently solved. The only problem we have right now is with the UIP Application Block. There are several people online stating they’ve got UIPAB working in a .NET 2.0 project. Unfortunately, we haven’t got it working… yet 😉
Because of a new way of working here at the customer I’m located at, two virtual machines will be deployed to each developer’s machine. These VM’s will be run using VMware player. The thing is, the VM’s should be able to access the network and all the ’normal’ resources. Because of this, all the VM’s should have unique (computer)names. But they have to be traceable to the host machine.
Together with a colleague, I’m giving basic .NET training for colleagues at this moment. Not at THIS moment exactly, because they’re doing exercises right now. But today is the second day of four days of training in total. Currently we already have two weird things popping up.
MSDN 2 Library has been online for a while now. When you visit the ‘old’ MSDN library, you see the following text:
“We’re upgrading the MSDN Library to a new publishing system which provides improved performance, better search relevance, XHTML compliance, URLs which don’t change after product releases, and more. During the next few months we’ll gradually move content over to the new site, although MSDN Search will work across both sites automatically. The first few levels of the Table of Contents (TOC) tree will be kept in sync across both sites; you can select the product/technology you want in the directory tree and we’ll redirect you to the correct library for that content.
Since not too long ago, I joined the MSDN Forums. The MSDN Forums is a big community where lots of knowledge is passed around. I recommend joining.
Yesterday I ran into an interesting post. It’s about an overriding method that exactly seems to match the call, but doesn’t get called. In stead, the base method is called… Apparently this is because of override-resolution starting at the base working its way up, and a method declaration that matches more than you would think it does.
“Consolas is a monospaced font (like an old typewriter) and good for programmers setting code (its core purpose).”
The above quote is taken from the Microsoft Design website, and specifically the part about ClearType fonts. It states the main reason for developing the Consolas Font Pack (download here) is to develop a better font for ‘programmers setting code’. Because of this, I primarily tested Consolas in Visual Studio, my editor of choice when writing code 😉