Dahlin Family

Archive for November, 2007

I recently installed MS Vista again.  I first installed it about a year ago this time only to find hardly anything would work with my machine.  I figured after a year all the drivers and everything I needed would be out there.  Well, I should have checked before I actually tried installing Vista again.  Looks like my motherboard is just too old and my graphics card just isn’t going to cut it even though it should.

 So I throw the XP Cd in and plan to rollback.  Everytime the “To boot from CD press any key..”  comes up I press every key but it still keeps booting up to Vista, wtf!

I think my problem is I am not pressing the “any” key, jk, lol.

Well turns out it was my USB keyboard wasn’t working until after the OS boot up.  I had to dust off a PS/2 keyboard just to get XP back.  I guess that was all I had the last time I went through all this..  Oh yeah, I had a wireless keyboard last time and I know that was the problem before.  I should have remembered.  Looks like I need to document this for next time.
 

I attended the 3rd Twin Cities Code Camp a few weeks ago.  I have been meaning to write a blog post about it ever since.

I thought it was a great day of code learning.  New Horizons really treated us well with breakfast, lunch and snacks.  First off, if you’re thinking about going to the next one, go.  You can’t beat a day of learning and food all for free, you can’t afford NOT to go!

It was a full day of presentations, 20 presentations in all.  There were always 4 at the same time so you had the chance to attend 5 of them.

The first session I attended was “Simple Web Part Development” by Scott Yokiel.  It was a nice over view on different ways that you can write Web Parts for SharePoint.  I can see myself using what I learned here in the future.  The thing I took most out of the session was to look at Smart Part, a third party app that makes creating web parts really slick for SharePoint.

Second session I went to before lunch was “NBusiness: An Entity Oriented Programming Library” by Justin Chase.  Pretty amazing thing what Justin has came up with and put together here.  First of all he believes that you should model your class library not off of your db schema but “The Source of Truth” meta data.  He goes over this in-depth on his blog.
Basically this is another code generator for building your data access layer with a bit of a different way of where it is derived from.  He does a good job of explaining this at the link in the previous sentence.  I’d like to know where he finds the time to work full time and then create an entire new language and framework, E#, on the side.

After lunch I went to what was by far the most beneficial presentation to me,  “Utilizing the ASP.NET Adapter Architecture”.  This was put on by Robert Boedigheimer.  He really had a good presentation.  It wasn’t something that was really advanced, but what was great about it was he talked about simple things that I had never known about.  At my former employer the seo department wanted me to remove all the ViewState that was rendered in html completely or at least moved to the bottom of the page.  In the end I found a way but it really took a lot of busy work.  I had to create a base page that all the .aspx pages inherited from.  Fine, but when the site was first created it didn’t inherit from one so I had to go through each page and update this.  With The Page LifeCycle Event Adapter I could have done this in about 5 lines of code in the .config file.  If only I had known that then.  He also talked about many other adapters that I could have used like one that can change how any controls are rendered.  My initial thought was, nice, I could use this to have all the controls rendered in div tags and css.  Good idea I thought until the next thing he talked about were the CSSControl Adapters!  Man I never knew about these.  You can be sure I will be using them in the future.  There have been many sites that I have developed entirely with div tags and css but then all the controls on the page would be rendered in html.  Finally a way to get away from that.  He was talking about how many people thing that this should be the default way of how the controls are rendered in .NET 3.5 but some believe that they can’t change it now because so many people are used to how it is.  Scott Guthrie of course has a good blog post on how to use them along with the download link of where to get them.

The next two final sessions were ok, but nothing really worth mentioning.

To finish off the day they had some awesome door prizes.  I may have left empty handed, but I was full of new knowledge and I had a great time. Like I said before, if you can attend the one in the spring I highly recommend it.

Here is how to debug by Attaching to a process… in Visual Studio 2005 on Windows Server 2003.

First go to Debug >  Attach to Process..

Then the process that you need to attach to is w3wp.exe.  I was used to attaching to the aspnet_wp.exe process, but that isn’t the case on Windows Server 2003.

One thing I noticed is when I simply did this when ever there was a connection being made to the database I would encounter a  

EXECUTE permission denied on object ’sp_sdidebug’, database ‘master’, owner ‘dbo’.

exception.   To get around this I had to make sure when in the “Attach to Process” dialog that the Attach to: attribute is “Managed”.  You can change this by clicking on the Select button next to it and choosing it.

I can now finally attach to a process when debugging on Windows 2003. 

It looks like what this site is running on, Community Server Personal Edition is no longer going to be available.  It just isn’t making sense for Telligent.  If you read their announcement it sounds like Graffiti is what they will recommend to future users.  Graffiti is expected to launch early next year.  You can sign up right now to get on the list to become a Beta tester at: http://graffiticms.com/ .  I have been meaning to move off of Community Server for a while now, just another reason to.  I think I am going to redo this site in DotNetNuke just so I can see what all the hype is about.  New site to come soon, stay tuned.

 
Read Telligent’s announcement here: http://communityserver.org/blogs/announcements/archive/2007/11/02/customer-support-announcement.aspx