Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Visual Studio 2008 Random Freezing and Office 2010 Beta

Posted on December 16th, 2009 by Kevin

If you’re running Visual Studio 2008, and you install Office 2010 beta on the same machine, you might run into this issue where Visual Studio will freeze randomly. The issue is that the Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Component was for Office 2007, and you need to repair it to work.

All you have to do is run one of the two commands:

64bit Windows

C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Microsoft shared\OFFICE12\Office Setup Controller\Setup.exe

32bit Windows

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft shared\OFFICE12\Office Setup Controller\Setup.exe

Big thanks to Martin Hinshelwood.

http://blog.hinshelwood.com/archive/2009/07/19/office-2010-gotcha-2-visual-studio-2008-locks.aspx
Raising Money for Men’s Cancer #Movember

Posted on November 2nd, 2009 by Kevin

Hey everyone! For the month of November, I’m dedicating myself to trying to raise money for cancer. To show my dedication, I will be growing a moustache for #Movember.

Please pass this link along to friends, family, and coworkers. If you feel inclined to donate money, please use one of the methods below.

Thank you all for your support!

-Kevin

Hi,
I have decided to join a global movement that is bringing much needed attention to cancers that affect men. I’m doing this by growing a Moustache this Movember, the month formerly known as November. My commitment is to grow a moustache all November and I am hoping that you will support my efforts by making a donation. The funds raised go to the Prostate Cancer Foundation and the Lance Armstrong Foundation (LIVESTRONG).

What many people don’t know is that 1 in 6 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime and testicular cancer is the most common cancer in men aged 18-35. Facts like these have convinced me I should get involved.

To make a donation, you can either:

•    Click this link http://us.movember.com/mospace/209945/ and donate online using your credit card or PayPal account , or
•    Write a check payable to ‘Movember Foundation’, referencing my Registration Number 209945 and mailing it to: Movember Foundation, PO Box 2726, Venice, CA 90294-2726.

All donations are tax deductible to the extent permitted by law.

The Prostate Cancer Foundation will use the money raised by Movember to fund research to find better treatments and a cure for prostate cancer.

The Lance Armstrong Foundation will use the money raised by Movember to fund:

•    The LIVESTRONG Young Adult Alliance program which has the goal of improving survival rates and quality of life for young adults with cancer between the ages of 15 and 40.
•    Research initiatives to further understand the biology of adolescent and young adult cancers.

For more details on how the funds raised from previous campaigns have been used and the impact Movember is having please go to http://us.movemberfoundation.com/research-and-programs.

Thank you
Windows 7 Boot From VHD License Error

Posted on October 20th, 2009 by Kevin

I just learned this the hard way, but if you’re trying to take advantage of Windows 7’s Boot From VHD feature, you need to keep one thing in mind. Boot From VHD is only supported when Ultimate or Enterprise are the OS on the VHD. I just tried to install Professional, and got this nice error during startup:

License Error: Booting from a VHD is not supported on this system.

Just putting this out there in case you were considering doing boot to VHD.
Happy Birthday To Me!

Posted on October 19th, 2009 by Kevin

Today is my 26th birthday!

LET’S EAT CAKE!!!
What Makes A Good Bug Report?

Posted on September 23rd, 2009 by Kevin

As developers, we understand one fundamental truth: our software is going to break. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. Hopefully on your team, you have a dedicated testing staff. Other teams are not quite as lucky. Their testers might be the project manager, or a single person who’s responsible for testing all software produced by your company.

Developers are terrible at testing their own software. I’m my own worst tester, and that’s because I have a large understanding of how it works. Without trying, I can make the software work flawlessly each and every time. On my teams, I state that I want others using my code as much as possible. But what happens if something breaks?

Hopefully your company employs a bug track of some sort. For example, my company uses FogBugz for all of our bug tracking. However, not many people in my company understand how to write a useful bug report. My goal is to outline some of the minor things that can be done to make a bug report more helpful to the developer who’s going to be using it.

1. Use descriptive titles

Whenever I see a bug with a title like “Got an error in (name a section of the app)”, I die a little inside. I also see bug titles every day where it’s just the name of the section of the app, for example “Order Screen” or “Customer Profile”. Imagine you’re a developer who’s going through a bug list. I tend to put these bugs off until later because in order to figure out what I need to do, I have to open the bug.

Instead, let’s try for bug titles like this: “Error ‘unable to save user information’ when on the user profile screen”. I know what the error is, and where it is. That’s helpful! Or “Order Confirmation: Clicking OK doesn’t respond”. Again, very helpful. As the developer, I don’t have to guess what the problem is.

2. Steps to reproduce

For the past few weeks, we’ve had this intermittent problem when saving a user’s profile. Every single time it’s occurred, I’m nowhere near the tester. I’ve been unable to reproduce it. Every time it happens, I ask “what was the input?” and I’m constantly answered with “I don’t know”. Without a details list of steps for reproducing the bug, I cannot guarantee that I’ll be able to fix the bug. When using guideline #3, you can save a lot of time.

3. Screen shots, screen shots, screen shots

A picture is worth a 1,000 words. If you’re having trouble verbalizing what the problem is, take a screen shot. Please make sure that a screen shot is worthwhile though. If you’re working on a web application, and it renders correctly in Firefox, but not in IE, take a screen shot! If you’ve filled out a 15 field form, and it errors out, take a screen shot! When used in combination with guideline #2, you don’t have to write out all the information typed into the form.

4. Prioritize correctly

When you’re adding a bug to the system, take into consideration how important fixing the bug is to the current or next release. If there is a misspelled word, I wouldn’t classify it as a “MUST FIX!”. Instead, you should be giving it a lower priority, such as a “Medium” or “When there is time”. If the system is unable to process customer orders, which is the sole reason for using the system, then you might want to mark that as a “MUST FIX!”.

This guideline is subjective though. The person in charge of the next release, a project manager or lead developer, should have final say over what priority a bug is.

5. Expectations

If the system did something you didn’t quite expect to happen, let the developer know. In many cases, whatever happened was the product working as designed. This is a perfect opportunity to discuss flow of application. One person’s design might not make sense to someone else.

For example, if the app allows you to hand type in dates, but only in the DD/MM/YYYY format and you typed in MM/DD/YYYY format, the system will fail. That’s not exactly a bug, because the system is set up to only accept dates in a certain format, but it is a bug in terms that the system didn’t do what you expected.

6. One Issue Per Bug Report

I can understand how tedious it must be to create a bug report. Seriously, what is it? Two, maybe three clicks? When creating a bug report, make sure you’re only referencing one issue. That way individual issues can be prioritized and worked on solely by themselves. Verification can be done on a single issue, and not a group. When you list multiple items in a bug, you’re risking that one item might be missed. Additionally, if I’m the developer on the bug, I can’t close it out until all items in the bug have been satisfied. I might be able to fix all but one item, and the bug will remain in the tracker until I have time or resources to fix it. If the bugs were individual, I could close out all the fixed issues and they could be evaluated again.

When writing your next bug report, please take these guidelines into account and make it easier on your developers.

I welcome any question or comments! What do you think? Anything you would add to the list? Remove? Let me know in the comments!
What Is Your Worst Technology Blunder?

Posted on August 6th, 2009 by Kevin

I’ve been tagged by @dpbullington.

In your I.T. career, there has to be one specific instance of when you made a mistake that took down servers, caught a forest on fire, or extinct an endangered species. I want those in the technology community to answer this question and send me a link for inclusion. I challenge the following to answer, calling out by Twitter name:
- @JoelCochran
- @Veverkap
- @foreachdev
- @devhammer
I submit my answer below:

I’ve only been developing professionally for three years, so I don’t think I’ve had the proper amount of time to make any blunders. I do recall that during my first year at my current company, I was working late one night, and I was making adjusts to our app’s database. One of the process items was copying the full database from one server to another. However, in order to do so, it was easiest for me to delete the destination database and recreate it. After ten hours, everything in SQL Server Management Studio starts to look the same. I selected the database and press Delete. The confirmation came up, and I said “of course I want to delete!”. And the database was gone.

Five minutes pass, and I went to copy the new database. However, it wasn’t there. Fear fell over me, as I realized that I had deleted the “good” development database, and not the outdated test/production database I wanted to. I ran around the office yelling several expletives. Our IT guy had gone home for the day, so I had to figure out how to restore from backups, but I had no idea where the backups were. I searched for about 30 minutes before I found the “SQL Backups” folder. Inside of it was a backup only a few hours old.

Disaster avoided.
Can’t Download Windows 7?

Posted on April 30th, 2009 by Kevin

Read my blog, subscribe to the RSS feed, comment on stuff. It’s not like you don’t have anything better to do, right?

I promise to start writing better blog posts…. now.
Wildcard search with LINQ

Posted on April 21st, 2009 by Kevin

I just a situation where I needed to perform a wildcard search on a table in my database. When I used to do ADO.NET, I would simply write my SELECT statements with LIKE keywords to do wildcard searches.

However, in this project, I’m using LINQ to Entities and the solution didn’t work the same way as it did back in SQL land. My alternative was to use the .Contains() method.

For example:
```
var userList = from u in entity.Users
where u.FirstName.Contains(searchParameter) ||
u.LastName.Contains(searchParameter)
select u;
```
Hope this helps if you ever run into this problem.
The XAML Experiment

Posted on April 3rd, 2009 by Kevin

The main selling point of a language such as XAML is that it can be read and written by both developers and designers. Oddly enough, every situation I’ve personally seen has involved the developer being the designer. This strays from the vision Microsoft set forth for XAML.

Luckily, I work with designers on a daily basis, and for an experiment I’m going to pick up a small side project with my designer. She’ll be equipped with only Expression Blend and her image editting tools. I will be equipped with only Visual Studio 2008. Together, we will design, build, and prettify a working application.

Step 1 of the experiment is to convince my designer to do the experiment with me. Let’s hope step 1 is a success! Any opinions for small apps we could build?
Possible WPF LOB & MVVM Training in the Mid-Atlantic

Posted on January 9th, 2009 by Kevin

I’m opening this up for discussion to all our community friends in the Mid-Atlantic.

I’ve been chatting with Karl Shifflett from Microsoft about possibility having a training event solely based around Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and building Line of Business (LOB) applications.

We have several options for training:
- A one-day training event. Most likely held on a Saturday.
- A two or three day training event. This would have to be held during the work week. All the information in a one-day event would be covered, and the 2nd/3rd day would be used for additional training.
The price tag on this event would be FREE.

As for location, it would depend on the type of feedback I get from the community. It is being sponsored by the Hampton Roads .NET Users Group, so I’d like to keep the event in the Hampton Roads area. However, I’m willing to move the event higher north to accomodate Richmond and D.C. folks. I’m open to suggestions.

Would you be interested in attending a free training event like this? Would you prefer a single-day training, or a multiple day training session? Let me know in the comments. Thanks!