Posted on December 31st, 2008%
Ah, the final day of the year. While many of you are partying the night away, I’m sitting at the computer, pondering what happened in 2008, thinking about what’s going to happen in 2009… and, as is often fitting of an evening after the house is finally quiet, enjoying the greatest invention of the modern era: the Guinness Draught bottle.
Back to reality. What were my personal highlights—and lowlights—of 2008? In no particular order…
Leaving a full-time job to go back to work for myself — for the third time in ten years.
Granted, the actual change happened in early December 2007, when I left a job with the New York Yankees to go back to being an independent consultant. Most people are amazed that someone would do such a thing, but I’ve made a bit of a history being just that person. Alas, my indy career didn’t last…
Getting . . .
→ Read More: 2008: A personal retrospective
Posted on December 30th, 2008%
Earlier today (or yesterday, depending on your time zone), Ayende wrote about the consumer pitfalls of software-as-a-service (see Software as a Service is a matter of trust)… which made me think of some of my own “saas” experiences.
Back almost two years ago, CodePlex went down for a few days and suffered significant data loss when it came back up (see CodePlex: Did they forget to back up a server?). That was the last time I willingly used CodePlex for any open-source project.
I also remember some time back when I tried various online backup and synchronization tools. I tried XDrive (soon to be defunct) — which worked well until I realized it corrupted a large chunk of my documents. FolderShare (now Windows Live Sync) was impressive but had a habit of sync failures and/or deleting when it shouldn’t. (Granted FolderShare was a beta, and Live Sync is not, so many issues may be resolved.) In the . . .
→ Read More: Be cautious when using online services (or: you get what you pay for)
Posted on December 29th, 2008%
MSTest, Microsoft’s unit-testing framework, has the ability to deploy files to a predefined test directory via the [DeploymentItem] attribute. The documentation, however, includes this vague reference:
[DeploymentItem("file1.xml")] Deploys an item named file1.xml located at the RelativeRootPath. The file is deployed to the deployment root directory.
[DeploymentItem("file2.xml", "DataFiles")] Deploys an item named file2.xml located at the RelativeRootPath. The file is deployed to the DataFiles subdirectory of the deployment root directory.
Sounds good, but what is RelativePathRoot? It wasn’t easy to find out, but eventually I came across a post on the MSDN forums, which stated:
… it is simply the directory of the solution containing your test project.
Hmm… This is great, so long as your test project only exists in one solution — or, if in multiple solutions, all solutions are in the same . . .
→ Read More: MSTest, DeploymentItem, and the frustrating RelativePathRoot setting
Posted on December 22nd, 2008%
The latest in military technology is here!
Shoe picture from http://www.shoeoutlets.com.
. . .
→ Read More: Weapons of Sole Destruction
Posted on December 9th, 2008%
One utility has paid incredible dividends over the past few days (not only because it is free): WMI Code Creator. This small Microsoft-provided gem allows you to explore the entire WMI namespace, and will generate code (C#, VB.Net, and VBScript) based on what you select.
If you’re using WMI, this utility goes right along-side the WMI reference documentation on MSDN in terms of usefulness.
. . .
→ Read More: Use WMI Code Creator to explore the details of WMI
