November 2005 Blog Posts
I really am turning into a grumpy old man. SQL Server 2005 Management Studio this time. I've got VS 2005 open on my left monitor, and SSMS on the right one. I'm attaching an existing database to SQL, and the attach dialog opens on the left monitor, not the right where my attention (and mouse) is focused. The security dialogs do the same. This is despite my Matrox display settings which indicate that dialogs should open on the same window as the mouse; obviously these aren't true dialogs. Some windows appear on the right, some don't, which from a consistency...
Looks like it is becoming a reality.
[Listening to: Love Resurrection - Alison Moyet - Alf]
First off, I admit to being old; I remember the days of computers the size of 5 or six fridges, with 16Kb (yes Kilobytes) or memory. But this isn't a nostalgia trip, but a comment on the current state and size of software. Over the past coouple of years I've had three boot partitions on my laptop: 1 stable with .NET 1.1, one with beta 2, and one with post b2 builds. Each was a 10bb partition (I keep the data on a separate one). With the release of 2.0 I needed a partition with both 1.1 and 2.0, SQL...
Thanks to Matt Reynolds who archives public newsgroups, I've finally found the solution to my install woes - http://dotnet247.com/247reference/msgs/26/130535.aspx. It seems that any directory under \Documents and settings\[user | All Users]\Microsoft Help (mine was named with a GUID) caused the install to fail. I moved the directory and the install works. Hoorah.
[Listening to: Stronger Than Dirt - Tom McRae - Just Like Blood (04:39)]
While not taking away from the loss of George Best, he is getting all of the news. Hidden among the headlines and not reported much, we should also remember that Richard Burns lost his fight for life. A sad time.
In case anyone is interested, I've converted the provider toolkit into VB and you can get the code here. This code has a database ready for use with SQLEXPRESS and the config files reflect this.
The PPT and code for the ASP.NET 2.0 Provider talk is now available, with VB code.
Following on from last weeks event, I've had two more this week. On Monday night I headed over to Coventry Flying Club for the Midland VBUG evening, which has to be one of the funniest events I've been to. Very silly indeed. Videos from various luminaries saying "Have a great time", including Scott Guthrie, Don Box and Steve Ballmer. Yes Steve actually made an effort to record something - that's pretty cool.
Many people, myself included, had proposed our favourite feature and these were voted on by all present. I went for master pages and was the only one to...
So, this is the second time I've tried to install this on my main development machine (fine on my laptop) and it's failed. The installation tells me to look at the logs, but to be quite honest these are useless. They are huge and it's impossible to find the reason for failure; it's not put at the end of the file, but buried within the rest of the logging information. Wouldn't it make sense to include the error information at the end, where it can easily be found? The only nice part is this line:
Hello, I'm your 32bit Elevated custom...
"About time too" are the words that first pop into my head. I've been working with .NET 2.0 for around 2 years and have excited about it for that long. For some of the time I wasn't allowed to talk about it at all, then it became public, and now it's finally here. What a relief.
As part of the release I've been involved in the launch tour, and popped down to London on Monday for the official press launch and to watch the live stream from San Francisco. I was a bit disappointed that Steve Ballmer was so serious, as...
I've just had a spam message to the Dave and Al Feedback page, which says:
Some of my clients are searching online for different types of sheds. Myjob is to find one place to send them to. I'd like to discuss anarrangement with you about this.
At first this seems in no way related to normal spam, but makes a weird kind of sense when you realise that on the Dave and Al site we have Al's Shed. I just found that funny, the tenuous link between trying to sell us something (which I'm sure is what the spam was really about)...
... isn't a RAID system supposed to protect you against disc failures?
So the story is that I installed my new RAID system - RAID 5 using 3 discs, with a hot spare. Installed Server 2003 and then Exchange (and why does the exchange install require you to put the product key in three times, once for each step?). Configured the users, set up OWA, and was just about to attempt configuration of RPC over HTTP.
Prior to getting everything running, I'd removed the floppy drive due to lack of room. After all, who needs a floppy these days, you can...