Posts

Join the surreal world of Barry Dorrans on DNR - if you listen long enough you could even hear something about Cardspace.

I have been trying to install the Feb CTP of SQL 2008 on an Virtual PC, but kept getting the following error SQL Server Browser Install for feature ‘SQL_Browser_Redist_SqlBrowser_Cpu32’ failed with exception System.InvalidOperationException: This access control list is not in canonical form and therefore cannot be modified. Turns out the problem was that I had run SysInterals NewSID on the VPC as it was based on a diff disk off our standard W2K3 test install and I wanted it not to clash with other test installs. NewSID leaves the registry in a state that causes the SQL installer problems. To get round it you need to run ...

I will be speaking at the Irish Microsoft Technology Conference in early April on the Business Intelligence features in SQL 2008. I also just found out my Continuous Integration session at Developer Day Scotland has been successful in the vote, thanks to everyone who voted for it.

Ages ago I posted on using MSTest and CruiseControl .NET with VS2005. As I am presenting tomorrow to the Yorkshire Extreme Programming Club on CC.Net I thought it a good idea to revisit this subject with VS2008. Well basically nothing has changed, the old ccnet.config I detailed still works. However, I discovered that you no longer really need the block to delete the TestProject.TRX file as it seem the 2008 MSTest.EXE can overwrite an existing test results file. ...

I was recently working at a client’s site where they were using TFS 2008 in a dual server setup. When getting large numbers of files (e.g. a Get Latest for the whole solution of 20+ projects) they were intermittently see ‘Invalid file handle’ errors. However, if they selected a smaller set of files, or just retried it would often work. We could spot no major pattern other than volume of files. ...

What seems many months ago I ordered an HTC Cruise from Expansys. My old QTEK S100 was literally falling apart. The new phone was supposedly on 4 day delivery, well it took best part of 4 months to arrive (don’t you just hate online stock levels and delivery dates that are just wrong) but was the wait worth it? Well I have been using it for a couple of weeks and in general I would say yes it was worth the wait. As with any of these phone/PDA devices some features can be a compromised, they are never the best phones in the world, if you want a great phone with a long battery life get something like an old Nokia 6310 from eBay. That said, on first impressions the HTC Mobile 6 package with their Touch interface does seem a good all rounder. ...

Interesting to see that the samples of Silverlight controls have been shipped with associated MSTest projects. I think this is first for Microsoft. Now this is a great way to see the intention behind the way any bit of code was designed. A good test set is far more use than most documentation, as it truly matches the code features. If you are doing TDD then it cannot get stale.

In a change from the usual venue in Leeds, the next meeting of the Extreme Programming club will be at Black Marble’s office in Bradford. I will be giving a updated version of my DDD4 presentation on Cruise Control .NET. The fun starts a 7pm on Wednesday the 12th of March, it is free and open to all, see you there.

I was at SQLBits II in Birmingham yesterday, a great venue and great sessions. I particularly enjoyed András Belokosztolszki’s session on transient data in SQL, giving an insight on when as a developer it is appropriate to use different techniques to manage data. My session on Visual Studio for Database Professionals seemed to be well received. However, I did sense some resistance from people (who I assume were DBAs as opposed to developers) who did not like the idea of a world where DB schema control is not done from within SQL Management studio, but with a revision controlled off line environment. Maybe some DBAs don’t want to be part of the larger developer family on a project? ...

I have been doing some Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) development in Word of late, not exactly a pain free experience. First thing to say is that even given all the marketing spiel, VSTO is not that different from VBA in older versions of Office. To get going I create a new VSTO 2008 Word 2007 Template project based on an import of our old Word template (to get styles, layout etc.). I then basically cut and pasted the logic from our old VBA macros into an ActionPane in the new one and it just worked. ...