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Tag: Kevin Miller

Installing ShoZu on a T-Mobile Dash with Windows Mobile 6

December 3, 2007 If you have a smart phone and like to use Flickr to share your photos look into ShoZu. ShoZu is a great way to move the pictures taken on your phone to the Flickr. You take a picture and it asks, Send To Flickr? If you have a data plan or the next time you are online the image is uploaded directly to Flickr. Very cool. What happens when you assume? I ran into problems using ShoZu with my T-Mobile Dash that has been upgraded to Windows Mobile 6. It was crashing and causing all kinds of stability issues with my phone. This morning I decided to reinstall ShoZu and figured out a simple fix and had to share. When you install ShoZu they ask for your phone number and what model phone you have. A text message is sent…

Is the Software Installed?

November 8, 2007 I went to update Windows Live Writer this morning because I am a technology whore and I like to run with the cool kids. The installer yielded a WTF basket of confusion that ended with me wondering if I had actually installed the software which, in fact, I had not. Most installers use the wizard motif with a workflow that goes something like next, accept EULA, next, next, Install, Finish. Here is my experience trying to install Windows Live Writer with accompanying internal dialog. The Download Google Windows Live Writer. --- Click on Writers Zone. --- Windows Live Writer: Out of Beta   Windows Live Writer 2008 (version 12.0.1366.1026) Click on the lovely shiny Download button. Wasn't that supposed to start the download? --- Get it free Excellent, I am using software whose target audience are smug people. Click on…

Unit Testing a Web Service

November 7, 2007 Dovetail sells a web services for Clarify product that consists of a SOAP flavored web service and a handy client library. To make sure all is continuously well we have NUnit integration tests that exercise the client library making calls against the web service. Our first iteration of the testing the web service involved launching Cassini and then later the development web server that comes with Visual Studio 2005 to host our web service under test. The configuring and launching of this process (WebDev.WebServer2.exe) has  been fragile and prone to failure. Yesterday while setting up a new integration server I flailed for an hour trying to get the web server running. My defeat turned into victory after I found Phil Haack's post on Using WebServer.WebDev For Unit Tests which taught me how remove our dependency on the executable web server…

CodePlex subverts our desires

November 6, 2007 I am really behind the curve on this but I was very excited when I heard that CodePlex is now supporting Subversion for source code control. After reading more closely it appears that they are merely providing bridgeware that allows you to use TortoiseSVN as a front end to CodePlex's Team Foundation Server. The number one new feature request from users is for CodePlex to support Subversion.  Specifically what users are telling us they want is the features and experience they get when using TortoiseSVN as a source control client.  It is important to us on the CodePlex team to provide our users the features they want and need to have the best experience possible, and so we will soon be offering support for using TortoiseSVN with CodePlex. How did their users' desire to have CodePlex add support for Subversion…

MVC Code Crush

October 10, 2007 It feels a little warmer over here sitting around the Microsoft developer Alt.campfire. Microsoft just came on out and publicly embraced the MVC pattern for web development (think Rails). Nestled gently inside of Asp.Net they have planted a nucleus of testable, extensible, and separation of concern compliant goodness. I can’t wait to watch it grow and mature. While watching Scott Gu present their MVC on Asp.Net Framework (can we get a cooler codename please?) at the Alt.Net conference I felt very strange. I felt that suddenly Microsoft gets me. At the time it would have seemed pretty normal to have Scott Gu break into song with smiling woodland animals surrounding him nodding to the beat. I think they slipped stuff into the coffee. They pretty much nailed everything I love about Rails and MonoRail and .Net under one umbrella. Lets…

Being Alt.Net

The Alt.Net conference held right here in Austin last weekend was awe inspiring. The quality of the people who came and the sessions they convened was outstanding. This was my second Open Spaces conference and I don’t want to go back to the old way. Much that I wanted to discuss was talked about. I would have attended each and every session there if it was humanly possible. Torn between sessions like DDD-jujitsu and A Microsoft Futurespective I was often flitting between sessions. Sorry there was no Developing Zune plugins session going on. Not that there is anything wrong with that. I feel confident the tenants of this movement will continue to grow and dare I say become normal and everyday. I want to thank each and everyone that came from near and far to attend I learned a lot…

NVelocity-o-vision

July 3, 2007 Jonathon Rossi has released a preview of his Castle Visual Studio Integration (CSVI) which, at the moment, gives us lovely colorization of views when using NVelocity for your template engine in Monorail. Anything that makes makes MonoRail views easier to read and edit at a glance is a great achievement for the Castle community. Apparently Jonathon is also working on intellisense support. I took the preview release for a very light spin and had no problems. Unfortunately we are using the NVelocity alternative Brail on our MonoRail projects here at Dovetail. Seeing that Ayende is looking into learning how to build parsers how long until we see support for .brail files in CSVI? 

Virtual Server oh how I hate your un-patched bugs

June 27, 2007 We are using Virtual Server 2005 R2 a lot in our database platform testing. We have automated tests that start up virtual machines to do database platform testing. Quite handy. Configuring Virtual Server on an new machine can be quite a pain. We run into a problem all the time where we are trying to create a virtual machine with a name that was once already used for that particular Virtual Server host. You get this dreaded message: The virtual machine could not be created. The virtual machine configuration could not be created. A configuration with this name already exists. What? No it doesn't. I had removed this virtual machine in the past. What is going on. Microsoft has this lovely KB which tells you how to half fix the problem which basically boils down to: C:Documents and Settings>del [virtual-machine-name]*.* /s…

DevTeach 2007 Begins

May 16, 2007 I am a lucky nerd. I work at a great company that believes in continual personal development and investing in their employees. Dovetail sent me to DevTeach and I am having a blast. The quality of the talks and general braininess quotient is very high. Excellent conversations in a lovely city. I got here Sunday night and Scott was kind enough to introduce me to little known Canadian traditions and playing tour guide around Old Montreal. This city is amazing and beautiful and vibrant and invokes wonder.  Pre Conference I attended the Monday Pre-Conference workshop(s). I actually sat in on both Design and Optimization Best-Practices with SQL Server 2005 and Introduction to .NET 3.0 workshop both speakers were good and knowledgeable. In hind-sight it would have been better for me to have stuck with the SQL content.  Nothing against Kevin McNeish's .Net chops, but I had been exposed to…

Asp.Net Controls vs. View Components

May 8, 2007 During my Monorail talk a lot of people were asking about whether or not you could use Asp.Net controls with Monorail. I think the question translates to I love my 3rd party web controls yet I hate ASP.Net enough to look into alternatives. I think we need a clean break here. Can you do it?  The answer is... sort of. First, you need to be using the Asp WebForms view engine. After reading the documentation and seeing comments like: With WebForms you can use all your existing skills to develop MonoRail applications, however its integration with MonoRail can be quite tricky ... Let's take a look at an example of perfectly decent controller code and explain when it does not integrate with WebForms. ... So, many simple scenarios can get really hard with WebForms. You will likely back away slowly and start…