Jim Zimmerman - ASP.NET, MVC, Ajax and ORM

I just got a slingbox because my neighbor is moving to London, U.K. and he wants to watch American TV over there and I guess there is not that much selection.  He said he had heard of something called a Slingbox and ironically my boss had just installed one and I thought it was pretty cool.

So being the nice guy that I am I offered to let him use part of my bandwidth, I have plenty to spare with my Verizon FIOS (fiber to the house) with 15 MB down/ 2MB up.  He just bought a slingbox to put in my house and I am going to add a third DVR and put it in the garage along with the slingbox.  He can control it from anywhere and record shows and then watch them later.  You know with a technology like this, it will be a big disrupter in the next few years.  Especially with their announcement of their new products at CES with the sling catcher so you don't need a computer. 

Also I just got this stuff to work on my Treo 700w.  So now I can watch any show I recorded or want to watch in real time anywhere here in Tampa.  We have EVDO everywhere which is about 400 kbps - 700 kbps which is really good for this stuff.

So as I was not planning on buying one, I still get to play with it because of my friend who is moving to the UK.  Now we will see if he kicks me off of it when he is trying to watch TV from over there.  It only allows one connection at a time.  I Hope I don't like it too much.

I just read a nice post from Jim Allchin on the Windows Vista Team Blog about some new data features in Vista that help you find data easier.  There were a few things I didn't really consider using the way he suggested and he had some very good pointers like using the search right above the windows new start icon to find not just programs but any kind of file.  Very productive tip.

I have been using Vista for over a month now and had not thought of using some of these features in the way they had intended.  I will let you read his post since he has a much better way of saying it than I would. Cool stuff.

While I have not used ZoomIt yet in any presentations, I plan on it.  I just downloaded it and it is pretty cool stuff.  I just watched a Continuous Integration for Team System Demo from ISerializable - Roy Osherove's Blog and he was using it.  He gave a great talk on some very cool continuous integration tips for team foundation server that I plan on using.  He did warn about how people in the front row got a little dizzy from the zoom.

I just came across this list of issues with Visual Studio and Vista.  For those of you that dared to jump on Vista on your development machine you will like this list. 

One thing to note is that to debug properly in Visual Studio you will have to run the application as administrator.  I pointed this out in an earlier post, but also pointed out how to run as administrator all the time form the user access control property.  Well this is fine, but it is nice to have the access control turned on.  I turned it off so that id did not have to remember to right click and select "run as administrator" every time I launched a new instance of VS2005.  Anyway, here is a way to make Visual Studio and just about any other program run as administrator automatically.  Right click your shortcut and you will see this window.

Click the advanced button and then make sure the checkbox for Run as administrator is checked. Now whenever you launch VS 2005 then debugging will work without having to remember to right click the shortcut every time you launch it.

So today I ran into my first real gotcha since switching every machine I have at work and home to Vista.  

For about an hour today, a fellow developer and I could not figure out why an SSIS package with a script component was getting this error on the script control:

[Script Component [311]] Error: System.BadImageFormatException: An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8007000B) at Microsoft.VisualBasic.Vsa.VsaEngine.Compile() at Microsoft.SqlServer.VSAHosting.Runtime.LoadSource(String project) at Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Pipeline.ScriptComponentHost.CreateUserComponent()

I did a google search "0x8007000B ssis" and was lucky, only one page in result and it was the answer I had been looking for.  Not the one I wanted, but what I needed to know on the following post.

This is a known issue, which (together with other Vista compatibility issues) will be fixed by SQL 2005 SP2 early next year. For now, please don't use Vista machines for SSIS development.
P.S. There is a preview (November CTP) release of SP2, it fixes many Vista compatibility problems, but it does not fix this issue yet.

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Michael Entin, IS team // This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights

Ok, well at least we know now.  We still used SSIS Development the rest of the day, but had to be creative on how to change some of the data with clean up SQL after the integration.  I still love SSIS and can wait for a fix.  But I hope it is soon.  I am sure it is very tough work being a developer at Microsoft right about now.  They have to rush to make all these fixes and everybody is watching.  Good luck guys! 

It looks as if NVIDIA spends more time creating mp3's, videos and marketing about Vista than actually creating drivers that a worth a crap.  I want to know what kind of video card they were using and with what drivers for their demos. 

They still are only offering a driver for Vista RC2 from October 17 which really sucks.  I went out and bought a new NVIDIA card as soon as I downloaded and installed the RTM of Vista in November.  I was thinking that NVIDIA would of course already have decent drivers ready.  I was wrong.  Kind of a let down to not even be able to view 3D very well.  The drivers even choke on 3D screensavers.  My xp laptop works better for 3D.

I will give the benefit of the doubt to NVIDIA in case something drastically changed from RC2 to RTM, but at least give us a beta for RTM.

Ok, I am still having a hard time sitting down after playing with this and getting it to work on a few prototypes using existing database schemas. It works with both SQL Server 2000 and 2005 along with MySql.  It has a few issues, all of which are correctable, but I have to say this is going to change the way I develop every web application.  It truly is a RAD toolkit that helps your website build itself as you go.  As I write this my mind is wondering at the possibilities.  The best thing about this is that it is open source.  Go to the SubSonic Project on CodePlex and download the source yourself. 

Make sure to spend the 20 minutes watching the Webcast on how to set it up.  You will be amazed.  If it does not work at first with your database schema or you have weird errors make sure to try and build all the class files and try to compile it.  There may be some naming conventions that you will need to follow in order to get it to compile right.  One off the top of my head is to not name a column the same name as any table.  I just changed the way I named a few columns and in what order and it worked beautifully.

This project has great promise because it can really help teams of developers build projects very quickly.  You can download the release, but if you want to be cutting edge I suggest you download the latest source code from the Latest Source Control Commits.  They have really added a lot of functionality since the last release.  I don't know how many bugs there are, but it worked good for me.

You can also listen to more about it on a Dotnetrocks podcast from October 2006 with Rob Conery.

Hats off to Rob Conery for starting a very cool toolkit for RAD web development in ASP.NET!  Thank you!

yeah, SP1 is finally here and has over 1000 bug fixes.  I hope they have fixed some vista issues also in the beta I saw up there after you apply service pack 1.  I could not get to it yet, but will have to update to sp1 first anyway. 

You can get all the service pack here.  Happy downloading!  I hope it doesn't break anything. It has to fix more things than it can break, I would think at this point.