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

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.

You can now download the Release Candidate of ASP.NET AJAX 1.0.  It is time to get your app's ready.  I am pretty sure we will not see too many changes at all now and can confidently write code that will be used when it ships next month. 

This has been a long wait, but well worth it.  I am sure that this framework will grow and grow as it matures.  It has been a little painful to wait this long for a release, but is well worth it.  These guys have worked so hard to come up with a release that works cross browser and is easy to use to develop with and is relatively bug free.  I am excited to all the new features that will be added once there is a 1.0 release.  I think people will really embrace it and add many controls that can be shared across the community.

I just released an implementation of the newest Virtual Earth on blawg.com today that mashes up all of the blawgers in the US and soon the world.  In case you wondering a blawger is someone in the legal industry that blogs. 

It has some cool balloons that pop up when you hover of the rss icons on the map that show information about that blawger. 

The new version of virtual earth has really come a long way and has some really cool features that allow you to plot directions, Ajax callbacks, zooming, adding pushpins, etc.  Check out the Virtual Earth SDK and play around with it when you have time.  They have really good documentation and many features that make it fun to play around with.

How bummed out I was when I went to debug a web application locally and my debugger in Visual Studio 2005 did not work on my brand new Vista Machine I had just built.  What?  Was this a joke?  I come to find out it wasn't.  Visual Studio 2005 does not work well and even SP1 has the debugger issue.  After researching it a little bit I began to understand why this was an issue.  The debugger actually gets into the kernel I guess.  So how do you fix this?

Well there are a few ways to do this.  The easy one is when you start visual studio you can right click the icon and select run as administrator.

Also if you want it to just work every time, you can run as a real administrator by Turning User Account Control off.  This will also disable some of those sometimes annoying modal dialog boxes when you launch certain programs.  Here is an attempt at a 10 second demo of how to do it.