February 2006 Entries

I received news this week that I was going to be starting a new project (well, just another release of my last project) so I started to prepare my build and source control environments in earnest.  Because I have to be able to build for defect fixes in the production environment at any time, plus I have to pursue a new strain of development, there were a number of hurdles that I needed to overcome. The first decision I had to make was whether I should keep only one VSS database, use two (one for production and one for new development) or move...

Recently the project I was assigned to came to a rather graceful, and most certainly successful end.  As it ended the subsequent system maintenance contract began and I moved on to it along with a new project manager type.  This new bloke quickly became identified by the moniker “PM Boy” (actual nickname with held to protect the not-so-innocent).  Over and over he’s proven that the name will never leave him. Let’s reminisce about the other day. PM Boy strides into my pod with one thing on his mind…..wait…..wait…..damn, I think he forgot it.  Dissuaded none-the less PM Boy returns to the...

Channel9 has a great video on the way MS Virtual Server is architected and a lot of discussion on how you may use it.  Like any geek, I regularly get the question “What computer should I buy?” and for the last year or more I’ve been answering that what ever people purchase, it will most likely be overkill.  PC hardware has far exceeded the needs of the average home and work user.  I really don’t need a 3Ghz machine with 1Gb of RAM to be able to run the company’s Excel (shudder) database.  Unless you are a gamer or you...

Ran into a bit of a problem on a side project recently.  Not all the members of the team had IIS on their machines so some were using ASP.NET Development Server (Cassini) to serve up the web services layer that I’d written.  The problem that they ran into was every time they restarted their project Cassini would fire up and serve the web services on a different port number.  I dug around and this MSDN posting on specifying a port for Cassini is the best info that I could find.  I’ve passed the info on and we’ll see if it helps...

I read this morning that Yahoo and AOL have announced that they will offer a pay-for-delivery, guarantee it makes it to the Inbox, email service.  Will it work?  Who knows.  Will people pay for this service?  Again, who knows.  Hang on.  Who cares? I do love the way my spam filter software plucks all but the occasional penile enlargement ad (occasionally they do make for stellar reading).  I even love the way that it learns that some of the recruiting agency’s I’ve dealt with in the past are now just a group of spammers to me.  Yes, I do run into...