Exploration of Thought

  At work, we just upgraded our machines to Quad Xeon x64 machines with four gigs of ram. NICE..... :) But for some reason the manufacturer loaded 64 bit XP, even though we requested Vista. We upgraded it to 64 bit Vista quite easily, problem solved. I did run into an issue while installing Service Pack 1 for Visual…

Problem The .NET Framework reference in the most recent release of Tree Surgeon has an old reference to .NET 2.0 Beta 1. This is in the NAnt.exe.config file. This will produce results that will not compile when using the <msbuild> task of the NAntContrib Tasks. Fix Open the file located in "ProjectName/Tools/nant/NAnt.exe.config" file. Find this:…

I've been using Notepad2 for quite awhile now and was recently introduced to Notepad++. I love saving time by launching Notepad2 by typing "n" into the command line. I save all the "otepad"s through the day. Its small, but hey, I learned it from Scott Hanselman, aka: the master of productivty. After installing Notepad++ I realized I…

At work we use the Gemini Project Issue Tracker every day. We've a very small team, so we're able to get away with the free license for now. Upper management reviews the status of tickets and bugs and the overall status of any project at any given time. We also use SharePoint to collaborate and…

Mike Roberts over at ThoughWorks have a project to help with continuous integration. The product is called "Tree Surgeon". Tree Surgeon solves the problem of how to set up a development tree. "Tree Surgeon is a .NET development tree generator. Just give it the name of your project, and it will set up a development tree…

Yesterday while performing some maintenance on our internal Gemini website I ran into an error where the default.aspx page would redirect to the main.aspx page and then the main.aspx page would redirect to the default.aspx page. This loop would continue until windows gave me the classic DNS error page. Looking at the log files I…

You can easliy alias a namespace in .NET by doing the following: using System;using System.Text;using myXml = System.Xml; // <-- myXml is the alias. Then in the code you can reference it like this: using System;using System.Text;using myXml = System.Xml; namespace MetaDatdaGenerator{   class Program   {      static void Main(string[] args)      {         myXml.XmlDocument xmlDoc = new myXml.XmlDocument();          // Do stuff      }   }} Uses Perhaps you've named something…

If you're like me, you visit new places quite often and you need to find your way around. Or, maybe you're just terrible with directions and you can't find your way out of a wet paper bag, either way, its Google to the rescue. For awhile now Google has offered Google Maps for mobile devices.…

In my previous post I showed you how to return XML from the SQL Server Database. To further this topic, you can also format your XML to use Xml elements. This time, we're going to take a list of Customers and view their orders along with some information from the order, thats right, its straight…

You can easily generate Xml from a DataTable by using the .WriteXml() method. But you can also bypass this and retrieve the Xml directly SQL Server 2005 by running the following command: USE Northwind; SELECT    EmployeeID,        LastName,        FirstNameFROM    dbo.EmployeesFOR XML AUTO;   This will return an Xml representation of the data that looks like this: <dbo.Employees EmployeeID="1" LastName="Davolio" FirstName="Nancy" /><dbo.Employees EmployeeID="2"…

Most developers dont know about the virtual trace output page available in ASP.NET. This page allows you to see the Trace Output provided by ASP.NET. You can view many statistics about the pages that have been executed on the system. The virtual page trace.axd is enabled by enabling tracing in your application by enabling tracing…

For those of you who use Simian, please be aware, they upgraded the product and the old "-recurse" option no longer works. Read below on how to fix it. The Issue I downloaded it last night to test it with my teams current continuous integration environment through Cruise Control .NET (CCNET).  I looked at some examples on the CCNET website…