Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 have been released to manufacturing. You can find the links to the trial, express and full editions at the Visual Studio home page.
The Akamai Download Manager does not like the proxy I have at work so I have to wait until tonight before I can download it :-(
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…
It has been an incredible adventure and a great experience…
Hm…
There is no easy or soft way to say this, so let me make a long story short. After almost 12 years working for Iris Technologies, IrisCube, IrisCube Reply, Sytel Reply I am leaving the company to learn something new.
I cannot wait to get started in my new job as I have a lot to learn at 10100
To my colleagues that read this:
I have one wish for a personal goodbye gift from you. I would really love it if you can send me your Outlook Contact card with your picture/avatar and whatever other info you want to share like phone number, messenger alias, web site etc.
I will continue to work in the Milano area so I am sure we will meet again soon. Please drop by my office for a chat and coffee before my last day at work 6/12.
I will miss you all…
The Vodafone Betavine site is a open community website created and managed by Vodafone Group R&D with the mission to
...support the wider development community in stimulating ideas, developing, testing and launching great new applications for mobile and Internet communications.
Interesting. Vodafone is huge, so they should have the power to make device manufacturers adhere to the (few) mobile browsing and applications standards that exists. If you are not familiar with developing for mobile devices, you can compare it with the problems we had a decade ago developing for Mozilla and Internet Explorer. But imagine a headache hundreds of times worse as each device has its own peculiarities (even “standard“ software like the Nokia Series Sxx).
The site is open to anyone and I am thrilled to see that Vodafone is not censoring complaints (at least so far).
<flame>
Judging from some forums they could have called the site VodafoneBetaWhine… Vodafone, correctly, get a lot of complaints regarding their Mobile Internet which basically destroys all internet sites that provide their own mobile rendering. Vodafone Italy goes one step further than the Vodafone operators in other European countries and even imposes their own Vodafone header and footers on some mobile devices making it look like the service is provided by Vodafone. Difficult to explain to customers that pays for picture perfect rendering just to see it garbled by Vodafone...
</flame>
Thanks for the link Maurizio.
It is several years since I last reinstalled my PC and it shows. I used to keep the setup program for the downloaded software in a download directory but I do not do it anymore as:
But installing from a "temporary" directory causes one problem: some programs cannot be uninstalled as they are unable to find the original setup so they return "Error 1714: The older version of … cannot be removed". :-(
This is bad design if you ask me. If you need something from the original setup, either you copy the stuff you need to your application directory or you tell me that I have to save it somewhere for the future. Downloading the latest version from the web does not help as you need the particular setup program you installed with :-( :-(
Being stuck with tons of old software on my PC I cannot uninstall is bad enough. But, what really bugs me, is that some software cannot be installed unless you uninstall the old version. I tried to install the new version of Virtual PC and I got this message since I had Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 installed already:
Error 1714. The older version of Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 cannot be removed.
I was considering using RegMon to see which registry keys the VPC2007 setup uses when I found the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility. It does not uninstall the application as such, it just removes it from the list of applications that Windows thinks is installed. Ugly, but it fixed the problem for me.
Select the software you want to "uninstall" from the list, click Remove and hope for the best:
I got this "new" exception when I was consuming one RSS feed:
System.FormatException was unhandled
Message="The DateTime represented by the string is not supported in calendar System.Globalization.GregorianCalendar."
Source="mscorlib"
StackTrace:
at System.DateTimeParse.Parse(String s, DateTimeFormatInfo dtfi, DateTimeStyles styles)
at System.DateTime.Parse(String s)
System.DateTime.Parse chocked on this input date 2007-09-13T24:28:51Z
Forcing the current culture to System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture did not help so I ended up with this ugly hack:
dateString = dateString.Replace("T24:", "T00:")
Let me know if you find a cleaner solution.
Believe it or not, I downgraded from SQL Server 2005 Express to MSDE and got a drastic performance improvement:
The DB is identical in terms of data and indexes. The only difference is the SQL engine. I am still not 110% sure why, but as far as I can tell it is due to the different ways MSDE and SQL Server 2005 Express limits performance on my particular hardware. Or rather, lack of hardware, as I am hosting everything on a Virtual Server.
Until January this year I hosted my mail and blogs at home on a PC. It has been a valuable experience as I have learned a lot about hosting a service 24x7. But after almost 3 years I decided to host my mail and blog at a hosting provider. Aruba has a basic Virtual Server at 12 euro a month with Win2k3 64 bit, 8 CPUs, 3GB of disk, 512 MB of ram that is more than enough or me. But not for SQL Server 2005 apparently…
SQL Server 2005 Express limits performance to one physical CPU. This gives good performance on multi-core or hyperthreading CPUs. But, in the case of my Virtual Server I believe it is only using 1 of the 8 available CPUs becoming a bottleneck. MSDE, on the other hand, does not have a CPU limit the workload governor starts slowing down the database engine when more than eight operations are actively running at the same time. Which means that SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine (MSDE 2000) is significantly faster than SQL Server 2005 Express on my “hardware“.
At least I believe this is the cause as I cannot think of any reason why my blog is suddenly 3 times faster than it used to be (after a few long nights downgrading by hand).
