You've got to be kidding

Just tried to unsubscribe from some InfoWorld email newsletters at the unsubscribe page.  Go check it out.  I'll wait.

I got to the page by clicking a link in an email they sent me, meaning they already had my email address.  Of course, when I got to the page, they hadn't filled in my email address. Or actually checked what I subscribed to.  Instead, I get a text box to enter my email address then 41 check boxes that I can select to unsubscribe from that individual newsletter.  No way to select all of them, or even groups.  No hint as to what I actually subscribe to.

So, guess how I determined there are 41 check boxes checked?  I counted each one as I checked it to unsubscribe from every InfoWorld newsletter.

Microsoft marketing off the rails

No, not that Rails. Believe it or not, more Heroes happen {here} nonsense from Microsoft. Just ran across a story on Slashdot about a daily Heroes happen {here} comic strip. From the Microsoft site: "The HHH Comic Series is a daily web comic that adapts tech stories from actual IT Professionals and Developers - a web comic that reflects the real lives of IT Hero's such as you." (Grammar mistake is a quote...) What in the world are they thinking?

Heroes Happen Here?

Heroes?  Really?  A little hyperbole?

One of the items in my swag bag from CodeMash was a schedule of the launch events for Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008, the so called "Heroes happen {here}" event.   Unfortunately, there's not going to be a launch event in Cincinnati.  The closer ones are:

March 20	Columbus, OH
April 3	Indianapolis, IN
May 22	Louisville, KY (handout says this is the 15th, but the site says 22nd)

I'm probably going to end up at the Indianapolis event since I'm going to be speaking at the Northwest Ohio .NET User Group  on March 20.  You can register for the launch event at the Heroes happen {here} site.

I understand that the Windows marketing people have to do something, but Heroes happen {here}?  First of all, I don't get it.  And heroic is not a word I apply to software development.  Give me a break.  My suggestion for next time would be to redirect the marketing genius budget toward an event in Cincinnati.

An example of why Microsoft sometimes drives me crazy

One of the nice things added in .NET 3.5 is the ability to use the ASP.NET membership providers from Windows form and WPF applications, also known as Client Application Services.  It's a great concept that I'm looking at for a project I'm working on.

One key piece of implementing authentication is the ClientFormsAuthenticationMembershipProvider class (yea, it's a mouthful) which provides the client side membership provider function and is a subclass of MembershipProvider.  So far, so good.

Check out this screen shot from the members for the ClientFormsAuthenticationMembershipProvider class:

Notice anything interesting? Like almost all of the properties say they're not used in this class? If you look at the methods, you'll see pretty much the same thing.

This is terrible object oriented design.  This class inherits from a class when it only implements a very small subset of the methods and properties of the base class.   This class design makes me think there are at least two separate coherent classes at play here (one for "client-side membership providers" and one for "server-side membership providers") which should be separate classes composed into a "membership provider".  Or they could have created a parent class of the existing MembershipProvider with the appropriate properties and methods for a "client-side membership provider".  Or what's more likely is that there are several coherent classes hidden here, but frankly I don't want to think about it any more.

I appreciate the fact that they've added the great ability to use the MembershipProvider from Windows form applications.  I just wish they would have done it in a way that doesn't turn my stomach.

Still Installing

Well, the install finally finished formatting the disk and appeared to be going well.   It started up and everything looked good.  Then I tried to connect to the Internet.   And there's no connection.  So I check out the device manager and the Ethernet connection on the motherboard has the dreaded question mark by it.  So I view the properties and ask it to reinstall the driver.  It lights up the CD for a while and can't find anything appropriate.  It offers to look to for a driver on the web... which doesn't get me too far.

So I have to switch to another machine and try to find the right driver, after I check out the BIOS to see exactly what Intel motherboard I have.    And when I find the motherboard I have, it doesn't appear that they have a driver for Windows 2003 Server.  So I subscribe to the driver RSS feed (a nice idea!) hoping there will be one at some point.  And in the RSS feed, there's an entry about a LAN driver that says it supports Windows 2003!  So I download the driver.

The good news is that the driver appears to be working, and I'm now doing the standard Windows Update thing to get all of the latest patches before I do anything else.  What fun!

Tip of the Moment

I got a new server today (may write more about that later) and made an immediate mistake.  I started installing Windows 2003 Server.  It asked me whether I wanted to format the disk.  I said yes(NTFS of course).   Then it asked if I wanted a quick format or a regular format.  I chose a regular format.  That was at least an hour ago...

So whatever you do, when you're installing an operating system, take the quick format option.  At this point, I'm not sure I can wait it out.  I may have to get up in the morning and finish the installation.  I'm not as young as I used to be... and apparently not much smarter either.

I hate computers

Had something "interesting" happen yesterday.  I tried to open a Word document, and after about ten seconds, Word would die.  It would usually offer to try to save my work and restart Word, and to send the error to Microsoft.  So I thought there was something wrong with the particular document.   So I tried opening other documents.    Each had the same result.  Finally, I tried just opening Word and doing nothing.  Same result.  So... I did a little searching on Google and basically struck out.   I did read that printer drivers can sometimes cause this kind of issue, so I uninstalled PDF reDirect, which I had recently installed.  That didn't fix it.

In one of the Google posts,  I saw someone talking about the Application log.  And as it turns out, there were messages being logged.  In the application log, it was the very useful message:

Faulting application winword.exe, version 11.0.8134.0, stamp 461557b7, faulting module mso.dll, version 11.0.8132.0, stamp 45fc0843, debug? 0, fault address 0x000302a1.

I love messages with hexadecimal.  There was also a matching message in the System log:

The device, \Device\Harddisk0\D, has a bad block.

At least this one was mostly in English.  So I ran chkdsk.  And it found an issue.  So I ran chkdsk again, this time with /f to fix the errors.  And of course, that didn't fix it.  Word crashed just the same.

Next step was to try to run the repair through the Add or Remove Programs.  This also crashed.  Luckily, it gave me a useful error message in the application log:

Windows cannot access the file C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\1033\WWINTL.DLL ...

So I looked through the Office .cab files from the setup to find this DLL.  Luckily, this DLL was in the first CAB file I opened, W2561405.CAB  (I was hoping since it started with "w" it would be in a "w" .CAB, don't know if I just got lucky or if there is actually a method to the madness.)  After I found it, I renamed the existing one on disk, extracted the DLL, and copied it to the Word installation folder.

That seems to have fixed it.  At least for now.  As I've been typing this blog entry, I've had two Word documents open, and neither one has crashed.

When I experience this kind of thing, it always make me wonder how most people actually manage to use computers.  It took hours for me to track down and fix this issue, and I didn't have to call tech support.  And I know that any tech support I called would likely have told me to reinstall Word, which would probably have taken even longer than what it took me.

Did I say that I hate computers?

Installing Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1

As described in a recent blog post, I finally took the leap and installed the Visual Studio 205 Service Pack 1.  It was quite an experience.    The first hint that it was going to be fun was when it said depending on my configuration it would take several minutes or several hours to install.  Just what I wanted to hear...

So I started into the process.  It took about ten minutes to get the a dialog asking me if I wanted to install, followed shortly by the EULA.  Followed shortly by:

 

I have to say that I wish it had not taken ten minutes for them to tell me I needed to uninstall the Web Application Project.  And for that matter why didn't it just uninstall it?

But I played along and uninstalled the Web Application Project and started the service pack again.  After another ten minutes, I got to the EULA and thankfully there were no more prerequisite uninstalls... so it cranked along for a while.  The next interesting dialog box was:

The interesting thing about this dialog box is that it displayed long enough for me to get a screen capture of it, which was approximately ten minutes.  I love it when that happens.

The entire installation took about about an hour and a half, not quite the entire time it took me to watch Serenity.

Have I told you lately that I hate Visual Studio?

I just tried to open a solution in Visual Studio. And it hung. Took 50% of the CPU and just hung. So I killed the process. Started Visual Studio again. Opened the exact same solution again. And it worked just fine.

Now you might blame ReSharper, but I don't. Every version of Visual Studio I've used is buggy and unstable.

I worked years as a Delphi developer and I can count on one hand the number of times I had actual exceptions in the IDE or had to kill the process.

So is it just me, or does Visual Studio just suck?