We've been working on our Silverlight code, and it's getting to a point where I can show potential customers -- I tried to load the code on my Demo machine (XP SP2), and got the following error.

Silverlight error message    
ErrorCode: 2252
ErrorType: ParserError      
Message: AG_E_RUNTIME_MANAGED_ASSEMBLY_DOWNLOAD    
XamlFile: TimeLine1KPoints.xaml    
Line: 7    
Position: 9    

When I setup the virtual directory, I had set the permissions to "Scripts and Executables."  I needed to set the directory permissions to "Scripts only", and my Silverlight application worked perfectly!

RSS is the lingua franca of the web...

We've been using RSS as our communication protocol with good luck.  Using a straight Publisher / Subscriber model we are able to get pretty rich functionality with pretty low effort spent thinking about communication protocols. 

The problem is debugging with RSS.  I'm stepping through my code, and want to check the values in an RSS response from the remote server, so I pop open a browser, and type in the URL.  I get:

Not very helpful when I'm trying to find the guid's so I can debug the server code -- I end up right click, view source....

To help debugging, I wrote a quick Xml2Html.ashx to grab the RSS feed from the remote server, and then "pretty print" the RSS with a XSL style sheet to render a readable output.  Google to find a good XML->HTML style sheet. 

To do the transformation, four lines are all that is needed:

   1:  XslCompiledTransform trans = new XslCompiledTransform();

   2:  System.IO.Stream xslStyleSheet = 

           System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetManifestResourceStream("helpers.Xml2Html.xslt");

   3:  trans.Load(XmlReader.Create(xslStyleSheet));

   4:  trans.Transform(Url, null, context.Response.OutputStream);

Being a professional programmer, text is very important to me.  My professional work-products are all text based files (with extensions of .cs, .java, .aspx, etc)  Having a good set of tools to work with text in your toolbox is important.

One of the tools that I use constantly is BeyondCompare.  The program is just excellent, it takes any two files and puts them in two panes of a window, side by side, highlighting the differences.  Using your mouse, you highlight each differences, and then "copy left", or "copy right" in order to synch up the files.  It even works with files available via FTP, allowing you to compare a local version to a version on your server, very handy.  To top it off, it runs off a USB key, so you'll be able to compare files wherever you go!

I just found out today, I can use BeyondCompare as a replacement for my Tortoise SVN "diff" program.  Go to "settings", and change the "external diff viewer", slightly obvious, but I didn't know about it until today!

From the author of *the best* computer book evah, (Code Complete, by Steve McConnell)  a new set of lists about software construction.  I love the one about trusting the map more then the terrain.  So often I've seen projects that aren't accomplishing anything, but the team insists that "The Project plan says we are right on schedule."

I tell my engineers, "When you're unsure what to do, do a lot, something is bound to be correct." (and "Don't confuse activity with progress.")

New Classic Mistakes

• Confusing estimates with targets

• ...

• Trusting the map more than the terrain

Classic Mistakes Updated - 10x Software Development

The next thing that strikes me about Silverlight is that it will rely on an already massive developer resource in the Microsoft machine, MSDN, all the existing infrastructure and tools like MSSQL, and the deep experience in content streaming with Windows Media.

To put it simply, the Silverlight juggernaut is just another display layer or front-end enhancement to an already massive developer toolset that is enabling a throng of existing developers worldwide to create Flash-like interfaces without having to learn the often quirky Flash-only language.

The final nail in the proverbial coffin for me is definitely tool sets.

I saw this article the other day, and I totally agree with his argument.  If think VisualStudio is one of the best computer programs not just one of the best programming IDE's.  Everything seems to 'just work' in VS2005 the way you expect (at worst, it's a 'right click' away).  And when you need an advanced feature, it's already there (like custom data visualization in the debugger, intellisense for almost everything, and the code snippets, 'natch).  Compare VisualStudio 2005 to Photoshop CS2 in terms of usability -- it took me years to learn the Photoshop options, and it still takes me quite some time to do mildly complex photo manipulations.

As a developer, I had always wanted Flash to succeed.  They have 98% browser penetration, and the Internet is such a good distribution model.  What developer wouldn't want his application to run "out of the box, no install" on 98% of the computers?  I tried several times to convert my application over to ActionScript, but the tools were just not mature for real applications (No debugger to speak of, 'almost' XML support, no native SOAP/WS support).  The lack of features and tools just precluded any real applications.

Wether Silverlight will kill flash or not is irrelevant to me.  Silverlight 1.1 alpha is showing lots of promise for me (it is so fast!), the key is to get it get widespread distribution.  It's a chicken and egg problem.  Until (any technology) has wide distribution, it's not worth writing software for it.  Once the technology has wide distribution, it's to late to start development.  Most of the environments I work in are totally locked down 'corporate' computers, so anything that is "already installed" is a pretty compelling environment to develop for.

Flash in the Pan: News - Software - ZDNet Australia

This was a bit harder than I thought it should be!  Our latest project is to integrate our SVG (and Silverlight) /AJAX client with a REST interface into our backend ESRI system.  The other team is still working on the ESRI connection, so our  development server is up and down (as any good development server is wont to do!)  I thought I'd make a quick shim project, that would mirror the REST API calls and simply serve XML files from the file system rather than going back to the original serve.

I quickly generated the project and REST pages (just dumb ASPX pages that read back an XML file) and added it to the solution.  I then wanted VisualStudio to automatically start a cassini webserver for new project whenever I was in "debug" mode.  I would have thought this was a common problem (what if I was connecting my app to a webservice, and wanted to start both my asp.net app, and the server?)

So, the base problem was, I had 2 projects in my solution, an ASP.Net client, and an ASP.Net REST proxy, and when I hit "F5-debug", only one client would start up, and I wanted to start both clients up.

After a few hours of fiddling, I found the "solutions / properties" button.  This let me specify which projects to automatically start

After you set these both to "start" then both servers start automatically.

ps, on my REST proxy, I had to 'hard code' the default port id (I gave the URL of the proxy to my real AsP.Net app)  To hard code the port number of the cassini web, go to "project | properties | web", and set the default port.

Dax is on a rant about WPF and Silverlight.

Look, I'm really happy with Silverlight. I'll be even more when I get to go deep inside Silverlight. But let's not forget WPF. That's the root technology.

Andy and I just had this discussion about Silverlight. His company is really deep into Silverlight and he's just worshipping it like a madman. I'm still iffy about Silverlight. But he and I both agreed on one thing: keep the web and desktop separate to a point.

My company is knee deep in Silverlight.  Although Dax makes it sound like I have a school-boy crush, I must admit that Silverlight answers two very specific issues we are having with our AJAX/SVG solution.  Our customers were giving us feedback on scalability/performance issues.  We have come up with some innovative (paten pending) solutions to the issue, but when I ported over our code to even the alpha-bits of Silverlight they are a 1,000 times faster -- bye bye performance problems!

What Dax and I did agree on, though, was the fact that the muddying of the waters isn't "a good thing."  We (as an industry) need to focus on leveraging the benefits of each platform.  Rather than trying to make "each platform look the same" we should be taking advantage of what each offers.  Rather than have a least-common-denominator interface that runs on both the Web and the Desktop, we should be creating applications that have a similar "feel" between the two delivery mediums.  I actually always wished that VB.Net and C# were actually different, rather than just different wrappers to the CLR.  That way, each language could have innovated in specific problem spaces.  If VB.Net had "just focused" on making client applications, and C# had "just focused" on 'business logic', the languages could have evolved differently.

My hope is with XAML, that we use XAML as purely the language for describing a user interface (user experience), and leave the processing out of it.  My fear, though, is that the industry will try to make XAML yet-another utility language, and I'll see articles with the title "Programming the WebService security model with XAML" and "Simulating deterministic destructors with XAML and WPF"

Although this is now totally obvious, I thought I’d point it out because it took me a minute to debug it today

An error in the environment.rb file will manifest itself in the server not being able to start. If you can’t get your WEBrick to restart, check the environment.rb…

My goodness how I miss a good compiler.

I've been doing a bunch of work with Ruby on Rails lately for our GeoBoost framework.  Rails seems to embrace JSON (JavaScript object notation) so we augmented our framework to work with JSON formatted data.  If you find yourself working with JSON, this utility will help a bunch.  And the best thing is, no install, just unzip the .EXE to a folder, how old-skool.

turn

into

http://www.raboof.com/Projects/TidyJson/

I'm with Kevin on this one (majorly annoyed bordering on perturbed).  It's hard for me to think of Vista as even new, much less not supported.  I switched to VMWare on December 30, it never even crossed my mind that they wouldn't have a free upgrade to a Vista compatible version.  I won't upgrade to Vista until VMWare sorts it out, virtual machines are that important to a developers workflow. 

Possibly VMWare thought that Microsoft was kidding, and they really weren't going to release Vista?

Am I the only one majorly annoyed by VMWare's support policy (or lack there-of) for VMWare on a Vista host? Apparently EMC's stance is that in order to run VMWare on a Vista host, we need to wait for VMWare 6.0. This presents several problems:

• VMWare 6.0 is only in it's first beta. VMWare major release cycles are not typically short. They're usually a least a couple betas and one or two release candidates. That means we'll be waiting a while.
• Major VMWare upgrades usually cost.

I've been a big fan of VMWare for a long time. It's a much more capable virtualization product than Virtual PC. I'd much rather use VMWare, even if it costs money and VPC is free. But they're not giving me a lot of outs here.

Source: Kevin Dente's PuppiesAndIceCreamBlog : VMWare on Vista Lameness