“Vacation”

Going on a roadtrip from CA to CT in the span of a week starting day after tomorrow. No computer for a week. Gasp. Hopefully, the PSP will keep me company. And also, there will be some wireless access points where I can steal my brother’s laptop for a while.

Visual Studio 2005 Compatibility Mode

So, I recently got my Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 CDs in the mail and hadn’t opened them for about a week (projects, classes, etc.). Now, only being finals week, and everything drawing to a close, I started working with it. I have to say all the new stuff is really nice. I’ll probably write about that later. Right now, I wondered whether I could continue working on my v1.1 applications with the beta – that is, if VS 2005 could be made to run such that it only worked with 1.1 and emitted code for 1.1. Turns out, it can. Jomo Fisher has shown how it can be done in his blog here. Thanks to Yggdrasil over at Channel9 for answering my question with a reference to that.

Mmmm…. memories

Wow, this is a veritable treasure chest of some of the most awesome flash animations…

http://www.nata2.info/humor/flash/

Of course generalities don’t hold for everything there.

Firebird

Ack! Gotta stop these 5 AM nights, coupled with the 3 PM mornings.

Chose to go with Firebird for the db for my web service in works. It has a (apparently) mature ADO.NET data provider so it should be fine. And, it does seem to be very fast.

Thanks Dave Perry!

At UCI, we have a Video Game Development Club. Recently, we’ve been helping Dave Perry of Shiny Entertainment with a game book he’s working on. While that in itself is cool, and I thank him for letting us help with that, what’s even more cool is this: Wednesday night (when we have meetings), he came to hang out and play games with us at our end-of-the-year shindig. And he didn’t come empty handed! He brought us PSPs and copies of Enter the Matrix! None of us were really expecting it and in fact, we were just thrilled to meet a prominent figure in the industry. But, we ended up with a PSP and Enter the Matrix also. Thanks a lot to Dave Perry!

In other news, I did something I’m really going to regret. Hopefully, it will end up OK.

Begging? Not yet…

I want to go!
But (Channel9 contests) only for 21 and over.

Apple moves to Intel, Class woes

Steve made it official: [WWDC 05 Keynote]. It’s tru_e he said … we’re transitioning to Intel. Quite an amusing keynote and not just due to all the fun jokes… what’s most amusing is how easy all the developers took it as Steve took the ground from underneath their feet. I myself got to believing it was going to be easy but that’s cause I’ve never programmed for a Mac before and have no idea what existed before Xcode. But realistically, it sounds like a lot of work and a potential cause for a complete downfall than anything good. Meanwhile, everyone is all excited about getting OSX for their current Windows/Linux boxes (with reasonable doubt that this won’t happen of course).

Oh, Steve Ballmer’s Keynote (opener?) at TechEd 2005 was kind of cool but the Channel 9 guys posted videos about all the “newest” stuff way before (so, they’re definitely doing an awesome job). Watched a webcast on security with WSE 2.0 [here] but kind of boring because nothing new and in fact, kind of lacking. Starting to wonder how popular WS-SC really is.

Meanwhile, have 3 major projects due over this week (should be doing that really instead of watching keynotes and logging). I really am frustrated by my Software Tools and Methods class (I used to like this stuff before but the class kind of killed it). I felt so strongly about this that I started writing a letter to my professor but stopped midway thinking that it may be offending.

Zombo.com

While I slave away at writing and developing UML diagrams (use case, class and sequence) for some completely useless and hypothetical Scheduling system, took a look at Zombo.com for a brief laugh.

Ambiguous Errors

You know those errors that just have no sensible description and seemingly, no sensible cause? Those errors that make you go through various lines of code that you know can’t be it but try to change anyway. Those errors that make you try clean builds several times. Those errors that make you restart your IDE, and even your computer to see if that fixes it? Those errors that make you want to smash your computer to pieces? Those errors that give you a throbbing headache? Those that make you want to quit for a day at least? Well, anyway, it can’t help that I’m doing this at 2 AM and there’s some girl throwing up very loudly in the pathway outside my window, drunk from a party in the apartment across from my window.

So, finally, what is the error? “Failed to load resources from resource file. Please check your Setup.” It just popped up after making what seemed like some small changes to my code. I had no idea what it was talking about. I had done no GUI form changes or anything that would remotely mess with the resource files. So, what in the hell was it talking about? After deleting the resource files, recreating them, restarting the IDE a whole bunch of times, restarting the computer, the error wouldn’t go away. I was baffled, stupified, getting angry, getting a headache.

So, what was the problem? Turns out, there was an exception generated with some new code I wrote. A stack overflow exception – was doing a stupid thing:

class ServiceProxy : WebServicesClientProxy
{
...

new public string Url
{
  get { ... return this.Url; ... }
  set { ... this.Url = value; ... }
}

...
}

(I meant base.Url..)

But since I was displaying a Win Form, the exception was somehow getting caught and turned into that horrible, unrelated error (when the ServiceProxy was used). Ugh.

WS-Eventing

So, WSE3 June CTP is out now at [here], with release notes [here]. While its cool that they have included some widely requested things such as MTOM support (Mark Nottingham has an entry with some good links and brief explanation [here]) and hosting of ASMX outside IIS, there still isn’t support for what I would’ve liked: WS-Eventing! So, I still need it and will still be sticking with the Plumbwork Orange implementation, which is fairly good though it looks like its about 3-4 months old now.