Hello (cruel) World

As blogged about previously, the organization I work for has a number of developer tools which are published using Clickonce which provides quite a lot of functionality for very little overhead. However, this morning I attempted to update and re-publish one of said applications I realized that the certificate with which the application was originally deployed had expired. Since we do not use private (trusted) certificates, I was able to click the ‘Create Test Certificate’ in Visual Studio to create another certificate. Everything seemed fine – I deployed the application without any issue and even tested it on my box. Everything worked nicely. Later in the day I received an email from a colleague who had received a rather unsavory error message in his attempt to open the application. It read: “The deployment identity does not match the subscription.” It was pretty clear that this was directly related to the change in manifest…after a quick google I realized that I was not the first user...

About a year ago, cut off from Rugby and soccer games back home in Ireland, and going a little bit crazy, I decided enough was enough. I weighed up my options for watching such games in the United States (even at the God-awful hours of the morning they are broadcast due to timezone differences) and found that Setanta Sports was the way to go. Every bar I had watched a game in in the US was hooked up to their premium service and I was impressed with both their content and presentation (commentators and panelists included). Deciding on Setanta was easy, but there were really only 3 ways I could get it: Directtv. I'd love it, but I already had a comcast subscription and didn't feel like going to all that bother to switch. Setanta Sports Online. The demo I saw on their website showed a tiny viewing window (I had to squint), though I believe this has changed now. The main drawback with this one is that I'd have to a) watch games on my pc or b) hook my laptop up to my tv (and gi...

2008 is going to be a busy year. Work is heating up, and I've decided that it is time to put my knowledge into a more tangible form - that's right, I'm going to get certified. This has been my plan for a while now and I decided to cough up the cash for one of Microsoft's MCPD training kits. Fortunately for me angelab of 'Ravings of a Developer TS' ( http://blogs.msdn.com/angelab/default.aspx ) fame posted a link this week to a company giving 45/50% off these titles. I've never used this site, so do not in any way vouch for them, but I trusted it enough to by my first set of certification books . Free shipping was the icing on the cake. Check out http://www.bookpool.com/ct/254 for more details. Happy studying!

Like many organizations, the company I work for has a pretty diverse history (up to present times) when it comes to programming languages used, application type created and…to the point of this post…deployment methods. It is difficult to picture the future however, without picturing Clickonce deployed applications. Right now a number of our internal developer apps use Clickonce. This was an easy decision - we wanted easy deployment and total control over application versioning (and I don't mean source control) - Clickonce delivers in a big way. So I've worked with Clickonce a little while now - setting up applications and deploying updates - the basics. But, in an effort to keep up to date (on a technology already at least 3 years old!!!) I decided to invest some time and learn a little more….leading to this first simple example. In the following example I develop a simple launchpad-type application - a winform with 3 buttons - Accounting, LegalForms and RiskManagement in...

I love SQL Server. I love SQL Server Management Studio for the most part. I love the idea of templates in SQL - allowing query templates to be created with variable fields which, with a simple CTRL-M can be populated in a handy dialog. This is a feature I would use all the time…if it were not for my propensity to overwrite the template when saving the resulting file. I do not advocate sloppy coding, nor am I a sloppy code. But every now and again, when things are really busy, I will find that I have saved a file out for future use, forgetting that it was a template to begin with…. I know what you're thinking - the obvious thought would be to set the SQL Script to read-only - allowing changes to be made and executed, but never saved. Unfortunately, in SQL 2005 at least, making the file read only and attempting to populate said variable fields, results in the following message (and no, the file is most certainly not under source code control): This I cannot explain, and I'd be in...

Recently I had to set up some virtual development and testing servers for some of our ASP.NET apps. Some existing servers were being retired and it was a good time to clean up the existing environments. The task was simple, install Windows 2000, SQL 2000, IIS 6 and promote our existing dev/test apps. Or so I thought…. Everything ran smoothly until I decided to test our reporting functionality and I was hit with an error message that appears to be pretty common: "C:\DOCUME~1\<server>\ASPNET\LOCALS~1\Temp\<temp report file>.rpt: Access to report file denied. Another program may be using it." My original thought, and seemingly the one with the greatest possibility for success, was granting appropriate permissions to this temp folder. A quick (unnecessary) perusal of the code confirmed that the file was being output to the current working directory - the temp folder of the ASP.NET account. So I gave ASP.NET write access to this folder….still no good. The same message...