Hello (cruel) World

I woke up today to an automated email from Lutz Roeder, the infamous author of reflector for .net - an amazing utility allowing the disassembly and analysis of compiled .net assemblies. The email ushered in a new era, with Lutz announcing his retirement from the project and the passing of all development to Redgate software. After more than eight years of working on .NET Reflector, I have decided it is time to move on and explore some new opportunities. I have reached an agreement to have Red Gate Software continue the development of .NET Reflector. Red Gate has a lot of experience creating development tools for both .NET and SQL Server. They have the resources necessary to work on new features, and Reflector fits nicely with other .NET tools the company offers. Red Gate will continue to provide the free community version and is looking for your feedback and ideas for future versions. For news and updates on Reflector, sign up for the .NET Developer’s Newsletter from Red Gate. To find...

I received this ridiculously inane error message when attempting to compile a visual studio 2008 solution this evening. I spent some time investigating as I had just upgraded the solution which was originally created in 2005. In fact the issue was caused not by the conversion but by an empty line in the pre-build event box. I know, I know - it was sloppy of me to leave an empty line in the first place but this is another example of a wonderful IDE let down by silly little bugs - I know for a fact that the microsoft corporation has the ability to remove empty strings!!! In the end I manually removed the empty string and all returned to normal - a few more minutes of my life that I'm not getting back :-)

Disclaimer: this post has nothing to do with software development. As I write this from my new iPhone 3g (sorry, I had to gloat) I can't help but realize that 99% of the content on the Internet is complete garbage. Of course that is completely subjective (and does not apply to this blog) but it is rare that I find something online that i feel the need to shout (read "blog") about. I've owned a guitar for as long as I can remember and been unable to play it for even longer...which is why I am so excited about http://www.justinguitar.com . I am in no way associated with the site nor do I have anything to gain by posting about it. This being said, this site is amazing!! Justin provides lessons in written and YouTube form. The real beauty of the site is most definitely his gift for teaching. Lessons are provided in both guitar theory and (user requested) songs. Video lessons are extremely clear with closeups of both the chord and strumming patterns. Lessons are perfectly...

This latest post finds me on my continued Subversion kick. Having checked out the wonderful, yet not quite mature enough Mercurial and the possibly wonderful but completely painful windows experience of GIT, i'm sticking with Subversion as my Visual SourceSafe replacement of choice. This week I have mostly been playing with Subversion hooks- an extremely simple and powerful trigger mechanism used when checking items in or out of a subversion database. For those who do not know, each subversion database contains a 'hooks' folder in which files exist for pre and post commit/lock/property change/unlock events. Harnessing this hooking mechanism is as simple as creating a file and giving it, for instance the filename 'pre-commit'. The true beauty (i'm sure i mentioned this before) is that the extension doesnt matter - you can use an exe, a batch file, a .pl file etc. etc. and, as long as your filename falls into the pre-defined list, your hook is guaranteed to run on...

In work this morning I attempted to fire up Visual Studio with an ASP.NET application I hadn’t used in a while only to receive an error message stating that the project could not be mapped to an IIS application. Looking deeper I found that the application did indeed exist, but IIS was not behaving nicely – a big STOP sign replacing my normally very pleasant default web site icon. The Event Viewer should the following error: Event Type: Error Event Source: W3SVC Event Category: None Event ID: 115 Date: 4/15/2008 Time: 10:13:31 AM User: N/A Computer: MYPC Description: The service could not bind instance 1. The data is the error code. For additional information specific to this message please visit the Microsoft Online Support site located at: http://www.microsoft.com/contentredirect.asp. For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp. Data: 0000: 40 27 00 00 @...

A couple of months ago I posted ( http://irwinj.blogspot.com/2008/01/itvn-is-this-end.html ) about ITVN, a streaming media service providing access to a host of channels, my favorite being Setanta Sports. This service had provided very positive results until about 3 months ago when uptime and performance began to suffer, server downtime increases and, about two weeks ago, people - myself included - were double-charged for their monthly service. Forums were taken offline, phone numbers made inaccessible and emails (in my recent experience) ignored. Over the last few days ITVN has disappeared as a listed provider on Setanta's site, almost definitely signalling the end. Tonight, as I sat down to watch the Six Nations Rugby tournament, all servers were offline and Setanta inacessible. A little googling led to this page ( link ) where a user reported receiving an email from setanta (he provided a screenshot) with the following quote: "Dear Setanta SubscriberSetanta on ITVNWe are as...

The associated image (you may have guessed) is not of a real book but was created via and is of course a satirical take on the world of version control. Note in particular the poignant pun on the word 'source' in the sub-title - feel free to laugh out loud if you're not already doing so :-) This post will hopefully pave the way for some more technically oriented content regarding source control systems - specifically subversion - over the following weeks and months. Source control is something that is close to my heart because a) I feel it is fundamental to software development and is at the center of any good development process and b) in my current role I am somewhat responsible for items of this nature. In recent months I have become somewhat frustrated with the source control system currently used at the office and, while it would take a pretty thorough pitch to sell another versioning system (not to mention the accompanying migration process and user training) it wo...

Recently I posted about syntax highlighting in blogger ( see link ). Everything ran smoothly up until the point that I changed blog themes, and then all hell broke loose. My highlighting broke and any code snippets appeared as ugly small text boxes before I noticed just a few days ago....it's a little embarrassing to post your knowledge of something only to find out that your examples are broken. Anyhow, since I've made a number of updated to the blog lately I figured that I'd messed something up. I find the code for blogger a little bit dirty with all sorts of widget and includable tags making up the page - I had a fun time debugging my code in an attempt to find the issue. The error console in firefox pointed to the fact that a variable dp (see previous post) was undefined. On closer inspection, it appeared that my whole javascript section with the syntax highlighting functions was compressed into a single line and this appeared to be the root of the issue. Try as i migh...

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...