Dev-Picayune

Last but not least, I have added comments to Dev-Picayune. Now all three blogs support comments. The Dev-Picayune blog now supports both Trackbacks as well as Comments. I have already been hit a little with spam on the trackbacks so they might have to go or get heavily modified. My commenting system is a little more manageable. I need to make the trackbacks slightly easier to modify as well as create notifications so that I know when I have gotten pinged.

I am about to install Longhorn Beta 1 on my laptop from work (that I am buying). Then, just out of curiousity, I thought to check around about compatibility and such. The laptop has the slow but reliable GeForce4 MX440 in it for video. But if you read the Microsoft requirements for seeing the new Aero Glass effects then you’ll realize that you have to have a graphics card that supports DirectX9 through hardware. This implies that you must have a GeForce 5xxx or newer card or an ATI 9xxx series card or later. This is a real shame since the GeForce 4 series (especially the Ti based chipset cards) were so good. So it looks like I won’t be getting to see the extra special cool Aero Glass stuff. That really stinks considering how long Apple’s Quartz stuff has been around now. One thing is for sure, computer manufacturers and video card makers should be happy. The release of Longhorn’s (Vista) final version should spur folks on to video card upgrades (if not whole machines).

At work we were having a serious problem getting another developer setup to work on a complex VS.NET solution we have that has Windows client projects, server-side web components and ASP.NET projects as sub-sections of the solution (among a few other things).

The problem we were having was the web type things would not properly work coming from Source Safe. We’d download the latest to his laptop (using the correct working directory (c:\inetput\wwwroot\websubprojectname) and then turn that folder into a virtual directory. Everytime you’d open the solution it would report “Error: could not open project file”. We tried everything, security, copying files from a working installation, enabling front-page extensions, Uninstalling and reinstalling the ASP.NET IIS registration. After beating our heads against the wall for many hours, Tim (my brilliant co-worker), realized that if you deleted everything off the local machine, went into VS.NET and created a new web project with the exact same name (and thus putting it in the same directory), and then deleting that new one and then regetting and redoing all the virtual directory stuff as previously described it would suddenly work. Apparently there is some sort of configuration cache or meta-deta being stored somewhere that gets cleared when you create an unrelated project with the same name and then delete it. Bizarre!