Monday, October 31, 2005
Comment Server Finally Online

This has taken me a bit longer than I thought, but I finally got around to it. All the Blogs on www.MarkusEgger.com now support comments. So if you have anything interesting to comment about, pick an individual blog entry and post a comment through the interface at the very bottom.

Note: I am still messing with this and it is not completely finished. For instance, the UI won't remember you from one comment to the next, but that should be fixed soon too.

Monday, October 31, 2005
DevTeach 2006 - Call For Speakers!

As was the case the last few years, CoDe Magazine is sponsoring DevTeach 2006 in Montreal. My good friend Kevin McNeish and I are going to act as the conference chairs for the .NET part of the conference. This means that we are the ones who solicit and pick speakers. If you are interested in speaking, send an email to either myself (markus@eps-software.com) or Kevin (kevinm@oakleafsd.com).

Here are a few tips: Submit at least 3 talks. More is better though, because to get in, you will have to present 3 different sessions, and it is somewhat unlikely that 3 out of 3 match our needs. So the more you can submit the better. Submit them as soon as possible. We have not set a submission deadline yet (we will make an announcement once we have). We are looking for all kinds of topics, as long as they are .NET related. And of course, we are focusing on VS2005 and beyond.

Monday, October 31, 2005
.NET Rocks - Road Trip Houston

Last Thursday, the .NET Rocks Internet Radio Talk Show stopped by in Houston as part of their road trip (see www.dotnetrocks.com/roadtrip). I went to the user group meeting, and we gave away a bunch of CoDe Magazines. As you may know, we have a partnership with .NET Rocks. For instance, we have a dedicated page in the magazine where we usually print excerpts from their show. Carl and Richard are also giving away magazines at every location, even though we are not a true road trip sponsor. At the end of the show, they take a bunch of people into their road trip RV ("the boat") and interview them. I also gave a short interview, discussing CoDe Magazine and also our Milos Solution Platform effort.

Check out the interview at http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showID=150. Also check out some of the other recordings from other road trip locations.

Saturday, October 29, 2005
Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 Released

In case you have not heard: Visual Studio 2005 as well as SQL Server 2005 have been released and are available for download on MSDN Online (assuming you have Microsoft MSDN subscription).

I downloaded my versions Thursday, and to my surprise, I found that it downloaded at a reasonable speed. Enjoy!

Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Venting About Error Messages

Have you ever noticed how bad error messages are in Microsoft products? Silly question. Of course you have. Us developers all have.

Here's one that I just had the pleasure of clicking OK on about 300 times (I am not making this up):

Maybe it's just me, and maybe this is really intuitive, but frankly, I have no interest in learning error-guids by heart. There gotta be ways to make this better! IMHO, it is just about time Microsoft treated this problem seriously. There is no reason this has to be this bad. It is simply a matter of recognizing that this is a problem and then fixing it. MS should treat this as a serious issue in code reviews, and they should apply static analysis to search for these things. (Look at what they have done with security and how much they have been able to change since they started to take it seriously! If only they did the same thing for error messages).

So how did I get into this mess in the first place? I am glad you asked!

It all started when I installed VS2005 Beta 2. I thought I had uninstalled and cleaned up everything I had on that machine, but apparently not. So once I installed VS2005 Beta 2, and SQL 2005 beta, and VSTO beta, and all that sort of stuff. VS2005 just wasn't working. I simply could not create or open any projects, which puts somewhat of a damper on things. So I started to clean things up manually as well as with a variety of tools (such as Aaron Stebner's cleanup tool). At the end, none of my VS 2005 stuff worked, and to my horror, I discovered that VS 2003 wasn't working anymore either. Now I am not complaining about that too loudly, because I realize that that's the risk I am taking when I install beta software.

However, what I am complaining about is how badly the reinstall of VS2003 is going. And once again, I understand that there may be issues in the system due to the beta software I installed, but that does not mean that I am happy getting a guid as an error message!

BTW: By now the install completed (well, it is done failing, actually). I just tried to look at the error log in the hope to find more details. Here's what I got:

Note: Click on the image for a full-size view.

So apparently the error log failed too. Great. Perhaps it got confused by all the guids.

I can not say it often enough: The situation needs to be fixed! Things can go wrong, but if so, tell me what happened and ideally why! How could I possibly fix these problems? Silly error messages in Microsoft products can be found all over the place. From the ones seen here to "reference not set to an instance of an object" messages without any further information.

Hunting down problems indicated by error messages that could have easily been better, certainly cost me a lot more money than buying these products in the first place has!

Tuesday, October 18, 2005
My Tablet PC Web Cast: Anywhere Access to Data

FYI: This Thursday I will be presenting a web cast entitled "Anywhere Access to Data in an Occasionally Connected World". The web cast takes place on Thursday, October 20th, at 11am PST. You can get to it at the following URL: http://msdn.microsoft.com/mobility/tabletpc/webcasts/default.aspx

This will also be recorded and can be viewed at a later point in time.

Note: For all of you who are interested in Mobile PC and Tablet PC development, don't forget to sign up for the free CoDe Focus issue about this very subject: http://www.code-magazine.com/focus/interests.aspx