Visual Studio 2008 has buggy windowing code introduced in SP1… And no hotfix planned!

Update: Microsoft has released a hotfix. Thanks!

This issue keeps on coming up in my day to day work, and it takes me an hour or so everytime to fix… Whenever you have to deal with docked windows and visual studio changes the mode it is in, you end up with a fatal crash. It can happen when you start debugging, when you stop debugging, when you open a project or when you close the app.

This issue was, of course, not in the original vs2008…

These are the bugs I collected on Connect explaining the problem in more details. Microsoft has said they won’t fix because the code has been rewritten in vs10… But considering the stability of it at the moment, I want a hotfix now!

Anyway, here are the links. Don’t hesitate to nag everyone you know in DevDiv until someone takes responsibility to release a hotfix.

http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=345345
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=355130
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=362433
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=363412
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=362508
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=369540
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=377247
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=376251
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=378065
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=377549
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=364335

VS Shell team, do your homework and fix your regressions!

From talking to doing – Open Space Coding Day

We are having very interesting debates and conversations at every single alt.net event that has been organized. Talking with others is a great way to reach a common understanding and evolve as a community.

There has however not been that much coding involved, something that many people have found was missing. That’s why I’m very glad Alan Dean has announced the first iteration of a project he mentioned at our last alt.net Beers: the Open Space Coding Day. Go and give feedback now!

OpenRasta is available

This entry may be outdated. For the latest updates on openrasta, see www.openrasta.com.

Don’t get too excited, I’m still quite far from beta 1… But here goes.

• The license: MIT X11. Do what you want with it. Hesitated for a long time, we’ll see if this works out.
• The svn access: http://svn.caffeine-it.com/openrasta/trunk
• The bug tracking: http://trac.caffeine-it.com/openrasta/
• The mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/openrasta/
• The documentation: http://svn.caffeine-it.com/openrasta/trunk/doc/content/default.html

As you can see, the documentation is still very much a work in progress and I’ll add several tutorials over the next few days. Expect some code churning as I increase the code coverage and continue delivering some functionality.

Didn’t think I’d get to the point of releasing that baby, but it’s finally there. Woo!

Blog design updated

For those of you only reading from an RSS reader, have a look at the website when you got time. I’ve updated the logo. Gives some well-deserved character to this blog.

OpenRasta status update

This entry may be outdated. For the latest updates on openrasta, see www.openrasta.com.

I’ll be adding the proper headers tomorrow and release this version. It’s getting to a point where it can start marching to beta status openly. Here’s the change log since the last status update.

IO

• new stream chain infrastructure for accurate content length discovery
  Codecs don’t have to deal with knowing the content-length anymore, it’s all done by wrapping the stream with one that tracks the Content-Length accurately.
• Multipart support
  Support is in, and for the most part there is no more issues with asp.net taking over. The next step is to completely bypass asp.net and use the IHttpWorkerRequest directly. There’s preliminary support for that, but I want to have a clean-cut separation between streamed and buffered modes, which means implementing bulk transfer. Support is only buffered at the moment.
  At the IO level, you’ll find the goods in BoundaryStreamReader and BoundaryStreamWriter, as well as the new HistoryStream class. The problem with potentially non-seekable streams when reading boundaries is that you may read past the end of the boundary and need to go back… But It’s not seekable! HistoryStream keeps a fixed buffer of the last couple of reads and let you seek within that.
  One level up, the MultipartReader and MultipartWriter classes are the ones able to give you IHttpEntity objects from / to your streams.

Configuration

• new configuration syntax
  Everything is now on ResourceSpace. I didn’t like the focus on URIs the previous versions had. Furthermore, they’re all attached to an IHas singleton, so you can add your own configuration language from the top-level ResourceSpace.Has.new demo site
  This should hopefully be used in the future to run some Watin automated tests.
• Configuration auto-wireup
  You can either do the configuration in your global.asax or use a class at the root of your app. You used to need IRastaConfiguration (how confusing), it’s now called IConfigurationSource

Infrastructure

• new dependency resolver flow
  No more direct access to the IDependencyResolver. The framework treats the internal one and any external one you may want to use (aka your favourite container) equally. Fixed a bunch of bugs when registering singleton instances in the internal container.
• Error infrastructure
  The pipeline has been modified to be able to go back and restart the processing. That means that your error page will be subject to content-type negotiation.
• Resource matching
  By default, resource instances you return from your handlers are seeked as an exact match you registered. There’s an opt-out by registering a resource as AnyChildOf<Customer>, which will then match Customer and any class inheriting from it. Feedback welcome.

Refactoring

• Heavy renaming
  Folders now have the proper names, there should not be anything left with the Rasta moniker. Lot of interfaces and classes have been updated to reflect the http spec a bit better (IHttpEntity, IHttpMessage…) or to be more meaningful (ICommunicationContext replaces IRastaContext, IRequest and IResponse are shorter than the previous interface names). All the asp.net specific implementations have been renamed to AspNetXxx.
• Http handlers and modules
  The http handler is now OpenRastaHandler. It may be changed to optimize the code path for IIS7 integrated mode when available. The module is now OpenRastaModule.

Bug fixes

• Integration tests
  Just fixed the infrastrucutre to copy web.config automatically to the correct folder. The default destination is now in a separate folder. Other projects will follow soon.
• Removing god objects
  RastaConfiguration used to be a big mammoth with way too much happening on it. It’s been split between DependencyManager (a service locator for the few repositories being used) and OpenRastaConfiguration (that exposes only the Manual property).
  All the same, IRequest and IResponse are much leaner than they used to be, with all the implementation details moved to the PipelineData object. TODO: Auto-register IRequest and IResponse in the container so you don’t need the dependency on ICommunicationContext.

Codecs

• Content negotiation and media types
  I thought I had this one fairly nailed-out, turned-out I was wrong. The mime types are now prioritized on the server, so that when the client asks for */* (<cough>IE<cough>), the mime type with the highest quality is selected. Reprioritized both the webforms codec and the html error page codec to prefer text/html over application/xhtml+xml.
  HttpContentType is now called MediaType, which should solve the confusion between the ContentType header and what a media type is.
  TODO: Write the tests to ensure the Vary header is appended correctly.
  TODO: Have a way for the codec to get involved during the selection of the correct mime type. This would let the webforms engine detect the doctype and set the content-type appropriately.
• Error codes
  There’s some new properties on OperationResult to detect client and server errors. This is used to automatically pad the returned representation, as IE (again) hides anything returned with a size less than 512 bytes.

Webforms engine

• Webforms url rewriting
  I’ve now re-enabled the capability to register a webforms page at a fixed Uri with new extension methods, associated with a behind-the-scene handler and some changes to the codec.
• Markup
  I’ve started refactoring the extension methods used for generating html content, which you’ll find in OpenRasta.Markup. There should be much more tomorrow.
• Uri creation
  IUriResolver has been simplified, and a lot of noise implementation is now done with extension methods. Also a work in progress so expect more unit tests in the next few days. And you can now automatically generate URIs from any object by using myCustomer.CreateUri(); Sweet.
• Plain text codec
  I thought it was more than time to bring plain-text back on the scene. So now you have a text/plain codec out of the box.
• Silverlight
  Work on this is suspended for now until we reach beta 1.

What’s missing

• For both the MultipartFormDataCodec and the ApplicationXWwwUrlFormEncodedCodec, we still haven’t gained back the support for complex types. This is coming back tomorrow, with a common code-base. That should be the end of ReflectionHelper, as the code gets migrated (and unit-tested).
• The license header files, which will also be there tomorrow. Once it’s done I’ll give the svn and trac addresses, and open the mailing list to the public :)

There you go, there’s probably a lot missing as I didn’t log everything in svn, but we’re approaching the end of the tunnel. Aim is to be feature-complete for beta 1 in a month time. Patches are welcome :)

And you wonder why I haven’t got my next contract yet…

Received yesterday.

A key aspect of the job would be your ability with using multiple SQL server data-sources within one application, calling from one or more data-sources, manipulating the data and inserting into another.

So apparently people still do horrible things like that. Makes me break in cold sweat.

Alt.net London Beers Proceedings available

http://www.altnetpedia.com/AltNetBeers.ashx

OpenRasta finally gets its yellow screen of death.

The infrastructure to generate the page presented when an error occurs has been in place for a while, but lack of time and a bunch of bugs were preventing it from happening. It’s now resolved!

Anyone has any preference for the color of the future error message page? I’m thinking red or green.

Blend 3 will use the Visual Studio 2010 C# editor

I could be wrong. But I could be right. Announced at the next Mix?

A birthday and looking back on my digital life

So it’s my birthday today. Every year until this now, my birthday has be the time for doing absolutely nothing. As I geared-up my community involvement this year, I find myself with so much to do and so little time that my birthday will be an after-thought this evening. Editing of alt.net content (7 hours of raw HD material to cut, compress, publish, of which I have only started), preparation of a talk next week, publication of a detailed guide for OpenRasta’s official launch (including delivering on my plan to port the Suteki project), a backburner project for Paris… And so far no contract in London, with agents driving the prices down and a global recession that is starting to ripple its effects through non-financial companies.

So I thought I’d celebrate the year by looking through my blog entries and twitters to provide for myself a roadmap of what I’ve done right and wrong.

2007

Had issues with a company and a manager with which I didn’t manage to work. Lesson learnt from it, there is a right time to move on and a right place to be efficient. Started a long rant on mocks and their uses, trying (poorly) to debunk the ideas that mocks were always better than fakes, and that there was a life outside of mocking frameworks. However, with the latest mocking framework syntaxes and new defaults, the problem will slowly go away.

2008

Spent a lot of time comparing and pondering how to provide data for the very poor http client called flash. Attended the first UK alt.net conference and felt so much more energized than I have been in years. Started giving presentations in user groups. Started working on the first version of Rasta that would lead me to write OpenRasta. Predicted that skydrive and foldershare (now WL Sync) would interop through the Sync framework (but Live Mesh doesn’t use skydrive yet, so this is not realized just yet). Organized the first alt.net beers event. Changed my relationship to code by switching my desktop to 30”. Started using twitter (and it’s all @CAMURPHY’s fault).Went to NxtgenUG Fest08. Made a point of supporting Linq2Sql and ignore Linq2Entities. Gave more talks. Went to Mix:UK, PDC, VBUG, TechEd…

 

And I’m  not including all the stuff I didn’t blog about. Very busy year indeed. And yet I feel I’ve pretty much under-achieved. So I take the public vow here to try harder. 5 year plan etc etc.

One more day at a conference…

And one more night of discussion, passion and learning. I get so much from meeting the people that attend conferences that I really think that not attending the sessions and only meeting people at dinner is where the value really is. I may just do that next year and skip the conf itself, and reserve myself for dinners, drinks and beer chatting.

Beginning of #TechEd – Early Bird WTF.

Thought I’d moan a bit more about the organization… By registering early, you get given, I quote the guide, ”a reserved seat” at the keynote.

When you check in, you get given a nice wristband supposedly giving you access to those seats. Comes in a nice plastic bag, together with a cap.  But no explanation notice explaining that, in fact, you need to come 30 minutes early to have your seat. So the wristband gives you the right to arrive early when no one else is there to choose a good spot. But it’s not reserved.

Of course, the very heavy booklet provided with the conference bag doesn’t mention those 30 minutes. Neither is any sign in the conference centre. Nor do the ladies giving you the goods in the morning.

So no “reserved” seat for me, because the reserved seat wasn’t really reserved at all. Fair enough.

But then one of the attendants that was managing the event replied, after my questioning:

“- you’re 15 minutes late, it was at half past for early birds
- but no one bothered telling me this
- well it must have been indicated, you should’ve been on time
- but there’s no sign, no documentation, no nothing about being there at half past?
- well we had those three rows over there. Don’t be late next time”

So it’s my fault no one mentioned we had to be there half an hour before? Or that you didn’t print it? Or that the documentation doesn’t show it anywhere?

Add to that there’s no Wifi in the room and not a single twitter mention anywhere, or facebook group, and I have to wonder what happened between last year and this year.

At least we get a nice conference bag, of about the same quality as the one from last year. As that one is nearing the end of its useful life, the new one arrives just on time.

#TechEd – Keynote

[Update: Indeed, the unannounced stuff was the sharepoint visual studio integration. Paul Andrew just blogged about it.

Introduction from the business guy. I assume the black blocks in front of the stage the presenter keeps looking at is some sort of teleprompter. It’s always very annoying to see any speaker fixed on his slides / script.

Talking about how great it is to do business in Europe. Slides showing partners. Still don’t understand why a developer conference ends up with marketing and business cases. Could they do TechEd decision makers and stop boring me with all this amazing stuff people do with Microsoft software? Or at the very least try and hit my geek soft spot?

Zander is now on stage. No powerpoint, just Visual Studio demos. Thanks god a geek is finally presenting. Will be releasing stuff not talked about at PDC. Good! Wonder if that’s in the bits we got at PDC, need to rerun the VM tonight.

Showing the reflector equivalent that’s built in vs10, which we’ve seen at PDC. Showing assembly dependency analysis, delving into class dependencies. Sequence diagrams (see pdc bits). Gets me worried to see all this UML stuff creeping back in.

Showing off the blackbox replay for testers. Sweet if it comes for free, other tools have provided this for quite a few years now.

So the machine they’re demoing is actually being RDP’d into. Wow. Showing off vista’s graphics capabilities!

More WPF editor goodness. Still no sign of the new windowing promised for vs10. Lot of code visualization stuff. Mentions of MEF (@gblock is gonna be happy :) ).

Trying to debug a session, find the bug… But changes live code without writing a single unit test to confirm the problem. There really is a need for Microsoft to start a cultural change.

In no particular order, saw snippets for xml and javascript, jquery, web deployment and a test-first demo of MVC. There’s still a lack of understanding of the difference between test-driven and test-first, shame the two words are still used interchangeably. Some VB10 goodness.

Xml transformations for config files. So you mean I can solve my config problems with some config solutions? Wow.

Some sharepoint stuff I have no interest in, dozing off.

C++ parallel_for keyword to use 8 cores to do ray rendering of pong in 3d. Some touch support to move the pong cursor (what, you mean with a touch screen i can move stuff around? Wow.)

That part of the keynote has been delivered perfectly, but what was shown was mostly PDC stuff. Not seen that many non-PDC news, but maybe I missed a bit (or was that the Sharepoint thingy?)

On my way to Barcelona….

[pre-nagging: this post contains jokes about Italians, British, Spanish and French people. If you’re offended by generalization about nationalities on holidays, please skip this post altogether.]

What a joy to travel. Only a few hours after I left home, I am already feeling incontrollable urges to hate 4hundred of people that have been encumbering my travel plans. Let’s review what happened for me to manage to board the plane.

1. International
   I was ready to leave the house on time, until I realized that for some Murphy’s law reason, my travel pass *and* my Gatwick express pass didn’t actually print, and Vista just silently failed on me. 5 minutes delay.
2. British
   The cab then shows up 5 minutes late, getting me to the Gatwick express at 15:03. And *then* do I realize that, for maintenance work, said service leaves every 30 minutes instead of every 15. 35 minutes delay.
3. More British!
   Well, you didn’t really expect the Gatwick express to arrive on time did you? 50 minutes delay.
4. Italian
   As it happens, a big Italian contingency was sharing the same train as I. Having been raised with Italians, I’m fairly used to them being slow and unorganized (and nearly as rude as the French). But when there’s only one elevator for the already overcrowded train, things just add-up. Wait for 15 minutes to get an elevator, 65 minutes delay.
5. British more and more, and some Italians
   Thanks to BAA, once I finally arrived at the airport level, and only one floor from checking in, a BAA representative barks at me that my luggage is too big to take the escalator. Bless the spotty face and the arrogance of the yellow-wearing Gatwick idiots.  At that point, I’m lower on the food chain and have to accommodate with the 2 out of 4 functioning elevators to get to departure. Wait for another 10 minutes, 75 minutes delay.
6. British Airways
   Well, by that point, even though I was checked-in, the whole masquerade of pretending to call the controller about late-checking of luggage is unfolding, me knowing that under no circumstance do you try to get in touch with the guys handling the luggage by phone. Ever. You need a radio. But the masquerade to protect the attendants from telling me to fuck off unfolds, adding another 10 minutes. At that point we reach 85 minutes of delay.
7. British Airways again
   Wait to get ticket changed at Customer Service. 15 minutes wait. Get told that I should queue (again) in the ticket buying queue. another 15 minutes. The fact that I have a business ticket seems to have no importance on how fast you get treated when you have a problem. People may wear smile well, but the customer service still painfully sucks. I stop counting.
8. Easyjet
   Last flight to leave for Barcelona is Easyjet, from which I buy a cattle-class ticket for £139. I never travelled with them until now, and I know why. Gate checking an hour late, hundred of people just trying to walk on each-others and a waiting room that is probably not dissimilar to the corridor leading you to the fatal injection room in some Texas prisons. None of the staff has shown a single smile by now.
9. Spanish
   Well, considering the destination, I have to moan about those a bit. While the lady next to me has been very polite and adorable, the (overweight) guy in front of me has insisted on reclining on his seat. Either that or said seat is reclining under the weight. In either case, the 17” laptop keeps on pressing uncomfortably against my stomach, making me regret the minute I thought getting the laptop out would be a good idea.
10. Spanish on the other side…
    So of course, with the lack of space and strong sense of agoraphobia growing on me, not tamed in the slightest by the double bloody-Mary I inflicted upon myself, I politely ask the Andalusian woman behind me if she wouldn't mind too much if I reclined my seat. Of course, I did check that the only thing on her table was one of those miniature overly-salted overly-aromatized overly-fat overly-disgusting and overly-non-bio  Pringle pack. If you’ve never had the delicious pleasure of enduring airline snacks, the cylinder measures roughly 3 inches. But of course, said brunette, either not understanding my desperate attempts at sign language, or just being an annoying bitch (my preferred explanation so far), refuses with an arrogant no. Not the polite one you would expect, being apologetic for denying your freedom to ensure theirs. No no no. The aggressive “are you kidding me” refusal. Thought about slapping her face, or worse, just reclining the seat anyway. Give up, tuck in and put the laptop in my belly.
11. German
    At last a smile from one of the flight attendants. I wondered for a long time why traditional airlines attendants always looked middle-aged, and where the young ones were. Now I know, they’re all trying to make a living working for easyjet.
12. British
    Uh. Yeah, you guessed it. The plane is *very* late.
13. American
    My iphone battery dies before I manage to connect to any network.
14. Spanish
    Finally make my way out of the plane and try to accommodate my smell to the lack of locker-room scent that I had to suffer for the last two hours. Of course, TechEd buses are not running anymore, and the (4) guys waiting with a TechEd sign have no will to help you get to your hotel, pointing you to a cab. Sweet.
15. Spanish
    Get in cab that has a big logo specifying they accept credit cards. Of course the guy refuses to take my card at all, so it’s off to the cash point, at a total interest of nearly 7% + £2 of transaction fee. Silly me I leave him a tip. Should’ve let him rot in hell. His teeth seem to enjoy the place.
16. Hilton Diagonal Mar
    So you’d think with such an insane trip, with a booking made in June, Hilton would at the very least solve my problems. Nope, non-smoking room and no way to get a smoking room. At that point I’m exhausted and will just flaunt the non-smoking status until I get a room of equivalent size or more in *smoking* environment. Otherwise they’ll have to rebrand my room. Or charge me. But as there’s no mention of such a charge anywhere…
    Speaking of which, don’t even get me started with the quality of the internet, that I have the privilege of paying a freakin 100€ per 7 days for. Or the fact that their book where you supposed to have all the information for your stay, including the room service, is still unordered and missing entries. Second year in a row.

Oh, and in the process I just realized I forgot my TechEd card at home!

Follow Sebastien’s adventures tomorrow as he tries to get the room he booked and get registered at the convention center. *orders another beer and pops a prozac*.

[Update: after feeling bad and going down to smoke outside the hotel, I managed to get my room changed tomorrow. There’s some light at the end of the tunnel.]

[Update 2: On the up, hotel room changed. On the down, breakfast eggs made me sick this morning. At the conf center, hopefully everything will be a smooth ride from now.]

Apologies for the silence… Out of work and conferences

Sorry to all people reading (and not taken over by tweeter fever). Between PDC and KaizenConf, I took a couple of days off and am now getting ready to meet even more great people in TechEd.

I’m doing the initial edit for some of the videos I took at KaizenConf / PDC (mainly recording of sessions, the interviews will take a bit longer). I hope to manage to get a few more at TechEd. Bittorrent of the raw material to follow.

Oh, and I still don’t have a contract, so any work you feel I may be able to help out with, please shoot me an email at seb@serialseb.com. Thanks!

KaizenConf , so far, has been about…

• Self-improvement
• Corporate adoption of lean
• Talking about how learning how to be a good developer and a good chefs are one and the same thing
• Talking about the American economy
• Talking about the meaning of feature
• Talking about the interaction between France and Quebec from the 1960s
• Talking about the cost of adopting technology and its value depending on the project / team size
• Talking about the waste of adopting lean in the silo of IT
• Talking about recognizing failure and success

I probably forget many, but my brain is obscured by the level of discussion and contribution that happens here. None of the PDC / TechEd events compare to the thrill you get when surrounded by extremely opinionated and excited people. I’m in geek heaven.

I am a ToolWindow

For anyone that attended Glenn’s talk.

Alt.net OpenConf session at PDC!

For all of you alt.netters and interested parties, I just came back from the OpenConf style area next to the exhibit floor, and there’s an alt.net track being proposed.

It’s at 15:30 on Tuesday. Be there or be square! (how tacky…)

Alt.net London Beers #4 – 25th of November

If you plan to attend, please leave a comment on this entry.

I should have the time in the next few days to publish the result of the third edition of the alt.net beers. Thanks for everyone who came and made it a very successful event.

So let’s plan the date for the next one. From now on, I’ll organize the event on the last Tuesday of each month. To make sure we don’t step on each others toes, most of the UK community events now share their dates in a central location, so hopefully you won’t ever have to make a choice between all the amazing events that happen in the UK.

Following on the success of the previous events,I am happy to announce the next alt.net London Beers event. Tequilla\ has been nice enough to let us use their downstairs lounge bar, to continue with the tradition of beer-oriented conferencing.

The format is a mini openconf-style session. Here are the rules, slightly changed to learn from the previous event.

• Arrivals, discussion and socializing between 18:00 and 19:15, with one necessity: find the topic of the day and find the questions that we will try to answer.
• Between 19:15 and 19:30 we will vote on the subject we want to talk about, in two rounds, by raising hands.
• At 19:30 the big clock will start ticking for a time-boxed 60 minutes workshop on the subject. The goal is simple: can we as a group get insight and progress our understanding of the problem.
• At 20:30 the clock will ring and that will be it of the conversation. Everyone will be invited to fill-in a wiki with a one or two line answer to two questions: what did you want to get out of the session, what did you get. The goal is to capture a snapshot of the state of mind at the event, and to be able to compare those with the result of our reflections that, I’m sure, will be extensively shared on blogs, mailing lists, twitter, etc.
• Once this is all written down, everybody will be able to continue the discussion in the pub or wherever they see fit.

The location:

TEQUILA\ London Limited
82 Dean Street
London, UK
W1D 3HA

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We’re always looking for new locations and one or several sponsors. If you or your company is interested, pop me an email seb@serialseb.com.

PDC tomorrow, WeHo tonight

Anyone wanting to come for dinner / drinks in WeHo (gaying PDC up a bit), or meet from tomorrow, phone number is +44 7789 00 8282 :)