sixgun

With the nights starting to draw in pretty quickly, It’s getting quite dark by 7pm, I’ve been getting to the rowing club a little earlier during the week to squeeze in as much on-the-water time as possible.

Tuesday was good as I went out in a wintech single, I’ve got used to that one now as I’ve been out in it 5 or 6 times already. I got some good work in, and even managed to go past someone. We were only paddling, but still, progress is progress

Yesterday I had to use a different boat as the wintech was already in use. So, I ended up in a sims, which I was told was a much finer boat so would be more sensitive. If anything, it say much nicer on the water and I found it more stable when coming forward towards the catch. I was in a bit of a rush to get out on the water because I only had about 90 minutes of light left. So, I quickly glanced at the feet which looked okay. I didn’t look at the slides, which were much to far forward. The end effect being that I couldn’t get my legs straight in the boat, so my calf muscles are a bit tight this morning.

But, I kept the boat upright again. I think that’s now nine outings without going in, so I’m pretty pleased. It would have been nice to be able to get my legs straightened out in the sims just to so how it compares to the wintech when I start putting some power into the drive.

I used to do all my software development (amongst other things) on my trusty HP laptop. It wasn’t what you’d call a normal laptop. It had 2 gigabytes of RAM and a fast dual core Intel processor. I also had a docking station for it so I could use my lovely Hyundia W240D LCD display and my normal desktop keyboard and mouse. So for all intents and purposes it was a desktop replacement. That is, apart from the speed of the thing, especially when it came to the day-to-day use I put it to as a development machine for working on a large ASP.NET and ASP website project. It seemed to me as a long time builder of my own PCs that the bottleneck was the disk subsystem. For all the right reasons, well one, my laptop was specified with 5400 rpm hard drives. In a laptop that’s a good choice as 7200 rpm hard drives are typically much noisier.

So, I made the decision to build myself a new uber-computer. But me being me, I took it a step further. So, here I am writing this on a completely silent PC. I say silent, but in actual fact it’s not silent, I just can’t hear it. Since I already had a number of devices mounted in a home-built rack, I decided to put my new machine in there and run cabling to my office. All I needed was a DVI lead, USB and an audio extension lead. Anyway, I’ve already detailed the actual build in another web page. This post is about my epic struggle to get vista to a point where I could use it to develop software.

I have decided to gather all my solutions to various problems that stood in my way, both as a future reference and in the hope that it my spare some poor soul from the same stress that I had to go through!

Website Projects/Solutions under Visual Studio 2008

When working with a website in Visual Studio 2008, it needs to be run with elevated privileges. This can be done in a number of different ways, first a temporary solution …..

• Right-click the shortcut in the Start Menu
• Select “Run as Administrator”

A permanent solution …

• Right-click the shortcut
• Select “Properties”
• Select the “Shortcut” tab
• Click the “Advanced” button
• Tick the “Run as administrator” box
• Click the “OK” button on both dialogs

There are other ways, such as enabling the administrator account and using that. But the two above ways keep the UAC intact.

Event Logs

Vista is locked down in terms of Event Logs, but there is only a problem when trying to create a new Event Log Source. This is easily solved by manually creating the required Source(s). This is achieved by a little regedit use.

Within the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\EventLog key there should be a key for each log.

To create the log …

• Right-click the EventLog key
• Select “New” - “Key”
• Enter the name of your log
• Press <Enter>

To create the sources …

• Right-click the HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\EventLog\<log name> key
• Select “New” - “Key”
• Enter the name of the Source
• Press <Enter>

Enable ASP Error Messages

By default IIS7 doesn’t send ASP error messages to the browser. Obviously, for development purposes, these are very useful. So, to enable them …

• Load the IIS Manager
• Navigate to your website
• In the “Features View”, double-click the “ASP” icon within the “IIS” section.
• Open up the “Compilation” section
• Open up the “Debugging Properties” section
• Set the “Send Errors To Browser” property to “True”

Enable ASP Parent Path References

In order for ASP to refer to parent folders …

• Load the IIS Manager
• Navigate to your website
• In the “Features View”, double-click the “ASP” icon within the “IIS” section.
• Open up the “Behavior” section
• Set the “Enable Parent Paths” property to “True”

Enable ActiveX Controls

ActiveX controls can only be used in 32-bit mode. So, if your website makes use of them you will need to change your website to run as a 32-bit application. To do this …

• Load the IIS Manager
• Navigate to the “Application Pools” section
• Right-click your website’s application pool
• Select “Advanced Settings…”
• Open up the “General” section
• Set the “Enable 32-Bit Applications” property to “True”

Javascript error - ‘Telerik’ is undefined

This one is specific to using Telerik controls. Add the following to the web.config file in the <system.webserver> section

<add name="Telerik.Web.UI.WebResource"  path="Telerik.Web.UI.WebResource.axd" verb="*" type="Telerik.Web.UI.WebResource, Telerik.Web.UI" />

This is by now means an exhaustive list, it’s just a small collection of the things I needed to fight my way through before I could use my machine in anger as a development workstation.

I have now been out in a single scull a grand total of seven times, and I have yet to get wet. Well at least from falling in. I’ve built up enough confidence to start doing some sprints and during one on those today I managed to splash myself from my own blade. It was only a little splash, but a splash it was! I guess that means I’m trying hard, that together with the fact that after the last few outings my legs have been aching. Then again, that could just mean that I’m not very fit at the moment

It’s just a case of building up confidence and allowing myself to stretch out to be fully compressed. To aid with that I tried a little exercise today where I would hold at the catch for a split second longer than I should. In theory that should help me to get more of a feeling for balancing the boat with the blades squared and clear of the water.

Of course that’s complete guesswork, as apart from about 10 minutes whilst returning from my first solo outing, I’ve not really had any one-on-one coaching. So I’m pretty much trying to apply all the things I’ve learnt from being in a crew sculling boat to my solo sessions.

I managed to land myself today, although it wasn’t the cleanest of landings. I did keep my dryness percentage at 100!

So, it’s been a good weekend, with 3 sessions on the water. Hopefully the weather will be good enough for me to continue improving throughout the winter months.

So, I started work today ready to try and fix yesterdays lingering problems. I load up Visual Studio 2008, click on my website link in the start window, it starts to load getting as far as telling me I have 11 projects in my solution, then it exits. What ??!?!?!?

No error message, no visible crash of any kind, not even a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). So after 5 minutes of cursing and chuntering at the sheer stupidity of what just happened, I started looking for a solution. My first port of call was the Event Viewer, I found this error:-

.NET Runtime version 2.0.50727.1434 - Fatal Execution Engine Error (79FEC5F0) (80131506)

On googling it I find that many other people are having the exact same issue. What’s more there didn’t seem to be a common solution that fixed the problem for all. The first thing I checked was for the existence of any Manifest tags in any of my included csproj files, as that was suggested as a possible cause. No joy there. Next stop was Add-Ins, specifically Resharper as I’d seen that mentioned a few times in my google search results. I disabled the three add-ins I have installed and tried reloading the website solution. Eureka!! it loaded.

So, it was one of my add-ins. I re-enabled them one at a time, re-loading the website solution each time. Well, it turned out to be Resharper causing the problem after all. So, it’s now disabled. I’m very frustrated by this, as I built a new development PC with enough raw grunt to be able to run things like that. My development laptop just grinded to a halt with Resharper installed. So, I’m basically back to square one.

Anyway, I hope this helps someone out there get past a very annoying and frustrating problem. I still cannot believe the stupidity of just having a program, whether it’s visual studio or even something as simple as notepad, just silently close itself down with no indication of what went wrong. Having to look in the Event Viewer to find the solution is next to useless. I’d have though a piece of software such as Visual Studio would be more likely to throw up an error, as the people using it are by definition more technically minded.

Rant over, and back to work.

Today I went out in a single for the third time. It has been a few weeks since my last time in a single, so I was a little shaky to begin with, but within a few minutes I’d got my confidence back. Pretty soon I was moving up and down the slide quite comfortably. This time my feet were adjusted before I set off, so I had enough room at back stops, which meant I could steer much better. I consequently managed to get in a few good little spells of sculling, without having to constantly correct my course.

As there was a show going on further up river at the jet ski club I couldn’t do my usual distance up river, instead I had to turn around a few times more than usual. Which was probably a good thing, as it gave me chance to practise my boat manouvering. Also, as all the other rowing boats on the river were doing the same thing, there was a bit more “traffic” than usual. So, my steering improved a bit as a side affect of not getting in the way of the more experienced folk. At one point, after I’d just turned the boat around, I managed to push away from a few singles on their way back down. During my first outing I would rag it round in order to correct my course. Whereas, today I was learning to adjust my course gradually and not interrupt my flow too much.

I got in a few good stints where I was rowing at about 3/4 slide and putting in a reasonable amount of pressure, probably about 50-60% of max for 10 or 15 strokes. So, after a stressful week at work it was just what I needed. The weather was pretty good too, so that helped. All in all I was pretty pleased with my progress, and also with the fact that I stayed dry again