Blue Onion Software

I was going to give a summary of the keynote proceedings but Dan Rigsby has already posted a great summary here.

It’s clear that Microsoft has really scaled back this year’s PDC. There is not much hype (at least for a PDC), the freebies, food and swag are “minimal” and the whole thing feels like a giant corporate yawn. Part of the fun of going to these events is to pickup on the “buzz” of what others are excited about. So far it’s been missing.

That said, I went to some very good breakout sessions yesterday. This is the “other reason” to go to conferences like PDC and in this case PDC has delivered the goods. I want sessions that “hurt my brain” and make me think about how approach programming problems and two of the sessions did exactly that.

First breakout was Future Directions of C# and VB. Luca Bolognese is a disarmingly charming young Italian with a thick accent and a great sense of humor. He wowed everyone at last year’s F# presentation. I attended this session because of the speaker and he delivered the goods. The most interesting bit of news here is a new use for the “yield” keyword. Although experimental, the idea is to yield control of a thread during async operations. It’s purpose is to resolve the ”many threads not enough cores issue” for parallel processing. I’m thinking we’ll use it in our current project when it becomes available.

Next came ASP.NET Futures. There are just so many cool things that are happening in ASP.NET that one presentation really can’t cover it. My favorite, ActiveRecord Integration. And not just with Entity Framework but other data providers. It even sports a “code first” model where you write the classes and just run. The framework creates and wires up a database and you’re off and running. Very nice.

Microsoft ASP.NET 4 Core Runtime for Web Developers. Again, I’m just blown away at the amount of “new stuff” coming in ASP.NET 4. This session focused on new tooling to allow better management of server resources. Frankly, much of it was “over my head” but then that’s sort of the point. Perhaps most interesting is that there are new tools to help find the “bad application” in an app pool that is running multiple applications. If you ever have encountered this problem (I have) you’ll really appreciate this new tooling.

Manycore and the Microsoft .NET Framework 4: A Match Made in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. Usually by the end of the day I’m burned out and the last session can be a dud for that reason alone. Not this time. I suspect this will be the best breakout session (for me at least) of the conference. I can’t do any justice to it with a summary. Just spend an hour and watch it. It’s that good.

I’m new to Wix and to Windows Installers in general so some of this is likely wrong or obvious. Still, I couldn’t find much information on how to do set file permissions for a particular user account so I thought I’d share.

I needed my installer to set the folder permissions for the App_Data folder in an ASP.NET site. Typically, you need to give the “Network Services” account write permissions to this folder. I scoured the Internet for a solution and posted a question on Stack Overflow before coming up with my own solution.

<CustomAction Id="PermissionAppData" Directory="TARGETDIR" 
  ExeCommand="&quot;[SystemFolder]cacls.exe&quot; 
  &quot;[INSTALLDIR]\App_Data&quot;
  /T /E /G &quot;NT AUTHORITY\Network Service:C&quot;" Return="check" />

Add this custom action to the install sequence table and you’re golden.

There’s a util:PermissionEx custom action in Wix 3 but it seems to only work for “well known” accounts (like Administrators). Maybe there’s a better way but darn if I could come up with it. Feedback appreciated.

Programming Computers

Windows API Code Pack for Microsoft .NET Framework -  The Microsoft Windows SDK is a set of tools, code samples, documentation, compilers, headers, and libraries that developers can use to create applications that run on Microsoft Windows operating systems. The Windows SDK combines two formerly separate SDKs: the Platform SDK (PSDK) and the .NET Framework SDK. For more information on the Windows SDK, visit our MSDN Developer Center.

Episode 33: Getting the Scoop About Olso and M with Shawn Wildermuth : Deep Fried Bytes Technology Podcast - In this episode listeners will get some real world examples and use cases for using Oslo and M along with a clearer understanding about DSLs and what the future may hold.

VS Addin: Fast Add Reference Dialog - No more Coffee Break! – The buzz is that this extension rocks. Haven’t tried it myself yet but anything has to be better the current VS implementation.

CodeProject: A Project Dependency Graph Utility For Visual Studio 2008 – Here’s what looks to be another cool addin for VS 2008. The author, Marc Clifton is well regarded and has several very good article on Code Project.

TestDriven.Net 2.22 RTM - What’s New? – If I could only have one addin in Visual Studio, this would be it.

Using your Personal Computer

Use The Command Prompt To Open And Display Folder Contents In Windows Explorer – It’s as easy as “start .”

InfoQ: Opera Unite Gives the Power Back to the People - Opera Software has just released the latest version of their browser, Opera 10 Beta 1, incorporating a server technology called Opera Unite allowing users to directly connect to each other to share data and communicate without an intermediary running the necessary services for them.

Science and the Environment

Riversimple to Unveil Open Source Car in London This Month - The company plans to unveil its first car in London later this month, a small two-seater that weighs roughly 700 pounds. If you agree to lease one for 20 years (yes, 20), Riversimple will throw in the cost of fuel for the lifetime of the lease.

First floating wind turbine buoyed off Norway | Green Tech - Siemens and energy company StatoilHydro installed what they call the first large-scale floating turbine. The Hywind turbine will still have a ballast that is tied to the sea floor with cables.

CT Scan Nearly As Good As Regular Colonoscopy / Science News – Having just had one of these the CT option would have been much more pleasant.

Most Efficient And Stable Source Of Pure White Light Ever Achieved - Researchers are reporting the first use of a fundamentally new approach in the quest to snare the Holy Grail of the lighting industry: An LED (light-emitting diode) — those ultra-efficient, long-lived light sources — that emits pure white light.

Slashdot Science Story | "Definitive Evidence" For Ancient Lake On Mars - A UC Boulder research team has discovered evidence of a shoreline on Mars of a 3 billion year-old lake 80 square miles in area and 1,500 feet deep (roughly the equivalent of Lake Champlain).

On the Web

Imagine Google Living Inside Your Home - If Google were a real human being who happened to live in the same apartment as you, will that make your life any easier? Well, this video might give you a clue.

Explore Google Search – Google posts a page about it’s search features in response to the recent surge in popularity of Microsoft’s Bing search.

Lifehacker - Microsoft's Browser Comparison Chart Offends Anyone Who's Ever Used Another Browser – Insulating and irritating are the two words that come to mind when I read this chart. Microsoft FTL.

Asp.Net vs php : speed comparison - Why is the myth that php is faster than Asp.Net so prevalent? Asp.Net is faster than php, here are the facts.

Stuff I just Dig

World's Smallest VGA Display is Literally the Size of a Thumbnail | Popular Science - tiny displays to make sharp, high-end electronic viewfinders in HD video and still cameras.

Wikipedia as a Printed Book - Seriously! – This Wikipedia book has some 5,000 pages and it’s a compilation of 400+ featured articles all picked from Wikipedia. Now this is some serious bookage…

Pick of the Week

Ted Notepad - TED Notepad is a chrome-less freeware text editor. It offers 197 text-processing functions, innovative features and other advanced tools. All of them on hotkeys; all designed for quick advanced editing. This light-weight portable notepad replacement fits on any USB flash disk and loads instantly with no installation required. What I like about this editor is how darn fast it starts. Faster startup than Notepad. Lacks regular expression search/replace and syntax highlighting but the speed more than makes up for it.

Programming Computers

Unit Testing is Not a “Figure It Out Later” - If someone tells you to wait and do it later on the “next project”, it’s really not their decision.  Unit testing is for programmers and is done while you code.  It’s a decision done by the programmer because he/she cares about better code and less bugs for the good of the team, the business, and its users.

Guy Burstein : Getting Started with jQuery in Visual Studio 2008 – How to add add jQuery IntellSense in Visual Studio 2008, and how to add jQuery to a simple Web Application inside Visual Studio 2008.

Fabulous Adventures In Coding : What does the optimize switch do? - What optimizations the C# compiler performs when you specify the optimize switch. Answer, not much. The jitter does all the heavy lifting.

ASP.NET MVC and SOLID Programming Principles June 2009 : Steve Smith's Blog – Steve gave this talk for us at the Ann Arbor .NET users group. Confirms what I’ve experienced over the last year of unit testing and inversion of control.

Science and the Environment

Slashdot Hardware Story | "Colossal Magnetic Effect" Could Lead To Another Breakthrough In Storage Tech - Scientists with the Carnegie Institution for Science have discovered what could bring yet another massive advance in memory and storage.

  Solar-Powered Infinium Race Car| Popular Science - More spacecraft than automobile, Infinium is plastered in black photovoltaic strips capable of drinking sunlight at rates rivaling the solar cells found on spacecraft. A specially-designed electric motor encased in one of the car’s three wheels peaks at 98 percent efficiency. The 50 lb lithium battery is 1/3 the size of the Chevy Volt’s and supplies the car for up to 200 miles without a drop of sunny fuel.

Using your Personal Computer

Rico Mariani's Performance Tidbits : Visual Studio 2010 Performance Part 2: Text Editor - Many people have reported that editing with the new editor is slower. I’ve experienced the same thing myself so I certainly do not want to accuse people of hallucinating but I thought it might be interesting to understand why that might happen, especially since this new editor is supposed to be better than the old.

Virtual Disk - Desk Topmost - Floats the desktop on top instead of minimizing all the windows. Interesting concept.

McAfee and Symantec fined over automatic subscription renewal – I’ve always thought of these programs more as viruses because of their aggressive renewal tactics. Apparently, the New York State agrees.

Lifehacker - Lifehacker Speed Tests: Safari 4, Chrome 2, and More – Confirms what I’ve experienced. Chrome fast, Internet Explorer slow.

Lifehacker - ViGlance Converts the Vanilla Taskbar into a Windows 7-like Superbar – Works surprisingly well. Nice feel and effects. Portable app. Just download and run.

Stuff I just Dig

Toolmonger » Blog Archive » It’s Just Cool (Or Hot): H2Glow - It makes your water glow as it flows out of the tap, blue if it’s safe to touch and red if it gets too hot.

Lifehacker - DIY Magnetic Fridge Pen - MacGyver Tip -If you've got a grocery list that lives on your refrigerator but never seem to have a pen nearby, reader Jay details how he made his own magnetic Bics on the cheap and easy.

What Really Prompts The Dog's 'Guilty Look' – Surprise, the dog doesn’t feel guilty at all. It’s just us projecting. Wonder how much grant money that cost?

Search Me - The New York Times > Magazine – Really cool pictures of data centers. Sort of like center folds for geeks.

PIck of the Week

Foxit Reader - For straight up reading and printing of PDF's, Foxit is the way to go. It's fast, light and does not assimilate your system compared to the Borg like Adobe Reader. Sumatra Reader is another one to keep an eye on.