Wednesday 18 June 2008 at 06:46 am
I have a small .net application that I help maintain from time to time, and I needed to drag out the old debugger the other day to help someone out. For the life of me, I could not get the debugger to stop on breakpoints in that project. I tried a VS2005, 2008 and they both had the same issue. I checked the obvious 'turn on debugging' web.config setting several times. I scoured the interweb looking for help. Most of the references I found to this type of issue were times where the .pdb files were not getting recompiled with code changes, and the IDE would give you warnings to that effect. In my case everything seemed perfect. No warnings at all. It just wouldn't stop at the breakpoints. Frustrating!
I finally came across a microsoft article on debugging that pointed me in the right direction. Did you know that there's another 'turn on debugging' setting for your application? I'm not really sure what it's purpose is, but there's another checkbox that turns on asp.net debugging buried under the 'start options' dialog. Really intuitive. Here's a screenshot:
If anyone has information on what the point of that checkbox is (compared to the one that controls the setting in web.config), let me know!
Allan
Tuesday 17 June 2008 at 4:57 pm
I've delayed blogging about our upcoming move, because we wanted to make sure that we told everyone first. :)
So, I won't go on and on about it, but here's the scoop: We're moving to Pender Harbour on July 15th! We found a townhouse right on the waterfront in Pender Harbour, and fell in love with it.
We were actually just out for a nice spring drive, thinking we might find somewhere interesting to moor our boat. We certainly weren't looking to buy something. But as we often do, we stopped by a real estate place just to look at the properties in the window and get an idea of what prices are like, etc. We chatted with the realtor (John Thompson), and he said we just _had_ to come take a look at a townhouse up in Pender Harbour. We thought - what the heck, why not take a look; we wanted to drive up there anyways. Well, when we drove into the neighborhood and saw the view we knew immediately that we were in trouble. :) We were smitten, and put in an offer within a couple of days.
I've posted pictures here: http://www.allannienhuis.com/albums/farringtoncove/
Wednesday 04 June 2008 at 08:39 am
Wow, two blog posts in one day. Someone will think I don't have enough real work to do... :) My morning ritual includes a cup of coffee, and sitting down to scan the rss feeds from my favorite blogs, and read a few articles to get my brain going. I found another one worth sharing today.
Scott Hanselman is a MS employee and long-time blogger. He has a fairly well-read blog on a variety of mostly-technology topics. He also has a weekly podcast that is quite good too.
His latest series of posts is on a fun-but-educational WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) application that he wrote for his kid. He's blogging about it and sharing the code as a way to 'share the experience' of moving from a win32 frame of mind to a WPF approach. As with Rob Connery's series on building a ASP.net MVC real-world application, the result is a much more enlightening learning experience than the traditional tutorial and hello world written examples. Watching the input from the community and seeing the refactoring going on is so much more like our real-life experiences as developers. It makes the learning experience so much richer.
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/LearningWPFWithBabySmashConfigurationWithDataBinding.aspx is the second post, but he's got a link to the first one there.
Enjoy!
Wednesday 04 June 2008 at 07:12 am
Dependency injection isn't something junkies do to themselves. It's something you can do to your code. :)
There are a bunch of resources on the 'net on this design pattern and the tools that support it, so I won't try to explain it in detail. For me one of the main things is that it takes the loose coupling theme and puts it on steroids, but gives you a way to manage it. The tools provide out of the box extra functionality once you've done this just by setting some configuration options, like scope control (Singleton, anyone?), caching (thread, httpcontext, others), etc.
I don't pretend to be an expert on this by any means. But of the material I've seen so far, Rob Connery's latest screencast in the MVC Storefront series is by far the best learning tool for anyone trying to figure this out:
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MVC Storefront: Dependency Injection
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This is a long one! I sat with Jeremy Miller (of StructureMap /CodeBetter fame) for over 2 hours, talking about DI, Singletons, kids, and other things and what came of it is, in my opinion, the best webcast in this series.
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I have to agree with him on the 'best webcast' comment. It's a looong screencast, but full of geeky goodness. Well worth the time. Go get a coffee and watch it now. Right now. :)
