Microsoft emailed me to tell me that they're giving away a copy of OneNote to PDC attendees. I installed it to play around with it, and it seems to be quite a useful application. OneNote allows you to take free-form notes, works on TabletPC, integrates with Outlook, is shareable between team members, allows external document linking, allows you to insert video or audio, is fully configurable based on your categorization scheme, has a bunch of pre-defined templates and is searchable (and I'm sure plenty of other features that I haven't discovered yet). I don't know about you, but I have todo.txt files laying all over my hard drive. I put all of them into OneNote, and it seems to me that this makes more sense. I'll be giving OneNote a chance here, and I look forward to bundling all of my PDC notes into it to see how it will work out.

I'll be heading for Los Angeles on Monday to attend PDC '05. I'm pretty excited about going. I have at least 3 sessions I want to attend in almost every time slot. I will definitely need to find a way to filter the most important sessions to the top.

I doubt that I'll be doing any real-time blogging on the event, but I found this link that should keep you in the loop if you don't make it there.

Make the time to go and watch the video of JBuilder 2006 Virtual Peer Programming. In one word: Brilliant! In many words: Absolutely drop-dead awesome, incredible, fantastic, and many other synonyms for great.

In a nutshell, JB2006 will allow you to carry on IM conversations; share projects among multiple team members; cooperatively and synchronously view, navigate, edit and debug shared projects. The concept is great, and the implementation is even better. I can't wait to get my hands on this in a future version of Delphi! Imagine, no more requests like "This isn't working, can you stop over?". The possibilities are almost endless. To name a couple of the top of my head, interactive training/mentoring without taking a flight to the client's site and using this to implement XP anywhere.

For some background, I remember chatting with Pat Kerpan back when I was in the DSP group at Borland. The conversation revolved around this very idea, and how it could help with product development. As a matter of fact, I actually wrote Delphi and JBuilder plugins to integrate TeamSource DSP into the IDEs. Among the many features those plugins had, one of them was an integrated IM client (implemented via Jabber). It was actually quite handy to have in your IDE. At first, I wasn't sure how useful it would be, but I soon became very dependent on it. Others seemed to like it to, since it won the Best Team Development Tool award at the 2002 JavaOne conference. Since it beat out Oracle, IBM, and Rational, I was quite proud of my contribution.

Still, it's a strange feeling to view this video. It's not like I'm seeing my baby being born, but more like watching from afar as my best friend has a baby that I've always wanted. Yeah, I know. Quit with the metaphors while I'm behind.

In the spirit of the old "touch" application, which allowed you a command line interface to set the date/time stamp of the file to a specific value, I am now releasing "bump". It's a utility that allows you to set version information on files. Some may argue that this isn't a good idea, but you could make the same argument for countless other utilities, too. Besides, you can already do this by jumping through more hoops if you use a resource editor. Basically, if you know what you're doing, and you need this functionality, now you have it. In the initial release, you can get help on the syntax by just typing the command "bump". The syntax for a bump command looks like this:

bump filename.exe

This will increment the build portion of the file version information for that file by 1. If you don't have versioin information for that file, it won't work. However, you can also use this syntax to either create version information, or set existing version information to a specific value:

bump filename.exe 1.2.3.4

The version string requires all 4 values to be set (major, minor, release, and build).

I'd like to thank Colin Wilson, since I used some of his code to create this utility. I sent my changes back on to him, so hopefully, he'll find those useful.

My wishlist of features coming up for this utility (some are already started, or in various states of undone):

• Support RES files
• Allow for a "touch" option to be integrated into this utility
• Allow for batch file processing
• Allow for string values to be passed into this utility
• Finish the GUI version
• Finish the COM version
• Finish the FinalBuilder version (I am currently using the console version inside FB within a List Iterator and it works awesome!)

Leave a comment here if you find it useful.

With the loss of Project | Web Deployment Options in Delphi 2005, you will need to create your HTML files by hand to display ActiveForms. When doing this, remember that you will need to specify the GUID of the CoClass, and not the GUID of the Library.

I came across Application Debugging in a Production Environment today, and gave it a quick read. Nicely done. Many times, I am asked "Will you debug this for me?", or hear its cousin "I don't know how to debug". This tutorial should get anyone up to speed fairly quickly. It covers 3rd party tools (e.g. SysInternals) and things like WinDbg - tools that I use on a daily basis to find out what's going wrong. With any luck, I'll hear less of the afforementioned phrases, and more questions like "How can we improve the design of this application". I know, I know. Dare to dream...

I was looking to setup a blog engine here for testing, so I tried CommunityServer and dasBlog. Both were pretty easy to setup, but what was confusing was that both of these blog servers ended up taking down my IIS process when hitting certain pages. The error messages in the Event Viewer were either:

aspnet_wp.exe  (PID: 936) stopped unexpectedly.

or

Faulting application inetinfo.exe, version 5.1.2600.2180, faulting module aspnet_isapi.dll,
version 1.1.4322.2032, fault address 0x0001e214.

I figured if both of these engines were taking down IIS, it wasn't just a simple bug in the blog software, but something more sinister. Googling came up empty for me, and then I stumbled upon the EventID website. Putting in the information there eventually took me to one possible solution. Namely:

Change the application setting for the website, which you will find under IIS Console. 
There is a button Configuration. There you will find a checkbox "Cache ISAPI Application". 
For asp.net this option must be enabled, otherwise you get this error.

Following this advice, the error did indeed go away. I haven't done anything to IIS to turn that off, so that makes this whole situation even more ridiculous. It's dumb enough to ship IIS with a default setting that makes ASP.NET applciations take down IIS completely, but IMO, it's even dumber to allow IIS to abend like this when Microsoft knows that this option must be enabled to make ASP.NET applications work properly. A simple exception trap to put better information in the EventViewer, or display a message box when the situation is detected, or even use the EventViewer server communication facility to tell you why you're getting the error would all be better than the current situation.

I'm going to PDC this year, and I'm really looking forward to it. Our secretary registered me to go, and I've been receiving email blasts about the fact that I'm registered. Yesterday, I received an email telling me the scheduling tool is available. I went to login, and was greeted with an error telling me that my Passport account is not registered for PDC. I emailed support and they confirmed this to be the case. So, even though my passport account has the email address registered for PDC, they won't accept it. I now have our secreatary's passport login information so that I can use the scheduling tool. I can't believe someone decided this would be a good idea. Furthermore, when I brought it to their attention, I would have expected them to say "Geez, we messed up on that one. We should fix that." instead of "Well, there's nothing we can do." I guess all of the jokes people have been making about the uselessness of Passport over the years are more true than we know.

As an aside, I'm *supposed* to be going to PDC, but we'll see how that goes since I'm heading in for surgery to repair my completely torn ACL on Friday, 8/19. Let's just say that playing in a 3 on 3 basketball tourney is not always the smartest idea. I've played competitive sports my entire life, including at the collegiate level, and this is the biggest injury I've ever had. I guess it's time to accept that I shouldn't be doing these kinds of things anymore.

I came across this link to Microsoft Scalable Fabric from The Daily Grind. I installed it, and I love it. It's a utility to help you manage a bunch of open windows. As you drag windows towards the edge, they get smaller and smaller. You can even create groups to categorize windows based on functionality, client, etc. After the first day of using it, I really like it.