June 2009 Blog Posts
As the 2140 does not contain a DVD drive it’s necessary to do the install off a USB key. The interblag contains a number of articles describing how to accomplish this (for instance here) however to install I found a small modification to be necessary. The USB key I was using is 4Gb which the BIOS turns out to be unable to read. During the partition of the USB key specifying SIZE=3072 enables the BIOS to read it and is sufficient to contain the Windows 7 install files.
I recently accidentally purchased a HP Mini 2140* onto which I have installed Windows 7. I’ve decided to try using it for all my primary communication; including instant messaging, Skype, email and blogging. So far its working pretty well. My only concerns at the moment are: Windows 7 seems convinced that I have a minimum 2 Live Messenger windows open at any point, one of which is my display picture. Live Writer won’t display correctly using my blog’s theme (which works fine on Vista) The carry case for the Mini...
Over the years I’ve written or maintained a number of frameworks for a variety of projects. From this I have come to the following conclusions: Unless no third party framework exists to cover your scenario you are in almost all scenarios better off using an existing framework than writing your own When building an application the most effective framework code is that used to apply existing third party frameworks to the application. This will often consist of code to make multiple frameworks play nicely together. Building a reusable framework is...
I’ve been running NDepend over some of my projects recently and have noticed a tendency for it to pick up on things in code generated by Visual Studio (which admittedly is of highly variable quality). I’m not going to write my own version of the generated code but I would like to clear out the noise. You can do so by editing the CQL and adding something like: AND !FullNameLike ".*Properties.Resources.*" This criteria excludes anything that matches the common pattern of the standard resource files produced by Visual Studio. You can...
No. Look around you. Are you working at Microsoft? If so, are you working on .NET itself? Congratulations, your assembly may actually be justified going into the GAC. If you answered No to either of these questions it’s highly unlikely that your assembly is going to be sufficiently widely used that software using it will assume its presence rather than include it with its own binaries. The benefits of installing into the GAC in the general case are relatively small and doing so incurs additional complexity. It also prevents scenarios such as allowing your application to be dropped...
Effective software development is all about leveraging the effort of others so that you can focus the majority of effort on the problem your system is to address. The following are the frameworks and tools that I choose to use (as is appropriate) when I get to decide what goes into a system. I’m not going to try to enumerate all the features, advantages and disadvantages of my choices. I’m always looking for additional or improved options for my list so make any suggestions in the comments below. Frameworks NHibernate Although I’ll acknowledge it has a...
I’ve just encountered one of those wonderful bugs caused by Windows path length limits. In this case a large part of the problem was a file with a name over 100 characters long. Most of this name duplicated information already known due to its context, such as the namespace it belonged to. When moving between environments a longer base path in the new environment resulted in an over-long file path and hence breakage in what was previously a working codebase. The base path in the new environment was not excessively long, the fault here is purely with a poorly chosen...