I have just been blessed with knowledge from 11 times MVP Chris Crowe. I was down in IS Land, complaining about how Visual Studio became unstable when debugging many instances of the same solution. And Chris drops the bombshell that you can launch and debug from the same instance.

Low and behold it’s true, and now I’m even considering moving more projects into the same solution, just to simplify the debug launch process…

So the steps are:

1. right-click on your Solution in the Solution Explorer
2. click of Properties

   

3. select Startup Project
4. select Multiple startup projects:
5. change the Action from None to Start or Start without debugging
6. use the Arrow to change the order of the projects starting up

   

7. press F5 to run them all…

For more information here is the MSDN link

A Code Camp for the mainland!

private string Message = "Welcome";
private string Register = ", please register today!";
private string Name = "Guest";

Console.WriteLine(String.Format("{0} {1} {2}", Message, Name, Register);

Trimble Navigation, 11 Birmingham Drive, Addington, Christchurch. Map Here  ( that is where I work )

Speakers are confirmed and sessions are close to finalised. View speaker details here.

You can view a list of sessions here

Most sessions at Boot Camp are 55 minutes in duration and will be held in one room. If we have enough speakers and topics then we have space for a 2nd stream - this is looking very much a possibility…..

The following is a tentative list of topics we would like to see covered. Once we have a final list of speakers we will be able to narrow this down a little.

• .Net Framework 3.5
• C# 3, VB 9, Dynamic Runtime & Languages
• ASP.Net, ASP.Net Futures, SilverLight
• LINQ, ADO Entities
• Windows Server 2008, IIS 7 ( I will be me presenting this session ), SQL 2008
• Architecture, Methodolgies, Patterns & Practices

If you are in Christchurch the weekend of November 3rd & 4th ( if not then why not! ) then drop in and participate ( this is a free event put on by the Christchurch .NET Users Group and a number of volunteers )

Please REGISTER your interest now - we need to have at least 130-150 people - just a hint - there are free prizes that you do not want to miss on the days.

We are talking products that can cost $1000s of dollars - and USD $ as well not that it means as much as it use to but these are YOURS to KEEP if you are the lucky winners…..

Registration NOW OPEN! Please complete the form below. We will email more details of Boot Camp as they come to hand.

As Boot Camp is a free event and our funding is limited, we ask that you only register if you are sure you are coming. If you do change your mind later and have to cancel, that’s fine too, but please let us know via email to christchurch@dot.net.nz.

Contact Details: If you have any questions, suggestions or want to offer sponsorship, please contact us at christchurch@dot.net.nz.

WE WANT YOU - Register at www.codecamp.net.nz

Stolen 100% from Chris Crowe

I was first introduced to PC-Lint at my old company, after complaining about code style and the state of the software after having warnings turned off for years to a co-worker.  I then spent a few months evaluating the software and removing bugs from our system before getting the sign off to purchase licenses for the team.

The best part was finding odd-case errors, fixing them, and later reviewing customer crashes and observing, Oh I’ve fixed that already. Nothing better to say to the management types who love to rush products out the door.

Anyway in our current C++ code base I have been removing large numbers of warnings (and solved some corner case bugs), and now have team buy-in. It’s the most beautiful thing to see the warning count drop, and read check-in comments about warning removal.

On Friday I pulled out the trusty PC-Lint again, but was not sure how best to run this beast of a tool against a Visual Studio project/solution. Enter Visual Lint, a fantastic integration piece of software.

I can see a few more purchase orders in the near future.

Shannon leant me Pikmin 2, GameCube controller, and GameCube memory card a few weeks back, and I have been playing it quite a bit. Need for Speed has taken a back seat.

It’s very fun just collecting the little Pikmin, and exploring the maps. I have just gotten to the third area, Perplexing Pool, and had been doing well at not losing (getting killed) my Pikmin, but the skinny walkways with water next to them have been slaughtering them in mass.

If you can get your hands of the required parts (game, controller, and memory card) it’s a great extension to the Wii gaming experience.

A few nights ago I had a few hours to go on a bit-torrent download, and didn’t really want to leave it uncapped over night. But at the same time didn’t want to rate limit the uploading while still downloading (there were only a few people get the file and the only seed was really slow).

In my moment of need, I found µTorrent already had the feature I wanted, but had never seen prior Alternate upload rate when not downloading. I set it to a lousy 2kb which helped me sleep better that night.

Harvey was on Newstalk ZB yesterday talking about his beer shop The Beer Emporium. I missed the interview, but they have a pod-cast archive of the last week online, but it’s only for the Auckland broadcast. They have regional broadcast till lunch time, then a unified show in the afternoon. Thus no pod-cast of Harvey. They did however have a recording that they provided to Harvey when he asked, which he sent to me.

Now via the power of the Internet I can share it with you

Points of note, Harvey gave me a box of the beer chocolates, and they are fantastic. The chocolates are made by a local company temper! temper!

I purchased the tome Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp by Peter Norvig in the weekend. For two reasons, I wanted to learn more about classic AI solutions, and I wanted to learn about LISP. Two birds with one large tome.

I’m still reading through the Introduction to LISP chapter, but finding it a great read so far. I’ve skimmed the rest of the book, and look forward to reading it in more detail.

I’ve just started to read Jomo Fisher’s blog found via Alex James’s F# post.

Normally I’d just add interesting post to my Links Feed, but I’m not actually sure who reads that, thus I want a full level, this blog rocks post.

I got up to Jomo’s Leaky Functions\Barrel of Bugs post and I thought its was great.

1. for things to be wary of
2. as great cannon fodder to my Master as to why immutable data is a good thing.

Well after my Sci-Fi zen thinking, I was still abuzz with smart computers type thinking, so I went on a Google rampage about AI/ALife and found stuff about Chatbots, which lead me onto the Loebner Prize site. Oh so my cup of tea. So I was reading the transcripts of the 2004 competition and my mind was in how-would-i-do-it heaven. I printed off some of the transcripts, and have spent the last few night (and middle of the night) and day (the ultra distractible part) thinking of how I’d do that, or this, etc.

Man I could happily spend vast quantities of time working on a chatbot system. In fact I have spent a little time, and my first thoughts have been that collection of statically typed programming languages just don’t cut the mustard. I’m wanting to codify the concepts that I’m thinking about, not think about what the name of a class should be, and other material concepts like that.

Hmmm, maybe this will be what pushes me into learning something more functional/duck-type of a language.

Anyway this post is really me trying to pull some of my excitement out of my head, and allow myself to focus at work, and at home also. In fact yesterday swimming I forgot my lap count due to thinking to much… it’s not healthy thinking, it leads to detachment….

Here’s a couple of my favorite chat snippets from 2004.

PROGRAM: Hello, my name is George and I am the human.
JUDGE: Hi George.
PROGRAM: Who’s George?
JUDGE: You are. Supposedly.

or

JUDGE: What hobbies do you enjoy?
PROGRAM: I like cinema.
JUDGE: What types of films?
PROGRAM: All.
JUDGE: What movie did you see this year that you liked?
PROGRAM: I don’t have time for movies.
JUDGE: I thought you liked cinema.
PROGRAM: I did, but then you started to say stupid things.
JUDGE: I say a lot of stupid things. What in particular was stupid?
PROGRAM: I don’t want to talk about the nature of language.
JUDGE: How about discussing the language of nature?
PROGRAM: What thing does ‘the nature’ refer to?
JUDGE: You brought it up.
PROGRAM: I did?

This hilarity is due to this bot reply’s to the last statement with no context of what has been said. So it appears ultra distractible, like me really. Hmm am I just a chatbot? Talking to myself, or maybe talking to that voice that only I’m hearing….

Well the full conversion ran last night for the other team.

Some stats:

• The current four Visual Source Safe repositories had a combined size of 11.2 GB
• The wanted code tree was 490 MB  (mix of text and binary files)
• The subversion history dump of the above code was 4.1 GB
• The subversion repository size is 620 MB
• The copy/dump/load took 12 hours to run

To merge the repositories together, I had to run a few svn commands between svnadmin loads to create/move/delete so the sub-trees were all happy.

One oddity noticed was that some files were different between the old and new repositories.  This was due to the file being altered by a developer is the US in his time zone, and then within the time-zone difference, a developer in NZ changing the files also. So even though the US change was made first, the dump program sees the NZ one having the earliest time, thus swapped the order of these edits. (Because VSS is done on local time, and the local client alter the repository, so different time-zone really should not work on the same repository)

But this will not happen now, because subversion itself does not have this problem.