Bring It On

Contrary to the usual (and dull) press release/white paper/statement mantra someone decided to spice things up with a very original and entertaining Escape From Yesterworld website.

I particularly like the tone of the desperate female voice when she says It's me or the computer :).

Humor is good and so is the design - kudos to whoever cooked this up.

The picture on the left is my new desktop wallpaper ;)

...including the feature that I find the most interesting: if you try to execute an action that requires administrator privileges you will get a login dialog and be able to temporarily become administrator just for that action (see picture below, click for full size).

Yes, I know that Linux had this basically since forever but it's really good news for everyone working with Windows. This does not yet work properly everywhere (mostly you get disabled controls on places where you should not mess things up) but it's a great sign of the things to come.

My books and games boxes on the right were broken during the day. Turns out Amazon Web Services changed some of the XML responses yesterday, specifically the ones related to pictures of items, thus breaking my code.

However, nobody put out the new specification - if you go to Amazon Web Services page you will still find the old specification from March 2005. Luckily, their blog provides links to release notes and updated programmers guide. But fear not, changes are few - I was able to fix my code in a few minutes or so based solely on an example output from a concrete query. I was too lazy to read the instructions on what changed ;)

Recent power anomalies reminded me that my backup practices still leave a lot to be desired. I have only two kinds of data worth saving and they are both kept in a MSDE and exported easily into two files. These get zipped and copied to another computer every now and then and even more rarely get burned into CD/DVD media.

Of course if you do the backup occasionally you might end up loosing whatever your occasional period was worth of data. The right thing ^TM to do is to backup nightly.

While thinking about what kind of media to use and whether I should write a utility that will handle the backup process I suddenly realized that I have bought Nero but have been using only pure burning application. Sure enough, Nero suite contains simple backup application that is nevertheless just right for my needs.

A wizard and a few minutes later, everything was set up. A trivial batch files invokes osql.exe exporting data from the database, scheduled (using XP scheduler) to run every night around 4:50. Nero BackItUp can be scheduled in the app itself to run about 5:00, will compress the data for you and what's really good will burn the files into a separate directory each time. Depending on the size of the data you might want to use small CDRW (about half the size of normal CD), regular CDRW or a DVDRW. If the data is really important and there's a lot of it, you should burn directly to DVDR and rotate a set of discs, then keep discs on separate locations.

This solution is simple and practically free (you must have bought burning software by now and most include some form of backup app) but will increase you data safety immensely.

I am working on a .NET 1.1 application that I will have to port to 2.0 beta 2 as soon as possible. Besides from Visual Studio itself, I absolutely must have Vault and Resharper installed too. Both of these tools were not "compatible" (note the quotes - of course at least standalone apps can execute side-by-side using older versions of the .NET Framework, but the add-ins can't) with .NET 2.0 beta 2 until only a few days ago.

Then all of the sudden, both release a compatible product - Vault 3.1 is final (was in beta for quite some time) while Resharper 2.0 is in very Early Access Program (read: alpha) but looks really promising.

This is great news for Virtual PC owners and MSDN subscribers. Instead of downloading Windows Server 2003, installing and configuring it followed by a complicated and sensitive installation of Team System, you can now get it all in one package, ready to run!

Unfortunately I have no use of this as I am using VMWare. Maybe I should start lobbying for VMWare images?

I just posted an article on code generation using CodeSmith. It includes two small CodeSmith scripts that allow you to wrap a legacy makefile for a C++ project into Visual Studio.NET 2003 solution/project. I also discuss advantages and disadvantages of using a (commercial) tools versus (in the next article) home-made solution.

You can check it out here.

Well, Robert asked for it ;), so here it goes:

Longhorn = LongThorn (in Microsoft's eye)

The only thing harder than developing the software is maintaining the software, especially when you need to go through any kind of upgrade/change process, be it the library you use, the IDE and/or the framework or simply an algorithm change in a single source code file. Thus if a code base you rely on is about to change, you generally want to avoid using it until the situation stabilizes.

On the other hand, by the time things are stable and working fine, your competitor has already built and shipped not one, but two versions of their product and you are late to the market, so you have to use early code in the shape of Community Technology Previews, Betas and Release Candidates. That beta 2 will break code you wrote for beta 1 is practically given, but that's the price you pay - code evolves over time and there are no guarantees during beta period. However...

Look at the following screenshot of Visual Studio 2005 beta 2 Output window (I tried compiling one of the examples built using beta 1):

In two cases, I was given exact instructions - a class has been renamed. On another I was given link to the Web page that describes what to do. On yet another the IDE took a "guess" about what I am trying to do and offered one possible alternative.

Now that's what I call attention to details and encouragement for developers to try the bits early. This way you are not afraid of investing time and effort as early as possible because you now that Microsoft will make sure that your upgrade path is as painless as possible. Developers that made this happen, I salute you.

Even though this topic has been beaten to death, I know for a fact that many inexperienced users still don't care about the security of their computers and in the end we all suffer when their machines become zombies...

Jeff asks Passwords vs. Pass Phrases and to that I say - both. You see, even though pass phrases are way better than passwords, you still have one big problem - the more pass phrases/words you have, the harder it is to memorize them and on top of that if the pass phrases are very long (which they should be) it becomes really annoying entering them all the time.

The best solution I have adopted is to use a password manager like Password Agent (see related post for more info). The manager itself is protected with a pass phrase (a very long one) but all the other passwords are automatically generated nonsense - the right mix of uppercase, lowercase letters and numbers. It is fair to say that I don't know a single password I use ;) This way you get the best of both worlds.