|Absolute Value|

Just posted a couple of articles around Silverlight and Storyboards on my WPF blog. Have a read!

***UPDATE***
Because I jumped the gun, its actually Virgin asking you to REMOVE the proxy not add one in. I’m guessing they had a transparent proxy or this was a problem with their system and asking old NTL customers to remove a proxy in the case they had one. Oh well, all is well in Virgin land.

This is a little scary.  The screenshot below is from my friend Grant’s browser after rebooting his router.  All requests to the internet with a Virgin Media account was resulting with Virgin requesting you enter a proxy server to access the net.

I can’t believe that this is a step that Virgin would be considering.  Their “helpful” call center in India kindly had zero idea of what a proxy server was and could only offer that the computer was restarted.

The page should still be available here but below is the screenshot we recieved:

Yes, its a known issue!  I stumbled across this problem after installing LINQ a while back.  Luckily there is a fix for the problem.  Just follow the steps below in the order provided and Visual Studio will be back up and running as expected.

1. Close Down Visual Studio
2. Start Regedit
3. Open the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Packages\{A066E284–DCAB-11D2–B551–00C04F68D4DB}\SatelliteDLL
4. Edit the “Path” value and change it from:
   “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC#\VCSPackages\1033\”
   to
   “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC#\VCSPackages\”
5. Go to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE and run the following commands in order:

1. devenv /setup
2. devenv /resetuserdata
3. devenv /resetsettings CSharp

After this, restart Visual Studio.  Your intellisense and smart tags will now be working as expected.

Have fun!

Working with a few code generation toolkits recently has sparked some thoughts on how the usage of code generation impacts the client that might purchase the software.  In the specific use case of an ISV writing software and then selling the IP to a customer there is a potential for future issues if code generation was used.

Code generation is normally used to cut down on the repititious code that follows certain patterns.  Stored procedures, data access layers and in some cases CRUD style forms/webforms are perfect examples where the code required can be inferred by database structures or other methods.  There are many examples of toolkits available on the internet such as CodeSmith, LINQ to SQL and CSLA.NET.  I can’t remember the last time I’ve written database access code and I don’t see why you should be doing this work yourself.

In the case of purchased/freely available toolkits, you can, on the sale of the software, package the template you used to generate the code with the software itself.  However, in the case of code generation where the tool used is not freely available, this puts the client in a bind for future releases if the ISV is not contracted for the work or the ISV is not available to provide the neccessary resources.  One could say that the client could simply copy the patterns in the generated code but in reality this will be time consuming and wasted time and effort.

Do you think that ISV’s should bundle their code generation tools with the source code as a matter of course?  Its an interesting topic and interesting implications for both ISVs and their clients.