I haven't finished installing everything on the new rig, and I needed to run some sql queries.  I didn't feel like installing Sql Server client tools, so I dug up QueryExpress.  I love it when there's no installer! 124K executable.  Here's a screenshot from the site, click the image or this link to go to the site to download.

Point number one.  This was the best I could do, and it's not even what I wanted:

So it's three times more than the parts I bought and not what I wanted.  Hmmm.  I didn't want an operating system, which is not a choice, not obvious anyway.  And I had to pay 99 bucks to "upgrade" to XP which is bullshit; Lenovo and all the other bastards are no different on that point.  The jump from the half gig ram to 4 gigs ram was HUGE which is ridiculous, RAM ain't that expensive. 

The biggest reason I don't do DELL? That's no fun.  As much as I like to complain, I feel really good after putting in time building a machine.  I'm not a hardware guru, so it's that sense of accomplishment that I like feel after the machine is up and running.  No adware bullshit is installed on my machine(my thinkpad had quite a bit of crapware installed which was annoying).

Continuing my day of rants...

OMG I can't even test this post in IE because scripting is disabled or some other stupid shit. Fine. I'll wrap an anchor tag around the thumbnail.

And when I say consistent, I'm referring to CONSISTENTLY SHITTY.

I realize that every other minute, IE gets blasted for being bad at this or bad at that or whatever.  But why is it, that when you do a fresh install of windows, and try to use IE, it's nothing but warning popups. phishing alerts, etc, just by surfing to naughty sites like... downloads.microsoft.com??

Do you want to add downloads.microsoft.com to your list of trusted sites?  No you piece of shit, I want to GO THERE.  In my browser.  Watch closely IE:  Open Firefox, type in a url, and .... wait for it.... wait for it.... KABLAM, the page renders without any questions. 

Today is not my day.

I got too excited about the prospect of instlling shiny 64 bit Ubuntu 8.04, with VirtualBox and/or VMWare.  My old machine was a 64 bit AMD dual core.  Pretty beefy for it's time, supplanted only by higher clock speed.  Anywho, I just realized that I only have an extra AGP card, a good one, but AGP none the less and of course my old AMD board is all about PCI-e.  The cash flow must stop until I get paid again, then what you ask? Yup, new video card!!!!  Maybe this one? GDDR4 sounds soooo naughty :)

It started off as a good idea.  I wanted to see if I could set up vmware on linux.  So I thought to myself, well  my old motherboard, cpu and ram is ready to go, why not rebuild the linux machine?  Well, it was all good until I realized that of all the power supplies I have left, and that's a total of four, are not equipped with 24-pin power connectors which my old motherboard requires.  So go to the local geek shop, and ask for a power supply, and then I saw a shiny new case.  It came with a power supply so I figured it was a good buy. 

Long boring story short, I pulled the parts out of the new rig, so they could go in the shiny new box.  Anywho, it seemed like all of the holes for the hardrives where they attach to the case were just smidge off.  So I had to adjust a bunch of parts to make them fit, also had to finally use some expansion brackets(thanks Jim!) to get the raptor to fit in the 5 1/4 inch bay since it refused to fit in the 3 1/2 incher. 

Once all of the hardware was in place, the only thing left was plugging everything in.  OK.  For some reason, I am not capable of remembering the process of plugging in components, because I always make the mistake at least once, and today was no exception.  I spent a significant amount of time(ie longer than 5 minutes) plugging everything in all at the same time.  What's the problem? Well, when I hit the power button nothing happened, not one f*cking thing.  And the fix? Unplug everything and do it the right way.  Baby steps.  Plug in ONLY the motherboard and power switch and see if that works.  Yep. Then plug in only ONE more component and make sure it still turns on.  Keep doing that until it stops working, and then you'll find out that you effed up the front panel usb connectors which apparently stops the machine from booting.   Grrrrr.  That was an unplanned amount of time to waste on a Sunday.

I figured since I wasted so much time on the shiny new box I'd take a few photos of the innards:

CPU

On the desktop, I have had nothing but great results with AMD, so  I went with the Athlon 64 X2 6400+ Windsor 3.2GHz.

Motherboard

I went for the a board that could support a lot of ram, at least 8 gigs, other cpus like the Phenom so I can upgrade when there's a compelling reason, and PCI Express 2.0 for the video.  So I went with  GIGABYTE GA-MA770-S3 AM2+/AM2 AMD 770 ATX.  Supports up to 16 gigs of ram.

RAM

I have no brand preference for ram, the board supports DDR2 1066 but some of the reviews mentioned that it's only supported when combined with the quad core Phenom, so I went with G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400).

Reinstall Everything

Originally I didn't rebuild.  I just plugged in my bomb ass Raptor with it's existing XP install and it worked.  Sort of.  It was NOT stable.  And of course 32 bit XP won't see all 4 gigs of ram.  So I went with Server 2003 RC2, turned on the Luna theme, and pimped out the look and feel with Royale Noir.

I've installed most everything, but for anyone installing Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 on Windows 2003 Server, be warned, a patch is required before you can install the service pack.  <rant>Nothing is better than waiting for f*cking ever while service pack 1 is almost completely installed just to be presented with an error message indicating that the install will now be backed out</rant>  Anyway, install the patch first before installing the service pack.

FYI: The name of my machine is Deathangel like the band who I was fortunate to meet before they played at a bar in San Luis Obispo, CA where I went to college.

If you guessed that it yields a crazy fun night ahead, equipping my new motherboard with a 3.2 GHz Athlon X2  cpu, 4 gigs of  PC6400  ram all the while, consuming 6 yummy Coronas, YOU'RE RIGHT!

So I'm pokin around Roy Osherove's tool site and took a look at the desktop gallery.  There I found this image(take note of the windows theme and not the gay elf thing that's the background image):

 

That theme is wicked awesome.  I usually end up with the Silver color scheme that ships with XP.  Now I wanted to know where that comes from, and apparently it's some never before released theme, named Royale Noir, designed for Windows Media Center.  Here's the blog post describing how it came about and how to install it.  I intalled it and LOVE IT.  Check it out:

Regular expressions are hard, for me anyway.  Roy Osherove's Regulator kicks ass when you need a quick tool for testing out regex.

I just got done playing around with Regulazy.  Wow, how have I not used that before?? Crazy cool.  If you're regex challenged like myself that thing can help you out bigtime.

On Pete's recommendation I tried Herradura today.  Whoa. Good.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it's even better than the Reserva I had a couple of weekends ago.

Ever wonder who's eating up most of the diskspace on a drive? This tool does the trick.  Check this out:

Way cool.  You can keep drilling into each slice.  Get it here.

I'm glad they've done this.  But it would be nice if they'd at least reference the one who originally came up with the code for PowerCommands.

Whoa.  Today I'm taking part in the most expensive bottle of tequila I've ever had:

Real men drink tequila:

OK.  Here's the challenge.  We have 3 physical tiers. The database tier, the middle tier, and the front end tier.  These aren't the best names for them but that's what they are.  The database and middle can talk to each other, the middle and front end can talk to each other, but the front end cannot physically touch the database.  Fine. 

So the challenge is how do you ensure a "Web 2.0" experience on the front end without touching the database?  Defining "Web 2.0" is a start.  For me, that's a responsive, intuitive interface.  No delay in ANYTHING.  Immediate results of your actions, you click save, I wanna see green or some sort of fireworks indicating success within nanoseconds of pressing the save button.

We're moving forward with a strategy of delivering some of the front end content from the middle tier.  The middle tier holds the rules, in this design anyway.  So if a user identified on the front end requests something or performs some action, the middle tier decides whether that user can do whatever they tried.  It's also a way of the middle tier deciding, based on the user in context, what that user gets to see on their front end. 

Other strategies have been suggested, like why not just have the middle tier execute sql against the database on behalf of the front end, return data and let the front end figure out business rules and what the user gets to see.  So If the front end needs data, it makes a call into the middle tier, and says "Get me stuff".  The middle tier says, "OK, lemme ask the database for it and i'll get back to ya in a quick moment".  Fair enough.  But then you get into the details of how that data is marshalled back and forth. DataSets? How do you fill datasets? This starts getting into the realm of writing your own sql, which is NOT what I'm in the business of doing.  There are tools that do that better than me, and I plan on utilizing those tools.

In the spirit of keeping an open mind, I'm gonna start from the basics, straight up sql from the middle tier to the database, and plain ol web service calls from the front end to the middle tier.  I'll post that guy in a few.

As I'm adding tests to HyperActive, I've noticed something.  I'm falling asleep! OMG this is boring, and a good reason why not to do TAD(Test After Development).  It's a snoozer :( Live and learn.

Here's another test:

[Test]
public void VerifyInheritsFrom()
{
  NamespaceDeclaration nsdecl =
    new NamespaceDeclaration("TestContainer");

  nsdecl.AddClass("Manager")
    .InheritsFrom(nsdecl.AddClass("Employee"));

  using (DomTester dom = new DomTester(nsdecl))
  {
    Assert.IsTrue(dom.Type("Manager").InheritsFrom("Employee"));
  }
}


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That snippet tests the compiled version of the following source that was generated:

I've mentioned testing generated code before.  I'm getting ready to release the last visual studio 2005 version of HyperActive as of this Friday and thought it would be good to finally get a handle on the testing.  Most of the initial testing, I'm embarassed to say was visual, or testing the whole shebang against a database, see what broke, fix it, run the whole thing again, etc.  it was sooper lame.  So I wanted a way to not only test that I've generated the correct source code, I wanted to see if the source actually compiles; and furthermore I wanted to inspect the resulting assembly to determine if what I generated is actually in there.  So here's what my test looks like:

[Test]
public void VerifyAddAttribute()
{
  NamespaceDeclaration nsdecl =
    new NamespaceDeclaration("Test");

  nsdecl.AddClass("SuperAttribute")
    .InheritsFrom("System.Attribute");

  nsdecl.AddClass("Customer")
    .AddAttribute(new CodeDomTypeReference("Test.SuperAttribute"));

  using (DomTester dom = new DomTester(nsdecl))
  {
    Assert.IsTrue(dom.Type("Customer")
      .HasAttribute("Test.SuperAttribute"));
  }
}


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If can print out the source code to the output window, it looks like this:

It's cool because it loads the assembly in it's own AppDomain.  What wasn't cool was when I was defining the attribute in the example above in the same class as the unit test.  When I ran the test it kept failing cuz it couldn't find something.  Yep, it couldn't find that stupid attribute I created in my test class.  So to fix the problem I just created the attribute in the same namespace that i need to test and KABLAM, now it knows where that attribute is located and passes.

Sometimes it's nice to have useful error messages, expecially in your own code.  I just came across this in my code:

Geez, here's one I've apparently assumed is just part of the operating system, or at least part of the .NET redist, Reflector. 

Using TestDriven.NET's Go To Reflector just now I was prompted with a "Where's Reflector?" prompt.  I was like, huh?? OH Crap, I totally haven't installed that yet.  Anyway, it's installed now.

FileZilla is a great lightweight ftp client.  Notepad++ is my notepad.exe replacement.  It's notepad.exe on steroids.

This is one of my most frequently used keystrokes for CodeRush.  It cleans up your using references, by removing all using statements that are not needed for whatever types currently exist in the class file you are viewing.

As I reach for stuff that's not on this machine I think, DOH, another must have tool.  Snippet Compiler is wicked cool, just sits in the systray waiting for you to play with it.  Get it here.

I'm getting my desktop setup so I can develop properly and I've just determined that I'm heavily dependent on alot of tools.  Here is a rundown of tools that I abuse.

CodeRush and Refactor!Pro

This is a no-brainer.  If you're not using CodeRush and/or Refactor! Pro or Resharper or any of the othe productivity tools, you are wasting valuable time typing monkey code when these tools will do it faster and better than you.  There's a bit of a learning curve with any of these tools, you just gotta get used to one and put it in your bag of tricks.

TestDriven.NET(et al)

Another no-brainer.  Go to the site and download it.  Then wire up CTRL+Shift+T to the TestDriven.NET.Client, CTRL+Shift+F5 to the TestDriven.NET.Debugger, and lastly CTRL+Shift+N to TestDriven.NET.Coverage.

NUnit

Make sure you shit works before you hit the web page.  Write a test first if you can.  Write a test after as a last resort.  Just write a test and verify that shit works.  Just do it and stop whining.  Doesn't have to be NUnit, MbUnit, xUnit.net, any framework will do, and TestDriven.NET will run them all.  Do it.

Dark Theme with Consolas Font

Easy on the eyes, great font.  Download the font from Microsoft here.  I started with Brad Wilson's dark theme and have been happy with it.  The font size is OK for my flat screen, but too big to run on the smaller laptop screen.

Visual Studio Command Prompt Here

Dude, just gimme the command prompt RIGHT HERE.  I first saw these on Hanselman's site, and Travis Illig has a good roundup and download of all of the prompts including his visual studio command prompt here for 2008.  You can download them here if his site's not being cooperative.

Cool Commands

Must have tools, adds some context helpers to the visual studio project menus.  Gaston Milano is the smarty behind this one.  Brian Schroer has a good description of the tools included in cool commands.  You can download cool commands from the source or from my server.

Clean Sources

This one cleans up obj and bin folder junk and .suo files and any other files that are mostly the product of using visual studio.  Omar Shahine wrote the original, Jeff Atwood added to it, it's the one I use.  Actually that's not entirely true.  Yesterday I downloaded the one from Jeff's site and tried installing, the frickin thing said I needed .NET 1.1...??? What the - sure as shizzel, I had every other version but that one. 

Well, no way was I installing .NET 1.1 just for clean sources.  Luckily Jeff posted the source on his blog, I downloaded and rebuilt against Visual Studio 2008.  Here's the setup and here's the VS2008 solution.  Funnily enough I used clean sources to zip clean sources...isn't that a circular reference? :)

Ghost Doc(New Arrival, Thanks Bill!)

I had my doubts but Ghost Doc  gives a great start on good documentation.  The comments are a start, most of them not the end all comments, developers still need to add useful information to the comments.

7 Zip(Also a New Arrival, thanks Hussain!)

I just can't use the lame zippy tool that ships with XP... 7-Zip, free and easy, just like me.  ???

So my Thinkpad T60p is not a happy camper today.  It's been getting unusually hot although the fans seem to working as they should.  I did buy an extended warranty and I'm not worried.  In the meantime the support gentleman indicated that I should not use the lappie until someone from the safety team contacts me...  I don't know what that means but I backed up my shit from lappie toot sweet and headed down to the dusty desktop machine.

That machine hasn't really been left out to rot.  It hosts my personal svn repository and also a dev sql server.  Both of which have been hosted on the same free vmware server instance since the 2006 timeframe. 

Anywho, as I'm doing stuff I'm noticing how much faster my desktop machine is over the lappie.  It has 74 gig Raptor as the boot drive, and man that thing is smokin!  The machine is running an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200 2.2GHz(socket 939 flavor) and has only 2 gigs of ram, 768 megs of which are dedicated to the vmware instance.

It's a great machine, but now since everything is sooooooo cheap I want more toys for desktop.