Rory Primrose

After contracting with Telstra for almost two years, it is time to move on. I started my role as a SQL developer and then moved on to an applications development team. It has been a great experience and I have been able to work with fantastic people and continue to learn new things.

Today is my last day at Telstra. As of Monday, I will be working for Avanade. Can't wait!

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For the last couple of weeks, I have found that my June CTP install of Whidbey has been performing so badly that I just can't continue to develop with it. Memory and CPU usage was peaking, it was taking 15 seconds to take each debug step and the IDE didn't even shut down anymore, but decided instead that it would take up all the system resources and just hang around.

This has been disappointing as it was a nightmare to install the June CTP in the first place and I wasn't looking forward to the same pain with the July CTP. After another set of crashes and poor performance, I restarted the IDE. What I noticed was the Refactor addin in the splash screen. Maybe, just maybe that is the cause of all my pain.

I uninstalled Refactor and now the June CTP is sweet again. Pity I didn't think of this a couple of weeks ago.

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You may be asking where the July CTP of VSTS is? First I heard about the drop was that it was going to be coming out last week. I then heard sometime this week. Getting a little desperate for the new drop, I felt like kicking and screaming like a two year old because it hasn't been released yet. I just came across Rob Caron's post with some info about what is happening. Looks like I might be able to continue playing again soon.

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Geoff and his wife have just had another baby. Geoff put up some photos as well. Congrats to Geoff, Jordie and Issy.

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Yahoo has just bought Konfabulator. One of the interesting side-effects of this is that arguably the world’s most popular widget software is now free. The carton on their new site about their history is really cool too.

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So I'm here at work, eating my lunch, and I hear Geoff moan. He had just come across todays WTF. I was fortunate enough not to choke on my lunch, laugh and cry all at the same time. This entry goes above and beyond the call of SQL injection. This is more like SQL injection with a turbo, maybe afterburners too. The backyard mechanic on this job must have thought that armour plating wasn't important.

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A few months ago, I found an issue when working with Whidbey Beta 2. I posted some product feedback about it, but never got around to posting a follow up entry here.

The problem I encountered was when I entered comments at the end of blocks of code. At the end of End If, Select statements etc, I like to add comments to indicate what the block of code was about. It makes following code really easy, especially when there are many nested code blocks. At the end of the statement, I press Tab + ' + Space and then enter my comment.

Whidbey has support for snippets (which are really great BTW), but they were tripping me up in this case. One of the ways that snippets work is that the IDE looks at what has been typed before a tab character to see if it represents a snippet shortcut. If it finds a shortcut has been entered, it pastes in the snippet over the shortcut. 

The snippet for the If statement for example, has the short set as If. So when I create an If block and go to the end of it to enter my comment, the snippet kicks in to take my code from this


to this:

Because I want to continue with my commenting standards, I had to change the shortcut for the If statement snippet. I opened the snippet file located at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Vb\Snippets\1033\language\IfStatement.snippet and changed the value of the Shortcut element. Problem solved.

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Looks like I am having problems with the Community Server htmlscrubber (and maybe other parts of Community Server). It is really stuffing up posts that contain non-standard tags and code samples. I have disabled those Community Server modules in communityserver.config but it doesn't seem to make any difference. Has anyone got around this?

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I have been developing a feed reader application on the latest Whidbey CTP since it came out. I was developing it on Beta 2 before that, but gladly upgraded to get around really bad designer problems. While the July CTP comes out tomorrow, I wasn't going to install it because it took me a very long time getting the June CTP up and running with Yukon. It looks like my hand is forced now though because the June CTP is having serious problems. 

The June CTP is taking up 360Mb of memory and most of the CPU, and that is without really doing anything. Running the application is incredibly slow and debugging it is even worse. For example, it is taking 15 seconds to step over a Try statement (not the block, just the opening Try statement so no, it's not just my poor performing code [:)]). Also, when I try to close the IDE, it takes up the system resources and doesn't close (digging in its heels like an application that knows it's about to be upgraded).

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I have added a few more entries to the feedback centre for Whidbey.

StartupObject is wrong in project settings and causes incorrect runtime theme rendering. 

XML values in the project settings are double encoded in app.config 

VSS can't analyze database if the analyze.log file exists from a previous analyze

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