Rory Primrose

Learn from my mistakes, you don't have time to make them yourself

View project on GitHub

Do they ever look like you thought?

I was doing a few things with a local radio station when I was a teenager and I saw a comic in the broadcast room. I was displaying a child being comforted by his mother after finding out what the radio announcer looked like. I never thought about it until then, but it is interesting how we create some kind of mental picture or impression regarding what well known people look like when we have never seen them before.

I am looking forward to meeting Scott Guthrie at TechEd, but do I know what he looks like? Nope, at least not until last night. Here is a photo that I nicked from Nigel Parker’s blog.

Scott Guthrie

I didn’t really think too much about what Scott would look like, but it’s great to be able to put a face to the blog though.

Oh, and hopefully his prior experience doesn’t happen to me this week. :)

Read More

There was a VirtualPC attempt on my presentation

Late last week I putting together another VPC build for my TechEd session. I had XP installed and fully patched, a minimal VS2005 up and running and the minimum WinFX Beta 2 bits thrown in. After a couple of hours installing the software on my base VPC XP drive I had finally got the build I needed for the session.

I wanted to move the VPC machine settings file to the same location as its hard drive (I stuffed up the original directory paths). After I moved the settings file, I double clicked it to make sure it would run.

Yeah… not good. I don’t know what happened, or who to blame (other than myself), but both my VPC hard drive and the machine settings files got deleted. Poof! Gone. No more, and not the recycle bin type deleted, where talking the end of the line. The files were no longer on the drive. Stupidly, I didn’t think about getting one of those drive utilities to undelete the files. Nope, I took the easy way out and rebuilt the VPC again from my XP base drive. Two hours later, I was again ready for WCF world domination.

Read More

EDM in ADO.Net vNext

I just read this post from the ADO.Net team. Looks like there is going support for entity creation (Entity Data Model - EDM) based on a database schema in the next ADO.Net release.

There is nothing more tedious than manually building entities from a schema. Although there are lots of O/R mapping tools around to do this for you, I haven’t been happy with the freeware applications available. It is great news that this should find its way into Visual Studio and the framework.

Read More

Ever heard of Script#?

I hadn’t heard of Script#, so when I saw it being referred to in one of Nikhil Kothari’s recent posts, I got a little curious.

The Script# compiler is a C# compiler that generates JavaScript as its output instead of IL. A key goal of the compiler to produce readable JavaScript (as if you had authored it by hand), and would be comfortable deploying into real apps. Hence the translation works from C# source directly into JavaScript without an intermediate IL layer. The compiler can also produce equivalent, but much more compact script for use in release mode deployment. The compiler does not introduce any additional levels of abstraction, thereby allowing you full control of what your application does. In essense the best of script with the best of C#!

How cool is that! Check out Nikhil’s Script# project page.

Read More

Assembly loading failure logging

This is basically a reminder post, but you might find it useful.

In the development I have been doing in the last few months, I have been doing a lot of config based assembly loading. Trying to find out why an assembly doesn’t load can be very difficult though. Check out Suzanne Cook’s post about fuslogvw.exe.

Read More