Noise from the Basement

You’ve been staring at the SQL Server view vwCustomersGH for the past hour.  The view is part of a project you just started maintaining and like many views and stored procedures in the project you are sure it’s not being used anymore.  Because you are a conscientious and professional software developer you want to remove this view along with the others.  You don’t want to leave it lying around for the next developer to stumble over like you did, getting confused between the legit vwCustomers and  suspicious vwCustomersGH.  What does the GH stand for anyway?

Saturday Morning Productions has saved up its hard earned pennies from the proceeds of mini-compressor for its first ever Staff Christmas Party! We love parties! Well, this party will be pretty quiet since there are only 2 staff members .

In the past, we’ve worked at all sorts of firms and participated in their Christmas parties. Once, during the dot-com boom, we were both flown to Cleveland to celebrate Christmas with other employees and their spouses. We’ve also been invited snowmobiling and dinner and at the boss’s house. A more rukus one featured a fight between 2 staff members in the parking lot of a rather upscale hotel. That one was especially funny because the company had hired a band to play at the party. The band consisted of members from a local media station. The local media was ready in the parking lot to report on the brawl. Fun times.

My 5 year old daughter is endlessly planning her birthday parties, even 11 months and 30 days in advance.  Her recent planning session focused on who she should invite.  After going over her list of friends she paused and then asked us “can I invite Santa Clause to my birthday?”

I was plagued by the above error but found a workaround, at least one that worked for me.  It’s a one line change to the NUnit config file.  Note, this the actual NUnit config file that is installed in C:Program FilesNUnit and used by the NUnit GUI/Console executables.  Not the config file used by your NUnit project.  Find the following line and either remove it or change the value to zero:

You can read part one at Upgrading Mini-Compressor to .NET 4.0 Notes post.

One item that I feel has been neglected by Visual Studio is the Setup & Deployment projects.  There has been little improvements to them since Visual Studio 2003 but finally VS2010 has new “feature”:

1. A customer installs your software using the installer created using VS2008.
2. You upgrade your product to .NET 4.0 using VS2010 and create a new MSI.
3. The customer runs your new MSI to upgrade their software.  After the upgrade is complete nothing is installed at all.

I really do mean nothing, no files in the Program Files folder, no registry entries, shortcuts, etc.  The old version is gone along with the new version.  It’s a great new feature, I mean bug.  The bug is known to Microsoft and you can read more about it here.  A summarized description of the error and some workarounds: