In my present application, I need to aggregate based upon properties of a type that is created based upon one of the fields in a record. An example (because that statement was barely intelligible even to me) would be:

A database field contains EVENTNAME-PORTION-OTHERCODE. I have a class that splits out EVENTNAME (after figuring whether PORTION is before or after OTHERCODE and allowing for EVENTNAMEs that also contain dashes).

I need to do a GroupBy() based upon EVENTNAME, but LINQ (I’m using LINQ-to-Entities) does not allow me to send in a type to SQL Server for aggregating. Thus the following fails:

IEnumerable<EventAgg> agg = ctx.Events.GroupBy(e =>
  new { w.EventCode.EventName }
);

I must instead do the following:

IEnumerable<EventAgg> agg = ctx.Events.ToList().GroupBy(e =>
  new { w.EventCode.EventName }
);

N.B.: For this, I have created a partial class Event with an EventCode property. The setter for EventCode has the parsing code to pull apart the drek in the table field:

public partial class Event {
  public EventCode EventCode { get; set; }
}
 
public class EventCode {
  private string _eventCode;
  public string EventCode {
    get { return _eventCode; }
    set {
      _eventCode = value;
      ParseEventCode(); // sets other properties
    }
  }
  public string EventName { get; }
  public string Portion { get; }
  public string OtherCode { get; }
}

When changing your password at AT&T wireless, the instructions are simple enough (I’ve highlighted the interesting bits):

Not super happy about the reduced password complexity with fewer available characters, but otherwise seems pretty straightforward. Left Hand of Guidelines, meet Right Hand of Validation Error Message:

OK, so pretty much just letters, numbers, and dashes. Failing grades for both website message consistency and, more importantly, available complexity for passwords.

Onto Google. Install Picasa, start it up, and one is greeted with the following modal dialog:

Modal, for the uninitiated, means you cannot do anything else in that application until you deal with that dialog. No “File” menu, no moving the application, no nothing. My wife and I are both photographers, so we have a shared folders for photographs (so, not “My Documents” or “My Pictures”). Plus, I have images on my computer that I do not want Picasa searching. (Let your imagination wander…) So, not only do I certainly not want either of those options, there is no Cancel.

I wanted the phone for two reasons: First and foremost, I wanted an Android device. I had been using a Nokia N900, which was a great phone four its day, but I was experiencing app-envy, and the N900 was starting to feel slow, especially compared to my wife’s iPhone. (I didn’t want an iPhone for reasons I won’t detail here.) Second, I’d like to start doing mobile development, so a Google device (i.e., vanilla Android) seemed like a logical choice.

I panned the Nexus S for its lack of removable storage, though I may reconsider that in the future with cloud-based services, like Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player, since music is definitely my largest space eater.

The phone feels good in my hand, the screen is beautiful (I know others are better, but that’s not a concern right now), and operations in the phone are quite responsive. Battery life isn’t great, which is due in part to the relatively small battery and in larger part to the fact that I use the phone nearly constantly.

In the app department, my favorite is definitely Swype. I’m using it right now, and not only did it start out fast but I’m getting faster and faster with practice (and as Swype learns my habits). Others that have gotten quite a lot of use are Launcher Pro and Beyond Pod. I really like Opera Mobile for a web browser, but it has an annoying tendency to crash. Firefox has its own pluses, but has a terribly long load time.

My biggest complaint about the phone is the bottom of the screen appears to be divided between the “buttons” off the bottom of the screen and whatever is actually on the screen. This most often bites me, sadly, while writing a message. I have at times lost my message by accidentally hitting one of the keys off-screen.

I’ll have this phone at least a little while, but it has already convinced me to make my next phone an Android device. (If only I could justify the cost of a Galaxy S II…)

When Visual Studio 2010 starts up, it sometimes gives me two error messages. I did not get the opportunity to screencap them before they disappeared forever (I inadvertently selected the “don’t show me these errors again” option on the error dialogs), but they relate to the “RadLangSvc” package.

I could ignore the errors, but they would rear their ugly heads when I tried to access some aspects of SQL Server.

I get another couple of error messages—that I did not initially realize were related—when interacting with SQL Server. These I did capture. When attempting to save a new connection to SQL as part of the the Add Entity Data Model wizard, I would get the following an error complaining that Visual Studio could not find SEExtensions.xml (really Microsoft.VisualStudio.Data.Schema.SEExtensions.xml, but you get my meaning).

I would get a similar error dialog if I tried to expand an existing connection in Server Explorer. (My Program Files directory is on F:\ due to the fact that I have a small (30 GB) boot SSD. That fiasco is worthy of its own blog post, actually.)

Amazingly similar, no?

At any rate, I have so far done three separate fixes for it.

The first was to reinstall three Data Access packages from the \WCU\DAC\ directory of the Visual Studio install disk, per Mark Dellacca’s comment on Microsoft Connect. This worked for me. For a while.

Next, I homed in on the fact that the path in the error message looked wrong:

So, I searched through the registry and changed every instance of “10.0VSTSDB” to “10.0\VSTSDB.” This, too, worked; and this, too, stopped working after a while.

Finally, fed up with fixing (and researching) the same problem repeatedly, I decided to just fake it. I used junction from the incredibly useful Sysinternals set of Windows utilities to create a symlink (symbolic link—not to be confused with Shortcuts) from the wrong path to the true location.

Voilà! Now the problem stays gone.

I was able to connect to the WiFi network just fine, got an IP address, gateway, DNS, etc., but no Internet connectivity anywhere. Disconnected from WiFi in order to download some exploratory apps (notably WiFi Widget and Ping & DNS), and finally came across an article by Rudd-O: “WiFi / DHCP network not working with your Android phone?” which pointed to a bug over a year old as of this writing.

Rudd-O describes a workaround by changing the DNS server, but I don’t have that option. So, I used IP Manager to create a static profile for use here at work. I’ll have to create another profile for everywhere else when I get home.

Speaking of which, my new phone worked fine on my home WiFi network. Apparently, Android is not affected by all wireless routers, which is likely why the bug still exists.

I prefer to use the “Allow Nulls” checkbox column (the one you see in the Standard view) to the “Nullable” Yes/No column that is in the default Custom View (so I can more quickly spacebar NULL/NOT NULL). However, adding “Allow Nulls” then changing the column order will crash SQL Server Management studio 100% of the time.

As a workaround, you can remove any Custom View columns already in place that you wish to appear after the “Allow Nulls” column, then re-add them after you’ve added “Allow Nulls.”

My installation’s @@version:

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 (SP2) - 10.0.4000.0 (X64)
    Sep 16 2010 19:43:16
    Copyright (c) 1988-2008 Microsoft Corporation
    Developer Edition (64-bit) on Windows NT 6.1 <X64> (Build 7600: )

Sadly, I discovered this bug only after having spent a couple of hours putting together a database design. C’est la vie!

Fix: Update the Program Files-related items in your Registry at HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion. E.g., ProgramFilesDir “C:\Program Files” –> “F:\Program Files.” Then, voila, it works!

The aforementioned CSS and images are inside that /css directory, plus some other goodies, like example code for using each of UI’s widgets. When I want to use a jQueryUI theme in an ASP.Net, I just copy the theme-name subdirectory from /css into the App_Themes .Net solution folder. From there, it’s a simple matter of letting the web app know to use the one of the themes in Web.config:

<pages styleSheetTheme="start" />

I used StyleSheetTheme over Theme, because a) StyleSheetTheme is processed earlier in the page lifecycle–before page control properties applied–and b) since these are style-only themes (meaning no .Net-specific .skin files that contain server-processed control properties), StyleSheetTheme just makes more sense.

Now that I have a couple of Themerolled themes, how the heck do I get the right customized JavaScript file to load? Glad you (er, I) asked!

When you download a themerolled theme, the included JavaScript file is named jquery-ui-1.7.1.custom.min.js (with the appropriate version number if you are reading this a while after I write it). The first thing I do is change that “custom” into the name of the theme: jquery-ui-1.7.1.south-street.min.js — and drop it into my site’s /js directory.. Now it’s time to crack open my Master page’s code-behind:

public partial class MasterPage 
 : System.Web.UI.MasterPage {
  protected void Page_Init(object sender, EventArgs e) {
    //prefer StyleSheetTheme, but use Theme if
    //  no StyleSheetTheme is present
    string themeName = Page.StyleSheetTheme != null 
     ? Page.StyleSheetTheme 
     : Page.Theme;
 
    string uiScriptPath = string.Format(
     "~/js/jquery-ui-1.7.1.{0}.min", 
     themeName);
 
    ScriptManager1.Scripts.Add(
     new ScriptReference(uiScriptPath));
  }
}

Not using ASP.Net AJAX? Then replace that last statement with:

Page.ClientScript.RegisterClientScriptInclude(
 this.GetType(), "jqueryui", uiScriptPath);

Now, if you want to provide a way for users of your site to switch between themes, the right customized jQueryUI file gets picked up!

On a related note, the MasterPage class has no PreInit event, so we cannot globally (i.e., just one time) do the following:

//no such thing as a MasterPage.PreInit event :-(
//  so, only works on content, i.e., aspx pages
protected void Page_PreInit(object sender, EventArgs e) {
  //grab from profile or session or cookie, etc.
  Page.StyleSheetTheme = Profile.Theme;
}

So how can we easily pick up our JavaScript file across the whole site if I want users to be able to switch between themes? (Microsoft suggested doing so in Global.asax in the above linked suggestion…but how the blazes can you access the Page.(StyleSheet)Theme inside Global.asax?!)

It just so happens that Sue Googe blogged about solving that very problem and also posted her solution to CodeProject. In brief, she created a BasePage class (which inherits from Page) in the /App_Code folder that sets the theme, and then all your site pages inherit from BasePage. Less than ideal for a pre-existing site with many pages, but I have yet to find or come up with a better globally-available solution. (Thanks, Sue! ^_^)

Update:  Found a YouTube vid by Alik Levin showing it off w/ instructions:

I have gone back to Firefox a number of times, including trying out the 3.1 Beta, because I love Firefox’s many features—particularly the huge and active addons community, which has produced some items that have made web development much easier and more productive. Recently, Opera has released an alpha of their Dragonfly development tool, which gives me many of the tools that I have grown accustomed to having under Firefox.

There are some other browsers out there, too. I’ve tried out Google’s Chrome, and it’s pretty good; also, Safari (for Windows), but its feel is different enough to make me slightly uncomfortable. One fairly small thing that gets to me about Safari is that the “back” and “forward” buttons on my mouse don’t work. Also, it tends to crash on my Windows XP machine. There’s one other browser whose popularity can only be explained by people’s unwillingness or inability to try other offerings.

I preview sites that I develop in every major browser to be sure that it at least has basic functionality, with pixel-perfect-pretty on whichever one or two I am targeting for a specific site. It just so happens that Opera is the browser that runs fastest and best keeps out of my way so that I can get my own personal browsing done.

To sum up, Opera is just blazing fast. As sites get better about supporting it, the experience just gets better and better for me. It’s kind of painful to go back to Firefox after running Opera for a while, because Opera is just so much faster.