CodeSmith 4.0 has been officially released. The press release can be viewed here and for a more in depth look at the feature set please check out one of my previous posts on CodeSmith 4.0 Beta 2 features.

A few days ago this would have been big news for me, but as of yesterday after doing a product comparison on the NetTiers CodeSmith Template and LLBLGen Pro, we decided to go ahead and purchase LLBLGen Pro for our project's ORM needs.

I recently stumbled across a really cool site which takes full screenshots of your websites and then stores the images on its server. Its a great way to check the look and feel of your site from many different browsers and operating system combinations.

Check out my KevinCastle.Net screenshots or go to BrowserShots main page.

Here is a small sample

Remote desktop is something which I hold very dear to my heart. Its actually quite rare that Im on a computer where Im not remotely logged in to my home machine. From my perspective, why would I want to deal with moving from computer to computer when I can simply login to my desktop PC @ home and work away there. I even go so far as to remote into my desktop from my notebook when im out on the balcony.

That being said a common issue which I needed to deal with was the ability to Remote Desktop into any one of the machines behind my router. In order to do so I had to configure RDT, on each computer, to use different ports.

Check out this article on how to configure Remote Desktop for a non-standard port number.

Arron Hallberg has a really interesting post on his blog on how to add a custom task to the Team Foundation Build Process. The possibilities of this type of extensibility which most areas of TFS have out of the box are truly amazing.

I have worked with a few code generation tools in the past, Wilson ORMapper, LLBLGen Pro, and now CodeSmith and immediately I thought how great it would be to automate these code generation tools into the build process. Ill probably take a stab at this very soon.

Just a reminder of a few up-and-coming webcasts.

Visual Studio Team Foundation Server HOW TO: Plan for, Install, and Configure

Thursday, November 16, 2006 2:00 PM Central Time (US & Canada)

Visual Studio 2005 and MSDN - a procurement perspective

Thursday, October 26, 2006 2:00 PM Eastern Time (US & Canada)

Momentum Webcast: Best Practices for Source Code Management with Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server (Level 100)

Thursday, November 30, 2006 11:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)

MSDN Webcast: Introduction to Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database (Level 200)

Monday, November 20, 2006 10:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)

Visual Studio Team System Demo

Thursday, November 02, 2006 2:00 PM Central Time (US & Canada)

Visual Studio Team System Demo

Thursday, November 30, 2006 2:00 PM Central Time (US & Canada)

Chris Birmele has written a nice paper on Branching and Merging as it relates to Team Foundation Server. Check it out here.

October 24th and 25th 2006 will go down as the most annoying days that I have had (for the better part of my software development life). Anyone who has seen this CS0433 error after converting a VS2005 website to a Web Application Project will feel my pain.

Here are the following events which had occurred:

1. A VS2005 website was created and a small number of pages, controls, sitemaps, etc were added.
2. A decision in the department was made to use the VS2005 Web Application Project for .Net 2.0 websites.
3. Our group downloaded and installed the WAP Add-In (Download Here)
4. I removed all of the VSS bindings (we are still waiting to receive our full Team Foundation Server edition)
5. I followed steps to Upgrade a VS2005 Web Site Project to VS2005 Web Application Project tutorial.
6. Everything went smoothly except that it was kind of a pain to add the namespaces to all of the source files. Nonetheless, I was happy because I was out of the horrific WebSite method of developing web applications. The application built correctly and I added to a separate project in VSS.

Everything seemed to be going great until I fired up the debugger and ran my application.

This is the error which I would stare in the face for the next 8 hours

Compilation Error

Description: An error occurred during the compilation of a resource required to service this request. Please review the following specific error details and modify your source code appropriately.
Compiler Error Message: CS0433: The type 'AgencyPro.UserControl_NavTree' exists in both 'c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\root\3f88d5c8\5840425e\assembly\dl3\e396fa14\0b806043_51f8c601\AgencyPro.DLL' and 'c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\root\3f88d5c8\5840425e\App_Web_navtree.ascx.78d7338a.aftov38w.dll'

Better yet here is the actual screen so that you can have the image burned into your mind.

I did a search on Google and it turned out that tons of people had faced this similar issue. However, I was completely unable to find anything which directly gave me a fix.

Initially I thought this issue was caused for several different reasons.

1. Maybe I needed to add the default namespace to all of the files in the project? - I did this and the issue continued.
2. Maybe it was because I had the reserved directory App_Code in the project? - I removed this and the problem was still there.
3. Maybe I needed to create an entire new project and add all of the files to that again? - I did this and the issue continued.

The obvious answer was that this error was being caused by the new ASP.NET compilation methods where a dll is generated for each of the pages (so lame in my opinion), but it was all a matter of trying to figure out how to override this behavior. After searching around in the web.config documentation, I felt stumped and due to the difficulty with generating a search phase which would turn up any real answers I was lacking documentation.

At this point I was getting a little desperate and frustrated but I knew that if I created the project from scratch and added all of the files from scratch as well, then this issue would go away. In fact, the only solutions that I had found for this issue had been describing doing just this. So, I gave up, and rebuilt everything from scratch (meaning copying and pasting all of the code into brand new files) but I still had to know what the fix was.

A buddy of mine @ work (Bruce Hoang) came over to my desk and told me to check out this article at DevX. Yes! All of my questions were answered.

Solution:

1. Remove the App_Code directory from the project.
2. Change the CodeFile attribute to CodeBehind on your .aspx, .ascx, .master, etc. pages.

Main Cause

1. I followed all of the recommended steps in the VS Web Site to VS WAP conversion but now in hindsite I think that the issue was caused by the fact that my files were still ReadOnly from VSS. Therefore when I ran the conversion, it was not able to change the CodeFile attribute to the CodeBehind  attribute on all of the pages.

Above -  The Attribute that stole my time!

For an in depth article on ASP.NET 2.0 compilation and deployment issues I would recommend this as a must read.

As I mentioned in one of my previous blog posts, I have been using Windows Live Writer to add/update my blog posts. I recently ran across a new plugin called CodeHTMLer for Live Writer. Its a great way for posting formatted source code. You can read more at Wes' Puzzling's blog.

Download the plug-in. 

Current supported languages include : C#, C++, Java, JScript, VB.Net, XML, and Powershell

Sample Source CodeHTMLer

/// <summary>
/// Summary description for Main.
/// </summary>
static void Main(string[] args)
{
  // string variable
  string myString = "myString";

  /* integer 
     variable */
  int myInt = 2;
}

I recently ran across this really interesting site called Programmable Web. The site offers information on hundreds of different Web API's ranging from Flickr, to Amazon, to Google Maps. 

On a sidenote, my personal favorite Mashup website is HousingMaps. It uses the real estate listings on CraigsList and overlays it onto a GoogleMap. The end result is a really cool way for searching for overpriced housing.

"Changes are not allowed while code is running or if the option 'Break all processes when one process breaks' is disabled. The option can be enabled in Tools, Options, Debugging."

If you're like me and you've had to work with a number of different installs of VS2005 then you have probably seen prompt before. You tend to see this annoying pop-up message while you're in debugger mode and you try and modify any of the source files. All that you will need to do is to uncheck the "Enable Edit and Continue" option in Tools > Options > Debugging > Edit and Continue.

If anyone has any more info about this issue please, please leave a comment.

There is an upcoming MSDN chat for Team System. These chats provide a great platform to ask the members of VSTS and TFS all of those insightful questions (or gripes) which you have been saving up. I joined in on the chat last month and found it to be an informative experience. I recommend it to anyone using TFS or VSTS.

The chat will take place Nov 8, 2006 from 10AM - 11AM Pacific Time

MSDN Chats

Mattias Lindberg recently posted on the advantages of VSS over Team Foundation Version Control. The main idea which Mattias was trying to get across was the fact that TFS Version Control is simply not a viable solution for developers who are running a small operation (1 to 2 developers). In order to get TFS up and running, there are several costs and requirements which make VSS a more viable, affordable option (although it may not actually be a better source control system). The hardware, software/OS costs to install TFS can be tremendous so I completely understand where the author is coming from.

Personally, I view TFS as a software process solution which integrates Version Control into the engineering process. Therefore, personal projects which may not require all of the additional TFS features (process guidance, Office Integration, TFS Build, Work Items, etc.) may benefit more from the lightweight VSS alternative. Afterall, there is a large amount of ramp-up time required just to start to get familier with all of the features (and small issues) with TFS.

Yesterday I decided to sign up for a feedburner account in hopes that I could track the number of subscribers for my blog. As a result my feed URL has changed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/KevinCastleDotNet.