If you are encountering issues with the installer for ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update, try these suggestions:

1. Wait. This install really takes a long time.
2. Make sure you exit out of VS.
3. If you are running in a virtual machine, it might not work :( because of #wp7 related parts in the installer. If you are using Parallels with Boot Camp, like I tell everyone to do, reboot in Windows, run the install and then switch back to Windows in Parallels.

Well, this is easy. If you have v5, I can't really recommend buying v6. I have found no appreciable useful difference between v5 and v6. Perhaps it is better in expanding disk performance, which I don't use. Actually stopped using expanding disk because fixed size was way faster. Then I moved to virtual on bootcamp.

Don't get me wrong. Parallels is a great product. If you are buying it for the first time, there's no reason not to get v6, but I'm not sure I'd pay more than $10 for an upgrade and that just to get to ride the upgrade/patch train.

Looks like I will be building an app for WP7 soon, perhaps even before I start on Android. This looks like such a modern developer friendly platform. I think we will see waaaay more internal business apps being built for WP7 than iPhone. Not many business apps were written for Windows in C/C++. I think Objective C is also too low-level for business apps.

http://www.msdnevents.com/wp7devlaunch/

Another quick and dirty SQL solution.

We had a need to take an existing app and make it so we could run it for multiple owners, as though they each had their own installation, but we didn't want to make a lot of code changes and we didn't want to actually have it connect to different databases because we make schema changes as we mod the app fairly frequently.

This is what I came up with: Use "Application Name" in the connection string as a filter key and make VIEWs that filter on APP_NAME() that the application will use instead of the real table.

Rename the tables that need to vary by owner.
exec sp_rename 'mytable', 'mytable_byappname'

Add a column to record the owner.
ALTER TABLE mytable_byappname ADD appname varchar(255) DEFAULT App_Name()

Set that column to the first owner
UPDATE mytable_byappname SET appname='hafthor.com'

Add that new appname column to your primary key if you are using a natural key (so that the same natural key can be used across owners)

Add that new appname column to your indexes (before other columns) if you think you'll need it.

Add a new index on just this new appname column, so the view will be fast (as long as the number of records for any given owner doesn't represent more than say 10% of all records).

Create a view that filters by owner
CREATE VIEW [mytable] AS SELECT * FROM [mytable_byappname] WHERE appname=App_Name()

Now, just add 'Application Name=hafthor.com' or whatever to the connection string.

Consider making the Application Name really short.

CREATE TABLE audit(
  [on] datetime not null default getutcdate(),
  [by] varchar(255) not null default system_user+','+AppName(),
  was xml null,
  [is] xml null
)

CREATE TRIGGER mytable_audit ON mytable for insert, update, delete as
INSERT audit(was,[is]) values(
  (select * from deleted as [mytable] for xml auto,type),
  (select * from inserted as [mytable] for xml auto,type)
)

The main goals were to make something really quick to record who did what when across several tables, but it is presumed that this would rarely get used, so queryability wasn't paramount. It would be more likely that tables get created or altered than this stuff would be dived into.

It doesn't work on tables that have certain kinds of fields that are incompatible with FOR XML like TEXT. Had one table with that and I just converted it to nvarchar(max) rather than fight it.

Also, this frees me from having to bloat my tables with fields like CreatedDateTime. Better still, I got to drop fields like DeletedDateTime which implied they shouldn't normally be selected, so every UPDATE and SELECT had to include WHERE DeletedDateTime IS NULL. This really caused problems since I could very easily get primary key violations because a record got 'DELETED' and recreated with the same natural key. I know, I know, just another argument for "surrogate keys only".

Had this happen today.

Tried to install WordPress on a Server 2008 box and the install just hung on step 1 of 7 Installing Update for IIS 7.0 FastCGI (KB980363)

The problem is it attempts to run
net stop iisadmin

and if there are other services installed that depend on that (like smtp) it will wait indefinitely on the prompt asking if you want to stop those dependent services too.

The solution is to manually run
net stop iisadmin

then find net.exe in the task list and end process (if you are still letting the webpi install run).

You'll note that cancelling the webpi install also hangs. kill net.exe works for that too.

Best way is to net stop iisadmin yourself before running webpi.

Check this out.

• You know how on IE, you can't login to multiple GMail accounts at the same time? Well, this browser can totally do that.
• Ever wish you could consolidate the chrome and get more real estate for browsing? Well how about the menu bar, button bar and address bar all on one line?
• It doesn't have tabs, it's got super tabs. Ever try to view to pages at the same time when you are using tabs? These tabs are each in their own moveable resizable window!
• Compatibility? This browser is probably the most compatible browser you can get. And the developers are committed to it. More man hours are put toward this browser than any other.
• Like that lolcat picture? Click a button that appears over the image to save it to disk.
  
• And it has other sweet little touches, like you know how when you hit F11 on IE it leaves that stupid status bar at the bottom, leaving you to manually hide it and unhide it when you are done? This browser cleverly hides it automatically and unhides it for you when you are done with Theater mode.
• Price? It comes free with Windows XP.
• Not ready to try something new and untested? This browser has a bazillion miles on it. It's over nine years old. IE6. The best 9 year-old browser on the planet.
  

Back in February I got a 17" MacBook Pro. I'm not a big fan of Apple, but I got this because I wanted a 17" WUXGA display, like my old, and now stolen, Sony VAIO VGN-A190.

Turns out, getting a machine with a display like that is kinda hard and the Mac really wasn't that high of a premium compared to others. I also got it because I wanted one machine to rule them all... that is, I didn't want to have to lug around a Mac and a PC so I can do iPhone development and .NET development.

I had experience using virtualization software before, like VirtualPC, Virtual Server, VMWare workstation, VMWare ESX, so I kinda knew what those were like. I had heard about Fusion and Parallels, but I was used to getting my virtualization free. (I know VMWare isn't free, but those were at work.)

I found VirtualBox and considered the problem solved. I ran that, but there were several annoying things about it and I ran into bugs.

I really wasn't very happy with Mac OSX and I wasn't doing much iPhone development, so I spent a stupid amount of time and effort to set up BootCamp on my Mac so I could just run Windows 7 x64 with no brakes. Sigh. Even that had problems. I couldn't TruCrypt the Windows system partition, which was a big reason for doing that. Couldn't pair my Apple Bluetooth keyboard to it. Then, of course, the need to do iPhone development came back. I wasn't looking forward to migrating back to Outlook for email and using iTunes on Windows. The other factor was that I wanted to be able to run SharePoint 2010 on my Mac. I upgraded to 8GB then found out VirtualBox wasn't gonna use it. I tried a crazy scheme where I booted Windows and ran VirtualBox to guest Mac OSX... yeah, that's not working. Had it worked, I would have spent even more time totally paving to run Windows 7 under TruCrypt with OSX in VirtualBox. Then I saw that MacSales was running a sale on Parallels v5, researched it and concluded, eh, for $50, I'll try it. I knew I couldn't keep running VirtualBox and BootCamp was too annoying.

The Parallels Experience

I got the disc, put it in, entered in the obscenely long license key, it downloaded a newer version, installed and walked me though getting a new VM going. Very easy. I built a new VM using Windows 7 Ultimate x64. A minor hiccup was the Windows timezone was not set correctly. I think it got set to Mountain Time, not Arizona's most-awesome, immutable, daylight-consistent-time. I could have migrated my BootCamp partition (or just run it in VM) but I wanted to get back to a single partition world and, if it is going to be a Windows install I have to work in everyday, I'm going to spend the time to build it clean. This is probably my sixth Windows 7 install that I'll use everyday. It's not really that hard.

A Freeway of Delight

• Wow. Taskbar and the Dock are one. The start menu is right there! And I can Cmd+Tab across Mac and Windows apps! Double-click an Excel document from Finder and Excel launches! Launch Mac programs from Windows.
  
• Ooooh, coherence mode. My Windows apps are running in, uh, a window!
• Brilliant! I can always use Cmd+C and Cmd+V, even in Windows! It's so clumsy having to remember Cmd+C vs. Ctrl+C.
  
• Awesome. My %USER_PROFILE% folder points out to the Mac disk!
• Cruising through the configurations, man, this product is built by passionate+crazy smart people. Features like disk resizing with guest resizing... nice. The incantations and shenanigans you have to go through to do this on a "mature" product like VMware made me recommend a while ago to just make vdisks crazy big, always.... bigger than the host disk even. Now, I don't have to. Turns out, these are the crazy smart people behind Virtuozzo, the OS-layer virtualization system used by a lot of hosting providers.
  
• Heh, heh, heh. The features of Aero that I hate don't seem to work, but the ones I like do.
  

The Alley of Sorrow

• Oh, my dream of keeping all my projects on the Mac side are dashed. Even after adding \\.psf\Home and the network drive mapped to it (Z:) to my Trusted Sites list and using caspol to make .NET trust them, I still can't really work with Visual Studio projects off the mapped disk or host sites using IIS from there -- I think this is due primarily do lack of ChangeNotification support. ASP.NET really wants to know when a dll or web.config changes. Visual C++ totally refused to build even a console project there. If I had one wish for a future feature, making this work would be it.
  
• Alas, I had to kill the beauty of Cmd+Tab across Mac+Windows because I needed to be able to use the function keys in Visual Studio. Boo.
  
• Minor hiccup: I set up another virtual machine to run Windows XP and IE6, because it is the most awesome browser! Anyway, running a second VM made things a little weird. I was expecting a second start button on the Dock, but instead I had to switch between them. Not a huge deal, given I was just going to run IE6 on the other VM, but the main thing was the networking totally didn't work when the VM came up the first time. Not sure why, but I could ping the gateway, but DNS didn't seem to work.
• I like the fact that I can access the Windows disks from Finder, but, it looks like that only works when the VM is running and didn't seem to work reliably. How sweet would it be if I could work with Windows disks anytime, but that, of course, would require Parallels include a full NTFS driver.
• The audio and video playback doesn't work quite perfectly, but given I run iTunes and surf mostly on the Mac side, this doesn't present a big problem for me.
• Another minor feature request: It would be nice if it could virtualize the iEye camera a little better. Allow all VMs to see it as hardware and the first to turn it on gets exclusive use of it until they turn it off or the VM is killed.
• I had this problem on bare metal too, but Aero seems to switch on and off. Sometimes, I'll have translucent window frames, other times opaque.
• I expect that when I shift+click a Dock icon for a Windows app, that it should launch a second instance. Heck, Parallels should add that for Mac apps. Ever try to run two instance of Calculator?
  

Conclusion

Parallels isn't perfect, but it is worlds better than any other virtualization product I've ever used. Is it as good as just dual-booting? No, for audio/video, but better for most everything else.

Caveat

The big caveat to this review is that I have never used VMware Fusion. I will. VMware offers a 30-day trial version and I will try it. I almost never get trials, because I'm hardly ever ready to commit to starting the clock on them. But I will. Give me a couple of weeks and I will download and try Fusion and report back. If it turns out to be mega-awesome, at least I can get $30 back on their competitive rebate.

You should try Parallels. They offer a 14-day trial, but, honestly, 14-days is just barely enough time to really evaluate it if you started right away. They don't seem to offer a competitive upgrade.

I wanted rounded corners, but with minimal fuss. I'm using border-radius and variants (-moz, -webkit, -khtml) which is great, except for on IE, but I found a DHTML behavior (http://code.google.com/p/curved-corner/) that makes it so IE will appear to have these powers. The trouble is, I'm using SiteFinity which, like any good CMS, has these virtual folders that don't exist in IIS and url references to behaviors must be in the same directory.

To fix this, I wrote a quick HttpHandler to all me to capture requests for htc files and serve them from any path.

Here's the source:

    public class HtcAnywhereHandler : IHttpHandler
    {
        public HtcAnywhereHandler() { }
        public bool IsReusable { get { return false; } }

        public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context)
        {
            FileInfo fi = new FileInfo(context.Server.MapPath("~/htc/" + context.Request.Url.Segments[context.Request.Url.Segments.Length - 1]));

            if (fi.Exists && fi.Extension.Equals(".htc", System.StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase))
            {
                context.Response.ContentType = "text/x-component";
                context.Response.BinaryWrite(File.ReadAllBytes(fi.FullName));
            }
            else
                context.Response.StatusCode = 404;
        }
    }

So now I have an /htc directory where I really store my behavior but a request to /skljfsfcio/border-radius.htc will serve the /htc/border-radius.htc file. Yay.

To make this work, you'll need to add an entry to the httpHandlers section in the web.config

<add verb="GET" path="*.htc" validate="false" type="HtcAnywhereHandler, HtcAnywhere" />

Then you need to tell IIS to use ASP.NET for .htc files. Go to the web site properties, Home Directory tab, [configuration...], add an application extension to C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_isapi.dll for .htc, Limit to: "GET", and turn off verify that it exists.

The bummer for me was that in my html that border-radius.htc didn't end up working. Sigh.