Bootcamp

OSX reads time differently than Vista.

So the time is ALWAYS wrong.

Things to hate about the Mac

The mac running windows is a laugh.

Broken drivers for the printer ... the trackpad can't click and drag properly ...

There is no print screen button ...

Lobut Fun Fact

When I first came to Canada, I got thrown into ESL. They assumed because I had a funny accent and they had trouble understanding me; that I needed special treatment.

For those that don't know ... I was from England.

HATE IT

So check this out.

I want to pull items out of a sharepoint list. STANDARD. Oh wait, let's use OWSSVR.dll because it provides XML over HTTP.

Shit, how do I deserialize this? Let's look at the schema and see if we can generate proxy classes. Nope. Hmm ... okay, someone told me this is a serialize data set, let's read it in. Nope. Data Table? Nope.

Okay, okay, what is it. Let me try reading the xml. Let's use XPath to read the schema. The schema provides mapping between names that make sense to us, versus their internal names! Can't read the schema, as a matter of fact the namespace of the schema will ensure that. Hmm, okay, so I can't XPath this bitch. What can I do?

Oh, I found the schema this is, this is a serialization of a ADODB recordset. You motherfuckers. Alright, give me some sort of .NET implementation to read this. After all, this is SharePoint 2007. None.

As a matter of fact, every retard on the Internet is accessing this list through the internal name. OWS_TITLE. Good God! You're kidding me. Nope. We're all retarded, fuck mappings, who is going to read this besides other people like us.

Hey! Did you know there are ALREADY provided web services. How about we use that instead of this OWSSVR.DLL? Okay, I'll research it.

Oh wait, it's GetListItems, and it returns an XmlNode. Why not. OMG, it's full of whitespace, why are there just whitespace nodes. If I was using a XmlReader, I could turn it off. Why can I not turn it off??

Alright, fuck it, ignoring the whitespace let's just see my output. THE SAME AS THE OWSSVR?? If you're going to serialize it, at least ... have some fucking common decency for the people who need to deserialize it?

I am now going to write retarded code. Fuck you.

Fuck you SharePoint.

I FUCKING HATE HATE SHAREPOINT

Check this out.

I can't post the code, but I retrieve an SPListItemsCollection or whatever it's called.

Then I do a foreach across each item in the collection.

Shit, null reference exception. Where did it occur? It occurred during enumeration of that bitch. Weird.

Now what? Let me debug.

list.Count;

Oh yeah, everything's fine now. That makes perfect sense. What the fuck did they do? Lazy evaluate until they make a certain call?

Let's check.

Nope, reflector says that assembly is too brittle.

Fuck you Sharepoint.

Experiment!

I think I want to try to use visual studio, ONLY using my keyboard.

I bought a keyboard, it's thin, it's light and I hate taking my hands away from it. If I was using VIM, this would not even be an issue. VIM was built for this shit.

Visual Studio is not. I know what you're saying. You can do anything in VS with the keyboard. But I don't feel as though Visual Studio was BUILT for it. You know?

So what I'm going to do is do my entire quick project using ONLY my keyboard. There is a challenge though, this is the thin mac keyboard and it's missing the context menu. So I can't do any right-clicking of any sort immediately. So I'll have to find a shortcut for that. I've decided to make a blog about it. Anyways, here goes.

Part 1

Common needed shortcuts:
Solution Explorer: CTRL+W, S (makes sense)
Team Explorer: CTRL+\, E (makes less sense ... wouldn't CTRL+W, T be ideal?)
Right-click (SHIFT+F10)
Build: (SHIFT+ F6)
Build Solution: (F6)

Part 2:

(after you build with errors, the error window pops-up, you can either let it take you to the first error by using the directional keys OR:)
View Code: F7


There we go. Those are quite common.

STUPID THINGS I HATE ABOUT MAC

• Maximize button doesn't do what it intends. You also can't fucking tell when it's going to minimize/restore or turn into a mini player.
• Eject button is not a hardware option
• Scaling can only be down with the bottom right-hand corner. (well it makes a difference when you can't maximize)
• Mice, just don't work as intended
• The Finder is stupid. You can't modify the path. You can download an app to make it work like it should though.
• You don't uninstall applications normally. I'd normally say I like this but then I installed some shit that went into System Update and there's no intuitive way to get rid of it.
• iTunes sucks on any platform.
• I had to buy display port adapters to output to either VGA or HDMI
• Expose only has invocation shortcuts which interrupt other standard shortcuts

MacBook Pro

OSX feels a bit awkward to me.

I suppose 'Windows' is natural to me because it's the operating system that I grew up with. However, I certain things weird.

Minimize/Maximize/Close

It's in the top-left now. What bugs me isn't that. It's that the maximize button doesn't "maximize". It changes its behaviour on application. Sometimes it fills up the screen as expected. Other times it only goes vertical. On iTunes it turns into a mini-player.

Resizing Windows

Reminds of the systems we used at schools where we can only use the bottom corner to resize. That's not a big deal but when I want to maximize the screen and the maximize window button doesn't work. I gotta drag and resize, drag and resize.

VLC Player

VLC Player is easily the best media player on any operating system in my opinion. But on the MAC I gotta write a script to open it up multiple times. Also the player is detached from the window which bugs me. It's almost difficult to click and drag a video.

NET Data Services + Entity Framework

I ran into an instance of pure OO zen when I decided to do Table-Per-Type inheritance and have that mapped appropriately in our model. I expose this through our ADO.NET Data Services layer and bam. We would then use data template mapping in Silverlight to map it to our control ideally.

I was excited.

Then I realized that none of this is ready for real use. It's nice, but we can't realistically use any of these things.

First off, ADO.NET Data Services does not allow a direct insert of the derived entity. I have to mess around with the ResolveName and ResolveType. Frankly, I dont know what to do. From Phani, probably the most useful person on this topic indicates that this is what's used on the client side to resolve the entity. I look at the ResolveType and pass back the derived entity. I get an error. How am I supposed to debug this? I try using reflector to hunt this down. Eventually my team lead asks me if I'm going to make my sprint and I say, no. He says that if I need to use reflector to learn how to use their API. There's a problem.

Second, derived types cannot have navigation properties. Let me repeat. This is their highly touted Entity Framework. If you cannot implement this properly then don't do it at all. Or how about not allowing the modelling to take place? I don't understand how this could happen. I didn't mind the lack fo support of enums. I like that they support a lot of different types of inheritance very well but ... it seems as though they didn't go the extra mile to make do it right.

I'll go into Silverlight but I'm tired.

I decided to make it composite. This is a place where it'll be bloated. We may include this in the next sprint to make it more OO pure.

Homeopathy

Egger: Heres the history of our medicine.
"I have a sore throat."
2000 BC : "eat this root"
1200 AD : "That root is heathen, say this prayer."
1500 AD : "That prayer is superstition, drink this elixir."
1800 AD : "That elixir is snake oil, Take this pill."
1900 AD : "That pill is ineffective, Take this antibiotic."
2000 AD : "That antibiotic is artificial, Here why dont you eat this root."

Change Default Search Provider

... How does it go again?

Don't explain with maliciousness what can be equally explained with malice?

Something like that.

Try changing IE's default search provider. When IE is not your default browser. Fucking ego, eh?

Piano

I've stopped learning how to play the piano.

I don't know what to do. I don't know how to really read sheet music. It's not motivating enough to simply follow this book. The book jumps too fast. I also don't know if I'm doing things right. I learnt that I was a note or two off for a few songs. It sounded weird but I didn't know.

With no direction, I feel a little messed up.

I'm considering hiring a tutor.

I need to also play more songs that I enjoy listening to. I can usually tell if a song is off. But if it's a song I know then I'll definitely know it's screwed up. It's also more motivating to do that than to just play scales. Scales are boring.

Everyone tells me that scales are the natural beginner's way to learn how to play a piano. That that's all that I need to know. But I fucking can't force myself to just play scales. I didn't buy a piano to learn how to play scales. I wanted to play songs. I can't *just* do scales. I need to play simple songs that compliment them.

I feel as though nothing is working for me.

R.I.P. Grandma

The funeral was last week Wednesday. Well, the ceremony was. The burial was on Thursday. I never forgave my parents for not telling me that my grandfather had passed away when I was in school. They considered school to be more important but I hated them for it.

She didn't leave this Earth in peace though. I know that. She attempted to kill herself a few times in the hospital. She was also living with my aunt who hated her company. She moved back voluntarily to help pay her (my aunt) bills during her messy divorce. Not to mention my uncle (not the previous wife's husband) was spending all his time taking away her life savings before she passes away. He took her money to bail out his son.

I'm honestly a bit tired of going through this drama repeatedly in my head. I wish it was easier than this. I can remember a time when family was simple. That was before I landed in Canada. My concept of family only consisted of my mother, father, and brother.

After we emigrated from England ... my parents were too busy and my grandmother took care of me a lot. Sadly, I could never truly communicate with her. I tried my best but my Cantonese or Vietnamese was almost non-existent. I still loved my grandmother. No matter how broken my Cantonese may have seemed. She still took care of us. Cooked for us. Looked after us. She even took care of the next wave of children who came by.

As a secular humanist, I don't believe in an afterlife. I also don't believe that she's looking out for me somewhere. But I would hope to live my life in a way that would make her proud. Which means, I'm going to have to be a better son to my mother. And a better family member to look out for the rest of those kids. 

Microsoft Dynamics CRM

So I'm trying to automate the deployment process for any Microsoft Dynamics CRM customizations that we perform.

Thus far, I've learnt the following things:

1. WCF does NOT play nicely with Microsoft Dynamics CRM
   
2. Apparently people rely on an external tool to register assemblies
3. There are two types of customizations. UI changes which annoyingly enough are called 'Customizations' and the second being assemblies deployed via 2.

Now, CRM to me is like SharePoint. It's an ASP.NET site that has all these extras that are loaded onto it. Since it's closed source, you need to be able to go around it. In order to automate deployment, we require a few funny tricks to be able to do it properly.

So far, I've narrowed it down to two steps. I need to run this PluginRegistration tool with two xml files to load in the CRM Customizations. Then I need to run my own custom application to load in and publish xml customizations.

Great, so how do I deploy it?

When I wrote my custom sharepoint package I wrote my own batch files that loaded and packaged everything into a cab file. They were pretty complex ... they didn't just run makecab. They also used scripting to do some automated things as well.

For this one, I'm thinking of using the SetUp Project for Visual Studio. I haven't done much of it yet. However, there are a few things that I see that I like already. I can output the results of any project into the project and it gets packaged. I also see that screens are nicely setup for me.

What don't I like about it?  It feels eerily restrictive. Each UI form has a set number of textboxes and radiobuttons that I can set their visibility. Their forms are dictated only by properties. I can only seem to add a certain number of forms. There's no designer for them. I can only enter code through CustomActions as well. I'm unsure how to do exception handling and for a silly little MSI app. But anyways, I'll need to run executables ... I'll need to run a lot of other things ... Just to see if this all works out. I'm wondering if it'd just be better for me to write my own .exe file to execute.

BULLSHIT

So a 47-year-old ugly person sings well. So what?

So she can sing. So nobody thinks she could because she didn't dress up or look like the norm.

Why the fuck am I reading all these self-satisfying mother fuckers writing articles about how disgusting all humans are and how we shouldn't pre-judge. Everyone's talking about how she teaches us a lesson about this.

Aren't there enough examples out there in the world of people who have broken preconceptions? You ever interview a candidate? You ever meet other people? It drives me absolutely insane.

You think this shows the ugliness of human nature? Are you fucking stupid? You ever heard of the Milgram experiments? How about Guantanamo Bay? How about the Taliban? How about the financial bastards who put us in the worse economic downturn since the great depression? You ever watch A&E where they talk about serial killers?

This doesn't even make a blip on my radar.

Now let's get back to this. This is the entertainment industry. Yes, most entertainers are intended to be very attractive and have a certain look but there 

*are* examples of entertainers who don't have the "look". Macy Gray, Courtney Love, or Amy Lee. So why is this making so much news!?

This is going to be my last example of why this commotion is ridiculous. This happened before:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DelJrP3P7tA

Same fucking show as well.

New Team

I'm a little annoyed at the circumstances that have occurred in the past week.

We had our principal architect run amok. He pumped up our website application with all these technologies. I had to be the wet blanket and say that I needed reasonable timelines to ramp-up on new technologies as well as architect time to help us along the way.

The deal was that our 3 person team was to grow to 5. My team lead and I were to each get an underling and to control either the front or the back-end. My 'sub' project manager was to get into coding a little bit more.

Due to circumstances beyond our control. They inform us that we will both lose our underlings. And lastly, I just lost my team lead.

The project will still go on without my lead. But that leaves myself as the technical lead on this project. I kind of want a lead on the project ... but I'd want a lead who's better than me. Otherwise, EVERY accomplishment I make is going to be "because we picked a good lead" and not because of me.

On the other hand, I don't want to be overwhelmed with technology and other things.


Here's a personal list of all the things that I want for the next project:

• NUnit (Unit Testing)
  
• RhinoMock
• VS 2008 Database Edition
• Entity Framework (Microsoft ORM)
  
• LINQ
• C# .NET 3.5
  
• WCF
• Silverlight 2.0
• MVVM Pattern
• CruiseControl

I'm devouring a book about the entity framework. I already know NUnit (straightforward enough). I need to know what RhinoMock is all about for devising my test cases. The VS 2008 Database Edition for managing database changes. I've read a lot of tutorials about LINQ. C# .NET 3.5 is just going to be me coding in 2.0 and learning about 3.5 from sample code I read online. I did some video tutorials of WCF a year ago but I'll need to refresh myself. I need to learn Silverlight from scratch as well as the MVVM pattern.

CruiseControl is set-up for managing our builds. I think I'll need to learn about how our solution builder works.

Previous Entry

The last entry looks fucked up because the blockquote button on the blogger is finnicky. Why is it finnicky, I don't understand ... You'd think it'd act like a toggle button.

Also I added some xml for my query. They're invisible because 'compose' doesn't automatically escape them.

I went to Edit Html and it's a mess. I'm not going to bother to escape them myself. I figured Blogger would take care of this. It obviously hasn't.

Bleh.

SharePoint Sucks - How do I debug this?

This is some dummy code that I'm testing:

SPSite site = new SPSite("http://site/");

        SPWeb web = site.RootWeb;

        SPList list = web.Lists["Project Management Documents"];

        SPView view = list.Views["View Reports"];

        SPQuery query = new SPQuery(view);

        query.Query = @"

                        

                          

                        ";

        query.RowLimit = 5;

        spLit.Text = list.RenderAsHtml(query);

So I execute the code. I get a null reference error at the bottom.

I'm like, that's odd. If any of those were actually null, then I should have gotten an error. Anyways, let's see:

list - exists

query - exists

spLit - exists

Fuck you SharePoint.