Vista Blue Screen

I’ve been running Vista since it came out and I’ve only had two blue screens. Both of them have occurred when I’ve been working with files on an external USB drive and have pulled the drive out too soon.

The new shade of blue is extremely relaxing.  So relaxing I wasn’t even upset when it happened.  I would have posted what it looked like but Alt+PrntScrn doesn’t work at that point

Here are the crash details. Notice that the Problem Event Name is “Blue Screen.”  Isn’t that weird?  Shouldn’t it reference an IO issue?  The Blue Screen is the result of me pulling the drive out too fast.

Problem signature:
  Problem Event Name:    BlueScreen
  OS Version:    6.0.6000.2.0.0.256.6
  Locale ID:    1033

Additional information about the problem:
  BCCode:    ce
  BCP1:    B5870785
  BCP2:    00000008
  BCP3:    B5870785
  BCP4:    00000000
  OS Version:    6_0_6000
  Service Pack:    0_0
  Product:    256_1

First LINQ query expression

from u in Users
join b in Businesses on u.BusinessID equals b.ID
orderby b.ID
select new {u.LastName, b.BusinessName}

Wow, a basic query expression sure is easy.  And it’s very familiar if you’ve worked with any flavor if SQL. This is an incredibly simple example, but definitely cool.

The order of your clauses definitely shift and your table alias equivalents are a bit different, but barely worth mentioning.

Btw, I’m reading through the .Net Standard Query Operators spec and using LINQPad to get started learning LINQ.  I’ve never met Joseph Albahari, but he seems to be one smart guy.

Linq and The LINQPad Challenge

In my quest to learn more about Linq, C# 3.0 and .Net 3.5 I downloaded Joseph Albahari’s excellent LINQPad. If you look at one of the sections toward the bottom of the LINQPad page you’ll see The LINQPad challenge.  The basic idea is to use LINQPad exclusively for an entire week for all of your querying of SQL Server and by the end of the week you’ll be thinking in LINQ and will likely end up preferring LINQ to T-SQL.

So I’m taking up the challenge.  Version 1.0 of LINQPad has many built in samples that are taken from Joseph’s new book, so this is a good starting point.

I’ll follow up on my findings as I get more into LINQ.

CRIneta SharePoint Meeting Tonight

Eric Johnson, an enterprise architect with Rockwell Collins, is presenting on Sharepoint 2007 tonight at CRIneta.org.  Eric recently worked for two years with Microsoft Consulting and gained a lot of practical experience with MOSS.

If you are interested check out CRIneta.org and RSVP so we can order the right amount of pizza (it’s free to you by the way).

ASP.Net MVC framework

It looks like Visual Studio/ASP.Net web developers are actually going to get a Microsoft supported MVC framework finally after all of these years. I have had a good run with ASP.Net 1.1 and 2.0, but its time time for something better.  A framework without the awkwardness of ViewState and the current postback model.  We’ll also be able to more easily test our sites (in theory).

Jeffery Palermo gave a teaser report on Scott Guthrie’s presentation at ALT.Net this weekend. I hope to hear more about it soon.

Also, Phil Haack is starting at Microsoft soon to work on the MVC project.

Pagliai’s Pizza in Iowa City

We were looking for a good place to take some out of town family last night and decided on Pagliai’s Pizza.  We’ve been there quite a few times and have always enjoyed the pizza. I think it is the best thin crust in the area.

We tried Bob’s Your Uncle once, but it was pretty pricey.  It was good quality, but the higher price made it not quite worth it. Plus Pagliai’s is focused purely on pizza while Bob’s isn’t.

John’s Grocery and Fat Tire

I heard recently that Iowa was officially going to be distributing Fat Tire, 1554 and all of New Belgium’s fantastic beers.  So I stopped down at John’s Grocery in Iowa City this morning after soccer and picked up a single of Fat Tire and a single of my favorite dark beer 1554.

When I first moved to Iowa from Colorado Springs I mentioned to a good friend of mine that I hadn’t had a Fat Tire in long time and he actually mailed me one from Portland.

This is a serious beer and now Iowans don’t have to use the postal system to get it.

C# Compiler Discrepancies

Technorati Tags: C# , compiler

Eric Sink just posted an issue that seems to show an error with the C# compiler.

public bool IsOrange1()
{
}

public bool IsOrange2()
{
    while (true)
    {
    }
}

‘IsOrange1′ fails with a compilation error while ‘IsOrange2′ doesn’t even give a warning.  Neither of them have a return statement which should always gives a compiler error in a non-void function to the best of my knowledge. 

I’ll have to go back to the C# spec and see if there is any room for this compiler behavior.

IT Legacy

I bet a job posting like this makes the phone ring off the hook.