Typically speaking in the past, critics would have laughed or promptly smashed any one who supported the “evil empire” in any way, shape, or form.  However, times change and the pendulum swings.  Thanks to people like Scott GU,  there has been much change to how Microsoft is doing development and relating to developers who work on their platform.  Granted its not perfect or without incident, but there is change from within the evil empire.

On the skirts of the empires domain, there has been for some time, open source projects that really have been the cornerstone and often taken for granted to daily development.  NUnit, NDoc, NAnt, Log4Net, NHibernate, Spring.Net, just to name a few projects that have really helped .net development community in general.

However, in the last couple of years, the reach out to developers of .Net who use opensource projects, software, tools, etc, has increased, with the likes of web sites like CodePlex and Port 25, which were not only created, but constantly improved upon and continued to be improved upon. CodePlex now supports SVN as a code repository.  Not only that in the last year or so; Microsoft has actually been helping Mono (which is an open source project that helps bridge .net to work on other platforms like linux or mac) with its adoption of Sliverlight, called moonlight.  Microsoft has even released their own shared/open source licenses like Ms-PL to the community.

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3 years later and it never ceases to amaze me with how many surprises SQL Express comes with when you try to install it on a windows 2003 server for whatever reason.  So today when I was playing the role of “Server Admin” and attempting to install SQL Express, I ran into a couple of issues.

The first one was

The SQL Server System Configuration Checker cannot be executed due to WMI configuration on the machine <mymachine> Error:2147749896 (0×80041008)

So after the initial, “why, God, why?????”, I found this nugget off of google. It’s basically a command script that goes through and fixes possible errors for the WMI configuration (FIXWMI.CMD).  So after running this, I could finally get SQL Express installing, well, sort of. 

Evidently SQL Express sometimes has issues installing, when it installs itself in “stealth” mode which is how it installs when you run the “SQLEXPRE32.EXE” installer.

SQLexpress fails with the error: An installation package for the product Microsoft SQL Server Native Client cannot be found. Try the installation again using a valid copy of the installation package ‘sqlncli.msi’

So to get around this, you need to create a temp folder where ever your evil server admin heart desires. I chose to be spontaneous and created: “c:\temp\sql”.   Then you need to open a command line and change the directory to where ever you have the file “SQLEXPRES32.EXE” kept and run the following command:

$> SQLEXPRES32.EXE /x:c:\temp\sql

This will unpack everything into that folder.  You should now have a “c:\temp\sql\Setup” folder, inside of which is a file/msi called … (drum roll), “sqlncli.msi”. Double click on that msi file and run “repair”.  After that rerun the “SQLEXPRES32.EXE” and all should be golden. 

This blog was sponsored by the letter S and number 5 and does not imply warranties of any kind, use at your own risk, the same kind that you take when you open up regedit and begin mutilating various keys and values. 

PHP was one of the first languages that I learned when web design was my primary focus as a career. It seemed to be simple with plenty of examples on how to use it as well as plenty of code to grab to use on the fly in order to get the job done so that I could concentrate on what I loved the most, doing design. However along the way, I somehow got sucked into the programmer paradigm and ended up being a professional code monkey.

As such, my exposure to quite a few other languages, features, and coding paradigms have drastically increased as I’m a sucker for new technology and things of the geekified nature minus star trek, dungeons & dragons, and obsessions with super models. Now PHP seems to be more of a thorn in my side as a programmer than anything. Since I do have working knowledge of the language, especially its Object Oriented Features, magic methods, its various editors, extensions, and its limitations and quirks, I tend to get drawn into PHP projects. Working on a PHP project makes me long for a good rails or asp.net project because PHP just makes me feel dirty as a programmer.

PHP has gone the way of PERL: somewhat usable, a few good features and scripts, but stagnating with its ability to push the language itself to compete with other modern languages.

So what makes PHP so bad to work with? (more…)

Let’s get crazy for a moment and declare the iPod touch the New Breed of PDA, a personal digital assistant, not to be confused with public display of affection, even though there are few zealous Apple proponents who might blend the two for their obsession with Apple devices. The iPod touch or iTouch is essentially the iPhone, minus the phone and things like Edge, but keeping the cool touch screen and allowing for connectivity not just through iTunes, but Wi-Fi as well. With the iTouch having the strength of the new iPhone SDK, the tech savvy jailbreak applications ranging from NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) emulators to Apollo Im, and even possible enterprise support similar to its cousin the iPhone, like syncing with a Microsoft Exchange Server; what is to prevent this extendable portable music player from becoming a full blown PDA device?

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Unit Testing is a word that has inspired some or has become a bane for others. TDD, test driven development, has changed the way many people write their code, and others… not so much. Then a new catch phrase appeared on the test scene, BDD, behavior driven development. So instead of tests, you’re writing specifications of expected behaviors and observations in code, that will also hopefully create your specifications documentation for you. Also there is this notion of doing story boards as well.

Ruby has Rspec built ontop of a well oiled web application framework known as Rails. So where does leave .Net developers, especially with the Asp.Net Mvc Option/framework on the horizon? I’ve been keeping an eye on .net tools that would allow or be the Rpec for .net. Things like NSpec and NBehave popped up on Google, but there was really no documentation, read me’s or even blog postings to demonstrate how to use these libraries. However a cool mock library named Rhino mock became the rage to heal the pain of NMock (but geeze man, all that "Replay" stuff is confusing, totally ignoring the KISS principle). And MbUnit, a unit testing on crack, which built on top of other Xunit frameworks, seemed to be stagnated.

Enter 2008, the year of open source and openness for developers of .Net. MbUnit has been hard at working on Gallio, the neutral test platform, NBehave has merged with Nspec and Behave# and have an April 4th release date, but you can still play with the bits. Even Microsoft is doing the release often and having open input on the Asp.Net Mvc framework. A new cooler mock framework has come out known as Moq that uses the c# 3.0 extensions and lambdas, which Scott Hanselman gave a great overview about.

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IE 8 Beta 1 will be released after the keynote, which is still currently going on as I write this. IE has been play catching up of late, but it seems IE 8 has not only caught up, but is now pushing the envelope with user interaction with the browser, that just might make the browser loveable again.

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Technically its 4am EST, but here it’s 1am (and I pretty much live on a west coast clock, even though I was born and raised in Va), which is prime nocturnal developer time to get something productive done without interruption. So I’m sitting at the Starbucks at the Egyptian style Luxor hotel here at the 24 hour Starbucks (take notes Charlottesville, we need more 24 hour places for geeky people like me. Even Richmond had a 24 hour gym that was like almost a quarter of the price of the local gyms that close at 9 PM in Charlottesville), hearing the rambling of someone to spout something that resembles a cheesy pick up line and echoing of random strangers walking by.

Mix 2008

But lets face it, the real reason I’m here is to find out all about the new and upcoming technologies that will hopefully make life easier not just for the developer, but you; the reader, the end user, the client, the father, the single mother, the person in the daily trenches that keeps things running smooth.

Unfortunately, new technology does not always lead to make your life easier, in fact it often makes you dependent or duplicate processes that should other wise should be done once. Or maybe you are in that organization that hacks together things so you’re ending up duplicating data in multiples places, chained to your cell phone that was supposed to bring you freedom, and using the latest and greatest software that is seriously lacking in features.

However, the developers at osc (opensource connections)  strive to use technology for the benefit of our clients and end users, and find ways of using new technologies to fill in the gaps that old technologies or bad design often leaves behind.

Tomorrow Microsoft is supposed to unveil the uber secret workings of IE 8 (Internet Explorer 8), have a keynote that includes Ray Ozzie (the guy replacing bill gates at Microsoft), Scott Gutherie, and Dean Hachmovicth.

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Read Css Fury: Part 1 the star/asterisk selector

One of the "wicked cool" but rarely used parts of CSS selectors is the Adjacent/Sibling Selector . IE 6 does not support this selector. However IE 7, Firefox, and Safari browsers do support this feature. So using this selector can be a good way of using CSS styles to enhance the visual experience while degrading gracefully in older browsers (which gives the user a good reason to update to one that does support CSS 2.1, without affecting the functionality of a site).

An Adjacent Selector basically allows you to select sibling nodes within a given node of the DOM. An example of what an adjacent selector looks like is below.

//css
p + p {
    background: #ccc;
}

// html
<p>I am paragraph one with a normal background. </p>
<p>I am paragraph two with a slightly smoke gray background. </p>

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