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Tomorrow is another work day, only this one is going to be a little more interesting than usual. With all the recent changes at work we have been looking for, and hiring new staff. So far, to my knowledge, we have hired the new development manager and 1 new developer.

Tomorrow the new development manager starts with us. I’ve been battling my own demons of late with work, even going as far as applying for jobs. I’m still with Stella for now, and for the most part things have been improving since the last round of departures from the team. I’m not suggesting that the departures were the cause of the improvements, just that I have been able to measure them since that time.

A recent comment from someone that knows of the new development manager indicates that we “got lucky” as he is “a god at what he does”. Obviously the proof of this is yet to be seen, but my only real hope is that he is more communicative then the last (sorry dude if you read this but we were in the dark). I believe that we may not have gotten as badly bent out of shape if more information was passing back and forth from the team and management. Time will tell if the new guy can be the information conduit that we need.

Well, somewhat crazy at least.

Tomorrow is the Gold Coast Airport Marathon, and I’m participating in the 10km run. The run starts at 9:30 am on the Gold Coast Highway in front of Australia Fair shopping centre. My aim, to beat Rhino. In truth I’ll be happy if I just finish without collapsing and having a fatal athsma attack.

Each year my work encourages us to participate. Last year we took out the largest corporate entry award. I didn’t run last year. Last year I did the 7.5Km walk with my darling daughter on my back (all 11.5 kg of her) and my wonderful fiance by my side.

I’ve done no training. None at all. Unless you consider looking at the Marathon website to be training. I have done hardly any physical activity like this in the last 3-4 years so my chances of actually completing are, in truth, pretty slim. I’d like to think that I can do it, and indeed I’ll be happy to just complete the run, even if I don’t beat Rhino.

I’ve started on a web project for a client using VS.Net 2005 and the .Net 2.0 framework.  This is the first project that I am undertaking in this framework and I am catching a few little teething issues as I go.  Some of them are obvious and some not so obvious.

The most un-obvious one that i have come accross so far was related to being able to debug the project.  I am set up working on my laptop which has both VS.Net 2003 and VS.Net 2005 installed.  I’d had the “unable to start debugging on the webserver” errors before in VS.Net 2003 and am fairly comfortable with what has to be done to correct the issue.  When I received that error this evening with VS.Net 2005 I followed the same path to try resolving it.

No good.  Doesn’t work.

After chasing links in circles through the online help I found a link to this knowledge base article that gives instructions on editing the permissions on the metabase.  Thankfully for my particular problem it was easy.  At the top of the article it says:

Note If you are using ASP.Net 2.0 and you have to grant metabase permissions to a Windows user account, run the ASP.NET IIS Registration Tool command with the -ga option instead of using the tool that is shown here.

A quick check in “Local Users  and  Groups” on my laptop showed that the windows user account  that ASP.NET runs under is ASPNET.

I ran

aspnet_regiis -ga ASPNET

and was back in business.  Debugging is now working, pitty that my code is not - but that is another tale altogether.

I’ve recently starting working in VS.NET 2005 for some development that I am doing for a client.  This is the first time that I have undertaken anything using the 2.0 Framework and the updated IDE.  Having done a fair amount of development in VS.NET 2003 I have been using nDoc quite a bit.  I was quite dismayed to learn that nDoc was not compatible with the 2.0 Framework.

A little digging lead me to Jonas Lagerblad’s post about a improvements he has made to a port of nDoc 1.3.1 for .Net 2.0.  I am about to install this as it will give me the docs that I need for now, but I would be more comfortable having a complete version.  As yet I’m not doing anything that is not covered by this version, but that may change soon as I become more comforatble in the 2.0 Framework.

I was googling a little more about this to find feedback from others that have used this version and came across a nice little post on  Fabrice’s weblog. Someone representing themselves as the “main developer of NDoc 1.3 and the titular admin of the project” indicated that a complete rewrite has been undertaken for the 2.0 Framework and that the new version is in alpha testing at the moment.  Hopefully it won’t be too long until the new version is available.

This is just a mini rant about Visual Studio .Net 2003 and it’s inability to be concise and clean when creating HTML and CSS.

It understands the clean shorthand notation as follows

padding:6px 0;

but insists on turning that into

PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 0px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 6px; PADDING-TOP: 10px;

I can see no good reason for this, and no way to stop it.  At half passed midnight on a Monday morning I’m at work finalising some content for a project that is supposed to go live in less than 24 hours and I’m fed up with the cruft that VS.Net is producing.

I’m over it!

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