Thursday, April 26, 2007

It has to be intentional

I'm sitting here at the end of the MySQL Conference 2007 waiting for "Orcas" beta 1 to uninstall.  Yes, I know I should have used a VM but that's not the issue.  The issue is that I'm missing a great closing keynote on Yahoo Pipes while I wait for setup to "generate setup script".  Folks, it's been doing that for 30 minutes!

I'm running Vista Ultimate on this Inspiron 6000 but I know these absurdities are not limited to lower end hardware.  I've got a dual-Opteron box at my house and uncompressing zip files is a joke.  Right-clicking a 30 meg zip on my home system (SATA, 2 gig RAM, dual Opteron) often takes at least 10 minutes to tell me that the rest of the uncompress will take another 20.  Enter 7-zip stage left and the same uncompress is done in about 90 seconds.  I've code for almost 20 years and I can tell you that I would have to work very hard to write code this bad.  It has to be intentional!

45 minutes - still generating setup script.

Before I left on this trip I needed to copy the Orcas ISO over to my laptop.  Both machines are on my home network but the ISO is 5.5 gigs so I knew it would take some time.  After showing me a "Calculating time required" dialog for nearly 1 hour the dialog simply vanished.  No file copied, no error, no apology, no smoke afterward.  Copying files on Vista is simply broken, whether it's across a network or local.  On many occasions I've emptied my recycle bin (that had only one item in it) and stared at a "Preparing to recycle" message for 20 minutes.  Hello!  I'm recycling a single 2k file and you have to think about it for 20 minutes.  No wonder we're the butt of the world's joke.

55 minutes - still generating setup script.

Yes, Vista does some good things.  Yes, the things I mention here can and will be fixed.  But for now, my best advice to Vista users is to not copy files.  *grin*

1 hour - finally got the script written.  Now doing the uninstall.

Friday, April 20, 2007

Outlook 2007 patch helps sluggishness -- so what.

Microsoft has released a patch that appears to help the sluggishness people have been seeing from Outlook 2007.  I installed it but I have to ask if Outlook is really relevant any more.  We're headed to an all online world but we're not quite there yet.  Even so, with all the products available that allow syncing Google calendar to your PIM do we really need Outlook any more?  Thunderbird is so much better than Outlook at handling IMAP mail accounts it's not even funny and who out there isn't actively using or looking to use an all online contact database?

So I ask you again.  Is Outlook still relevant?

Visual Studio "Orcas" Beta 1 available

This is already making the blog rounds but the next pre-release version of the best development environment on the planet is out.  VPC images out and some ISO bits are available on MSDN.  Microsoft will also be making Express versions available in the next few days.  You can find all the links here.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Got tired of waiting...

Our next version of Connector/Net will include support for Compact Framework 2.0.  One thing that's been challenging is how to test our provider in this environment.  We have a NUnit test suite that we use with the normal provider but so far I haven't found any good way to run it under the compact framework.  I know about CFNUnitBridge but I needed something that could also work with compact framework 1.0.

So, I decided to write my own.  After two days of hacking I now have an application that does just what I want.  It loads my test suite and implements all the NUnit framework junk that I use.  I gave it a reasonable UI similar to what is seen in NUnit's GUI runner.  You can select a single test to run and have it run all the tests.  It also keeps track of exception messages and stack traces per test failure.  Here's a shot of it.  Anyone wanting to check it out can find it in the sample applications that will be included with Connector/Net 5.1.