Here's a real treat.  I'm working on yanking some old .Net 1.1 code forward to 2.0, including a bunch of DataSets, so I was grabbing these old 1.1 DataSet XSD files, pasting into the new project directory, doing an "Add Existing" in the new project, and letting VS2005 re-generate all the "accessory" files that accompany the XSD.  This wasn't really exciting, but it was easy, and it was working really well until I got to one that just wouldn't import cleanly.
The first thing I noticed was a build error:

Custom tool error: Failed to generate code. Failed to generate code. Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. Input string was not in a correct format. Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. Input string was not in a correct format. 

I'm working with a new computer and a new setup where I'm running all development tasks in a VM. It's been pretty interesting so far - I'll blog about my experience with this setup later. Right now, though, I'm getting ready to chuck the PC out the window because I can't get VS2005 to work right.

Like many people, I know I am quick to slam products when they don't work well, but fail to give kudos when they do work well.  Today, I'm going to throw a tally on the good side of that scorecard for LogMeIn. I've used LogMeIn for around a year, now, and I've yet to have it let me down.  Not too bad, considering where some other software vendors set the bar.

I recently wrapped up development of a new application using Rocky Lhotka's CSLA Framework, and I really liked it a lot.  I think there's a fair bit of mis-information and confusion circulating about this software, so while it's all fresh in my memory, I threw together some notes on the things that worked well, and the ones that didn't work so well, too.

I was doing some development recently using Rocky Lhotka's excellent CSLA framework.  This framework lets you easily connect multiple tiers of an application with HTTP Web Services, WCF, Remoting, or Enterprise Services (you can even change transports just by changing your config files - cool!).  In my case, I was using WFC, and I had occasion to change a value in the config file.

The next thing you know, i was looking at this error box.

It's a popular misconception that if you throw some SOAP, WCF, or J2EE service layers on top of an application, it's automatically easy to integrate.  I place the blame for this misinformation squarely on PHB's and Gartner conferences, because this is simply a case of management by buzzwords.

A good friend of mine used to tell me all the time that the reason we're entertained by a dancing bear isn't that the bear dances well - it's that the bear dances at all. 

It's rare these days that a Web 2.0 startup lands a round of financing, and the funding is completely overshadowed with bad news.  Twitter isn't just shooting itself in the foot - it's mowing itself down with a chain gun.

Problem #1 is uptime, or lack thereof.  Anyone who's been on Twitter over the last month or so has experienced a *severe* up-again, down-again roller coaster ride at Twitter.  Every day, it seems like there's an outage, and some of them have lasted for hours. 

It's said that the gauge (width between tracks) of American railroads can be traced from bureaucracy to bureaucracy back to the width of Roman war chariots.  It turns out that this is just another urban legend, but if you've ever worked in an organization of any size, you've experienced the organizational inertia that makes this legend so plausible.

I ran into a great one today, for instance.  I'm doing some work in a place where I don't get to set the standards (yes, it's a government agency).  One of the real winners is a standard that mandates that all SQL queries for an application be stored in an XML file, with the queries and their corresponding parameters specified.

Here's a quick way to add a mobile interface for your web site: Wirenode.com lets you feed in your site's RSS feed or edit pages by hand to create a mobile-friendly site in just a minute or two.  Of course, I made one, too.  Give it a try!

I just got a new smartphone - a T-Mobile Wing, in fact, and I like it a lot.  I've never used Windows Mobile for any extended length of time, though, so I'm still learning a few things.  This morning, while trying to figure out what a button did, I caught myself doing something astounding, and I gained a whole new appreciation of affordances.

This phone, if you're not familiar, is a touch-screen smartphone with a slide-out keyboard, so if I'm doing anything remotely complicated, I'm usually using a stylus to point to the screen.  This is sort of interesting all by itself, because in many ways the stylus acts as an interface metaphor for a mouse, which is, in many ways, acting as an interface metaphor for a finger.  It's no wonder parts of the UI are screwed up!