Jeremy Simmons: The Blog

I went to the MSDN Unleashed: The Best of PDC event at ConfigureSoft. David Yack and Rob Bagby were presenting on the topics originally presented at PDC

• What to expect with C# 4.0
• It's really just the distilled content that has been available since October. You could hear it straight from Anders himself. Dave did an awesome job though.
  
• The Silverlight Control Toolkit
  
• Microsoft is releasing code out of band for Silverlight for those who wish to live on the edge
  
• REST with WCF and the WCF REST Starter Kit
• Creating a REST-ful web service is dead simple using WCF. Add to it the starter kit and you get all sorts of free goodies out of the box to making even more dead simple. Once again, "It Just Works"
  
• Overview of Windows Azure (“The Cloud OS”) and Azure Services
• Azure = a cloud operating system + a set of developer services. Somethings you just gotta have a platform to write scalable apps on without worrying about the infrastructure.
  

We got some awesome "Rest in WCF" t-shirts with a photo of Rob's dog on it. I'm going to have to hang it on the wall so everyone will ask why I have a sleeping dog on a shirt. It's all because of Representational State Transfer of course!

Rob had some very funny lines I will quote often in the future as well.

Like the guy on the Ginsu knife commercial says, But that's not all you get

...that's a potentially marriage limiting maneuver...

Thanks for the great presentation gentlemen. Thanks to Microsoft for continuing these events. They're a great way to digest the information.

I recently did a MSBuild script for a colleage to zip some files and move them to a file server and email them to two recipients.
The script should only run on a specific day (Sunday), and fail with an error if it is not that day.
Using the MSBuild Community Tasks Project from Tigris makes this a trivial exercise.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Project xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003" DefaultTargets="Build">

  <Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\MSBuildCommunityTasks\MSBuild.Community.Tasks.Targets"/>

  <Target Name="Build">
    <Time>
      <Output TaskParameter="DayOfWeek" PropertyName="DayOfWeek" />
    </Time>
    <Message Text="It's Monday!" Condition=" '$(DayOfWeek)'=='Monday' "/>
    <Message Text="It's Tuesday!" Condition=" '$(DayOfWeek)'=='Tuesday' "/>
    <Error Code="1" ContinueOnError="false" Condition="'$(DayOfWeek)'=='Monday'" Text="Stop everything, it's monday!"/>
    <Message Text="Everything is ok"/>
  </Target>
</Project>

Edit 1/21/2009
No sooner do I get my site back up and running - (4 months is a little embarrassing to move to a new webhost), do I start receiving

Thanks for the comment Jack! I had no idea you could still get an archive of this information. It would be awesome if RedHat were distributing this stuff, instead of the folks at RPMFind. I can understand having a support policy with a reasonable life-cycle which we assuredly have surpassed. We'll call this the grumblings of a hasbeen admin who wishes this could just be easy.

---

I'm trying to install a RAID Card into a Linux file-server so we can amp up the storage.
Unfortunately it's running an older distro of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (3) uname -r = 2.4.21-47.0.1.EL in case anyone cares.

In order to do that, I need to compile a driver. Not so difficult. The hardware manufacturer created a really nice readme.txt file that I'm pretty sure I can follow.

- For Linux kernel 2.4 -
    
     You need a full kernel source tree to build the driver. If you are building
     a driver for the currently in-use kernel, the kernel source should match
     the version of the running kernel. In addition, you must obtain the config
     file for the running kernel:

No problem - lets go grab this from a RPM (from RedHat). Think again buddy -

"This system may not be updated until it is associated with a channel."

Wow - That's kind of a nasty cryptic message. What does it mean though?
https://rhn.redhat.com/rhn/help/release-notes/hosted/rhn-release-notes-2.8.0.jsp

Now when using up2date to register a system, customers will be presented with a message stating "This system may not be updated until it is associated with a channel" rather than an error. The system will be registered with RHN but will be unable to benefit from its service.

Let me spell that out for you dear reader. The myth of open source software isn't a myth. You can give away software for free. The bug fixes, and ongoing support... that will cost you.

I think I'm going to stick with an operating system that allows you to pay up front for the patches of your system for the supported lifetime.