I have come to the conclusion that I actively hate the new Web Application Project stuff in VS2005. It requires that my code live in some weird folder structure, I don't get to choose what files get compiled into my project, and it uses a completely different compiler (aspnet_compiler). I totally understand why we added this feature, it's just that I think we overreacted to people complaining about how hard it was to build reliable WebForms projects and now have made it harder to build Web Services using ASMX/Indigo. I really wish we'd allowed a developer to choose which project model to use if they're building a Web Service.

In my opinion, if you're worried about having fine-grained control over compilation, you're probably OK with attaching a debugger to a process. With that in mind, here's how an ASP.NET rebel sets up his Indigo projects. Set it up as a class library, reference System.Web, System.Web.Services (and optionally System.ServiceModel and System.Runtime.Serialization if you're building an Indigo service). Unfortunately, you do lose F5 debugging and must either explicitly call Debugger.Launch in your startup code or manually attach to aspnet_wp (XP) or w3wp (2k3), but you regain control the compilation process.

A warning to anyone who is installing the Feb CTP as an upgrade from XP; uninstall ActiveSync before you upgrade. I just got bit by this, and it's annoying.

As a good little coder, I sprinkle debug assertions just before many places where I throw exceptions. Problem is, I have unit test code that wants to hit those exceptions to verify error handling behavior, and the unit test came to a screeching halt when it ran into those assertions - it would wait indefinitely for some user to show mercy and click the dialog away so that it could barrel on and encounter the exception it wanted. So, I discovered this handy little tidbit.

foreach (System.Diagnostics.TraceListener listener in System.Diagnostics.Debug.Listeners)
{
  System.Diagnostics.DefaultTraceListener defaultListener = listener as System.Diagnostics.DefaultTraceListener;
  if (defaultListener != null && !System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached)
  {
    defaultListener.AssertUiEnabled = false;
  }
}

So I've found that the whole blog-thing got stack-ranked to the bottom of my “things to do when I'm not at work” list. I'll try to bring it back a tad higher.

I'm finally getting to spend some quality time with VSTS, and man, it is pretty slick. After the upcoming Beta 2 release I'm planning to post a few items about how to play with some of the more interesting extensibility hooks over the next few days. In particular, I give a tutorial on how to create custom work items and how you can register your application for notifications (and how you can make those notifications look like events to your desktop application).

So, I haven't been geeking out nearly enough lately. I finally took a look at John Lam's blog and saw his Nerd Quiz score. Because I am a good alpha-geek, I had to take it. And here's my score:

I was a pretty diehard VMWare user before I came to Microsoft, but I decided to be a good 'Softie and give Virtual PC 2004 a chance. In general, I'm satisfied, but the one thing in particular that I absolutely love is the Undo Disk. If you enable this option for a virtual machine, Virtual PC will prompt you to commit or discard the changes you've made to the virtual machine when you shut it down.

If you are going to be doing any installer work, I highly recommend this feature - it certainly beats manually copying the virtual hard drive files.

... when they could have made them glow in the dark, too?

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/10/27/biotechnology.cats/index.html

It took WAY longer than I thought to get everything set back up. I am no longer an Earthlink customer - they were simply unable to get service established. My personal favorite was when they told me that they couldn't provide me with DSL service because I already had DSL (their vendor had somehow half-provisioned the line). After two months of waiting, I gave up and went with the local provider, Qwest. So far, so good.

So, if you are one of the few who left me in their list of RSS feeds, thanks! For the rest of you, I'll just have to entice you back.