Paul Litwin's Blog : Rants

Symantec: A Leading Edge Company -- Not

plitwin — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 17:09:00 GMT

I just tried to chat with a tech support person about restoring from a Ghost image and this is what I got:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server error '80040e31' Timeout expired /sdccommon/inc/db/dbcommon.inc, line 276

Nice use of include files in asp classic that is only about 6-7 years old! And of course this message was seen repeatedly. Nice recovery for a site from a billion dollar company. Go Symantec!

Paul

Team Foundation Power Toys: There's a Reason They are Called Toys

plitwin — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 04:31:00 GMT

So I desperately needed to rollback the deletion of six source code files, which, by the way, were asp.net custom control classes. See previous post. The simple solution, right click on the files and select Rollback, Revert, or some other command. Okay, so maybe the command is nested somewhere below that point in the command hierarchy. Or NOT! Microsoft actually decided to ship Team System without any rollback feature. Can you believe it? Makes one think that Team System is a joke.

Power Toys Don't Cut if For Me
So I read about the unsupported Team Foundation Power Toys, which I dutifully download. And, guess what when I enter the tfpt /rollback command, I get the wonderfully usefull error "Unable to determine the workspace." So I read through the power toys docs and they make little sense, stepped a bit too thick in their own terminology. But I don't want to become an expert in learning to use the power toys--I just want my source code back! Am I crazy, or isn't recovery one of the major reasons we all use source code control systems? Anyway, I could never get the power toys to work for me. Oh well.

The Happy Ending
I did manage to hack up with a workaround: I could open the files by viewing the history from the TFS Source Control Explorer (double-click on the Source Control node under your project name in Team Explorer). From there I could view each of the six files in Notepad (right click on the folder, select View History; the History window pops up; select the changeset that you wish to view and double-click on it; now double-click on the source file from the Details for Changeset window) and then I in turn added each of the six files back to the project, copying the text from the history into the new files. Of course, this is made worse by the fact that the Details in Changeset window is a modal dialog, but it did work one painful file at a time!

My question is this: why is Microsoft worrying about releases of Expressions and AJAX when they have some serious problems with their enterprise-class team-based development tool. And they wonder why some critics don't take them seriously...

Brain Dead Decision: No Roll Back in Team Foundation Server Source Control

plitwin — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 19:08:00 GMT

I can't believe it. How stupid is Microsoft? I swear. They ship a supposed rock-solid server-based source control system and don't provide a rollback feature? I didn't discover this until today when I inadvertantly deleted some source files. So I'm rooting around for an hour trying to figure out how to restore the files from history but to no avail.

Finally I decide to do a Google search and lo and behold, according to a post from Barry Gelvin, Microsoft decided to ship TFS without support for rollback.That makes the product very marginal in worth. What were they thinking? When was the last time my neighbors in Redmond checked into the real world. <disgusted>

Alas, there is some unsupported download called the Team Foundation Power Toys that provides a back door to this functionality. I will download this puppy and see if it works as claimed.

How incredibly lame!

Paul

Very Scary U.S. Election Article

plitwin — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 05:11:00 GMT

Just read the article by Robert Kennedy, Jr. in the latest issue of Rolling Stone on election rigging. You have to read this article about how easy it is for elections in the US to be stolen by either those in control or the companies like Diebold who have pushed their totally-hackable (by employees, political cheats, or anyone for that matter) machines on America. This is so scary I don't know what to say. The article points to very real irregularities that may have swung the last two elections where George Bush Junior won, as well as a host of other elections.

How could this happen in the USA? This sounds worse than an election in a "Banana Republic".

Disgusted,

Paul

Brain Dead Microsoft Decision #1 - Label as the Text of Labels

plitwin — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 05:38:00 GMT

Many could rightly accuse me of being a lackey of sorts for Microsoft. But every so often, I have just have to scream "WHAT WERE YOU THINKING???". This is the first in a series of posts (unless I get bored with it) on stupid, bread-dead Microsoft decisions:

#1: Who makes use of the fact that a label added to a Web Form or WinForms app has the wonderful feature of placing the text "Label" in the Text property. The answer: nobody! Never, ever has one person on this planet ever benefited from Microsoft adding this value to the Text property of labels. Never. Ever.

This has got to be the all around lamest decision Microsoft has ever made in its history (okay, I suspect there's a few (dozen) competing decisions...). This has persisted since VB 1.0 I believe and has infected most Microsoft software (oddly, Microsoft Access never succumbed to the dumbness, though, it was hardly immune from stupid decisions, but I digress...)

So what should Microsoft do: stop doing it! Now, already! Microsoft, do you understand how many millions of programmer hours have been wasted deleting that lamest of values from labels everywhere?

Bye for now. Feel free to append your own brain dead decisions as comments. Or to throw gasoline on the fire that is my fury.

Paul

Community Server is Mobile PC Hostile for Blog Posting!

plitwin — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 04:25:00 GMT

Community Server 2.0 is Mobile PC Hostile...(read more)