Brian Hartsock's Blog

While looking at my blog code today, I realized I often label a blog entry as Part 1 and never have any subsequent parts. I promise to add more parts to all those blogs from here on out. »

A common problem with Windows servers is remoting. Unless you pay a large amount of money, you can only have two terminal services connections per server for administration purposes. Sometimes people leave the office and accidentally stay connected, which ties up a connection and means no one else can connect. Since most of our development and live servers are accessed remotely, this quickly becomes a big problem. Luckily, I found an article that can help in this situation. »

Today I ran into a few problems while writing test cases for NUnit. I kept receiving reflection errors and the exceptions were too vague to help me fix the problems. Luckily, I found an article on debugging while testing with NUnit. Works like a charm. Update… If you use TestDriven.NET you can just click on a project and use Test With->Debugger. It has the same effect and is much easier than the above article. »

One of the greatest things about .NET, in my opinion, is the debugger built into Visual Studio. For a developer, a great debugger can’t be beat. Unfortunately, there are some cases that a great debugger can cause more harm than help. Since I started using NHibernate, I got into the habit of tail-ing the MySQL query logs. I have written a lot of database access code, and still don’t trust NHibernate. »

As most of you know, the data access layer is my favorite application layer to work with. For a while, I worked on my own active record implementation in PHP. After switching to .NET, my outlook has strayed away from the active record pattern though. I like using business entity objects that have no coupling to a database. Instead, I use an object/relational mapper to translate from business entity to persisted database object. »

Lately I have been hacking some things out with NHibernate. I ran across an interesting issue with calling Assembly.GetManifestResourceStream(). For NHibernate, I have different session factory configuration files for each entity assembly. So I needed to load an embedded resource from an assembly and pass it to NHibernate. This was my first attempt… Assembly assembly = this.GetType().Assembly; assembly.GetManifestResourceStream("nhibernate.cfg.xml"); …which didn’t work. After some research, I found this article. Basically, you can’t just specify the resource name. »

Last night, I was unhappily surprised when my roommate decided to bring home a Christmas tree. Not that I dislike Christmas by any means, but it was a real tree. Real trees are a pain. I told him he should have bought a fake tree so that we didn’t have to worry about pine needles and fire hazards. He proceeded to harass me, calling me Scrooge and saying not having a real tree as a child explains why I am so weird. »

Today I figured I would upgrade my computers to Ubuntu Gutsy. It turned out to be a long day. Start with the desktop at work… My xorg.conf was completely destroyed. After about 40 reboots, I finally had my desktop load without going into failsafe mode. Unfortunately, Xinerama support wasn’t working. After some research I learned that Xinerama is no longer supported by the ati drivers. Instead, XRandR is. The great thing about this is it is in the early stages of development and doesn’t support multiple GPU’s, which my work computer has. »

It seems as though my previous post discussing the recent FCC ban on cable company monopolies was wrong. While the FCC did approve such a regulation, it doesn’t apply to NTC. The VT newspaper discusses the issue in a recent publication. »

Over the past few years, I have installed Windows Server on a handful of our development machines. Every time, I follow the same steps except it didn’t work to well this time. Somewhere in the mix of releases and service packs, a major naming change occurred that I had no idea about. In previous versions, to enable remote desktop, I would just install terminal services which would run in administrative mode by default. »