Visual Studio: My build actions are missing

Since this seems to be a faq without an answer: In Visual Studio 2008 (and earlier?) if your project files are missing their Advanced properties - like Build Action - it probably means you were handed a "web application" that is actually a "web site" in Visual Studio parlance. You have to create a new "web application", copy over the source files, and a few other steps to complete the conversion. Some relevant links:

VS 2005: Converting a Web Site Project to a Web Application Project in Visual Studio 2005

VS 2008: Converting VS 2008 Website to Web Application

VS 2010: Converting a Web Site Project to a Web Application Project

The Nerd in the High Castle

I like to read history books, and that includes the history of the computer industry. Steven Levy's stuff is pretty good, even if sometimes he gets a little breathless in the telling. Dealers of Lightning, West of Eden, Soul of a New Machine, stuff like that.

From reading enough of these, and from the tech press as well, I know there's this notion floating around that during the early 80s Apple was fighting the wrong enemy. (Pirates of Silicon Valley also plays this note.) During that era, Apple focused on IBM instead of on Microsoft. But Microsoft and MS-DOS really won their independence from IBM during the Clone Wars. Everyone wanted to clone the IBM PC, and run MS-DOS on it, because IBM had been so successful. If Apple had somehow won market dominance over IBM in the early 80s, they would have also defeated Microsoft by proxy.

That got me thinking though, that Microsoft probably would not have stayed out of the OS market. They were still a successful applications company at the time and, if PC-DOS had failed, they surely would have made another attempt at an OS product. Now it starts to sound like the plot of a alternate history novel, doesn't it? On the back cover: "What if Apple had defeated IBM in 1984? What if Microsoft had partnered with Commodore to sell MS-Windows in 1986?"

Wow I just realized... if someone wrote that book, I would totally read it.

Aspect Oriented Programming for .NET

PostSharp

See also

10th Anniversary of Macworld Boston 1997

This August marks the tenth anniversary of Macworld Boston 1997, AKA "The Return of Steve Jobs." You can see the video of his speech here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEHNrqPkefI

At the 23 minute mark, he says something very interesting. He says that when he returned to Apple and examined the state of the company, he uncovered two core assets: the Apple brand name, and the MacOS software. Looking back over the last ten years, it is striking how well Apple has executed on leveraging those assets. They have leveraged the Apple brand into markets previously considered tangential to personal computing, and they have continued to invest heavily into creating and maintaining the best personal computer operating system available.

Also notice at the 27 minute mark, when he announces the infamous Microsoft "partnership", how he is carefully conciliatory and diplomatic towards Microsoft. Certainly, that didn't last. Probably, with Apple on the brink of ruin, Jobs wanted the option of increased cooperation on the table, but it turns out they didn't need it. Now, they obviously feel very confident and comfortable in making fun of Microsoft.

What kind of breakdown would your computer have?

When a Mac, or a Linux computer, or a Sun, is broken, there is still a logic to the brokeness. I have tools available to me for inspecting the computer, and I can pursue the symptoms of the problem, and the symptoms lead on a rational path to the cause. In the cases where I can't fix the problem, I at least feel confident that I have exhausted all my options and the machine is truly well boned.

Trying to troubleshoot a Windows computer is like trying to reason with someone who's had a psychotic break:

Me: Hey what's the problem?
Windows XP: I don't have a problem.
Me: Well you're not remembering my preferences. Really, what's the problem?
Windows XP: BLAH BLAH boogity boogity boo BLEE BLAH BLARRRGH!
Me: Can you be more specific?
Windows XP: I don't have a problem.

Here's a good time I had trying to reinstall Norton Systemworks:

Norton: I'm installing... gosh, I can't do it.
Me: Why not?
Norton: I'm not going to tell you. Would you like to rollback or retry?
Me: What's the point of retrying if I don't get a chance to fix the problem?
Norton: Well, those are your choices.
Me: Fine, retry.
Norton: Nope, still can't do it.
Me: Okay, I give up. Roll back the install attempt.
Norton: Heave... ho... nope, I can't do that either.

(Remember when "Norton" meant "unquestionable quality"? Not anymore.)

We're gonna need a longer spoon

Open Letter to the Community from Novell

See Also:

Novell Withdrawing Participation from the Hula Project

A penny saved

I just learned that if you want to go to the Zune store and buy one 99 cent song, you can't just spend 99 cents. You have to buy $5.00 of "points" and then spend 99 cents worth of points.

Just like Expose versus Flip 3D, Microsoft can't just copy something even when the template for success is right in front of them. They have to copy it, and then tweak it, usually tweak it for the worse, so they can claim to be innovative. (Their word, not mine.) If you're going to take something, just take it, cause you're not fooling anybody. You guys already won that lawsuit anyway.

But in this case, there's more. The points system is a way to take your money and give you nothing in return. If you buy $5.00 of points and buy one song, obviously you leave behind $4.01, or you buy five songs and leave behind $0.05. Buy $100.00 worth of points, and you can buy 101 songs and only leave behind a penny. Everyone assumes there's a breakeven point, even if they don't reach it personally. But where is the breakeven point, exactly?

It just so happens that the numbers 500 and 99 are relatively prime. This means their least common multiple is the product of themselves, 500 x 99. The breakeven point is 500 songs at 99 cents each, or $495.

And you thought your grade school math was useless.

If the Zune store is even moderately successful by global standards, it will have a few million customers. Aside from the lock-in effect of the points system (i.e., no one is going to drop $5 and just buy one song), if each of those customers leaves behind a few pennies, we're talking about at least a hundred thousand dollars - not in revenue, but profit - for which those people received no product!

It's like J Allard was watching Superman 3 when he drew up the pricing structure. (Geez, did you know that's his real name?)

VBScript == teh SuxOrz

VBScript sucks in so many - oh, so many! - ways.

The interaction between VBScript and ADO is particularly non-intuitive and bug-ridden. Let me make a note of this one in particular, before I push it down into the part of my brain where it will become just another mote swirling around with all of the other instances of VBScript sucktitude in my memory.

Sometimes you want to know if a field of a database record is NULL, because some VBScript functions like Replace() will choke if you pass them a NULL field. This does not work:

for objField in rsQ.Fields
  if IsNull(objField.Value) then
    strValues = strValues & "NULL,"
  else
    strValues = strValues & "'" & Replace(objField.Value, "'", "''") & "',"
  end if
next

ASP will crash out saying "invalid use of Null: Replace()" even though the value passed the IsNull() check. This, however, works fine:

for objField in rsQ.Fields
  scratchVal = objField.Value
  if IsNull(scratchVal) then
    strValues = strValues & "NULL,"
  else
    strValues = strValues & "'" & Replace(scratchVal, "'", "''") & "',"
  end if
next

One of the nicest projects I ever inherited was from a guy who had done a site in "old" ASP (pre-dotNet) but he did all of the scripting in server-side JScript. It helped that he was a good programmer, but with JScript you spend less time fighting the language. Unfortunately, you can only combine VBScript and JScript under some narrow conditions, so if you inherit a site already done with VBScript you can't just start writing all of your changes in JScript. Even if you fit inside those narrow conditions at the beginning, you'll probably very quickly reach a point where you need to include some JScript into VBScript at a very specific point or vice versa, and the necessary ordering of the code just isn't going to work out.

What you can do that's better yet is to start a gradual migration to ASP.NET, using this really great trick for sharing session state between ASP and ASP.NET on the same server.