Dotmad.net

I read a post in Lifehacker about someone that attached a Disk-On-Key to his child’s neck in case the kid got lost:
“My little redheaded boy was SCREAMING for his mom. The ‘finder’ came to help him, the boy showed the ‘finder’ the labelled USB drive, the ‘finder’ then brought him to security, security plugged the USB drive in to his computer, saw the message and called me on my cellphone. When we went to retrieve our boy the security guard asked for our USB drive with the secret phrase on it. The USB drives performed just as set up to. It had my cellphone number, my boys’ first name (first name only!) to calm him down and his favorite treat.”

I can think of several reason for this “method” to fail:
1) The security could have been clueless about using a USB device.
2) Plugging an external USB device could have been forbidden/disabled due to security reasons.
3) The “autorun” feature could have been disabled.

On the other hand, wouldn’t it be simpler to simply attach a written note to the kid?
Digital is not always better than analog.

Great post:
Developers are from Mars, Programmers are from Venus

David Starr wrote an open letter to Scott Guthrie from Microsoft regarding the way Microsoft deals with the open source community. Scott replied in the post’s comments to some of the claims in the original post, but chose to ignore the “reinventing the wheel” issue (VSTS tests vs. NUnit, Linq vs. NHibernate…)

Scott McMaster wrote follow-up to David’s post pointing to the fact Microsoft includes tests only in their Team System version, which is much more expansive than the professional edition, and I think that the main cause of the problem:
Since Microsoft charges more money for a complete solution, including unit tests, they can’t charge money for an open source product, so they had to build their own testing framework instead.

Avner Kashtan wrote a nice post about using reflection to verify you are subscribed to an event:

FieldInfo delegateField = myObj.GetType().GetField(”MyEvent”, BindingFlags.NonPublic BindingFlags.Instance);
EventHandler del = delegateField.GetValue(myObj) as EventHandler;

And once we had that - it’s a simple matter of iterating the invocation list and seeing whether I’ve registered already:

foreach (EventHandler handler in del.GetInvocationList())
{
if (handler.Target == this)
return true;
}

Just be aware to the fact that using Obfuscation to protect your code will break this code.

I just got this mail:

To all Registered Delphi 2007 for Win32 Developers,Mark your calendars for this one-time only, online exclusive FREE event!

OnThursday, March 29th (for registered users of Delphi 2007 for Win32), you’re invited to spend a virtual day with the engineering team that developed Delphi2007 for Win32.

This is your chance to get answers to your toughest Win32 development challenges– directly from the team that created Delphi 2007 for Win32. Whether it’s Windows Vista, XP, or 2000, AJAX or VCL for the Web – you’ll get theanswers you need to give you the edge, share tips and tricks with your colleagues, and meet the luminaries that are blazing new trails in Win32development.

You can find more details here.

You can read this post on possible problems (”TF30059 : Fatal error while initializing web service“) during SP1 installation.
Update: If you encounter a message saying: “TF53018: The application tier [SERVER] is attempting to connect to a data tier with an incompatible version” the solution is here.