Month: March 2011

Undelete popular tabs in IE9

Using IE9, I like the “popular sites” list of links that shows up when a new tab is opened. Of course google is one of the first ones.. except I accidently removed it a while back, and now can’t figure out how to “un-remove” it.

Some searching online found out there is no real way to do this (wooooops!) but deleteing the keys in the registry seems to fix it: wipe anything under this path-

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\TabbedBrowsing\NewTabPage\Exclude

 

bam, worked for me.

ReactOS 3.13 released

The ReactOS project, which I follow pretty closely, has finally released version 3.13 as of today. It is claimed to support running Mono now, so I’m really curious to see how well it does. Eventually having an open source Windows replacement, which can also run .Net code, could be a really good thing. I will be running it inside a QEMU emulator (full qemu + reactos image can be downloaded as one) and see how it works.

More info available via www.reactos.org

 

EF Code-First first look

Modifying a project built using EF Code First, and so far I like what I see. The whole POCO concept seems to work well, especially for a smaller simpler project. I learned a lot about it from this link: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/07/16/code-first-development-with-entity-framework-4.aspx

I also like how you can eaisly define test data to use in place of the database, so that during testing and debugging you don’t have to mess around with a “real” database- you can launch from the same start data every time, or create custom test cases etc.

Phalanger PHP Compiler – new version released

I’ve been watching this project for years, and just noticed a new major release was made last month. Phalanger is a Php to .Net (CLR) conversion framework. Effectively lets you run PHP apps as .Net, inside the CLR, on an IIS server. As it matures, this should be a great option for running php code on microsoft servers, as well as a good method to assist in porting php apps over to a “real” .net language.

see http://phalanger.codeplex.com/

 

Groupon Clone

Doing some research into ways to get a “daily deals” website online, much like the famous groupon.com site. There are quite a few out there now, and a number of options if you want to create your own. It seems the lifecycle is still early enough that many providers are charging $1k+ for a reasonable usability, but often limited to a single instance etc.

Looking into open source options, I’ve only so far found a chinese one called “open groupon” (I’m sure the name will need to be changed ;). Testing it out now, and looks ok but a little rough in some areas. It’ll be interesting to see what comes out next around this type of app, I’m sure the OS community is hammering away at this and there will be 20 different clones out by year’s end.

Add any good options you’ve found in the comments below, I’d like any feedback I can on this.

DDOS at Codero

I’ve been hosting with Codero for a while now, and had great service. Until this morning, when a DDoS attack effectively blocked one of their data centers from the rest of the world. So, all my projects on my primary server with them were offline for… about 6 hours or so.

Last year a DDOS at my registrar, which I use for DNS, blocked access to all my sites as well.

Time to start looking into redundency options. Fun.

Installshield sucks. Thanks Microsoft.

Adding an installation project to my solution in vs2010, i notice an “installshield le” option for installation projects. ok, whats this? I do some research and apparently microsoft is abandoning their own installation projects, and will be moving everyone to use this “light edition” of installshield in the future.

I’ve used installshield in the past. Surely it’s not as bad as it used to be.

I add the new installshield le project, and am instructed I need to download it. this requires registration with “flexera”, who apparently now owns installshield, or whatever. create an account, give all my personal info. get a registration key in the mail. download installer and run it.

now, go back to visual studio, try to add the installer project again. Please enter serial number first problem – error, cant authorize. what? go through registration process again and try with new key. finally works.

now i finally have an install project in my solution. go through the setup steps using the weird navigation system (yes, it’s weird).

ok, we’re ready! build. what? errors?

get some kind of crazy “cant set codepage for lcid 1033”, as well as some other nonsense. click the error message, and am take to the “flexera” site, which lists a bunch of matches on this error message. no real solutions found, the matches listed date back to 2009 and 2007, so definitely not something new. I still haven’t resolved this, but do not look forward to dealing with it.

So, not much has changed. Same old cryptic BS dealing with installshield, and apparently microsoft has given up trying to provide something better. So this is what you get with a mult-thousand dollar license of visual studio 2010. Thanks Microsoft! for the opportunity to remember something i hate worse than crystal report.