A quick reminder that the first meeting of the Aarhus .NET Usergroup is this wednesday 19:00 at Hostnordic A/S, Åhavevej 5, 8260 Viby J. Check out my original post about it and also take a look at the attendee list. I'm taking the liberty of proposing an agenda for our initial meeting to try and encourage a more productive meeting.

Goals for initial meeting
Vision/Mission for the group
Elect core responsible for group
Website

Who are we
Introduction of attendees
Wishes for the usergroup - advanced topics vs. entry-level topics
Brainstorm for content - concrete presentations

Physical space
Schedule meetings, e.g. the last Wednesday of every month
Venue for meetings, e.g. round robin of work spaces
Informational web site

Content
Attendees wishing to do presentations
Contacts in companies (possible speakers)
Content topics: SQL Server Express, SSIS, ERP, Vista, Commerce, Ruby, BizTalk, data access, LINQ, architecture, concrete projects
INETA
Use of Prosa/Samdata

The new Windows Live Writer is very good as I pointed out in a previous post but couldn't figure out where my spell check had gone off to. It turns out that if you run LIve Writer on a box with a non-English regional setting the spell check will be disabled with no way of activating it through the UI.

Luckily I found a workaround on Roy Osherove's blog; basically a small exe which launches Live Writer with spell checking enabled. A bit of a dirty workaround but it gets the job done until Microsoft release a version with this behavior fixed.

On a related note I still remember when Apple decided to do something along these lines with a release of iTunes which basically read the current locale of the system and launched iTunes in that particular language without any way of overriding the setting. Really annoying if you like me run an English version of Windows with a different locale. I just want my programs to speak English with Danish keyboard enabled and have all their features enabled damn it! :)

My colleague Nikolaj passed along the feelgood link of the day: A video of a salesman who absolutely wows the audience at a song contest. I guarantee that you will have a smile on your face after seeing this.

Singing salesman makes Cowell's jaw drop

We decided to go ahead and put the "smart" in Smart Client and use ClickOnce deployment for the business tools of Commerce Server in order to make initial deployment and future updates to the client machines easier. In short a good idea which unfortunately met a speed bump due to the fact that we're deploying the business tools from the source code and not the compiled version shipping with Commerce Server 2007.

Basically everything went fine until we got to the Customer and Orders Manager which just didn't work. Every time we ran the ClickOnce installer locally or remotely we would get a SecurityException telling us that we didn't have FileIOPermission. Additionally Visual Studio reported that various assemblies didn't allow access to partially trusted assemblies. Baffled we started debugging. New certificates, strong naming assemblies, various ClickOnce deployment modes, changing trust levels for ClickOnce, etc. etc..

In the end the clue that helped us in the right direction was a warning in Visual Studio saying, "Invalid value for 'TargetZone' of item 'LocalComputer'.". Searching through the entire solution yielded nothing. Finally we used a text editor and opened up the .csproj file for Customer and Orders Manager project to have a look at the actual XML of the file. Lo and behold an element called <TargetZone> was defined with the value LocalComputer. Removing the element altogether and redeployed fixed the problem.

I'm assuming that the <TargetZone> element in the csproj file is a leftover from a partial trust deployment setting. Interestingly enough it turns out that this element is defined in the Microsoft Commerce Server 2007 Partner SDK source code distributed by Microsoft which means that everybody trying to do a ClickOnce deployment of Customer and Orders Manager from the supplied source code will encounter the same issue as we did.

Other than this issue configuring the business tools for ClickOnce deployment is a snap I think our client will be very pleased with this particular deployment model.

First we had a Mac guy saying positive things about Windows Vista and now ... the Mac browser Safari is being released for the Windows platform. It must be a cold day in hell indeed :) There's a news story on the unveiling at WWDC on Computerworld.

In all seriousness it's a nice move from Apple because we can now test our web applications in the Safari browser without actually going out a buying a Mac computer. We are looking at a public beta 3 of the product and as such it exhibits a number of problems but the overall experience is definitely there. In the 45 seconds I spent testing it I came across two glaring bugs: The H1 tag is not rendered when running with 120 DPI in Windows (screenshot below) and clicking the bookmarks button crashes the browser. I checked with a colleague and it works in his machine leading me to believe that the issue is related to my 120 DPI setting also.

Performance-wise I'm pretty impressed with Safari it renders pages very quickly, about the same as the latest beta of Firefox 3 called Gran Paradiso, and of course notably quicker than IE7 which is just dog slow on my current development box.

David Messner gave a talk on Commerce Server 2007 architecture at TechEd 2007 Orlando. I didn't think too much of it when I saw that he had posted his slides to the Commerce Server Team blog because the slides are usually worthless without the actual presenter going through them. I was however pleasantly surprised to find that he had actually put some effort into adapting the slides to a PDF making the content very useful to those us not fortunate enough to be a TechEd Orlando.

Take a gander at the Commerce Server 2007 Architecture PDF on the Commerce Server Team blog. I believe that this is required reading for anybody working with Commerce Server.

 I'm probably getting not getting enough sleep when I find something like this funny:

It was actually trying to say:

Earlier this year there were some rumblings that a .NET usergroup would be started in Århus, Denmark. Nothing ever came out of it but this time around I do think that we have something. Quite spontaneously too by the looks of it.

If you are at all interested in talking to like-minded .NETers now would be a good time to show up for some community service :)

The date is set for June 20th 1900 at Hostnordic A/S, Åhavevej 5, 8260 Viby J.. A couple of guys from Vertica will definitly be in attendence, myself included. If you're thinking about attending go and post about in the ActiveDeveloper forum or leave a comment at Vadstrup.dk.

UPDATE: There's an attendee list up at Vadstrup.dk.

Yes I know it's not related to .NET but they were just too cute not to post :) An entire photoset on Flickr of tiny little animals on fingers.

Tiny Animals on Fingers.

Developing web pages requires testing in multiple browser version. Unfortunately Microsoft doens't make it easy to have multiple version of Internet Explorer installed side by side. Luckily TredoSoft has just the thing: Multiple IE Installer.