Blog

Vacation

2011-08-01T11:16:00.001-05:00

Aside from going to Seattle once a year and an occasional weekend outting, I haven’t taken a vacation since 2005. I am taking one this week! Not sure what I am going to do with my self, but I am sure the kids will have fun.

New Component Available: Task Bar Docker

2011-07-26T16:41:00.001-05:00

Taking a breather for a moment and since I decided to take up blogging again, here is a little piece about a component I wrote last night. I am working on yet another tool and this one lives in the system tray. I wanted the main window to dock to the task bar. I looked around these here interwebs and found a lot of half-way-there implementations but I couldn’t find one that handled multiple

Update

2011-07-23T11:26:00.001-05:00

Gosh time flies. I haven’t written much for a very long time. Back in early 2007 I was writing almost every day. Not so much these days. I have been working on a new product, which will be announced later this year.. Our company, forProject Technologies, has been pushing very hard on it for almost 2.5 years. It will be a big deal, for me anyway, when we launch. That work consumes the

SfxCreator 1.1–Face Lift!

2011-05-28T15:38:00.001-05:00

Memorial Day Weekend Hobby Project Preview–Limited Time Only

2011-05-27T15:27:00.001-05:00

Limited to this weekend only, I am making 64 bit preview editions of the following tools available: SfxCreator - A simple self-extracting executable generator DebugViewer - An update to Mark Russinovich's DebugView, fully implemented in .NET using Microsoft's MDbg stack Queue & Performance Monitoring Suite for Project Server - A set of utilities for monitoring

New Debug Viewer Tool

2011-05-18T19:18:00.001-05:00

This is coming out after I get the Project Server Queue Monitor out. I haven’t had much time. Pretty busy at my real job right now…

If you are going to use the MDbg library in your app…

2011-05-18T18:13:00.001-05:00

…REMEMBER TO SET THIS ON YOUR ENTRY PROC: [MTAThread] // MDbg is MTA threaded static void Main() { … }; I did this when I first started working on my debug viewer tool, but moved some types around and forgot to re-add it and spent an HOUR staring at my screen trying to figure out why everything stopped working…

A Sweet Queue Monitor for Project Server

2011-04-08T13:35:00.001-05:00

And you can color code the jobs:

Visual Studio 2010 Performance Tips

2011-03-09T09:30:00.001-06:00

First, just released yesterday, is the Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack I, described here. As of yesterday, it was only available to MSDN subscribers but will be broadly available on March 10th. Since upgrading all of our projects to VS2010 this past week, I have been struggling with performance and usability issues. The most vexing problem was my mouse would simply stop working except when

Microsoft Project: TimeScaleData Method from .NET without GC.Collect

2010-12-16T16:11:00.001-06:00

Project has a bug where accessing time scaled values causes an exception after a few calls. You can get around it by calling GC.Collect() and GC.WaitForPendingFinalizers() but this is super slow. Here is an example of what that looks like. 1: TimeScaleValues workValues = assignment.TimeScaleData(startDate, endDate, pjAssignmentTimescaleDataType, PjTimescaleUnit.pjTimescaleDays, 1);

USE WHITESPACE IN YOUR CODE

2010-11-12T13:54:00.001-06:00

Now, I am not a fan of VB.NET (mainly becase I VB’ed myself out when I was at Pacific Edge) to start with, but if you have to write in it, it is really important to follow a good set of development standards. Good development standards usually include a clause about using whitespace to make code more read-able. The following is an piece of code I saw (blurred because I am demonstrating a point

Nice

2010-11-12T09:10:00.001-06:00

I kinda wish people were capable of putting up dialogs when they “encounter an internal error”, like this dialog Visual Studio gave me a few minutes ago: Of couse this dialog is really bad because while it suggests I save all files and exit, I have no way of doing that. Kinda of like when people have “internal errors” and become unstable: you really can’t save them either.

Update

2010-11-11T11:57:00.001-06:00

I am still here. For the past 16 months I have been working on a new product. We are not quite ready to announce publicly but I will say what we have built is very exciting (to a certain crowd, of course). My hobby projects have taken the way-back seat to product development. Recently, however, I made time to update the CSharp Header Designer and a new version (actually derivative) of the

CustomReportingCustomFieldMetadataChangeMessageFailed

2010-02-04T12:38:00.001-06:00

If you get the error message CustomReportingCustomFieldMetadataChangeMessageFailed after calling UpdateCustomFields, make sure you actually changed something on each custom field row or call GetChanges on the dataset before passing the CustomFieldsDataSet to UpdateCustomFields (which, by the way, is standard practice unless you think you have changed every row). I THOUGHT I was making a change

DB Connection Library on Code Gallery

2010-01-29T09:43:00.001-06:00

Jon Henry asked about how to change connection strings dynamically in an application so I packaged up my DB Connect Library and put it on CodePlex. http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/dbconnectionlibrary HTH

Still Here

2010-01-05T14:43:00.001-06:00

Folks have been asking what happened to the blog. I am on a pretty intense product development cycle right now, but I will be back soon!

Browser Download Sites – Markup Validation Service Score Roundup

2009-08-14T18:31:00.001-05:00

I needed a quick break from the slog and I just happened to read an article about RockMelt, a forthcoming browser from the brain that brought us Netscape. Just on a whim I ran the site through W3C’s markup validation service to see how much this group is paying attention. There were 16 errors on the page. Just for grins, I ran some other browser provider’s download pages through the validator.

Reading Lookup Table Structures and Values for a Specific List of Lookup Tables

2009-08-07T15:07:00.001-05:00

I am writing a fairly complicated piece of code that uses lookup tables heavily. As I am ramping down on this part of the project, I took one more look at performance. Originally I was reading all of the lookup tables to have the structures and values handy for processing. The problem is the client has HUGE lookup tables and many of them, so I was a little concerned. I occurred to me early on

Microsoft Project Server Error Codes

2009-08-07T11:35:00.001-05:00

A resource (.resx) file with the Project Server error codes AND their descriptions might exist somewhere else but I couldn’t find it. So, here you go. The first link is to an Excel 2007 workbook that contains the error information and the second is a link to a .resx file that you can include in your PSI projects. Workbook (use Save\Target As and save it as a “.xlsm” file otherwise it might try

Machine Crashes, Rebuilds, and Deadlines

2009-07-27T13:21:00.001-05:00

Nothing like having your primary and secondary development environments flat line on you AND have crazy deadlines. I hope Microsoft continues to invest in setup across the board. Windows Server, SharePoint, SQL, Project Server… A better install experience would go a long way to help us non-infrastructure guys get things up quickly. Now I am virtualized with backups of everything…

Help Wanted – Core .NET, SharePoint Technologies, and WCF

2009-06-12T12:22:00.002-05:00

Company Description A long-time Microsoft Partner, forProject Technology has a suite of companion products for Microsoft Project Server and Project Professional. The company is breaking ground on a new product suite targeting large businesses and government agencies concerned with earned value management and integrating data from disparate systems into their Microsoft Project implementation.

forProject Technology, Inc. – Help Wanted!

2009-06-08T10:30:00.001-05:00

About a month ago I left Microsoft to take on the role of chief architect at forProject Technology, Inc (FTI). FTI has an existing suite of products for Microsoft Project that provide advanced earned value management capabilities. FTI is moving its product suite from the desktop to the enterprise and I am helping them move to a modern, service-oriented architecture. The company is

Returning to BlogSpot

2009-05-08T13:09:00.001-05:00

This blog will become my primary blog for the time being.

MpFx Walkthrough: Creating the ProjectServer Object & Enumerating Project Information

2009-01-29T13:27:00.001-06:00

I am taking a little break from my current project. Whew. Only such much you can cram into your brain about SharePoint in one unbroken period of time. Today’s topic starts at the beginning of mpFx: How to create a ProjectServer object. I will also demonstrate enumerating project information. The code sample and an update to the core mpFx library are available on Code Gallery. Here is the

mpFx: Simon Demo

2009-01-28T21:51:00.001-06:00

Simon from Australia needed an example of how to use mpFx to create projects, resources, tasks, and assignments. Here it is: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=mpFx&DownloadId=4636. Here is the source: 1: using System; 2: using System.Web.Services.Protocols; 3: using Mcs.Epm.MicrosoftProject.mpFx; 4: using