OK, conference organizers, listen up: You never get the box lunch right. Ever. Even when I was in grade school and you were the field trip organizer, you still never got it right. Not everyone wants a pre-made meat sandwich, and not everyone who doesn't want meat is a vegetarian. Giving me the choice between soggy ham, limp turkey, or sprouts-on-rye isn't a choice. I might consider the ham, but you made it six hours ago, threw a really moist tomato on there, and wrapped it tight as you could in plastic, thereby ensuring the tomato juice permeates the bread and makes...

I use Snippet Compiler quite a bit for quick one-off testing to see if something will work. Something I've been doing a lot lately is doing little quick checks to see how you'd do certain things with TypeMock Isolator. Snippet Compiler basically starts you out with a very thin framework for a console application and when you hit the "Start" button, it builds and runs the app. (You could do the same thing in Visual Studio, but Snippet Compiler is very lightweight and is totally built for this sort of experimentation.) To make my TypeMock experimentation easier, I created a template...

I participate in agile projects where we have a daily standup meeting to discuss high-level task status and roadblocks. I've noticed that many times I find there is a general feel that if the manager is out sick or can't otherwise make the daily standup that the team feels the standup is inherently canceled. When you run past their desks to find out where the missing members are to round them up, they're astonished: "What? We're still having a standup?" Even if the manager is sick, even if one of the team members is out, yes, we are still having the standup. Why...

This weekend [finally] brought an end to my latest struggles with Xbox Live digital rights management. I didn't get a call from Xbox Support, which I was told I would get, but I did notice that several folks on the Xbox Live forums, also in my situation, suddenly had their issues resolved without any notification, so I figured I'd give it a shot, too. When Xbox Support has fixed you up, you'll be able to go into the Xbox Marketplace section of the dashboard, go to "Account Management," view your Download History, and select "Download Again" for each of the items...

I'm in the process of updating a bunch of old Visual Studio 2003 projects and solutions to, well, something a little newer. I found this odd behavior issue where there were some references that were marked to as "Copy Local" and that would work fine in a Visual Studio build, but when run from MSBuild, the references weren't getting copied correctly, which would cause unit tests to fail and such because things weren't where they should be. A little Googling led me to this forum post which basically boils down to: Go through your projects in a text editor and look for references...

Anymore, if you want to generate documentation, you're using Sandcastle along with, most likely, some community-generated wrapper for it so you're not manually executing the bajillion steps Sandcastle requires to get things done. (Wow, that didn't sound bitter at all.) I use Sandcastle Help File Builder for several projects and like it a lot. When Sandcastle generates its reflection information (so it can properly resolve links in your docs), you need to tell it where it can find third-party dependencies so it can generate the information it needs. All of this has to happen on the command line (no, there's not...

Sunday Jenn, I, and our friends Angela and Keaka gathered up in the Wagon Queen Family Truckster and headed down to Lincoln City, OR. Every year they place a bunch of glass floats up and down the beach, and Angela's totally into floats, so we went to help her find one. After a couple of hours walking around on the beach, searching with the other treasure hunters, we came up empty-handed. I was tempted to run to a local shop and just buy a float and then hide it in the sand somewhere to "find," but I couldn't sneak away. Somehow...

Saturday was my seventh in a series of laser hair removal treatments for my face. I had some excellent results from last time and my facial hair is getting pretty noticeably patchy. Especially at the end of the day, I get sort of "five o'clock dirty-face" now since it's less "shadow" and more sparse. (I went to the dermatologist the other day and forgot to mention I was getting the treatments. He was all, "I don't remember you mentioning you had really bad acne when you were younger..." It's pretty patchy.) The area around my mouth is being a little stubborn,...

The Verizon Fios installers just left, and I've got my 15mbps up/2mpbs down running in full form. Got everything transferred over to use the Verizon router and Xbox Live, my primary network problem child, seems to be working swimmingly. Of course, it didn't come off without a hitch - the person taking our order mistyped the phone number, so the installers couldn't really transfer our phone number from Comcast to Verizon because the paperwork didn't match. So now we have Verizon video and data, and we have both Verizon and Comcast phone. How does that work? Verizon is actually hooked up...

Getting TypeMock, NUnit, and NCover to work together in your build script can sometimes be a tricky thing. Getting any one of those things to work individually is easy enough, getting two going is a little tougher, but getting all three together requires a bit of finesse. Add to that the fact that you may run different versions of different products (different NUnit versions, for example) for different source code bases and it gets downright complicated. The way my product code works, when I check out the codeline I want to work on it comes with all of the dependencies -...

I'm playing with the latest release of TypeMock (now "TypeMock Isolator," as it sounds like they have a suite of products planned beyond their mocking product) and I think my favorite feature is the better debugging support. Sure, you can mock fields now (admittedly, a little scary sounding, but with legitimate applications nonetheless) and they've cranked up the performance on it, but how many times have you fired up TestDriven.NET and started your test in the debugger only to get odd behavior because you tried to step into a mocked method? Now, when you try that, you actually see the method outlined in...

Looks like Atwood is seeing the ugly Xbox 360 DRM beast for the first time. This is something I've been painfully aware of for far longer, as have many other people. Sorry you're having trouble, Jeff. Maybe you'll have better luck getting a DRM fix out of Microsoft than the rest of us poor saps.

Went to see Cloverfield this weekend. What I expected: A cool, maybe kinda scary, fun roller-coaster-ride monster movie. What I got: A headache from too much shaky-cam following stupid people through New York. Before I get a bunch of people telling me I missed the point, let me stem the tide: I got it. I mean, I get the whole "point of view" thing and how the interesting bit was that rather than tell the monster movie story from an omniscient perspective they drilled down and got it from a 'new and different" perspective - that of victims. I get it. That doesn't make it...