I just scheduled - and got approved - my week of luxurious paid time off duing the first week of November for…

Wait for it…

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas!

That’s right! The entire first week of November, my vacation in San Andreas begins. I will be sitting on the couch, eating junk food, sitting next to my 16-pound fat cat (who likes to lay around next to people playing video games - it’s my Tubby Game Cat), doing drive-by shootings and robberies. Living the life of Grand Theft Auto.

I seriously can’t wait.

Check this out - it’s a guy who makes sort of ambient techno using a Jew’s Harp and a signal processor. It’s actually pretty cool.

I’m working on a Visual Studio .NET add-in project where we need to be able to build the project both through the Visual Studio IDE and through NAnt.

So I’ve got NAnt 0.84, which builds all the other projects (using the <solution> task) I’ve got just fine, but gives me this error: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. at NAnt.VSNet.Reference..ctor(Solution solution, ProjectSettings ps, XmlElement elemReference, SolutionTask solutionTask, String outputDir)...

And so on, tracing down the whole call stack. What’s the deal?

As you (probably) know, references in a .csproj file look like this:

<VisualStudioProject>  <CSHARP>   <Build>    <References>     <Reference      Name = "EnvDTE"      AssemblyName = "EnvDTE"      HintPath = "..\..\..\..\..\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\EnvDTE.dll"     />    </References>   </Build>  </CSHARP> </VisualStudioProject>

Of course, the “HintPath” attribute is optional.

Apparently it’s not an option for NAnt. The add-in wizard doesn’t put HintPath in for your references, and regardless of what you do, NAnt won’t build without it. (Yes, I added <assemblyfolders> attributes to the <solution> task - you need those, too, but it doesn’t fix it.) So manually edit your .csproj, add the HintPath, and you’re in.

Hockey season, at least as far as the Winter Hawks are concerned, has begun. This means 36 home games between this past weekend and next March, which is quite a lot if you think about it.

We went to two hockey games this weekend - one Saturday night (which we lost) and one Sunday night (which we won) - and we’ve got another coming up on Wednesday. I love hockey season - it’s a social event, similar to folks meeting up at the local pub or whatever - but it sure does take a lot out of me.

At last night’s game, during the first intermission, two altogether too avid hockey fans got married at center ice, the team mascot acting as “best man” (or “best bird,” in this case). I’m not sure I’m into that. I think it’s cool to be a fan and all, but married at center ice at the second game in the season for a junior league team? That’s a little much. (The “best bird” dropped the ring in the middle of the ceremony and wasn’t able to pick it up off the ice with the mascot gloves on. They had to stop the ceremony and pick it up for him. Too funny.)

An idea came to me while watching the Zamboni ice resurfacer run its course around the rink at the game: They need to make a riding lawnmower that looks/works like a Zamboni. A Zamboni lawn resurfacer, if you will. The collection tank could catch the grass… it’d be brilliant. Maybe I’ll have to submit that idea to them.

Side note: Last month my dad was driving home from work and the motorhome behind him was driving a little erratically (according to witnesses). It then attempted to pass (or something) in a no-pass zone. For those who think they can pass in the no-pass zone, here’s the accident that happened right behind my dad:

Pieces of motorhome landed on the back of Dad’s truck. Apparently they had to use the Jaws of Life to get the motorhome driver out. Crazy stuff.

I sent this to Scott Hanselman like three months ago and didn’t mention it here, but I ran into this again today (with the same set of users that originally had the problem

• surprise, surprise) so I figured it was worthy of repetition.

If you have the Microsoft Loopback Adapter running on a machine where you try to execute a web setup project generated from Visual Studio .NET (an MSI file), you’ll get the following error:

The specified path ‘http://MACHINENAME/http://MACHINENAME/InstallFolder’ is unavailable. The Internet Information Server might not be running or the path exists and is redirected to another machine. Please check the status of this virtual directory in the Internet Services Manager.

The problem, as you can see from the message above, is the Loopback Adapter doing its job - looping back on itself. That messes up the installation path, though, and the MSI pukes.

To fix the issue, disable the Loopback Adapter, run the installer, then when the install is finished you can re-enable the Loopback Adapter.