A day in the life of...

This morning I spent an hour on the phone to Microsoft support. I tried to log into my machine only to see the error message The user profile service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded. The guy on the phone got me to put my Vista install DVD into the drive, boot from that, go to system-recovery, and revert to a restore point. Worked nicely. The thing is, why did this happen? The only thing I can think of is the open source Firebird DB server. I installed it on Sunday to get an old app to run (installed as app, not service). I didn't install the control panel plugin due to a warning on the site telling me not to install it on Vista or it will trash my Control Panel. I suppose the warning about the control panel should have been enough to put me off. Still, it works now. I just wont be installing it again, at least for some time.

I wrote and now maintain a Pocket PC app for Imperial Tobacco (yes, despite supporting the ban on smoking in public places). It is important that the date/time on the PPC is accurate so part of the business flow is to get the user to check the date/time immediately after they log in. Despite this step we were getting invalid dates back from their collected data, in all cases it was always one day ahead of the correct time. We have recently introduced various additional common sense checks such as "You have missed a working day, are you sure?" etc, but the change that will have the biggest affect is the one that was the smallest to change. When the user enters the current date/time if it is less than the last known date/time on the server (sent in their database of work to do) I showed a message saying it was incorrect. The message read "The date you have entered is invalid" At this point the user looks at the date they have entered, thinks "but the date is r

One of the most important things to do when designing a system for a customer is to to try create a common business language between you and the people who understand the problem domain. A lack of what is known as "the ubiquitous language" can result in misunderstandings and a failed project. I had a real life experience of a ubiquitious language failure yesterday. My brother went to the shop to buy some credit for his phone and offered to take my children with him to buy sweets. When they got back my son asked me "How come uncle Stephen was able to buy credit for his phone?" When I asked what he was talking about he described the sign on the wall in the shop, it read "Please do not ask for credit as refusal often offends"

Very funny :-) http://www.quoted4truth.com/articles/I-do-not-have-any-money-so-am-sending-you-this-drawing-I-did-of-a-spider-instead and you can bid for the picture here http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=190265903424 I wish I had thought of ebay'ing it :-)

Aspect Oriented Programming looks great. It's something I have always wanted to use, but I avoid it because it doesn't work exactly how I would like it to. The first thing I want to avoid is lots of reflection at runtime (compile time is fine), it is for this reason I have mainly been interested in PostSharp . PostSharp looks great! You decorate your class with attributes that you create yourself. After compiling your assembly PostSharp inspects the result for Attributes that are descended from one of its own special PostSharp AOP classes. When it sees these attributes it modifys your code in a specific way. To use the same example as everyone else in the world (yawn) you could create an attribute from the method-boundard attribute. Override the methods declared on that attribute for entry/exit of the method, and write some code in there to write to the IDE's output window using System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(). Now when I add that attribute to a method on one of my cla

I have a friend who once decided to teach himself VB. We had a mutual friend who was the manager of a video shop so he decided to write some new software for him. He started off by creating an MS Access database to hold the data for his application. Each week I'd pop around to his house and he'd have MS Access open, reworking his tables etc. After a few months I asked "Have you started to write the app yet?". "No, not yet." He replied, "I am trying to get the DB right first, then I will get onto writing the application". I asked what he meant by getting the DB right. He explained that he wanted to make this the best video-hire software ever, and that I should hear about some of the features that are going into it as a result of the DB structure he has made. Record the cast of the film. Record the director, producer etc. Record the genre; horror, comedy, etc. Record film information for films due to be released in the future. All sorts of stu

I've just spotted something I omitted before zipping up my AccommodationManager app and making it available. When you run the app in Release mode you will experience SQL errors. These errors are intermittent, and a query that worked only seconds ago might not always work. The reason for this is that ECO executes all queries within a transaction; SQLite creates a journal file for every transaction and then deletes it when done; and my anti-virus decides it wants to take a look at this new journal file to see what's inside it; resulting in SQLite not being able to open its own journal file exclusively. This was something I noticed a while ago in another ECO+SQLite app of mine and the guy who writes the library spent a couple of hours with me on MSN trying to work out what the problem was (he had a fix to me by the next morning!). Anyway, I have updated the project so that the connection string tells SQLite not to delete the journal file when it has finished with it, as a conse