I’m starting to scratch the massive surface that is CAB.  CAB is better known as the Composite UI Application Block developed by the Patterns & Practices Group at Microsoft.

It’s hard to define exactly what CAB gives you in one sentence, but I’ll try.  How about manageable windows forms architecture with an emphasis on patterns ?  I’m an ASP.NET guy, so that’s where my expertise lies, however I have built a few moderately sized WinForms apps and they get unwieldy very quickly.

I plan on posting a bit about CAB as I dig into it, so stay tuned for that.  For now I’ll just post my first experience with it:  Getting the darn thing installed.  In tune with many CTP and early release software, it doesn’t always go as smoothly as planned.

First thing to do is install the following things in the correct order:
(I assume you already have .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 installed)

• Guidance Automation Extensions
• Guidance Automation Toolkit for Visual Studio 2005
• Composite UI Application Block (CAB)
• Enterprise Library (June 2006)

I found some sources on the internet that listed those in reverse, and I got an error at the Guidance Automation Toolkit installation that said “Operation invalid for the current state of the object.”

In my case, I got the error even after uninstalling them all, but I was able to fix the error by modifying the registry.  Open regedit and navigate to HKEY LOCAL MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\COMMAND PROCESSOR\.  There should be a key in there called AutoRun.  I renamed this to AutoRunOld and the installation worked.

(I have a feeling that this setting was modified by an XPize installation, since they modify your command prompt settings… but I haven’t confirmed this.)

Now that everything is installed and running, check out these resources to get your feet wet with CAB:

• Bill Simser’s blog has a few nice gems about CAB
• A First Look at CAB at .NET Developer’s Journal
• Microsoft Whitepaper on Designing Smart Clients with CAB (PDF)
• CABPedia (wiki)

The next post will definitely contain more “meat.”

Many of you have already heard the news, but my company, Software Architects, was recently acquired by Sogeti.

My only real prior knowledge of Sogeti was that I knew that Tim Rayburn worked at the Dallas office.

It’s hard to know what to expect at first.  Most seem to think it’s an exciting change, probably because we will be introduced to a lot of new clients and have one of the largest Microsoft consultancies in Houston (among other cities).  I sincerely hope that the culture that I love here will not be disturbed.  Sark stands out among a number of similar companies here in Houston, largely because they have fun company meetings (open bar!), a great training program, you’re paid to get certifications, they have a great library and will order books if you need them.  We’re reimbursed for tolls and parking as well.

It is my hope that these things do not fall through the cracks as we make the transition to becoming “Sogetians” (ahh… just doesn’t have the same ring to it!).

We’re ramping up to integrate everything this month, mostly moving Sarks over to the Sogeti infrastructure.  March will definitely be an interesting month, that’s for sure.

They should be ashamed of themselves…

I just upgraded to BlogJet version 2, and I wish I had done it sooner!  I always found it annoying that I couldn’t add tags on the fly through BlogJet, however now I can!

The interface looks a lot cleaner as well.  I’m sure I will uncover some other cool new features as I use it, but for now… if you’re not writing to your blog with BlogJet, go try it!

This is seriously cool.

Lifehacker has a couple video tutorials that only last about 30 seconds that will explain it all.  Basically, think of it like turning your textbox into a mini TextMate, this works for Notepad, BlogJet, or just about any old web input box.

http://lifehacker.com/software/texter/lifehacker-code-texter-windows-238306.php

Most people don’t realize this, but JavaScript can leak memory if you don’t write it properly.  This is a strange concept, because for one, it runs in the browser, two, it’s a scripting language so it feels simpler, and 3 because you usually don’t do very much in JavaScript.

But, when JavaScript is written carelessly, it can lead to enourmous memory leaks that can actually crash the browser.

Take a look at this incredible article on javascript memory leakage up at CodeProject posted by Volkan Ocelik to find out the different leakage patterns and how to avoid them. In order to fully understand how to avoid memory leakage, it is important that you understant closures. The best explanation I have found is here. So make sure you think when writing JavaScript so you don't hurt yourself.

I wrapped up my project at a client today, so I’m on to a new one on Monday.

The project consisted mainly of SharePoint, but I did get to do some interesting development aside from that.  I worked on a Stock Quote web service that would gather information from pluggable sources.  They wanted to pay for a dedicated source, however politics and paperwork were such a barrier I ended up just scraping Google finance.  It won’t last forever, but it’s free and avoids the paperwork.

We wrote a few custom SharePoint Web Parts, and I found out first hand what a pain in the ass it is to deploy these things.  The deployment project outputs a CAB file.  This CAB file needs to be copied onto the server, and you have to use the STSADM tool to install it into the portal server.  This means you need Remote Desktop access just to deploy to a server!  Our production servers are load-balanced, so this means you have to do it twice.  To save us a lot of time and headaches I wrote a Windows service that would monitor a CAB file for changes using a FileSystemWatcher, when it detected a change, it would…

• Extract the CAB to get the dlls
• Copy the dlls to the target bin folder
• Optionally sign the assembly so it can be installed into the GAC
• Run STSADM to remove the old CAB file from the portal server
• Run STSADM to get the new CAB file in the portal server
• Reset IIS

This thing worked like a charm!  We could kick off a build, run a batch file the copy the new CAB over, and the thing would install itself.  I wish I could release the code here, but I wrote it at a client site, so it belongs to them.

We also managed to contort a SharePoint Portal site into something actually pleasing to look at, and ripped out most of SharePoints crappy markup.  Why in the world does SharePoint output so many damn tables?

To be clear, this is all with SharePoint 2003, so I imagine MOSS 2007 is loads better, but I haven’t yet worked on it.  Anyway, my next project doesn’t involve SharePoint, so I’m happy.

Installing MCMS 2002 SP1a on my laptop proved quite difficult this week.  This is one product that Microsoft really did not focus on the install experience.

I first tried to install it without Visual Studio 2003.  It complained, so I got Visual Studio Installed.  It also asked for the IE Web Controls, so I downloaded those, extracted it, and ran the build.bat file.  I copied the sample app as directed and everything was working there.

I didn’t have SQL Server installed locally, so I didn’t have SQL-DMO, but the installer didn’t tell me how to get it.  It kept complaining that I didn’t have Visual Studio 2002, Visual Studio 2003, IE Web Controls, and SQL-DMO, when I clearly had 2 of those 4.

I installed the SQL Client tools and that solved the SQL-DMO requirement.  Then I found an MSI installer for IE Web Controls, and that did the trick there (apparently it doesn’t REALLY check to see if you have it, it just checks the Add/Remove Programs section).  Visual Studio 2002 isn’t really required, the wording is just off on the installer.

That was a waste of a day.  I could have gotten much more accomplished if this installation had been easier.

Finally.  A book on NHibernate!!!

I was the first to guess that this was the secret news so I suppose I will be getting a free copy.  Maybe I can be a technical reviewer for them (though I’m sure they already have one lined up).

Pierre Henri Kuaté should do an excellent job with the book, especially knowing that Bauer and King are behind him!  (If you don’t already know, they wrote the original Hibernate in Action — which is a must-have)

I gave a talk on Continuous Integration last night at the Houston Sark Office.  Thanks to all who attended.

We had pizza and discussed some of the processes and principles behind CI, as well as some of the tools to get you there.  I did a live demo of an app, connected to source control and a build server.

A-la Jeremy Miller, I had my CCTray audio clips setup, so when the build failed, you’d hear Napolean Dynamite say “Freakin Idiot!”

I think it went well, however for those of you who attended, I’d really like to hear your thoughts!  Please take a second to leave a comment.

Here are the files used in the demo:

continuous integration.zip (8323 KB)

(included are the sample project, cruise control config, and power-point slides)

I left out the build server installation because it was over 70mb.  It consisted of Subversion binaries, Nant, and a Cruise folder with some project state data.

I got amazing help from Jean-Paul Boodhoo, who has a 9 part NAnt starter series, which ends on a screencast of setting up CruiseControl!

Additional resources were:

• James Shore – Continuous Integration on a Dollar a Day
• Martin Fowler – Continuous Integration
• Pragmatic Project Automation by Mike Clark 
• Expert .NET Delivery with CruiseControl and NAnt by Marc Holmes

Many of you already know, I got married to Silvia on December 30th, 2006!

We had a beautiful ceremony with lots of friends and family.  Everyone had a good time.  My wife and I are quite the happy couple!  As promised, here are some pictures from the wedding.  The entire album is avaiable on flickr.