I had a backup. Really.

Visual Studio 2008 feature request

Is this really too much to ask?

Windows XP Reinstallation failures on Dell Dimension 8400

This is written mainly for Google, hoping to save somebody some time.

I was helping a friend clean up a Windows machine — a Dell Dimension 8400 — and it was decided that the best road was to flatten and reload, but after getting the reinstall disk from Dell, it would repeatedly bluescreen with a STOP 0x0000007B error. A replacement OS reinstall CD from Dell didn't change anything.

Turns out this is related to infortuitous default RAID settings in the BIOS, which has what appeared to be a poor user interface for changing the settings. This machine had a single SATA drive and was not using any RAID configuration, but the BIOS was apparently trying to get RAID involved anyway.

The goal is to essentially turn off all the RAID features, but there isn't a way to do this directly: instead, one must point the RAID settings to the unused controller to get it out of the loop. Expanding the Drivers icon, there should be a setting for RAID: change it from RAID Autodetect/AHCI to RAID Autodetect/ATA. There really should be a setting RAID Off.

Do insure that the hard drive is in the boot order, then reinstall XP; it should now work normally.

Note that the Dell reinstallation CD doesn't appear to have the NIC drivers, so it's helpful to download them in advance as well

How to estimate a software project

1. Take your best estimate of how long it will take
2. Double it
3. Go up to the next unit of time

Example: 3 days »» 6 weeks

Sigh.

Stupid highway design

Living in Southern California for the last 20 years, I've gotten pretty used to the roads, and it was helpful when a couple of toll roads were put in to bypass some of the particularly bad traffic on the the freeway.

These roads have far more limited access than the usual highway, so it seems inconceivable that these two connected thoroughfares could have three exits with the same name, but that's exactly what happened: there are three exits for Portola within about eight miles of each other.

I don't know about everybody else, but it took me a long time to really remember the difference between the similarly-named 241 and 261 tollways, and in a kind of perfect storm, I used to live near the 241 Portola and had to routinely visit a place off the southernmost 261 Portola.

I just can't imagine how many people have gotten lost due to this poor design (which inevitably leads to imprecise directions), and it's hard to believe that there couldn't have been a way to remove at least one of them (for instance, putting an exit at Bake instead of the southernmost Portola would have been helpful).

If there's a good reason for this, I'd sure love to know it.

Note: this is not a recent development, but it's just taken me a while to get around to writing about it.

"BindingFailure was detected" in Visual Studio 2008

I'm writing this mainly for the search engines.

A recent project has me using Visual Studio 2008 with web services, and I spent a bunch of time tracking down this error (click the image above for the exact dialog):

BindingFailure was detected
The assembly with display name 'MyLibrary.XmlSerializers' failed to load in the 'LoadFrom' binding context of the AppDomain with ID 1. The cause of the failure was:
System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly
...

I wasn't intentionally doing any LoadFrom, and the Web Services code was more or less stock output from the wsdl command. Hmmm.

It turns out this is an artifact of an optimization in Whidbey (VS2008), and easily worked around. This post includes this information from Microsoft:

The behavior you're seeing with the XmlSerializer is by design. The XmlSerializer has a new feature in whidbey that supports loading pre-generated serializers at runtime. This can greatly improve performance, as well as providing other usability benefits; however, the only way we can "probe" for the pre-generated assembly is to try to load it. This is why you're seeing these "file not found" errors -- the XmlSerializer is probing for pre-generated assemblies. These errors should be caught by the XmlSerializer and runtime should resume normally.
... XmlMessaging team

As interesting as this is, it's not showing how to make the problem go away, but a bit more digging showed that this was a self-inflicted problem on my part. Previously in the project, I had enabled every exception I could find, and this was causing a routine exception (that was designed to be caught by the platform) but breaking on it.

The solution in my case was to turn this off by selecting Debug : Exceptions... and disabling Managed Debugging Assistants:

Poof: end of problem.

Stuff you didn't know: Dry Cleaners

One of the nice things about being a consultant is that I get my hand in a lot of different industries, and it's fun to pick up stuff you'd never know as an ordinary consumer.

Some time ago I helped my local dry cleaner install a few computers, and though it didn't really require that I know anything about the business per se, I always feel that I'll do a better job supporting them if I know more about how they work.

So I got to see how stuff is done from start to finish, and though I didn't run the cleaning equipment itself, I learned about job checkin, how stuff is sorted, the flow through the system to make sure stuff doesn't get lost. It was fascinating.

My interesting tidbits:

• When a new dry-cleaner starts up, how do they train their workers, tune the equipment, and make sure that the flow, flows? The answer was one of the best win-wins I've ever seen: they get a truckload of used clothing from Goodwill!

  It's all checked into the system as if it were from a regular customer, they train the workers on all aspects of the system, make sure the equipment is adjusted properly, pressed, bagged, and racked. This can go on for a coupla weeks as the bugs are worked out.

  But they don't immediately send it all back: on opening day, customers see racks full of clothes (empty racks would not inspire confidence). Some time later, the laundered or dry-cleaned clothes are sent back to Goodwill in several rounds, presumably for sale in their thrift stores.

  I love a good synergy.

• They find all kinds of strange stuff in pockets, and though they try to reunite things with their owners, some stuff falls to the bottom of bins. They had recently found a pacemaker in the bottom if a bin - gotta wonder if the owner is missing it...?

• If you want to be nice to your dry cleaner, undo every button when you take your stuff in and turn it all right-side out; if you don't, they do, and after checking in a lot of clothes I will tell you that undoing the cuffs and collars and fronts of a coupla dozen shirts is not nice on the fingers.The worst is if a guy pulls off his long-sleeved button-down shirt over his head, turning it inside out but still fully buttoned. Ugh.

• If the back room of a dry cleaner is dirty, then they probably won't do a very good job on your clothes. If you really want to find out, ask to use the restroom. If the place is a dump. take your clothes elsewhere.

Who knew?