Monthly Archives: September 2004

Help : The Original Human Dilemma

Purely Personal

This new book by Garret Keizer, who lives in Vermont, was featured this week in our local weekly, Seven Days.

I look forward to reading this book. It is about how people deal with wanting to help others, how people deal with being helped by others. It is not a book that is set out to answer questions, but to analyze this issue.

I am sitting here filling out paperwork and contracts, doing data entry, thinking about my work and in the meantime, I wonder why I do this stuff instead of hopping on a plane to Haiti or whereever I can to help people in real trouble. Every time I open up my web browser there it is (I have cnn.com as my home page). How do we manage to go about our daily lives. Certainly it is a form of self-preservation. It is a constant struggle for me as someone who is highly empathetic to other people’s troubles.

I recently read a description of a character in The Secret Life of Bees who is empathetic to the point of having created for herself a wailing wall to deal with her uncontrollable grief when she hears about the hardships of even perfect strangers. Things like reading in the newspaper about a car crash where people were killed. Thank goodness this person lives in the 60’s where she is protected from the onslaught of news that we have today. I completely understood this character and saw that she does not have whatever key it is that most of us do have to protect ourselves from internalizing the pain and suffering of others.

VS2005 Beta 1 Refresh and Visualizers

dotNET

James Avery recently emailed me to see if I had experienced any problems with the refresh and some of the visualizers that I have written in the past.

As I had not yet bothered with the install I couldn’t confirm for him but we got a pointer from Scott Nonnenberg to check that the Microsoft.VisualStudio.Debugger.Visualizers dll was referenced in the project.

Yesterday I got the dvd so I went ahead and uninstalled the beta (but no the framework or other dependent stuff since apparently, the refresh only adds Team System). Then I discovered the same affect that James had. My custom visualizers did not work, but the ones that came with VS did.

Here is how I fixed it.

The quick list:
In your visualizer’s project
– Remove meehost.dll from references.
– Add a reference Microsoft.VisualStudio.Debugger.Visualizers
– Rebuild
– Copy resulting dll to My Documents\Visual Studio\Visualizers
In client application
-be sure that the visualizer’s assembly (dll) is NOT referenced

The Julie-style verbose explanation

The original project referenced meehost.dll. This needs to be removed and replaced with a reference to Microsoft.VisualStudio.Debugger.Visualizers. Note that if you leave meehost in there and add the other, you will learn that they have duplicate classes etc which is why I removed meehost.dll. (This is in the actual project where you build the visualizer). Rebuild the visualizer and copy the assembly into My Documents\Visual Studio\Visualizers folder.

This still did not fix the problem totally as I got a new error that happened on both my custom and the included visualizers. I noticed that my visualizer assembly was referenced in the client project. That shouldn’t be necessary as the visualizer is available to all projects once it’s copied into the (above mentioned) folder. So I removed that and voila – all was well.

MindReef SoapScope v4 is out

Tools

I just checked my link on the previous post to Mindreef’s site, and was suprised to see that the version just changed from 3.0 to 4.0 since I looked at the site last week. Copying & pasting a list of new features as I have not had time to look more carefully yet!

  • SOAPscope Workspace: Gather Web services resources for a particular test or problem. Focus on the relevant resources viewing, testing, analyzing and annotating within the workspace environment.
  • SOAPscope Packaging: Workspaces may be saved to a package file for archival and sharing. Use Packaging to create artifacts of your testing process or capture and share problems between customers, support, operations, test, and development.
  • WSDL Closures: WSDL documents may reference other documents, which may also reference documents. The complete hierarchy is called a WSDL closure. SOAPscope 4.0 is the first tool that can compare, analyze or graphically view a WSDL closure.
  • Testing Secure Services: WSDL Invoke and Message Resend can now utilize SSL client certificates for mutual authentication. WS-Security compliant user and password header info can be included when invoking or resending messages.
  • Support for New Standards and Technologies: Industries first product to support test against the newest WS-I standards including the WS-I Basic Profile 1.1 and WS-I Attachments Profile 1.0. Attachments support includes features to test, debug and support services that employ SwA/MIME attachments.
  • Eclipse 2.x/3.0 Plug-in Support: Use SOAPscope directly within the popular Eclipse IDE without having to leave the IDE. New support for Eclipse 2.x makes the plugin available to a broader audience.
  • Improved Scalability: As the sophistication of Web Services increases customer demands on SOAPscope are scaling as well. Release 4.0 is tuned for better thoughput, memory utilization, reliability and performace to meet the growing demands of our customers.

Michele Leroux Bustamante at Vermont.NET this Monday

dotNET

Very excited to have Michele coming to Vermont to speak to Vermont.NET on Monday. Luckily she comes in Sunday night, and the leaves are already turning, so I plan to show off a bit of our beautiful little state to her before she heads right back to Boston as she has an 8:30 am talk at  SD East in Boston on Tuesday morning. Although we had planned a more leisurely Vermont trip for Michele, her hectic schedule has put her in the tough position of having to do a lot of travelling in a short amount of time that I do not envy and that I am so grateful she is doing. She is also speaking at the NH .NET Group on Thursday.

Michele lives in California, so this is a long trip for her. Her Vermont.NET and NHDNUG talks are both thanks to INETA.

At Vermont.NET, Michele will be doing a talk on leveraging HTTP Handlers and SOAP extensions to extend ASP.NET. I saw part of this when she did it for a WebCast in the early spring and have been very much looking forward to having her do it for Vermont.NET (and seeing the rest of it myself, as well). 

We are also fortunate to have a license of MindReef’s SoapScope to raffle off at the meeting, thanks to Scott Gagnon of MindReef.