This is for DotNetDave McMasters who said – “hey if you figure that one out…”

The problem

I have had a very annoying problem with a Crystal Deployment. I did find, 2 years ago, thanks to the Wrox Crystal book and then FINALLY Crystal put the info up on their own website, how to deploy the product to clients. The trick is getting your license key into the appropriate spot in the setup project.

My app was not installing properly though. The license key goes into the registry inside of Local Machine about 5 keys in from Software/Crystal Decisions. It was only building a few of the keys and not getting down to the keycodes at all.

I could never solve it so luckily, I was just doing a deployment here and there and just went on to the box myself over pcanywhere and cut & paste the reg key. Not a useful solution but a band-aid. However I had to get around the problem and could never find any solutions anywhere.

So then I tried to just export the keys from the registry and import them but the license info still wouldn’t go in.

The solution

I had copied and pasted my license keycode from the VS.NET help area and it had not pasted in properly! Doi! Once someone who was monitoring the HOL’s where I went to hunt down the Crystal person who was supposed to be there found this problem (we remoted into my development machine at home) everything was fixed. He had me copy & paste right from the original registration email I had received (and still had!) from Crystal.

The explanation

The crux of the problem was that I had messed up my license when I inserted it into my setup project. But my stupid (“I give up I’ll do this nonsense instead“) band-aid solution with the registry would NEVER have worked becuase obviously Crystal has to protect themselves from people copying the license info around. I had a legal license, but still… The license info in my computer’s registry was encrypted. When I run the set up package on my client machiens, it gets encrypted there, too. So that’s why you can’t (and shouldn’t be able to) just export and import the registry keys.

In addition to reading Eric Sink’s post on VS2005 Team System and the relation (and possible effects of) it’s source control tool (”Hatteras”) to SourceGear Vault, this post by Korby Parnell addresses the relationship of the VS2005 Team System and Microsoft’s Visual Source Safe as well as the future (yes, there is definitely one) of VSS.

Mark Miller, from Developer Express, was clearly the “belle of the ball” (well, the beaux of the ball) at TechEd showing off their phenomenal product, CodeRush. This was viral. I knew it was cool when I saw Scott Hansleman hunkered down with Mark and his laptop for about 2 hours at the cabanas. In fact I was chatting with someone who had something to talk with Scott about and said “he is way too seriously involved with Mark right now, I’d recommend waiting…“ Just google “CodeRush weblog” and you will see how many people were writing about it. I spent some time with Mark as well and saw it work it’s magic in C# and it is amazing. I think C# needs it a lot more than VB does (think: “where is that damned end bracket?:….right?) and will check out what it does in VB as well. CodeRush has been a must have tool in the Delphi world for a long time. It will surely make the same dive in to the .NET world now.

I took advantage of the 1/2 price (for first 500…) cert tests taht Pearson/Vue was offering at TechEd and finally took some tests. Other than the recent .NET Security beta that I took I have never taken cert tests in my 20 years of programming. I took the Windows Forms VB.NET and Web Applications VB.NET tests. The first was the windows forms and I took it totally cold and just barely passed. There were many things on there that I have never happened to do or use before. Also, I found that my deployment and debugging skills were my weakest. I can definitely attest the fact that I have not done a lot with tracing and event logging and it showed. I know quite a lot about them, but just don’t have hands on experience. MeasureUp was offering one free practice test there also, so I spent about an hour with that in prep for the web app test. There were definitely some new things for me which I got into my head before taking the real test. They weren’t on the real test! Once again, the deployment and tracing stuff was my weakest suit but I passed that test with no problems. I didn’t think I had and was surprised by my score!

Rebecca Dias did a demo during Ballmer’s keynote this morning. Rebecca is the Product Mgr for web services. It is great that it almost seems like just “the norm” to have a woman doing something so incredibly  visible + extremely important at an event like this. Doing a demo at a Ballmer keynote is no small thing!

WSE2 &IBF (Information Bridge Framework for Office) are what she showed.

what this means is that WSE2 is now RTM’d! Go get it !!!

VS2005 (thanks Korby) “Team System“…..

integrated team mgmt of project, unit testing and FXCop-like error checking and more.

I was fiddling with my new PocketPC and went to System and memory to look at how much memory there was. Then tapped on ok and nothing happened. After a little fiddling around I just pushed the power button but heck it doesn’t turn off. Darn. I’m still not finished packing for TechEd. I thought it would be kind of fun to use. Maybe I’ll clear the battery out and resynch it. Not much to that…

I can see referrals coming in from people’s websites where the teched bloggers feed is. THat means the idea is working. Good job, Drew. I have one here, too, but it might be too low down on the page…

The July issue of Visual Studio Magazine features this article, SQL Server Tips & Tricks, by Roman Rehak. Roman is one of our local heros, and as track chair for PASS, a popular PASS speaker, frequent author of SQL related articles in VSM, track chair for DevTeach and a speaker there as well AND one of the co-founders of the local SQL Server SIG..and a blogger on SQLJunkies – we certainly can’t keep him a secret around here any more.

The article pulls together tips & tricks from some of Roman’s awesome conference sessions. As a developer who gets stuck doing most of my own database administration and all database related coding that my applications need, this stuff is priceless.

Roman will also be at TechEd this year along with a few of my other local friends.

I am so sick of trying to explain WHICH version of vs.NEXT I am using. It is tooo long. Just because they removed “.NET“ from the name, doesn’t help.

Visual Studio 2005 Community Edition March Preview or something like that

Visual Studio 2005 Community Technology Preview March 2004

Can’t I still call it VS Whidbey? It’s a nice name. And what are we calling the whole kitten caboodle these days? Just .NET 2.0? And let’s not even talk about the name of the Tablet PC O/S which is losing it’s identity bit by bit.

from Simon Fell:

If you use PocketSOAP, then I’m interested in which platforms & features you use, head over to the mailing list and do the survey, thanks !