Scott Hanselman

Old news, but it matters to some. If you're using MSXML4 and you get this while doing a POST:

msxml4.dll error '80072efd'
A connection with the server could not be established

It might be because of the tightened security around MSXML 4.0 SP2.

The docs say:

"Security in the implementation of the MSXML 4.0 SP2 ServerXmlHttp object has been enhanced to check the Internet Explorer security policy setting for submitting non-encrypted form data. A security policy setting of "Disable" or "Prompt" for the "Submit nonencrypted form data" option will result in an "Access Denied" error message when attempting to post form data using the ServerXmlHttp object. This is a change that can potentially break existing code that uses earlier versions of the ServerXmlHttp object (such as prior released versions of both MSXML 3.0 and MSXML 4.0) to post form data when the Internet Explorer security policy setting for submitting non-encrypted form data is not enabled."

This might happen if you have an existing application running on, say, Windows 2000, then you upgrade the machine to Window 2003 and get the new MSXML "for free." Remember - know the application stack, the whole stack if you can. The OS is part of the stack, and in this case, XML is too.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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My thirty-fourth Podcast is up In this unusual episode I head over to Chris Sells' house to chat. It's a little longer than usual, but Chris is an interesting guy. We ramble, but cover software design, user experience, programmer personality types, and Windows Vista. This is the first show I interviewed someone on (not counting the TechEd "on the floor" show) so if it's interesting (or not) let me know and we might do others.

We're listed in the iTunes Podcast Directory, so I encourage you to subscribe with a single click (two in Firefox) with the button below. For those of you on slower connections there are lo-fi and torrent-based versions as well.

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About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I had a friend whose team said:

"...most of them have 1GB of RAM and Pentium 4 3.0Ghz HT CPU’s. hey are all complaining about performance, especially with build times. Visual Studio is eating up most of the memory on their systems. Right now those with 1GB of RAM are generally running around 1.2GB of memory usage, so they are swapping like crazy and thus adding even more overhead. There are a couple systems with 2GB of RAM with Core Duo CPU’s. These systems are having the same issues where they are using 2.2GB of RAM, most of which is meaning eaten up by Visual Studio."

And I asked...

"Do they have too many projects in their solution?"

and he said...

"They said 50 projects and growing."

...and Scott Guthrie posted last week on optimizing build times in VS 2005.

"1.2GB RAM usage is pretty out there...50 large projects will strain a system depending on what they are doing. They should look hard at whether they really need all 50 in one solution.  Multiple solutions (even with multiple instances of VS running) work great too."

Clarifying Update from ScottGu:

You should be able to load 50 projects in a single solution - my comment in the origional mail wasn't to imply that you can't.  It was more than 1.2GB of RAM to-do so is larger than I would expect (unless each project is large and there are lots of cross project references).

Editoral: That makes me suspect Resharper as the issue in this case..

As an aside, they were also running Resharper at the same time, and it's currently unclear how much memory was being used by Resharper's on-the-fly analysis. I'll post if I learn more.

Nutshell: Try to break your projects up into reasonably sized subsystems that can build separately. Our SDK has about six solutions, each with about 10 projects.

If you're running VB and you're hitting the VB-specific problem with large projects, you can get a HotFix here.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Very well written and thoughtful article by Stephen Chu up at InfoQ.

To be fair, I still think .NET is great. It has offered me a place where I am consistently delivering great business value to my clients. However, I constantly remind myself that there are multiple ways and numerous technologies to solving a single problem, some better than others. By being loyal to one technology stack, I am bound to unconsciously make biased decisions, which will ultimately hinder my ability to deliver business value.

Here's some choice tidbits, emphasis mine:

There are a few hurdles I had to go through in learning Ruby. First, I had to go through the emotions of accepting the fact that it will take longer to find a new Ruby solution than to use an existing technology that I am comfortable in. This is by far the most painful experience. But, after a while, you will start cherishing the fact that you are starting to develop multiple ways to solving different problems, and that’s where the pleasure comes in. Secondly, reading about Ruby/Rails only gets me so far. Practically using what I have learned helps me to remember what I have learned. Remember, use it or lose what you have invested time to read about.

This article says, better than I could, why .NET folks should look at Rails. If you're resistant to change (or installing things) try Instant Rails. If you refuse to install anything, and still want to Try Ruby, then try it directly in your browser.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I'll be speaking with Patrick Cauldwell at the West Coast 2006 Patterns & Practices Summit (PNPSummit) October 9th-12th this year. If you haven't registered and you've got some training dollars, do check out this event.

Check out the schedule of sessions. Not only are Patrick and I there, but Corillian's own "Agilist" Wayne Allen is speaking on Continuous Integration as well.

There's a great lineup for this event this year, including talks from Ted Neward, Jim Newkirk, Peter Provost, Brad Wilson, Rocky Lhotka and many other technorati's with keynotes from Brad Abrams, Scott Isaacs, Jack Greenfield, and Rick Maguire.

Hope to see you there! I'll be ducking out occasionally for the Windows PowerShell Developer Conference happening the first two days. Busy week!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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