Scott Hanselman

The stunning Betsy Aoki, the Community Program Manager for MSDN and TechNet emailed me earlier with details on my recent GotDotNet troubles. (Reminder, I met Betsy at a recent Nerd Dinner. She found me to be dapper, and preceded to be cyber-stalked by one Phil Weber ;) )

Betsy has kindly pointed out that most of the GDN problems are caused by what she calls "unclean Passport cookies." I'm unclear on why I'm unclean, but a clear of the browser cookies and cache and a little mercurachrome cleared the whole thing right up.

She has also seen fit to update the GotDotNet FAQ with all the details on how to fix troubles you may have.

Turns out that not all that fails to glitter fails on the server-side, if I may mix my metaphors. The new GDN FAQ has good information that solved my problem; do spread the word to people in need of assistance.

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.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By

This is less of a technical post than it is a complaint. GotDotNet.com's Workspaces have been down since Friday and are reporting a generic error.  There's no news, no announcement and no ETA. Frankly, it's very frustrating and very unprofessional.  I participate in a number of projects up on GDN and I do apprecaite it's existence. But, if Workspaces isn't given the respect it deserves, folks will start using SourceForge (more than they already do).

A lot of people on a lot of listservs, public and private, and lamented the lack of attention and feeding that GDN has received. What's your thoughts? Has GDN seen its hayday, or is this just a minor bump on the road?

Now playing: Amel Larrieux - Make Me Whole

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.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By

The XmlSerializer is a much maligned piece of software, but I have to tell you, it's the bomb.  We use it a lot here at Corillian. Recently we had to debug a pretty funky problem where an enum was writing out to an XML file, but wasn't reading back in. We suspected it was a namespace thing, but the XmlSerializer is such a black box, a lot of people really have trouble dealing with it. It inspires a trial-and-error style, while I prefer to debug and step around myself.

Here's how to debug into a generated assembly from the XmlSerializer.

1. Given an application like:

using System.Xml;
using System.Xml.Serialization;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;

namespace Foo
{
    public class Bar
    {
        public static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            XmlSerializer x = new XmlSerializer(typeof(Person));
            Person p = new Person();
            p.first = "Scott";
            p.last = "Hanselman";
            x.Serialize(new StreamWriter("foo.xml"),p);
        }
    }

    public class Person
    {
        public string first;
        public string last;
    }
}

2. Create a yourapplication.exe.config like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
   <system.diagnostics>
      <switches>
         <add name="XmlSerialization.Compilation" value="1" />
      </switches>
   </system.diagnostics>
</configuration>

3. Compile and run and step up to the line where the XmlSerializer is constructed, and step over that line.

4. Go to c:\documents and settings\[username]\local settings\temp and look at the most recently created *.cs file. Open that file, it will have a name like asdasdfs.0.cs. Note that there are *.pdbs in that folder as well.

5. Set a breakpoint anywhere in that generated file.

6. Debug to taste (see screenshot below)

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.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By

Next Whidbey Feature: "Looks like you're writing shitty code!"

[via Stuart Laughlin]

Now playing: Various Artists - Street Official Mixtape, Vol. 1

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.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By