Author: Andrew Huey

Allergies

Happy Easter.  My allergies have been bothering me a lot lately.  (At least I think it’s allergies.)  I took a generic Claritin last night before bed, but it really didn’t help much.  This morning, I ran out to Walgreen’s and picked up some generic Zyrtec (Wal-Zyr).  I just took one, and I sure hope it works.

WonderCon 2010

Packed show floor image – WonderCon 2010 draws in S.F. (photos) – CNET News

Well, I’m not in SF at WonderCon this weekend. Maybe next year.

Nor did I buy an iPad today, though I did go to the Apple Store with a friend when he picked up his. I’ve almost justified getting myself an iPad, under the theory that attending WonderCon would have cost much more than an iPad, between the plane fare and the hotel, so I can spend some of the money I would otherwise have spent on WonderCon on an iPad. Yeah, I know the logic doesn’t quite hold up.

fun with virtualization

One of the estate-related items on my to-do list has been to get rid of my Dad’s old PC. It’s an old Dell Windows XP Home machine. Not too old, but not really worth keeping. I did, however, want to keep his files, of course. My brilliant plan was to do a P2V migration on it, and set it up as a virtual machine either on my dektop PC (using Virtual PC) or on my Mac (using VMWare Fusion). To that end, I downloaded the Sysinternals Disk2vhd tool and the VMWare converter. I ran both on the PC, just in case.

Now, the one thing I forgot with all this is that Dad’s copy of XP was preinstalled on his PC by Dell, which pretty much means that you can’t run it on anything other than an actual Dell PC. (I should have remembered this, since we ran into the same problem at work some time ago, but I completely forgot.) So, I wound up with two virtual hard drive images which were both perfectly fine and perfectly useless.

I tried working around this by entering a valid, non-Dell, XP product key at the activation screen, but that didn’t work. And I tried doing a repair install of XP, but that didn’t work either. Then, I came up with the bright idea of upgrading the VPC to Vista. That also didn’t work, since you can only do an upgrade install if you boot into XP first, and run it from there, not if you boot from the Vista DVD. And I can’t get past the XP login screen.

I can think of a few possible ways around this, but the whole thing was starting to get frustrating, so I punted and went back to Dad’s computer and just ran the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard on his account. I then restored his files & settings to a new account on an existing XP VPC on my desktop machine. That seems to have worked out OK. I just used the defaults on the FAST wizard, which seems to have sucked up quite a bit of data, including a bunch of stuff that can’t possibly be necessary, but I guess that’s OK.

I still have the option of going back to Dad’s (real) PC and doing an upgrade of some kind on it, either to Vista or maybe from XP Home to XP Pro, so it’s not using the Dell-specific install anymore. Then, I’d have to go back and run the P2V tool(s) on it again. I think I’m OK with the way things are now, though.

priorities

Yesterday was my last day at my old job. Since I don’t have anything new lined up yet, I’m now officially unemployed. I’ve got three priorities I’m going to work on while I’m unemployed:

  1. finishing up all the work I need to do on my parents’ estates,
  2. finding a new job, and
  3. passing a few .Net certification tests.

The third item is optional.  I’ve been working on studying for the 70-536 exam for the last few weeks, and I still don’t think I’m quite ready to take it.  I learned a lot of valuable stuff by reading the book and working through the exercises, but passing the test itself is really just going to involve a lot of memorization, and I’m not 100% sure that’s the best use of my time.  It might be better to just work through the material, then go on to the next thing without worrying about the exam.  I’m undecided.

C# cookbook, 2nd Edition

Some of the “recipes” in this book are proving quite helpful in my attempts to learn everything I need to know to get through the 70-536 exam. There’s a newer version of the book out now, but it’s this older version that I’m using via Safari.
Here are a few of the useful recipes:

  • Recipe 8.6. Using Event Logs in Your Application
  • Recipe 8.11. Implementing a Simple Performance Counter
  • Recipe 8.16. Determining Current appdomain Settings Information
  • Recipe 17.3. Encrypting and Decrypting a File
  • Recipe 17.16. Securing Stream Data
  • Recipe 20.2. Controlling a Service

Using Delegates in C#

Raj Kaimal has a two-part blog post on Using Delegates in C# (Part 1). Here’s part 2.  I don’t really have any problem understanding delegates & events, but I will admit that I usually need to stop and think for a minute any time I need to set up anything non-trivial using delegates and/or events.

Writing a Useful Windows Service in .NET in Five Minutes

This blog entry is a great overview of writing a simple Windows Service in .Net. Good study material for 70-536. I don’t think I’ve ever stumbled across the BCL Team blog before. Useful.

C# 3.0 Unleashed

I’ve been doing a lot of supplementary reading to try and get myself to the point where I can pass the 70-536 exam. I’ve found a couple of books on Safari that have been pretty useful. C# 3.0 Unleashed: With the .NET Framework 3.5, in particular, has a lot of useful content. I’m putting an Amazon link below.

I link to Amazon frequently on this blog, but I never got around to signing up for an affiliate account, so I just went ahead and did that, so if you buy the book from this link, I’ll make a buck or two. Oh, and I just figured out that ABP was interfering with the fancy Amazon links, so I had to go ahead and tweak that again. I like ABP for blocking the really intrusive ads that some sites have, but I’m finding lately that it’s blocking stuff that I actually do want to see. I may have to look into tweaking it a bit more, to let more stuff through.