To complement a previous post for Visual Studio 2003 and 2005, this registry key will add a context menu item to windows explorer.  The menu item opens a command prompt with the vsvars32.bat from Visual Studio 2008.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTDirectoryshellVisual Studio .NET 2008 Command Prompt]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTDirectoryshellVisual Studio .NET 2008 Command Promptcommand]
@=”cmd.exe %1 /K “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\Tools\vsvars32.bat””

Over the last few years, I’ve used Google to help me solve various problems, resulting in me not figuring them out on my own.  I’m not saying that I can’t solve problems, but Google is usually the first place I turn to for a solution before taking the time to manually do it. 
I feel that my problem solving skills haven’t been practiced nearly as much as my ability to work the search engine to return relevant results.  Think about it… how many times do you turn to Google to answer a
question that is on your mind?  Rather than figure it out, Google
provides the answer with little thought on your part.  When it comes
time to think for yourself in a situation, you’re less prepared to
solve the problem than if you had been practicing problem solving
skills all along.  So while I don’t dismiss the immediate benefits of
using Google as an answer, I do think we grow more lazy as its index becomes richer. 

This correlates with how cellphones change us as well. 
It might date me to say this, but in high school (and part of college), I
had memorized every phone number of everyone I directly knew.  Although now, I
doubt that I could readily tell you the cell phone numbers of close family members, off the
top of my head.

While I realize that Google (and the cellphone phone book) are tools for solving problems, it feels like cheating to me.  This probably all boils down to evolution.  Lets
just hope the tools we use on a daily basis are factual.  If not,
hopefully we can discern which results are
accurate with our modern tools.
 

I started playing around with .net 3.5 today.  I wanted to take a look at the TimeZoneInfo class first, since that new class conflicted with a custom class I wrote for Property Center.  I’m happy to say that the new MS class does everything that mine does, so I can migrate my code to use the MS TimeZoneUtil class in the future.  They finally provide an easy way to iterate all timezones (listed in the current machine’s registry – which seems to be all current timezones in the world), not to mention easy ways to convert datetimes between each timezone.  It factors in all of the rules related to daylight savings as well.

After that, I looked into linq to sql so that I can start playing with actual data in my sql database.  I didn’t really feel like using the Object Relational Designer to generate the entity classes because truthfully… designers really don’t do it for me.  They ship a commandline tool called SqlMetal that does what I wanted.  If you have used subsonic’s generator, you’ll be a little disappointed with the options that SqlMetal provides.  For example, I prefix my tables with pc_, but i don’t want that showing up in my object model.  I couldn’t find a way to have sqlmetal ignore the table prefixes.  It also generates one large file containing all classes, which is a little annoying, imo. 

You can find more information on how to use SqlMetal at: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386987(VS.90).aspx.  And as a side note, SqlMetal.exe exists in C:WindowsMicrosoft.NetFramework3.5.

I kept running into issues when I tried to restore a database from a backup file.  The error I kept getting was:

Restore failed for Server ‘localhostSQLExpress’.

Additional Information:
System.Data.SqlClient.SqlError: Exclusive access could not be
obtained because the database is in use.

For local sql instances, it’s not a huge deal since I can just restart the db server and clear the connections.  But in a managed/shared environment, that’s not possible.  I googled quite a bit for a solution, but didn’t really find anything that would work.  So I asked the newsgroups for some help and they came up with putting the db in single user mode before restoring the db.  That was cool and all but ended up locking me out of the db at my hoster.  So what I had to do was run the single user mode command and the restore command as one query.  Something like:

ALTER DATABASE  [your_db_name] SET SINGLE_USER WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE

RESTORE DATABASE [your_db_name] FROM  DISK = N’C:Program FilesMicrosoft SQL ServerMSSQL.1MSSQLBackupyour_db_name.bak’ WITH  FILE = 1,  NOUNLOAD,  REPLACE,  STATS = 10
GO

The restore line can automatically be scripted for you by Sql Management Studio.  Just click the Script icon at the top of the restore dialog.  Maybe MS will add an option to clear connections on restore in a future version of the management studio… One other note is that the restore command will automatically set the restored database in multiuser mode.

Hope this helps someone…

Edit:

If you need to set the database back to multi user mode, you can use the following command:

ALTER DATABASE  [your_db_name] SET MULTI_USER WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE

Now that things aren’t so hectic with Property Center development, I hope to get back into the swing of things and start posting more regularly.  I’ve also been thinking of what to do with this site… From the sounds of things, Graffiti cms might be more appropriate than Community Server as the engine for this site.  I’d like to get away from the separate blog per user concept and do something where there is only one entry point of the site while still allowing multiple contributers.  I also think that I’d like to get away from having the date embedded in the friendly urls.  I could go either way with the date thing, since I know I’ll have some posts that are useful for chronological organization, but I’ll have other posts that I don’t want an age associated with.

Community Server doesn’t really fit the role of where I want to take this site, but hopefully Graffiti will.  If not, I may look into writing the software by myself to get acquainted with some newer MS offerings (.net 3.5, linq, mvc, etc…).

The only bummer that I’ll have to work out is what to do with the pictures.  I don’t want to lose the pictures and really don’t feel like moving them all to Flickr.  I guess I could write an image gallery app, but that really doesn’t thrill me.