Once in a while I actually use the "My Documents" folder to retrieve files I've put there. Or worse, I sometimes store files there!
Gosh, impossible? Hell yes! Impossible due to the shitload of folders all sorts of software vendors think I need in MY user space! Who in the hell allowed ICQ to start storing received files in there? Do I really want that? Did they ask me?
Who actually decided that every damn game out there you install has the right to just go into your "My Documents" and place it's save games in there? If I open up my documents I get a almost 100% accurate view of what I've been playing over the last few months or so.

That's unacceptable! Sorry to say that, but I have 3 folders in there where I "dare" to put my data, while the total folder count in my "My Documents" is 19! So that's 16 folders I didn't create and I don't need in there.

But why did it get that bad?

The answer is simple: Because backup is painful.
Even an IT pro has a hard time collecting all those config files from the various C:\Program Files\config folders, imagine a home user going through those steps. So software vendors thought: Users may know how to back up their "My Documents" folder, if we put our stuff in there we're safe!

Guess what? They made the opposite true: Users simply don't use this folder any more, most people I know keep their data on locations like "D:\" or some other place where they can access them conveniently without seeing unwanted folders pop up.
And, I'm inclined to do the same. Screening through 16 unknown/irrelevant folders isn't something I want to be doing in a folder I thought was for my private use only!

But where to put those files?

By far the most convenient location for configuration files imo is the program directory where you've installed the application. But to be honest, I don't think the average end-user app should really need a config file. Most applications we currently use just work out of the box with very little need for configuration.

Secondly, there's still the AppData folder that's intended to hold application data, and by definition config files are application data. Why in the hell didn't they use this??
AppData is also located in the users's profile folder so it might get backed up.

PLEASE:

If you're writing software, either omit configuration files (best solution!) or keep them out of my user space and save them in a location that actually makes sense!

Oh, and by the way. With user space I don't mean only the "My Documents" folder. I really can't understand why some applications (namely eclipse, oracle, visual paradigm, virtual box) decided that it's ok to put them in my C:\users\<username>\ instead! That folder was intended to give me quick access to my Documents, Desktop, Favorites, Downloads, Images, Music, Videos. Not to scan through those .eclipse/.sqldeveloper etc etc folders. Please guys out there, understand that windows isn't hiding folders that start with a dot from the user! That's linux and we Windows users don't want those folders to be in the root of our profile!

So, after reading some stuff about HttpModules lately I thought it would be fun to create one myself. And, so I came up with something that might be useful in some scenarios.

A HttpModule that will cry foul when you try to put up a ASP.NET website with debug="true" onto a production server.
It is actually rather simple. Just a standard HttpModule that will check wether the request is local and wether debug is enabled. The local request check is done to make the module transparent to you while developing the app on cassini, while you'll see it instantly when you copy it over to your web server.

The code is rather simple:

public class DebugWarner : IHttpModule
{

    public void Dispose()
    {    }
    public void Init(HttpApplication context)
    {
        context.BeginRequest += new EventHandler(context_BeginRequest);
    }
    void context_BeginRequest(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        if (!HttpContext.Current.Request.IsLocal &&
            HttpContext.Current.IsDebuggingEnabled)
        {
            HttpContext.Current.Response.Write(
                "<div style=\"background: #ea999d; border: 1px solid black; width: 500px; text-align: center;\">\n" +
                "<h1>Debug Mode is enabled!</h1><p>This severely impacts Webserver performance<br />" +
                "Set <compilation debug="false"> in your web.config</p>" +
                "</div>");
        }
    }
}

Making this work is quite easy too, simply put the above class in your App_Code directory and add this line to your <httpModules> (or <modules> on IIS7) section:

<add name="DebugWarner" type="DebugWarner"/>

If you now try to access the page with debug="true" you'll get:

After some thought I finally dragged myself to make a decision on the del.icio.us links in my RSS feed:

I finally decided to remove the links from the feed, most of my del.icio.us links aren't just that relevant to my blog posts that I really need to share them with you.
If you still want to recieve my del.icio.us links you can simply subscribe to my del.icio.us feed or add me to your network in del.icio.us.
Another way to stay informed on my del.icio.us (and all my other activities, wether you like it or not *gg*) would be to simply follow me on friendfeed (although I still haven't really grasped the concept of the site).

Hope the feed just got more enjoyable for you :)

Cheers!

When talking about Skype I usually mention that Skype is one of the few IM clients out there that has great encryption built into it. Due to it's peer to peer hybrid structure encrypting data while sending it through the p2p network is very important, and Skype has some pretty advanced encryption algorithms in use.

But, guess what?
You won't notice that somebody is spying on your Skype conversations if your Skype login information has been disclosed. :)

I noticed this after leaving my computer running while going to university today, and the IM conversation I had with Mathias was not only delivered to my laptop but also to my home computer. Completely unnoticeable (from the laptop) my home PC received the whole conversation, so a 2 way IM session could have been a 3 person chat session with only 2 nicknames. Weird isn't it?

This behavior is especially dangerous if you think about how most users pick and protect their passwords.

As Mathias has already hinted, today was the final presentation of the ongoing computer games implementation week I was instructing at klagenfurt university. During the last week I and Christian where working together with a small group of 7 high school students (of age 15-17) on some pretty amazing computer games with Microsoft's XNA framework.

We started out with some basic talk about computer games in general and introduced the students to Microsoft XNA on the second day. Most of them had some basic Java experience and absolutely no knowledge of C# or XNA. After pointing out some syntax differences between Java and C# we started with a very basic boulder game tutorial from the XNA creators club website that should teach 2D rectangle collision detection with XNA. Afterwards the students were asked to expand on this idea and create their own 2D computer game.

And now I am very happy to show some of their great work they did during the last 4 days!

This is where we started out:

And these are screen shots from our student's projects (click to get the full view):

I also promised Mathias to create videos from the projects that we did so he can show them at future computer games courses, I'll post these videos on YouTube once I've recorded them.
We will also be releasing the games source code, but I am still trying to figure out the license for some of them.

I've had a great time with those talented kids and hope they enjoyed learning as much as I did enjoy teaching!

Something hit me today when I went into the "Team Synchronization Perspective" in Eclipse/Subclipse while trying to merge some changes a colleague made with my repository:

Visual Studio 2008 doesn't sport ANY source control of ANY kind that's for free!

If this isn't true I'm eager to hear about it.
But I only know about Visual Studio Team System, and that's not free:

Typically, customers purchase an MSDN Premium subscription when licensing the Team Editions and Team Suite, which provides Software Assurance that entitles users to product updates over the life of the subscription. This includes Team Foundation Server Workgroup Edition, development licenses of many Microsoft Windows versions, Visual Foxpro 9, Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Microsoft Office, development licenses of many server-side offerings, SDKs and DDKs, a large amount of documentation, and more. The Team Edition and Team Suite products can not be purchased without an MSDN Premium subscription.

Last time I checked, MSDN Premium costs $2,499 and additional $1,999 every following year.

I also used Visual Source Safe before (VSS 2005), and it was a huge pain in the ass trying to work with it due to the "one-guy-check-out" policy it enforces. So if you need some field/method in another class to continue working on your class, you'll be running circles through the office trying to get others to check the file back in (resulting in half-broken check-ins etc).

So I wonder, with all that commitment Microsoft has been showing to supporting and promoting open source (CodePlex, CodeGallery), why in the hell do they keep all the tools that would support open source development away from their users? I think that even Visual Studio Express edition should at least come with decent support for source control inside the IDE that is actually able to connect to CodePlex! (There is a SVN bridge, a command line client and the suggestion to get the team edition of VS.).
So, bottom line my CodePlex source control experience has been "lacking", while I'm getting more and more fond of subversion combined with subclipse.

While I'm seeing subversion becoming more and more "standard" among open source projects (if not THE standard), I wonder why Microsoft is making it intentionally hard to work with Visual Studio on shared projects.

So, as I already hinted at in my post about ASP.NET Wiki, Microsoft seriously needs to get more consistent in their efforts. Either support OSS and developer collaboration, or don't. But don't try to do so badly. The way they try right now isn't really going anywhere.

Update: Btw, Eclipse just released a new version called ganymede that really rocks!

Update2: Apparently I didn't find this info last time I used Codeplex, but it looks like there is a way to integrate a Team System client into VS called Team Explore 2008. I'll be looking at this tomorrow.

Update3: Mark Phippard just pointed me at AnkhSVN for Visual Studio that seems to be a pretty decent SVN client integrated into Visual Studio. Thanks for this link.

So far I've been using Windows Vista since day 1 it's been released here in Austria and I have been very pleased with the system. Imo Vista has a far worse reputation than it deserves. I really can't think of myself using XP any more .

Also I think that UAC is a very very good think in Windows Vista and really helps secure the computer against malicious programs. If you get over it popping up every 3 clicks while you set up the machine, in running state you hardly see the question any more (except for administrative tasks).
So, I never ever disabled UAC until now.

Why? Because ClickOnce is giving me a hard time.
ClickOnce is automagically working perfectly in XP because it just starts up IE and starts to bootstrap the program. But if the program requires admin rights you're out of luck in Windows Vista.

But, I've found a workaround for ClickOnce when you download the ClickOnce application.

Just start IE as administrator (right click -> run as administrator) and the ClickOnce bootstrapper will eventually use the running instance of IE that has elevated rights.

I haven't had a way to identify why this isn't working 100% of the time, but sometimes this doesn't work either, so your only way out is to temporally disable UAC. Here's how to do it:

First you need to start msconfig through the run dialog (Windows-Key + R -> msconfig -> O)
Now you select the Tools tab and need to scroll down until you find disable User Account Control (or something similar, I'm running a German Windows).

Once you've found the line simply press "Launch" / "Starten" and reboot the machine. UAC will be disabled and you can run your ClickOnce application.

I strongly advise you to turn UAC back on once you're done, because running in admin mode compromises your computer's security!

Bottomline:  Try to avoid older ClickOnce applications (newly compiled ones don't have this problem) that require administrative rights to run.