Home - Sean Skinner

1/8/2009

Windows 7

Well, I took the plunge and downloaded Windows 7 last night. Not my first exposure to the new OS, but certainly not my last! I love the new taskbar thingy. Kinda like the OSX dock, but better I think. More intuitive.

Back to coding...

Posted at 4:24 PM by Sean Skinner | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

12/5/2008

Of MacBooks and Unity

Ok, so I have been struggling for a while now to find a way to run Vista 64 bit on my various and sundry Dell laptops to no avail. If you have been reading Erics blogs you know he has suffered the same fate. Well we decided that the MacBook Pros were the only real solution. Eric has had one for a while and never had any driver issues.

In case you weren't in the know, we need to run 64 bit Vista so we can access all 4GB of RAM in our machines. This is advantageous when running virtual machines, as well as for doing heavy developer work.

Anyway, Eric ended up buying himself a new MBP, and I got his old one. I know, lame eh? But the net result is I got a MBP to use now. And me being a more adventurous sort then Eric decided to NOT have Vista as the only operating system on my new toy. So, after an agonizing adventure getting OSX back on this thing (a story for another time perhaps?) I was able to install Vista 64 bit via Bootcamp for some dual booting greatness.

All I can say is WOW. Vista has never run so well on ANY machine I have used it on. And I LOVE Vista. I defend it at every turn, but now it's even better. Gone are the BSoD's i would get every few days. Also gone are the times when it could no boot at all (and I would have to use the install DVD to re-initialize the MBR). Everything just works. Apple really knows how to put out some solid drivers. Even for an OS that isn't theirs!

But wait, there's more! I decided to be even crazier and try out some of the unique OSX virtualization that is available. Specifically I decided to try out VMWare Fusion. The latest version includes a feature called Unity. This allows you to run you VM in a 'hidden' state, with only the application windows visible. It gives the illusion of running, say Visual Studio 2008, natively in OSX (without the usual window dressing of course). So far this is working great. It even used my Vista Bootcamp partition so I didn't need to waste valuable space setting up a whole VM.

All in all I am very pleased with the whole experience. Is Mac OS X better than Vista. No not really. And the iLife applications aren't really any better than the Vista counterparts (although they both have strengths and weaknesses that oddly compliment each other).

But having a choice is worth its weight in gold. I can boot into either OS natively, and while in OS X I can access my Vista install and run any application I need without fear (or the need to reboot!)

Cheers!

Posted at 11:28 AM by Sean Skinner | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

10/31/2008

Why EVERYONE should be using SharePoint

I know I have said this before, but here I go again. Everyone should be using SharePoint as their application delivery platform. There is not a good reason not to. Go and download WSS v3 right now, install it, and start delivering world class applications in less time and with more features. I would say more but I have to get back to developing!

Posted at 1:07 PM by Sean Skinner | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

Why I hate my PS3 (but still play it)!

I was given a PS3 for my birthday last month by my awesome wife who loves me very much. This is in spite of my out of control gadget addiction. God bless her. Anyway, after the fall of HD-DVD I really wanted to get into Blu-ray for my movie collection. I mean, whats the point of 106" projection if your not gonna watch movies in HD!?! So, we figured if we were going to drop $400 on a BLu-ray player we should just get a PS3 for the same money. She also got me some movies (V for Vendetta which I love!) and a few games (Unreal 3 and Sol Caliber 4). Everything was great. Movies look amazing, the games were good. Even the interface, while minimal was kinda nice.

Then I heard about the SOCOM beta. Now, I've never played any of the SOCOM games before, being a die hard Xbox guy, but I figured "Beta test!! Why not?" So, the beta was ok. I fell in love with the game, when it worked. And this is the crux of the problem. Without a central online PAID service like Live you cannot get a quality game. Period! The SOCOM servers were always down, or flakey, or a patch would be released that broke, well, everything. But everyone figured, "Hey, it's a beta. They will fix it by retail release!" Sadly this was not the case. The game has been out for two weeks now and received around three patches and it still performs as bad as the beta. Now you could blam this on the developer. And I do to a certain extent. But Sony should have central servers and a solid API for interacting with them.

This condition persisted with the Resistence 2 beta. Days would go by where the servers would not respond at all. No matchmaking, no game list. Nothing at all. And these games were on-line only. That is just insane! In SOCOM you can't even change you load outs wothout signing into the server.

In contrast, games on the 360 just work. All the time. Even the betas I've been in. Halo 3 beta was perfect. And the network code was amazing! No lag, no stutter. It was smart enough to work around issues like this.

I just don't know why Sony wastes time on things like Home when it should be improving it's on-line gaming strategy.

Until then, I'll use my PS3 as a great Blu-ray player, and occaionaly check to see if SOCOM is working. It has the potential to be a really great game.

Now if MS could get an exclusive on a new Counter-Strike...

Posted at 12:46 PM by Sean Skinner | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

Blogging Day!!!

Well, it's Halloween today so I decided I should get a couple of posts I've been mulling over out of the way.

Enjoy!

Posted at 12:45 PM by Sean Skinner | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

10/27/2008

Adding new Virtual Directories with code!!!

Ok, we had a question come up at the User Group (UG) the other night. This person needs to create new virtual directories each time a new site is created. These VirDirs are to host legacy ASP.net applications. Now I know the CORRECT answer (at least mine) is to not host other applications on your SharePoint FEWS. However in the interest of being fair and realizing that it may be the only option for some folks, here is some C# code you can use where appropriate:
=================
//Create New Virtual Directory in IIS with DirectoryEntry()
string wwwroot = "c:\\Inetpub\\wwwroot";
string virtualDirectoryName = "myNewApp";
string sitepath = "IIS://localhost/W3SVC/1/ROOT";
DirectoryEntry vRoot = new DirectoryEntry(sitepath);
DirectoryWntry vDir = vRoot.Children.Add(virtualDirectoryName, "IIsWebVirtualDir");
vDir.CommitChanges();
vDir.Properties["Path"].Value = wwwroot + "\\" + virtualDirectoryName;
vDir.Properties["DefaultDoc"].Value = "Default.aspx";
vDir.Properties["DirBrowseFlags"].Value = 2147483648;
vDir.Commitchanges();
vRoot.CommitChanges();
======================
Enjoy!

Posted at 1:04 PM by Sean Skinner | Category: Code Samples | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

6/26/2008

Adobe 64bit iFilter Workaround

I know this has been an issue so here is a post I found on the subject. Enjoy!

http://share-point.blogspot.com/2007/11/ifilter-adobe-has-pre-released-x64-pdf.html

Posted at 4:12 PM by Sean Skinner | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

6/12/2008

My Last Day at tech-ed

Well, this is may last day at tech-ed 2008. Its been a wild few days. We have gotten a lot of great traffic to our booth. We have even sold a few Sonar licenses which is fantastic news. Working the booth has been a lot harder than I expected, being on my feet all day and talking Sonar, but it has been a great experience.

I'll have to put together a better post when I get home.

Till then, Cheers!

Posted at 12:01 PM by Sean Skinner | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

6/11/2008

TechEd 2008, Day 1

Well things went pretty well on our first day. We had a lot of traffic to our booth and got sdome good leads. Here are some pics from the day:

Our booth:

Eric let our waitress borrow his hat:

And Bob Fox takes a dip in the fountain!

Thats all for now. I will post more details when I can.

Cheers.

Posted at 9:47 AM by Sean Skinner | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

5/21/2008

DFW Community Meeting and Dev Breakout

The DFW Community meeting last night was pretty good. We finally got to break out into a developers only session where we spent an hour going over how to deploy SharePoint features (using WSPs natch). It was a really great discussion led by my partner The SharePoint Cowboy himself.

The next meeting is on June 17th. It should be really good. Andrew Connell (SharePoint MVP and all around awesome guy) will be presenting, and of course we will be having our now regular developers breakout where we will tackle any issue you may have. So come hungry and bring your coding questions!

Posted at 10:39 AM by Sean Skinner | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

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