In Vista there is the shiny new start menu with the shiny new turn off options, and until recently I have been using the fly out menu on lock to hit sleep or hibernate or shutdown etc... Thankfully I have gotten over that through two dumb luck experiences.

Firstly my home box I have been hitting the power button since it is quick to resume and I don't really worry about things. I always just thought it was putting it into sleep, well this weekend I stumbled across a new feature in Vista (well new to me) called help. It's amazing, it's like Google for windows off line

Seriously, in the help feature I found an article on what the power button does. Basically if you have an old machine the power button puts it into sleep. However if you have a more modern it puts it into hybrid sleep. This new mode, works like both hibernate and sleep in shutdown (i.e. it does both). Then when it needs to start up again it checks to see if the memory still contains the information (i.e. sleep mode) and if it does restores damn fast from that. If it doesn't contain (say due to power loss) then it restores from the hibernate information.

The power button is the ONLY way in the Vista interface to do this!

To check if you can use this or to turn it on/off go to power options (either off the battery icon in the task try or in the control panel), click Change Plan Settings on your selected power plan, next click Change Advanced Power Settings and under sleep you will see the options (see the attachment of this post for a screen shot).

Working with Microsoft software is often a ride of highs and lows. Highs caused by a tiny feature which changes your life. These tiny features are the spark of genius from some lowly dev in Redmond which makes the magic happen (my favorite is the fact you can copy and paste the MSCRM license code into the installer and fills in all the blocks at once, not just the first block like other installers. Office 2007 has a similar good idea).

However there is the other side, the lows of the idiot. The people think about problems so much they forget how the rest of the world works/sees there item and thus makes it work in odd ways (MSCRM team bastardizing relationships in 3.0 to build certain things. Thankfully fixed in 4.0).

Today though I met another one of these issues, the RegularExpressionValidator in ASP.NET. You give it a RegEx to validate against and guess what it validates against that. Good, expected, normal. Here's the issue, leave the field blank or put only spaces in the field and BOOM! No validation! The workaround, and it is a workaround since this is supposedly by-design, is two validators per field (RegEx and Required!). I mean for heaven sake this is retarded. There is no reason why it should be like that, and if there is WHY OH WHY is there no property to make it work logically/illogically.

Let it be said that if I find you, Mr RegularExpressionValidator Designer Guy/Girl, you will pain for the torture you have caused me to go back through every field in my app and add another validator!

 Update (14 November 2007): Dates confirmed! I should be landing last afternoon on the 25th and flying out late afternoon on the 28th. Thats three nights there!

Sometime this month it looks like I will be in Malawi for work for a few days. This means I should have a little free time there (particular evenings), so if you are in Malawi and are looking for someone to do training, speaking or advising on a few hours basis on any topic I am involved in (MSCRM, CCF, I also have a great TFS evangalism slide deck, general dev...) please drop me an email or comment on this post and let me know.

SSIS and Reporting Services are the two features of SQL that I use more than anything. I absolutely love what SSIS provides to the world (Baby BizTalk for Everyone!). However I often need to undo, in particular with SRS (mostly due to the bastardised VB style language in it, and that I work mainly in C# which makes it horribly difficult), and with both applications the undo is terrible. Definately something that needs to be fixed in SP 1 in SQL 2008! If you have used these just think about how much money/time/effort/head-smashing-into-desk could have been saved by decent undo.

Simon has some connect items now up to vote on these. Please vote on these so we can all spend less on Panado next year :) For details on that see Simon's post

Ryan (the same one who corrects my BizTalk posts) has managed to get up the South African BizTalk User Group!!!
The first meeting is from 6pm on the 5th December. I'll definately be there. If you want to attend, it is free and open to everyone (not just Microsoft Partners or customers) and you can signup at: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032356879&culture=en-za

I had an odd issue with trying to get the reportviewer control to work on some ASP.NET pages. I was using VS 2008 beta (but it was a 3.0 project so it should be the same as what you get in VS 2005), and running the solution through the VS web server. When going to the pages (which used local reports) I got the error:

Server Error in '/ATL' Application.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Failed to map the path '/'.
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.InvalidOperationException: Failed to map the path '/'.

No idea what caused it but the moment I changed to run it on IIS it stopped. I did get an error on IIS about reporting services not being able to access the web.config file which was fixed by giving Network Service access to it, that didn't do any difference with VS 2008 web server but it did mean the reports worked. I suspect that it has to do with the way that reporting services locates the web.config file as VS 2008 server runs it as http://localhost:<random port>/<project name>/ where IIS runs it as http://localhost:<random port>.

This really is the worlds most needed, most hidden and most marketing bs item ever. For those who don't know SQL Server Express is the light version of SQL Server, basically runs a database server but nothing else, not even a management tool. However it is free to redist with apps and it ships with Visual Studio etc... so it's out there a lot.
But you can just feel there are things needed to get it from almost useless to void filling tool (management tools being number 1). Anyway someone at MS realized this at some point in the last year and decided to bring out the Advanced Services edition (how is that for marketing spin, it should be the complete edition but no we need it to be advance, even though it install stripped down features of everything still).
Anyway above the standard express you get:

1. Stripped down management tool
2. Reporting services server (the /ReportServer, you don't get /Reports)
3. and full text search.

These features are so advanced it's insane, oh wait they are all in the standard SQL server from day one.
Anyway if you need this you can get the 250 odd MB download, which you can just run on your vanilla SQL express to upgrade it, from
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=5B5528B9-13E1-4DB9-A3FC-82116D598C3D&displaylang=en
More details on this is available at
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms365248.aspx

From a conversation between myself and Pierre:  ...afterall it isn't everyday that one buys a new car
true.that new car smell, the first time you shit yourself cause you see a taxi in the rear view mirror, the first time you put petrol in it and wonder why it costs the same as the car, the first time you take it in to get those little issues fixed and get it back with the radio tuned to kaya fm, and a scratch on the side, fact for first 6 months you are crazy healthy, from walking from the far side of car parks where you parked away from anyone in case they hurt the car and the first time it rains and you go fuck it, and park next to someone.
Enjoy the new car, Pierre!

This is very cool, a special bottle of Stormhoek branded for Microsoft. I wonder if Microsoft South Africa will get any of these? Read more on Steve Clayton's blog or on the Stormhoek site. 

I'll anyway try find the Stormhoek sauvignon blanc this weekend at Macro to give it a try.

So after travelling so much last week (around 3000km, but not all at once) I finally enjoyed around 12 hours of sleep after the Bokke win against the English on Saturday. However during travelling I had some interesting thoughts I wanted to share:

• Why can you gargle in private without messing, but not in public?
• Why do I always get a seat on an airline with something wrong with it, forcing me to talk to airhostesses?
• Men serving drinks on a plane are airhostesses.
• I love how, when someone from a competitor company joins, there is almost a want to tie him to a chair in a dark room with a bright light until he tells all his secrets.
• Why does the rain ALWAYS follow me to the coast?
• Real developers get together after 7pm.
• The state of confusion with woman is not a constant for men, it increases exponentially with each interaction.
• Never trust a project manager.
• When someone is truly grateful for my help, I feel bad about charging them.
• I'm glad project managers charge for my time and not me.
• Ever notice how people driving slower than you are idiots while people driving faster are reckless? Love how I am always perfect ;)
• I am glad I am not English (as in the country, not language)
• I wish the national pride that swells from 80 minutes of rugby could last 80 years.