Tales from the Evil Empire

We’re makers, all of us, we build stuff for work and pleasure. Software development is a great discipline for people like us as the ticket to entry is relatively modest. All you need is a computer and that is pretty much it. There is no real limit to what you can do.

We shipped Orchard 0.8 on Monday and it’s the last release we will make before 1.0, which is scheduled for January 2011. We think it’s a pretty nice release in that it wraps up the UI story for the platform.

I love SQL CE 4.0 because it promises to solves a problem that only SQLite has been able to solve thus far: no-install, x-copy deployable relational engine with good performance.

These last few weeks I’ve been refraining from starting any deep work on my new Orchard-powered blog because most of what I had in mind involved widgets, which are being built right now. Version 0.8 is just around the corner: the team is just putting the final touches to the new theme engine and to the widget system.

When trying to backup my machine onto a USB drive, a few weeks ago I have been starting to get a very unhelpful 0x81000037 error. Of course, the first thing I did was to bing it but I didn’t like what I found. There is a “How to troubleshoot Windows Backup and Restore issues when a reparse point folder or its subfolder is added to a user library in Windows 7” KB article that unfortunately does not live up to its title. It does some hand waving around “reparse points” but does not even bother to explain what a reparse point is, let alone how to discover and remove them.

Yesterday, a new crypto oracle-type vulnerability was publicly disclosed. It is an important vulnerability that is likely to be exploitable on a large proportion of ASP.NET sites, even those that are using configuration settings that were previously considered safe.

In the previous post, I installed Orchard onto my hosted IIS7 instance and created the “about” page.

Several people have asked me if I would move my blog to Orchard. There are actually several challenges with this that have nothing to do with Orchard itself, but suffice it to say that right now I’m not really considering it.