Russ Nemhauser

Friend and all around nice guy Steve Smith wrote this blog entry about how to install Windows 7 from a USB key. Quite a few steps, but I've done this before so I know it works. I began thinking what the Apple story would look like and smiled: 1. Download OS X and save it to your USB drive. 2. Reboot. :) Seriously, though, I had to track down lots of steps when I did it a few months ago so Steve's entry will be helpful to many.

Several weeks ago I did a WordPress installation on a friend's server so they could update their site themselves. They use GoDaddy for hosting because it was cheap. You get what you pay for. I can't stress this lesson strongly enough. Ever since I completed the installation, I noticed dreadful performance on anything that needed a database call. I complained to GoDaddy on three occasions but nothing was really done except to say that in a shared hosting environment "sometimes" the performance slows down. I had hosted my blog www.russology.com on WordPress for a couple of years now but I just signed up for Crucial Web Host and moved my blog to my new shared hosting account last night. Lightning by comparison. The WordPress pages load so fast it's like static HTML, even the ones that hit the database (MySQL 5). Crucial Web Host is $25 per month. Some might balk at that number. After all, GoDaddy is something like $5 per month. But as I said earlier - you get what you pay for. Crucial uses cPanel, phpMyAdmin, and other very common tools. GoDaddy uses a bunch of different things that aren't really intuitive and sometimes give me problems. One thing is for sure - I certainly don't miss seeing GoDaddy's advertisements as I do what I need to do on my domains or hosting account.

Anybody ever had MSTEST freeze after the test run and then, when you close the DOS prompt you see a message very briefly about an SEHException? This happens on the same two test projects every time, yet my other test projects don't cause this. Any insight would be appreciated.

I created a user and customized tons of settings, then copied that user to the Default user from the System control panel. However, some of my settings didn't take. For example, my start menu items and colors are all there, but I hid the Sidebar - only it still shows up when I create a new account and log in! Also, all those icons in the systray that I hid appear for the new user as well. The default home page in the IE7 (google.com) and the default search provider (Google) didn't work for the new user based on my new profile either - they went back to msn.com and Live Search. I want EVERYTHING that I did to be used for EVERY new user created on the box - not just a few of my customizations. Can anyone offer any assistance? FYI, the machine is not on a domain.

I am a software developer and architect (currently using Microsoft technologies) so of course I was interested to watch the sessions from the MIX conference that just happened last week in Las Vegas.

I've been doing a bunch of Google searches today trying to figure out how I might be able to raise a violation if somebody tries to do a check-in when there are more than 100 warnings in the solution. Because (as far as I know, anyway) the only object available to you in a check-in policy is the PendingCheckin, I'm finding it difficult to implement this. Does anyone know how I can approach this? I'm aware that Visual Studio will raise a violation when the number of warnings reaches a certain number, but this number is way too high for us. I thought of doing it as a Code Analysis policy, but several questions came up with that approach as well. First, in order to write a custom code analysis policy, I have to use th FxCop SDK 1.35, don't I? There isn't a "CheckInPolicy" abstract base class that I can just subclass, is there?

It was formally announced by Microsoft today that Visual Studio 2008 will be released at the end of this month. The only thing I'm going to say at this point is that it seems WAY too soon to me. I'll make blog posts after the release and we'll see if my gut feeling was right or wrong (and I have absolutely no problem being wrong).

Given that I'm blogging much more on my new blog, I thought I'd write a "reminder" post on here to make sure that those who want to read my non-dev entries can. http://russology.com/