Friday, July 29, 2005

Books....

Read it. Boy, quite a bit different from his later works. Check my ratings by clicking on the Cussler link to the right.

Thursday, July 28, 2005

Microsoft gets funny... on purpose.

Take a look at this site: http://www.escapeyesterworld.com/. Cracks me up.

Anyway, reading The Mediterranean Caper, another Clive Cussler book. What a change from his later books. More corse and risque. It's also interesting the character's personality changes. But still a good read.

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

Note about Visual Studio debugging

For some reason, when I would debug a web app in Visual studio, I cannot use the play button. That's fine. I usually click Tools - Debug Process, and select 'aspnet_wp.exe'. Then when you click attach you get a list of options. Common language Runtime is the only thing you really need to debug for most Web Apps (and most windows forms apps, though I can just hit the play/start button for those). However, I have had Native checked off too.

Debugging is a lot quicker without Native checked.

Monday, July 18, 2005

Reflections on ... it's been done.

I've learned more about Reflection. I was successfully able to use reflection to dynamically open an assembly, unload it, replace the file, reload it, and use it some more. Amazing.

Clive Cussler - I'm reading Serpent now. And Mediterranean Caper is ordered. Serpent is good, but the main character Kurt Austin matches Dirk Pitt, and it's a little confusing seeing this new name. Still, a good book.

Thursday, July 14, 2005

Diving into Reflection

I've done some very miniscule things with reflection, basically just getting the version of assemblies. Now I find myself needing to access an assembly, then overwrite that assembly in the same code.

So, what I've found through digging here is I need to create a second app domain. I worked through it, did it, and was able to use the assembly from the app domain. But then I unloaded it to try to do the overwrite, and it failed. It was still in use.

It seems that even if you load something into the second domain, but try to get stuff out of it, like create an instance of a type (like an instance of a class) it still loads the assembly in your main or first domain. So, what I need to do, is in domain1, create an object inheriting from MarshalByRefObject, and create it in the second domain to do the work.

I'll be thinking about this long and hard.

In the mean time, I have been training my new apprentice. He is a PHP guy, and I'm bringing him to the dark side, I mean VB .Net side.