Cannot debug ASP.NET in Visual Studio

Today I stumbled upon a curious bug while developing some ASP.NET code using Visual Studio 2005: the debugger didn't work. What "didn't work" means? It completely ignored the breakpoints within the code.

After messing around with this issue for a while, I discovered that the issue is actually with IE8 (?!). If there was an instance of IE8 running prior to the debugging process, the breakpoints will be ignored.

Solution: close the IE8 window, and press F5 again in Visual Studio. Viola, now the breakpoints break.

Remote Assistant

I mentioned in the previous post that my parent's PC was broken, and that I had to put quite a few hours to get it back to normal working state.

This isn't the first time that I've provided support for their PC or the PC of some other family member of mine, and probably not the last. I guess every geek finds himself as the "family tech support".

When my brother's computer breaks down, I usually start a remote desktop session using the IM client, and solve the issue. Now, I want to have the same ability with my parents, only this time it must be done with zero interaction on their side. I want to be able to call my mom, and tell her to turn on the PC. That's it. No confirmation dialogs, no chat and no nothing.

This is why I installed on their PC the free version of LogMeIn. It starts as a service, supports wake-up-on-LAN and doesn't require any router configuration. Problem is that the user experience on my end isn't very good. Performance lag even on a 2.5Mbps line. Maybe it's a price I have to pay, or maybe there are better services which does the same and I'm not aware of.

A final tip for this post: most non-techie-parents will do just fine with a limited computer account (when using Windows/Linux). There really isn't a good reason for them to use a privileged account just for browsing the web and using Skype.

Issues wasting my time

First and foremost, since I set the integration feature between Google Buzz and my Blogger account, I wonder whether this post will also appear in my Buzz stream (for those who follow me). If so, readers have the ability to choose whether they want to use simple RSS/Atom following using a feed aggregator, or following via Buzz using whatever UI Google/3rd-parties are going to come up with.

Enough said about that, I'm wasting my evening trying to fix my parents' PC. It's 3.5 yrs old, but already behaves as if it's six. By now, it appears the DVD-RW drive is broken, one memory stick is corrupted, there are bad sectors on the HDD, and the NVidia graphics card is also misbehaving. Thankfully, I set-up on this computer a partition with Ubuntu a long time ago (now it's 8.10), and it became very valuable, as it provides memtest86+ and other tools which were used to diagnose all of those issues. Too bad most are hardware issues that cannot be easily fixed like software issues.

Other than that, I spent a few hours tagging all of the faces in my Picasa, so I can easily find pictures of people. The "People" feature in Picasa is very neat and works impressively well.

Places to get infected

When it comes to humans, people might get infected in a virus while it is carried over the air. This means that there are places which are more susceptible for infections then the others, due to being crowded or contain many ill people.

With computer viruses, the situation is a little different. Put an infected computer near a "healthy" computer, and nothing will happen.

Today I was at the photo-printing shop with my disk-on-key. Nothing special, as we all print photos this way nowadays. When I got back home my DoK contained 7 new unrecognized .exe files, and an "autorun.inf" file. Hmmm... I don't remember putting those there. A quick virus scan, and viola, 7 torjans/droppers/viruses found their way to the DoK in the few minutes it was mounted at the computer at the photo-printing shop. Good thing I'm safe, but I guess many other get infected after printing their photos in this store. Ouch.

ADO.NET and Connection Timeouts

Today I've written some code at work which is connecting to a SQL Server DB via C# code. The code is executing some heavy SQL transactions, so it is supposed to take a while before it completes its tasks.

Knowing this, I've set the "Connection Timeout" correctly on the connection string, to a big enough number, so my connection won't timeout during the execution of the query.

Setting this option seem to be ineffective in some cases, as my code kept getting kicked with a "Connection Timeout" exception. After over 30 minutes of digging around I finally found the culprit. It seems that SqlCommand objects doesn't inherit the timeout configuration from the connection string, rather they have their own 30 seconds timeout default. So in order to overcome this, one should set "command.CommandTimeout=...".

Still didn't find any explanation for this behavior that would convince me it is rational.

Adium failing to connect to GTalk solved

Every once in a while a different IM client is giving me a hard time to connect to the Google Talk service. Empathy, Pidgin, Adium, you-name-it.

For all other services, an upgrade, or re-adding the account solves the issue. With Adium, this seems to be consistent.

Not anymore.

In order to have Adium connect to GTalk correctly, open the account preferences, and in the "options" tab, change the port to 80 (the default is 5222). Leave none of the check boxes checked. And that's it. Adium now connects to GTalk perfectly.

Anti-Social Networking - Part 2

In the previous time I wrote about this topic, the main issue was people using social networks and how little they really know about their "friends". This time I want to argue something a bit more extreme: people are knowingly becoming more distant when choosing such network as a way of communication, rather than becoming closer.

I'll explain.

In my last birthday I was a little insulted by friends not calling to wish me a happy birthday. It's not that such people are not my friends anymore, it's just that they offloaded some of their knowledge about their friends to some on-line database, so it's a little bit easier on their heads. The same thing happened when we stopped memorizing phone numbers of our dearest, simply because it is stored on a SIM card, and it's easier that way. The problem here was that only people which are members at the same database (e.g facebook) could one keep information about. So people forget birthday dates.

I thought "oh, OK, I don't have a facebook account, so people forget about me". Just this week I considered opening an account, and the strangest thing happened: a friend who's active on facebook had a birthday and told me how insulted he was that most of his friends didn't bother calling him and wish him a happy birthday. It's not that they forget, It's just that they preferred leaving him a short message on facebook: "happy birthday". Being easier than sending an SMS message, leaving a message on facebook seems to be even more insulting.

So instead of enriching this friend's social life, he feels facebook has degraded those. His main dilemma right after seeing all those messages was whether to reply to each and every one, or not. And what to do with those written on the wall?

Is this the case for everybody on social networks? I don't know.

Is there a reason people leave such messages and don't do real social activity (such as calling)? I believe that yes, there is. It is faster, cheaper and doesn't require any human interaction.

I'm still pessimistic thing will get any better before they'll get worse.