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How Do I Sign Up You can signup here: http://phillydotnet20120531.eventbrite.com/ The Event May 31 Scott Hanselman: The Future of ASP.NET Thursday Blue Bell, PA This special meeting will be held at the Montgomery County Community College Science Center Auditorium in Blue Bell, PA on Thursday, May 31 from 6:30-9:00.We have some great meetings lined up for the next few months. Please take a look at the upcoming schedule on the web site and follow other local user groups on our community calendar. 6:30 Scott Hanselman, Microsoft The Future of ASP.NET 8 Scott Hanselman, MicrosoftApprenda Software Spend a night with Scott and learn about the future of ASP.NET.Scott Hanselman works for Microsoft as Principal Community Architect for Web Platform and Tools, aiming to spread the good word about developing software, most often on the Microsoft stack. Before this he was the Chief Architect at Corillian Corporation, now a part of Checkfree, for 6+ years and before that he was a Principal Consultant at STEP Technology for nearly 7 years. He was also involved in a few things Microsoft-related like the MVP and RD programs and will speak about computers (and other passions) whenever someone will listen to him. He’s written in a few books, most recently with Bill Evjen and Devin Rader on Professional ASP.NET. He blogs athttp://www.hanselman.com for the last 10 years and podcasts weekly at http://www.hanselminutes.com and http://www.thisdeveloperslife.com.We are pleased to have Apprenda Software as our sponsor for this event:Apprenda is an Open Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) stack for .NET that enables any organization to transform their existing infrastructure into a self-service cloud application platform. By decoupling applications from infrastructure and Developers from IT, Apprenda empowers organizations to achieve significant cost savings and massive productivity improvements that result in better business/IT alignment. Come enjoy the company of the best geeks in the Delaware Valley! 9:00 Books, software, and other goodies!

As I was developing my first Metro App today I came upon this weird error. Error 1 Error : DEP0600 : The following unexpected error occurred during deployment: Illegal characters in path. at System.IO.Path.CheckInvalidPathChars(String path, Boolean checkAdditional) at System.IO.Path.Combine(String path1, String path2) at Microsoft.VisualStudio.ImmersiveProjectServices.Shared.AppxLayoutManager.CheckPackageLayoutState(DeployPackageName deployPackageName, String location) at Microsoft.VisualStudio.ImmersiveProjectServices.Shared.LocalDeployJob.GetLayoutState(DeployPackageName deployName, Boolean hasFrameworkDependencies) at Microsoft.VisualStudio.ImmersiveProjectServices.Shared.RegisterAppxLayout.Start(Boolean forceNewLayout, Boolean forceRegistration, NetworkLoopbackState desiredNetworkLoopbackState, Boolean refreshLayoutOnly, String& packageMoniker, String& firstUserAppID, Exception& deployException) Not knowing what to do, because the error is vague and cryptic. I decided to throw a hail mary pass and remove the application I was developing from the start menu. And lo and behold this was the problem. I know this is still a beta framework and everything, but can the Windows team please throw us a bone and put in exceptions that actually mean something. ...

Similar to the situation I previously posted about in my last blog entry on ZLIB Compression in .NET. I needed to support a byte array coming from Java’s BigDecimal type. To understand why I can’t just use the decimal type in .NET you have to understand that BigDecimal is designed to scale way beyond typical numbers that anybody would realistically use in their day to day programming. And supporting one of these types as a standard type, would eat up much more memory than a typical programmer would want to use for a single number. ...

I recently encountered a situation where I needed to provide a compressed byte stream to Java’s Inflator class. This probably isn’t a situation that you run into a lot as a .NET developer, but to make a long story short, my FluentCassandra library had to send a compressed byte stream to the database server in order to execute a query. The part that got me scratching my head is the fact that nothing in .NET Framework mentions ZLIB as a supportable compression type. So I had to start hunting down the specification and found that you can actually generate ZLIB compatible compression with the DeflateStream. However the format that Java and other libraries expect has a header in the stream as well as an adler-32 checksum at the end. ...

This post requires a little understanding about how strong naming works. It’s complicated, but basically here is the jist: When you compile a library against a strong named assembly, only that specific version of the assembly can be used with the assembly that you are compiling with out resorting to heroics. You may say what is the big deal that is how all libraries are compiled and linked. But that isn’t true in .NET, if you don’t have a strongly named assembly, you have for better terms a weakly named assembly. And with weakly named assemblies there is no enforcement of the version, just the library name. So this makes it possible for developers to update a referenced library without actually recompiling the original library that referenced it. This is very powerful in the right hands, and pretty much what makes services like NuGet function with so many intermingling of references between projects. ...

In case everybody wasn’t aware, and to be honest it is really my fault for not announcing this, but I started a podcast with Lee Dumond, Dustin Davis, and Keyvan Nayyeri called the Mash This Podcast which can be found here and on iTunes. We just released our 5th episode in which we talked with Brad Wilson of Microsoft about his work on the ASP.NET MVC and Web API team now commonly referred to as the ASP.NET Web Stack team. Our conversation started with us focusing on Microsoft’s major announcement that happened last week regarding the open sourcing and accepting public contributions to the ASP.NET Web Stack. The announcement surrounded the fact that were going to make the process of developing the web stack open source, under the Apache open source license, instead of just releasing the source at major release points like they have done in the past. The difference may be lost on some people, but this means the direction of the framework is now influenced by the community instead of just a select few Microsoft employees and ASPInsiders. ...

One of the great things about VirtualBox is that it allows you to open up, mount, and run any hard drive from the other 3 major manufactures. VMWare, Microsoft, and Parallels. However one of the bad things is that there are no automated utilities that just make them work like some of the manufactures provide. And a common issue that I have always run into, especially when converting from VMWare to VirtualBox is this error. ...

RavenDB has a great identity generator that is very fast to generate a new identity when you are inserting a ton of records at once. You can read more about it here: http://ravendb.net/documentation/docs-api-key-generation and http://codeofrob.com/archive/2010/05/16/ravendb-hilo-what-how-and-why.aspx However if you start and stop the RavenDB service, by restarting your computer, or recycling your app pool, the numbering of the identity generator skips, which for most people it really doesn’t matter. However sometimes sequential numbers really matter, for example in an invoice number you don’t want to skip a number because it can really screw up your accounting office? ...

NuGet 1.6 was released today. And with it came some great new features, one that I am particularly excited about is. Using NuGet Without Checking In Packages (Package Restore) NuGet 1.6 now has first class support for the workflow in which NuGet packages are not added to source control, but instead are restored at build time if missing. For more details, read the Using NuGet without committing packages to source control topic. ...

Steve Jobs February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011 My first computer was the Apple II, my second computer was a Macintosh Classic, my most useful computer to date has been my iPhone. The iPhone has been the perfect convergence of technology and life for me, just the way that I imagine Steve Jobs envisioned it. His vision of what the world could and can be will be sorely missed in the generations to follow. But his legacy will live on, so rest in peace. ...