My Life and Code

I've been meaning to write this review for awhile, but life has been keeping me pretty busy lately. In fact, while I'd like to have spent more time playing this game, I haven't had much opportunity -- or energy -- of late. Rocksmith allows you to plug a real guitar into your PS3 or (in my case) Xbox 360 and play along to real songs (using a special cable included with the game -- plug one end into the guitar, the other into your gaming console). It adjusts the difficulty up or down depending on your skill (or lack thereof!) and no matter how badly you do, you can't fail out of a song as in games like Rock Band or Guitar Hero. When I first heard about this game, I was intrigued. But when I happened to come across it the day it came out, I was hesitant to purchase it. What if it didn't work well? What if the mechanics were off? I decided to hold off until reading some reviews. By the end of the day, a steady influx of glowing reviews had piled up on Amazon (the...

I've recently run across an exception that occurs while trying to update Entity Framework data models from their respective databases. The exception message is "Unable to generate the model because of the following exception: 'An error occurred while executing the command definition. See the inner exception for details. Undefined column mapping." I searched online and couldn't find any mention of this exception. This surprised me, considering the frequency with which I've been encountering it. I thought that perhaps it had something to do with the DbContext I'm using with Entity Framework 4.1 to create persistence ignorant POCO (plain old CLR object) classes. I tried a few things to alleviate the issue, but to no avail. As of now, the only solution I have to this problem is merely a workaround: delete all of the entities from the model and re-add them. I hope to eventually find a good solution to this problem, but with limited time and no other leads ...

I recently made use of a Devart Entity Model to allow me to use LINQ with an Oracle database and to get around an issue when using views with Entity Framework 4.1. Everything worked well...until the code was deployed. When running on my local PC (either through Visual Studio or from another site under my local IIS) the code worked without a problem. But when built using our build machine, I would receive the "Unable to load the specified metadata resource" exception when trying to call a service method that made use of the entity model. When I used IL DASM (ildasm.exe) to examine the manifests of the assembly built locally versus the one built on the build machine, I found that, indeed, the resources for the Devart Entity Model were not present in the assembly manifest of the assembly that was built on the build machine. The solution -- and it's not a good solution -- was to install the Devart developer tools on the build machine. Again, this is not a good solution -- o...

Awhile ago, I was having issues adding a WCF service reference to a project I was working on. I was getting an error when trying to add the reference that said “Custom tool error: Failed to generate code for the service reference”. Looking at the Reference.cs file for the service, it was blank except for the comment block at the top. The answer lied in one of the warning messages (I've changed some of the assembly and namespace names below to protect my company's privacy): Custom tool warning: Cannot import wsdl:portType Detail: An exception was thrown while running a WSDL import extension: System.ServiceModel.Description.DataContractSerializerMessageContractImporter Error: List of referenced types contains more than one type with data contract name 'Content' in namespace 'http://www.mycompany.com/backoffice/core/services'. Need to exclude all but one of the following types. Only matching types can be valid references: "MyCompany.BackOffice.Core.Domain.Pack...

(Hat-tip to theforce.net and the contributor of this information, Luke) I still need to confirm this, but apparently the Boba Fett cartoon from the Star Wars Holiday Special is part of the new Star Wars Complete Saga Blu ray set. To view it, go to the following menu in the Original Trilogy Bonus Disc: epiV > Bespin > the collection > concept boba fett armour > click on first look

It's been a few months since I've written anything here. Things have been extremely hectic, and any downtime has usually been spent trying to relax and recharge. In fact, I haven't had time to think about what to write here, so this blog entry will be a hodge-podge of miscellaneous thoughts and updates. I've been playing the new Mortal Kombat game. When I heard it would be moving back to a 2D fighting plane, and doing a "Let's go back in time and have an alternate history of the first three games (a la the latest Star Trek film)", I had absolutely no interest. But the pulled it off very well. Yes, I do miss the strategy and depth allowed by a 3D plane, and miss the multiple fighting styles that the characters have had in the last 3 games, but what's there is really good, and I love the addition of a 2-Player tag team co-op mode -- my son and I enjoy playing this together. I like the focus on characters from the first 3 games, though the downloadable ...

I had written some code in C# to try to account for possible fractions that looked something like this: double columnCountDividedBy2 = numberOfColumns / 2; In the above example, numberOfColumns is declared as an int. I thought that, because I was assigning the result to a double, I would get a fractional number if numberOfColumns divided by 2 was not a whole number. However, what was happening was that the fraction was being dropped. ReSharper was also giving me a warning message, "possible loss of fraction". The reason why (which I have to smack myself now for not realizing) was that, even though I was assigning the result to a double, I was still dividing two integers . Adding a decimal point and zero to the second number of my equation, as shown below, solved the problem: double columnCountDividedBy2 = numberOfColumns / 2.0;