A couple of weeks ago my laptop was renamed as part of an Active Directory change. Since then I have been debugging problems related to services not starting or database connection strings that had the old machine name in them. This weekend I ran into another problem that I think was caused by the machine rename although I don't have any direct proof of that. When I would create a project in Visual Studio 2005 and attempt to debug it I would get the error that the binding handle is invalid. I was able to compile and run the application but not debug. Even something as simple as a default windows application with jsut Form1 in it wouldn't debug. I spent several hours on the option to fix Visual Studio 2005 but even after that I still got the error message.

I ended up looking on the Internet and found this is a known bug. The bug report shows it as a bug in the CTP that is closed but it had a workaround that fixed the problem for me. The solution is to not use the VShost for debugging. You do this by going into the project properties on the debug tab and unchecking the option to Enable the Visual Studio hosting process.

Just in case you are wondering what the Visual Studio hosting process is (I know I was) it is explained at http://www.dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/mihirsolanki/archive/2005/11/06/133588.aspx as a process that enables faster debugging and also debugging in partial trust environments. For the most part I am all for that especially since I normally don't run as administrator on my machine but in this case I guess I will have to settle for slower and untrusted debugging that works until I have the time to repave my machine.

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The other day I got an award from my employer.  It was given to me "for exemplary perfomrance in Achievement Through Teamwork". This is the first such award I have gotten in over 13 years of working under basically the same management. I am somewhat surprised that I got the award since I didn't do anything that much beyond what I have been doing since I started working.

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So the whole award thing got me thinking about how to recognize employees. I have this pipe dream of one day leaving the corporate world and becoming an independent consultant and eventually building up a company that would employ no more than 20 highly focused and extremely talented individuals. I say pipe dream because I am addicted to a steady paycheck but that doesn't stop me from thinking about how to recognize people.

I have seen many different ways of showing your appreciation for people who have done a good job. The most obvious is the "employee of the week/month/year" type award. I have long been opposed to those because there are usually way more deserving people than time periods to recognize them. If you make the period too short, the award seems trivial i.e. Today's employee of the day is Bob because he made it to work 2.8 seconds before anyone else. If the time period is too long you end up with something like: I know all 10 of you worked yourself to death to complete the project but only one of you can be employee of the decade so Susan will get the reserved parking spot and exlusive use of the company car until 2016. Keep up the good work and maybe your turn will come around.

I have also seen monetary rewards. These seem to be recieved the best when presented correctly. Most of the time I have been given a gift certificate to a local resturant so I could take my wife out. The certificate rarely covered the meal but it let us go someplace nice for very little money. I did get one one time where my manager said something like "I know you have worked 100 hours of overtime in the last 2 weeks. Here is a $25 gift certificate. I hope this makes up for it." I was obviously less than pleased about the implication that my personal time was worth so little to the company especially considering the fact that they billed the client for all of my overtime hours. So maybe money is not the best idea.

For some people extra perks are a good motivator. I would love to see a program at Keane or any company that I worked for where you were rewarded with training or going to a conference. Maybe I am just too much of a geek but I love learning new things and the best thing is that I can use the knowledge I get at a conference to further my career. The only problem I have come up with when thinking about rewards like that is how to quantify what kind of contribution would qualify for a large conference like TechEd or PDC. Oh well, I guess I have a lot of time to think about it before I make the plunge into the world of running my own business.

The Mercury News has an aritcle at http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/14418693.htm about Scott McNealy stepping down as the CEO of Sun. He will remain at Sun as the Chairman of Sun Federal. Whether you agreed with him or not there is no denying that Sun has pushed other hardware vendors and that Java has influenced Microsoft .NET so the competition has helped all of us in IT. I don't expect Sun to have any major changes other than the rumored large layoffs but it will be interesting to see what the future brings.

I got word that an article I started writing last November has finally made it through all the editing and other stages and has been posted on-line. It covers how to use reflection and the CodeDOM to create a proxy for a web service. It also has a Windows application that uses the dynamically generated proxy and will allow you to call that web service. The URL to the article is http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnvs05/html/CallWebServ.asp

I spent 5 hours today chasing down what I thought was a SQL server error to finally find out it was a problem with nested web.config files. When I came in this morning I was told that a web service that had worked for many months wasn't working. When I checked the event log on the web server it had an error that the SQL server did not exist. That usually means that the user can not log in. I tried logging into the SQL server and it failed so I set the password back to the value that I know it should be and was able to log in. I thought the problem was that someone else had changed the password without telling me. The only problem was that the error didn't go away.

After trying a lot of different things I was finally able to use a different program to call the web service and I got a message back that the version of the DLL that I am using from the configuration management application block didn't match with the version in the assembly manifest. I thought that was strange but maybe someone had copied a newer version of the .DLL into the bin directory so I uninstalled and reinstalled the web service. Still I was getting the version mismatch error from the web service and the SQL server connection error in the event log.

I finally found someone who had a similar error on the Internet. The resolution that they posted was to look at a virtual directory higher up and see if there is a web.config file there that has slightly different settings. Sure enough in the wwwroot directory there was a web.config file that had been copied from a different virtual directory. It had slightly different settings for the configuration management application block DLLs. When I deleted that web.config everything started working again. I don't know why the original error message said that it couldn't connect to the SQL server but if it hadn't told me that I might not have wasted so much time looking at the SQL server.

Looking to upgrade your computer or buy a new one? Well, Microsoft has released a hardware guide for Windows Vista. You can use this to make sure that your newest machine will not be outdated when Vista ships.

The guide can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/evaluate/hardware/vistarpc.mspx