MonoRail runs on .NET 2.0. AspView is no different, and is compiled for .NET 2.0, so people who cannot run 3.5 (shared hosting, other limitations) can still enjoy every shining new feature.

However, if you DO want to use c#3 stuff in view templates (like extension methods), then you can. Thanks to Felix Gartsman, the AspView compiler would try to load the c# compiler based on the codedom section of the application .config file.

So, if you're using autorecompilation=true, the add this to your web.config:

<system.codedom>
  <compilers>
    <compiler  language="c#;cs;csharp"
               extension=".cs"
               type="Microsoft.CSharp.CSharpCodeProvider,System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089"
               warningLevel="4">
      <provideroption value="v3.5" name="CompilerVersion" />
      <provideroption value="false" name="WarnAsError" />
    </compiler>
  </compilers>
</system.codedom>

If you want to precompile your views, then add the same to vcompile's app.config.

This is a piece of screenshot that you probably hopefully won't see on sites I'm involved with:

Today I've given a little help to a friend, with a JET 4.0 (Ms-ACCESS) thing.

Situation

Given an existing schema:

  Customers (Id, Name, ..., Email)
  Ads (CustomerId, ...)

the client wanted to add a field name TargetEmail to Ads table.

Adding the field was simple enough:

ALTER TABLE Ads ADD COLUMN TargetEmail TEXT(255)

Now the client wanted to initialise the TargetEmail field for existing ads, based on the Customer's email.

A Naive and SQL Server jockey as I am, I gave him that little snippet:

UPDATE   Ads 
SET      Ads.TargetEmail = Customers.Email
FROM     Ads 
    JOIN Customers ON Ads.CustomerId = Customers.Id
WHERE   Ads.TargetEmail IS NULL

Problem

JET had refused that syntax.

Or rather, Jet is weird.

Solution

Google to the rescue. answer was here.

UPDATE  Ads, 
        Customers 
SET     Ads.TargetEmail = Customers.Email
WHERE	Ads.CustomerId = Customers.Id
  AND   Ads.TargetEmail IS NULL

All I wanted was to find a decent hotel in Barcelona, with the aid of my buddy Firefox

(from http://www.mygrouptour.com/)

No explanation is needed

Let's talk about these three activities, or rather on aspects of them.

Assuming one want to get from London to Cambridge, by car. The directions would be something like "Take the M11 to north, leave at Junction 12 toward Cambridge and you're there".

One might require slightly more explicit instruction, such as "To get to the M11, you'd need to leave the M25 on junction 27", or "On junction 12 you'd want to turn to the right toward Cambridge".

At no point would someone need to be told to "Turn the steering wheel to the right" or "Do not forget to use the clutch when changing gears".

When driving, there are:

• intention:
  either implicit ("Leave ... toward Cambridge") or explicit ("you'd want to turn to the right toward Cambridge")
• mechanics:
  Turn the steering wheel, use the clutch
• infrastructure:
  The steering wheel's movement is transferred to the front wheels, which turn to the desired side, then the various physic powers are causing the car to make the turn

When flying a small aircraft, there are several things that affect it's movement:

There's the Elevator which affects horizontal shifts, controlled by the moving the stick backwards and forwards.

There are the Ailerons which generates rolling motion, and controlled my moving the stick sideways.

There is the Rudder which controls the nose position, and controlled by kicking pedals with the pilot's feet.

And on single motored aircraft, even changing the engine's speed affects the "steering" as the radial movement of the propeller is inflicting different airflow on the wings, causing a slight difference in the elevation.

However, flight directions include things like "Fly to point A, use bearing X, keep altitude Y". At most, a flying student would be told to keep the aircraft's Nose at a specific position in the Horizon.

I remember that in flight school, when we were being taught about simple manoeuvres, the language used by the instructors was of the implicit intention kind. However, there was a guy that kept asking "so what am I supposed to do with the stick now?". He of course was one of the first to be kicked out of there.

All of the above apply to programmers, too.

In forums and mailing lists, sometimes someone asks a question, that gets answered with the needed intention, but that someone keeps asking for the exact mechanics. For example:

Q: How can disable the controls on a web page after a certain button click?
A (implicit intention): Hide the whole page with another, transparent element.

Q: How do I do that?
A (explicit intention): Use DOM manipulation and DHTML to add a div with the size of the entire page, positioned over the page.

Q: How do I do that?

A (more explicit): some pseudo code.

Q: I tried to run this code you've sent but it throws errors. Can you please send me the correct code?
A (mechanics): function disableControls() { ... }

You get the point, right?

If not?

a. When asking for help, expect to get the intention. That usually should be enough.

b. If you really can't figure out the code (at least to create an 'almost working' implementation) out of intention, then you probably are in the wrong business.

As for infrastructure - a driver does not have to know anything about Newton's Laws of Motion. However a professional racing driver has to understand the basics of that in order to be as good as he needs to. And definitely not being troubles by the angle of the steering wheel. That should become naturally. Just as transferring intentions into working code should come naturally for a programmer.

After failing to setup git access to my newly created repository on git-hub, I managed to nail the problem, thanks to Lee Henson's good advice (and by re-reading the hint text)

After generating the public key (with puttygen) I copied to git-hub only the key itself (the HEX part), while I was also supposed to copy the text surrounding it, as can be seen in the image below:

I've just opened up a VS2005 solution in VS2008.

The conversion wizard popup up, with some bad UI (empty window with "Next", "Finish", "Cancel" buttons), but it worked ok, and at the end suggested that no errors occured.

Then I went to the project's properties and changed the target to .NET 3.5

VS told me that he had to reload the project, so I let him.

then I started to get weird errors in the IDE:

1. Cannot explicitly convert System.Boolean to bool VS2008
2. Cannot apply operator ++ to identifier of type int

huh?

anyway, closing the solution and re-opening made this weird happening go away.

And I thought I'm about to go back to vs2005 ...

Following a question from NHibernate's users list:

<configSections>
  <section name="log4net"
            type="log4net.Config.Log4NetConfigurationSectionHandler,log4net" />
</configSections>
 
<log4net>
  <appender name="rollingFile"
            type="log4net.Appender.RollingFileAppender,log4net" >
    <param name="File" value="log.txt" />
    <param name="AppendToFile" value="true" />
    <param name="DatePattern" value="yyyy.MM.dd" />
    <layout type="log4net.Layout.PatternLayout,log4net">
      <conversionPattern value="%d %p %m%n" />
    </layout>
  </appender>
  <logger name="NHibernate.SQL">
    <level value="ALL" />
    <appender-ref ref="rollingFile" />
  </logger>
</log4net>

and configuring your application to use Log4Net (if you hadn't done that anyway):

log4net.Config.XmlConfigurator.Configure();

If you wan't to know more about log4net and it's configuration options - look here or use your favorite search engine.

Another quote:

Please don't use table even though they work fine,
when it comes to indexing they give searches a hard time

and also

Check in all browsers, I do it directly,
You got to make sure that it renders correctly

This should be in the curriculum for any webmasters 101 course

Now that I'm getting old, I need to keep up with the cool kids, so I'm taking git for a spin.

Downloaded MSys Git.

Upon install I went for the git-bash option.  Running the bash shell has reminded my some of the old unix memories, however I am much more comfy with the windows shell these days, so I have manually added the the path things needed for running in cmd.exe/f

Now it was time to test remote. Luckily enough I got a git-hub invitation.

Step 1 - signup to git-hub.

downloaded the newest putty, then used puttygen to generate public and private key.

Step 2 - create a private repository - went smoothly.

Step 3 - trying to push to the remote repo.

I ran the PAGEANT.EXE tool, loaded it with the private key, and set the GIT_SSH environment variable to point to PLINK.EXE.

Then tried to "git push origin master" and got a message like "The server's key signature is not in the registry, press 'y' for storing in the registry, 'n' for skipping, 'return' to exit". the problem is - it got stuck, no input allowed except ctrl-C.

Then I tried to putty directly to the server, and now it did let me press the y, hoora - server's public key's signature is stored.

You'd think could push to the repository? think again. I then started getting other weird errors like "No supported authentication methods available".

grrrrr.

Maybe Ill try again tomorrow.

UPDATE (07/04/2008 - I guess tomorrow is a flexible term these days ...):
It was me being silly. Now it works perfectly