Rob Windsor's Weblog

.NET Rocks - Back To It's Roots

For those of you who might have caught an episode or two of .NET Rocks! and found it wasn't quite your cup of tea, I suggest you give it another shot. The show has gone back to it's original format which consists of a little bit of email and news and then an hour interview with the guest, basically 75 minutes of pure .NET bliss. 

The extra “stuff“ like Google Weirdos, Ask Rory, the Weird Wide Webb, and Richard the Toy Boy have been moved to Carl's new show called Mondays (which is recorded in front of a “live” audience of Fridays). If you want more freaky and less geeky then this new show is the one for you.

Call for Help: No-Touch Deployment and Unhandled Exceptions

I've been banging my head on this one for a bit so I thought I'd fire up the Bat Signal and see if any (OK, both) of my blog readers knew a good workaround for this issue.

When you create a Windows Forms application, the standard way to deal with unhandled exceptions is to trap the Application.ThreadException and the AppDomain.UnhandledException events. The only problem with this technique is that assigning handlers to these events requires a SecurityPermission that is not granted to code coming from the Internet or the Local Network (Intranet) zone and therefore you cannot use this method if you want to use No-Touch Deployment.

There's a XL Tim's in it for you if you have a good solution to this problem. I realize those of you who live outside Canada or the northern United States will have no idea what an XL Tim's is but trust me, it's worth the trip to Toronto.

Checking Out Delphi 2005

Although it's been a while since I've done any real development with it, I'm spending a couple days checking out what's going on with Delphi 2005 at the Falafel .NET Developer Conference. I cut my Windows development teeth using Delphi and I was on the executive of the the Toronto Delphi User Group for a few years so I try to keep up on how the product is evolving. I thought these two days would be the best way to catch up since the presenters are two current Delphi team members (Danny Thorpe and Allen Bauer)  and one former one (Lino Tadros).

Get a SPOT Watch for $10!

It sounds too good to be true but Tiger Direct is selling Fossil Abacus Wrist Net watch for $29.97 with a $20 rebate, total cost to you is $9.97. This same watch is selling at Future Shop for $149.99.

[Update: We'll it looks like, for me at least, this was too good to be true. My watch died in it's sleep on Friday night, barely more than 24 hours after I received it. I'm not sure if I'm going to go through the hassle of trying to get a replacement or just eat the fourty bucks (I bought mine pre-rebate).]

[Update #2: I tried to call Tiger Direct's Customer support tonight at 6:35, I got the muzak and the “Your call is important to us...“ message until 7:05 when the phone disconnected. I called back to find out their office hours end at 7:00pm and that they were now closed. I also learned that a watch recently purchased by another Canadian MVP also died within 24 hours, he posted a series of steps on how to give CPR to the watch and potentially revive it but I'm not too optimistic.]