Toluu

Chris May

{Consulting; .Net; IT Services}

Streaming Audio From WHSJanuary 5

I have been looking into some of the options for streaming music from my WHS to devices in my house.

So far I don't seem to be finding many good options.  There are some that you point to a UNC share and then have to deal with a crappy UI to select the songs you want.

2 of the nicer options I have see are:

http://www.sonos.com/howitworks/

 

 

and

 

http://www.roku.com/products_soundbridge.php

 

 

 

http://www.roku.com/products_soundbridgeradio.php

 

 

I'm going to have to keep my

Learning Spanish In Cancun MexicoJanuary 4

I recently had an opportunity to travel to Mexico for some spanish lessons.  I wanted to put up a little write up here so if someone else was searching google for some options they might come across my article.

I arranged for lessons with Francisco Romero of the Cancun Spanish Language Institute.

http://www.studyspanish-mexico.com/

We had a great experience with Francisco.  We opted for an immersion type experience, with Francisco speaking almost no english during our lessons, but unlike some of the other instructors we have had, he was clearly 100% fluent in english, and could help explain some of the nuances in english. 

I would really recommend him to anyone else considering taking language lessons while in Cancun.

HP MediaSmart Certificate IssuesDecember 15 2008

I am in the process of testing out a Windows Home Server (WHS) for possible use in backing up multiple machines.

Today I ran into a problem.  I noticed that when logging in remotely (using mydomain.homeserver.com) it was sending me to an http page and not an https page.

Asking me for my username/password that will allow anyone to access my machine over https is not acceptable.  I tried manually changing the url to https, but I got a certificate error.

I took a look at the certificate error and it appeared the certificate was for the URL https://MYDOMAIN  which is the name of the server, but not the full domain name.

I am not fully sure which change I made fixed the problem, but I went into Settings-> Remote Access and changed the "Web Site Home Page" from the HP page to the "Windows Home Server Home Page" because my friend had it setup this way and he had a button that took him to an HTTPS page to login, but I don't think that solved the problem.  I then clicked on "Change" on the "Domain Name" section and just re-confirmed all the same settings.  At this point I think it grabs a new certificate from homeserver.com and it made it start working.

Now if I could only figure out why my one laptop is not backing up....

 

Extending Microsoft Data Access Blocks (early version)December 4 2008

Microsoft has released several versions of their Data Access Blocks, but they started mixing all their blocks together at some point, so if you wanted to use the DAB, you had to also use the Configuration blocks, and you had to use the Encryption blocks, and those needed the logging blocks etc.

So in many of my projects I have kept with one of the earlier versions.

But, there was a problem.  Basically in order to pass parameters, the easiest way to do it was in an ordinal position way, such as:

Public Shared Sub Whatever(SomeParamsHere) Dim storedParams() As SqlParameter storedParams = SqlHelperParameterCache.GetSpParameterSet(ConnectionString, "Whatever") storedParams(0).Value = 1 storedParams(1).Value = 2 storedParams(2).Value = 3 storedParams(3).Value ="abc" SqlHelper.ExecuteNonQuery(ConnectionString, _ CommandType.StoredProcedure, _ "ItProjectInfo_General_Update", _ storedParams) EndSub

Obviously, this code is hard to read because we don't know which parameters are getting which values w/o opening up the stored procedure and looking ourselves.

So I wrote some extra code to allow of working with SqlParameters in the form of Dictionar

Using nant to build projects from the command lineDecember 1 2008

NAnt is a tool that can help you build your .net applications. 

You can get really detailed with it, but what if you just want to set it up to quickly build projects/solutions or run automated builds.  This is especially useful if you are rebuilding 1 project that you are in the process of testing so you don't have to wait for VS to figure out if any of the referenced projects need to be rebuilt.

Well, with a few quick steps you can have this.

After downloading NAnt you need to create a little batch file somewhere in your PATH (for example, c:\windows).  Name the file nant.bat and put this in it:

@echo off "C:\apps\nant\nant-0.86-beta1\bin\NAnt.exe" %*

You will obviously want to replace my path with your own path to your nant exe that you downloaded.

Then add an entry to your PATH system variable to the directory that contains devenv.com.  For me this path is:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\ide\

Then you just need to add a .build file to your project.  I name it the same as my project name but you can do whatever you want.

This build file should contain the following XML:

<? xml version