Dumbing down work environments

Our LOB application has a couple of different codelines. Occasionally two will be in use simultaneously for a short period of time. This requires developers to think about where they are working. The TFS task that is assigned contains all relevant information, such as the codeline in which the developer should be working, but there are a couple of people who just always pick the wrong one.

Maybe I need to dumb down the work environment. Right now we've got separate VS2008 solution and project files for the codeline. We've got separate databases related to each codeline. And the multitude of reports are also similarly segregated by codeline. I suppose that I could spend time getting the codeline name somehow worked into all object names, but this feel unnecessarily infantile to the other developers who are able to consistently pick the right place to work.

We have no junior developers on staff. No one is new to our organization either, so it's not like our software development processes are novel to anyone. Maybe I'm being too hard, but my expectation is that if your title is 'Senior Software Engineer' then you should be able to successfully analyze and execute work assignments. Knowing the personalities of the individuals involved I don't think that this behavior is intentional. That leads me to the conclusion that this is either apathy or sloppiness. Or both.

I suppose that this is a sore spot for me because I resent spending so much time merging and synchronizing. When someone works in the wrong place I've got to spend even more time sorting it all out. And then I also feel really petty when I have to scold someone who is a highly skilled, highly compensated professional for making such a rookie mistake. Again.

Windows 7 x64, Toad 9.7.2.5, Oracle 11g ODAC

After too much time and frustration, I finally got Toad (version 9.7.2.5) and Oracle Data Access Components to work on Windows 7 Professional x64.

For hours Toad wouldn't even acknowledge that an Oracle client was installed. I tried the 11g x86, Instant Client, 10g Oracle x64, finally Oracle 11g ODAC and Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio AKA ODTwithODAC1110621.zip started to work. At one point while trying to get Instant Client to work I manually set the ORACLE_HOME, TNS_ADMIN, and PATH environment variables. I don't know if that had any effect on my success. I'm too scared to remove them to find out considering the fragility of the Toad / Oracle client interaction. For now I'm just happy that my Dell Latitude E6500 can play any role other than netbook.

Corrupt TNSNAMES.ORA file

I just spent three hours troubleshooting this error: "ORA-12154: TNS:could not resolve the connect identifier specified." I had three TNSNAMES.ORA files with identical information. Oracle.DataAccess interaction with two of the three resulted in the ORA-12154 error. After scouring Google, I finally came across this nugget of wisdom:

Just a note, sometimes the TNSNAMES.ORA will get messed up. Nothing will jump out but it will not work and you cannot see the file though the net config. Just re-create it using notepad or [s]omething.

I replaced the two misbehaving files with the 'good' file and guess what? ORA-12154 magically went away.

ClickOnce and NHibernate

I've been working on a WPF MVVM intranet application that uses NHibernate for data access. As I expected, the initial ClickOnce deployment failed due to a missing configuration file and Castle assemblies. My View project used a Post-build event to get the required NHibernate files so that everything would run smoothly. Here's what that command line looks like:

C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\MSBuild.exe
   "$(ProjectDir)DeploymentUtil\CopyNHibernateStuff.xml"
   "/p:TargetCompileDirectory=$(TargetDir);TargetProjectDirectory=$(ProjectDir)"

Originally it just used the $(TargetDir) macro as an input to an MSBuild project file to copy the NHibernate files to the bin\Debug directory. In consideration of ClickOnce I modified it to also use the $(ProjectDir) macro to copy the files to the View project's root directory. Here's the contents of the CopyNHibernateStuff.xml file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Project xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
<PropertyGroup>
<TargetCompileDirectory>.</TargetCompileDirectory>
<TargetProjectDirectory>.</TargetProjectDirectory>
<HibernateCfgPath>C:\SourceTfs\Patient Safety Organization\Eligibility Manager\PsorgEligibilityData\hibernate.cfg.xml</HibernateCfgPath>
</PropertyGroup>
<ItemGroup>
<NHFiles Include="C:\Program Files\NHibernate\Required_For_LazyLoading\Castle\Castle.Core.dll" />
<NHFiles Include="C:\Program Files\NHibernate\Required_For_LazyLoading\Castle\Castle.DynamicProxy2.dll" />
<NHFiles Include="C:\Program Files\NHibernate\Required_For_LazyLoading\Castle\NHibernate.ByteCode.Castle.dll" />
<NHFiles Include="C:\Program Files\NHibernate\Required_For_LazyLoading\Castle\NHibernate.ByteCode.Castle.pdb" />
<NHFiles Include="$(HibernateCfgPath)" />
</ItemGroup>
<Target Name="CopyNH">
<Message Text="NHFiles: @(NHFiles)" />
<Message Text="TargetCompileDirectory: $(TargetCompileDirectory)" />
<Copy SourceFiles="@(NHFiles)" DestinationFolder="$(TargetCompileDirectory)" />
<!-- Now copy files (again) to project directory so that they can be referenced as a publishable file by ClickOnce. -->
<Copy SourceFiles="@(NHFiles)" DestinationFolder="$(TargetProjectDirectory)" />
</Target>
</Project>

I did some spelunking in the View project file to determine how items appeared in the Application Files dialog on the Publish tab. I figured out that I could manually add my required NHibernate references in the following manner and they would be available to ClickOnce for publishing.

<ItemGroup>
<Content Include="hibernate.cfg.xml" />
<Reference Include="Castle.Core.dll" />
<Reference Include="Castle.DynamicProxy2.dll" />
<Reference Include="NHibernate.ByteCode.Castle.dll" />
</ItemGroup>

Of course after I did all of this work I discovered this post which described my process in detail. At least it confirmed that I wasn't terribly abusing MSBuild.

NHibernate and Oracle 9i

Spent 1.5 hours troubleshooting the following error when using NHibernate 2.1:

"NHibernate.HibernateException: Could not instantiate dialect class NHibernate.Dialect.Oracle9Dialect ---> System.TypeLoadException: Could not load type NHibernate.Dialect.Oracle9Dialect. Possible cause: no assembly name specified."

I was looking at outdated documentation. The correct dialect is "NHibernate.Dialect.Oracle9iDialect" (emphasis mine). "NHibernate.Dialect.Oracle10gDialect" is also valid.

The Case of the Disappearing Drive

I made a big mistake recently when reinstalling Windows XP Professional SP3- I didn't disconnect my secondary hard drive. After installation was complete the second hard drive appeared as unallocated space in Disk Management. The NTFS-formatted disk had plenty of stuff on it. Well, it did prior to my lapse in judgment. TestDisk saved me. Great tool. These two tutorials (thanks Herman!) walked me though recovering my partition, which obviously I had blown away during the XP install process. I had to actually use the dig deeper method to get my partition back.

VS2008 WPF Intellisense no longer works after SDK install

Another in the "note to self" series...

Intellisense stopped working for VS2008 WPF projects after installing the .NET 3.5 SDK. Resolution is here. This fixed my problem without a machine reboot.