bencoffman.com/blog - Windows

Parallels CTRL ALT DELETE on Windows VM

Ben Coffman — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 02:41:02 GMT

A quick note. I do all my development on a VM (virtual machine). If you don't you should. It will change your life in many ways. I'll list a few of the reasons why you should and let you come up with the rest.

1. Primary Machine Crashes

If you back up your vm, you simply fix your primary machine and load your vm back up where you left off. All of your tools and special setting are right where you left them OR you could just go to a different computer and fire up your VM. You'll never miss a beat, great for deadlines and computers that always crap out when you need them the most.

2. New person on the team

When a new person starts it's pretty rare someone on the team sets up the new configurations on the new persons machine so they will be ready to blast off and show their skills. Now they can, you point them to a VM that has all the necessary stuff installed, all the directories set up. The new person simply checks out the code, builds and he's off. 1 hour tops as opposed to a 1 day or 2 and most likely another team member sitting right next to the new guy spoon feeding them the entire way.

3. Exact same environments for QA and development machines

I've seen some pretty major shops, (3 letter business software company based out of Germany) that has development machines that are significantly different than their QA environments. These environments were so different that most of their developers develop right off their shared dev (semi QA) machine (what happens when you have more than one developer making changes at once?) HUGE NO NO. They wonder why they have problems with with time lines and bugs.

I digress, the reason I'm making this post is because I couldn't figure out how to simulate "ctrl alt delete" in a Parallels VM running on windows.

Answer:
ctl alt insert

Hopefully Google will index this quickly and it will be a quick search for the rest of you.

Debug: Double Backslashes In String, 2 Backslashes in String

Ben Coffman — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 19:10:24 GMT

Error Readout:
None, it's not an error silly.

The Problem:
When I debug, and look at a string that contains my file path I see 2 backslashs (escape characters) in my string when I only wanted 1.

The Solution:
It's nothing, don't worry about it, that's just the way Visual Studio "debug" shows your path when you catch it while debugging. When the path is used in the code for the file system there will only be 1 backslash and it will work correctly.

This is such a stupid little thing, but for some reason every once in a blue moon, I forget and freak out on why it's doing this, thus wasting a solid five minutes of my life. I put this post up in hopes I will never forget again and that if someone happens to Google this, my post will pop up and help them move on quickly....maybe only wasting 1 to 2 minutes. :)

When to use the * (star) with Objective C

Ben Coffman — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 15:59:04 GMT

It's a good question.

There are some types that are not derived from NSObject, these types are called "Primitive Types." Some examples of these types are

int
bool
short
long
double
char

Sooooo basically any type that is not derived from the NSObject class is a Primitive type and does not require a "*".

Now I bet you are wondering how do I figure out if it's a primitive type or not.

An easy way is to look at the color of the syntax in xCode, is it deep blue or a sky blue? Deep blue = primitive type, but this is not entirely reliable as the standards for coloring syntax can fluctuate or change.

You can option-click on the object after you have typed it in xCode, click the little book in the upper right hand corner, when the class reference viewer comes up, look and see if it inherits from NSObject. If it doesn't it's Primitive and you don't need a "*".

Note:

int

NSInteger,

Just for fun:

value types

int i = 5;

System.Int32 i = new System.Int32(5);

UPDATE:

HTTP Error 404 - File Not Found or HTTP Error 404- File or Directory not found

Ben Coffman — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 20:22:50 GMT

Error Readout:
HTTP Error 404 - File Not Found
HTTP Error 404- File or Directory not found

Fix:
Enable a Pre-existing Web Service Extension in IIS 6.0

To permit IIS to serve content that requires a specific ISAPI or CGI extension that is already listed in the Web service extensions list, follow these steps:

Open IIS Manager, expand the master server node (that is, the Servername node), and then select the Web service extensions node.
In the right pane of IIS Manager, right-click the extension that you want to enable. In this example, this is Active Server Pages.
Click to select the Allow check box.

Microsoft Link: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315122

Explanation:
Apparently there was no easy Google search for this stupidly easy fix. (UPDATE: I'm wrong Google the title of this blog entry and a Microsoft fix is the first result) Consequently, I spent more time than I would like on trying to fix it.

Here is how it went down. I recive a HTTP Error 404 - File Not Found error on a page I was browsing to from IIS 6.0. How could this be I ask myself, the page does exists, I know because I see it in IIS 6.0, I right click the file and I select browse. WTF. Upon a little investigation I found out what was wrong and I found a Microsoft website furthers my fix. Soooo easy! Anyways moving on, going to go drink a beer and forget this time was lost in which I will never get back.