The shoe finally dropped. My former employer Borland finally completed the sale of their CodeGear division. The sale is for $23M to Embarcadero Technologies of San Francisco a database tools company. After 16 years looks like I’ll finally be removing BORL from my watch list. It’s pretty quiet on the CodeGear Blogs on the subject and I have yet to hear from anyone on the inside. I wish them great success going forward!

If you’ve taken a peek at Microsoft Live Mesh would you leave a comment here and tell me what the big deal is? And what the hell is Steve Gilmor talking about? Seriously, read that article if you can get through it. I get the feeling that top bloggers like Gilmore and Scoble use all this social networking buzz like a proverbial hacky sack devised to simply keep a conversation afloat. Scoble even goes so far as say

Microsoft’s fans are delivered to the promised land.
  - Robert Scoble (link)

Where exactly is this promised land? Seriously, that’s out of touch given Mesh’s beta status, numerous missing features and a nebulous definition. Heck, I’m an MS fan and I just don’t get it. I’ve yet to come across a clear description of what Mesh really is or will be? My initial experience completely sucked. The other night I sat down for dinner with Barry Kelly and Adam Markowitz (Adam, you’ve been linked to so get that blog up!) and neither had a good understanding of Mesh and these are bright guys!

I’m actually glad or perhaps even relieved it confounds Joel as well. For now, I’ll take that as a good sign.

Anyway, .NET started out pretty nebulous and poorly defined but the end result has proven extremely satisfying so there is hope. I wonder if Microsoft felt compelled to release something in these days of exploding social networks simply to remain relevant and in the conversation which, in this case, somehow seems to have worked. IMO it seems Mesh was released so customers could try to help Microsoft to figure out exactly what to do with this technology as a number of pieces seems like a rehash of existing services.

Now, had Microsoft announced a Windows based, Amazon-like, elastic compute cloud that would have been really interesting.

If you’ve downloaded either the Facebook Developer Toolkit or Facebook.NET Starter Kits I recommend voting in Facebook’s poll regarding which client library you use. It seems to me there’s no good reason Facebook shouldn’t provide an ASP.NET support on par with PHP though I’m biased. Here is the blog post about the poll.

Heck, even if you haven’t downloaded my starter kits but you do ASP.NET development be sure to vote!

So this is a new twist...

I decided to take a peek at Microsoft’s new Windows Live Mesh and upon attempting to install the client for Devices got this error message:

 
Now, I don’t know about you but I’d be hard pressed to think of someone I know running Vista who hasn’t disabled UAC. Anyway, I switch my account to Power User and install the client which gives me this message hovering over my tray:

Pressing forward I click on the Mesh icon in my tray and see this:

Now, I recognize the little colorful shield next to Configure Live Mesh Report Desktop means it requires elevated privileges. I click the link and get the above error window again. So, I exit live Mesh, click on the Start menu, type "mesh" then right click to "Run as Administrator":

I return to the above Live Mesh window and click the "Configure Live Mesh Remote Desktop" link and:

So much for living on the edge now, back to work!

Anyone else have better luck?

I’m a big Clive Clusser fan and I stumbled into this article by Joshua Davis in Wired through Barry Kelly's shared Google Reader items. It’s been sitting in a tab in my browser for days now and I’ve read it a few times and I keep getting drawn back to it sort of like I did with Into Thin Air yet another good real life story.

Thanks Barry!

Do you have a link blog or share links via Reader?

The other day I blogged about potentially switching to blogengine.net but one of the major issues is ensuring the URL’s I have in dasBlog either continue to work or redirect accordingly. To that end, I started investigating URL rewriters for ASP.NET and found this post of ScottGu’s very helpful. He mentioned two different Open Source rewriters and I opted for UrlRewriter.net which describes itself as:

UrlRewriter.NET is an open-source, light-weight, highly configurable URL rewriting component for ASP.NET 1.1 and 2.0. UrlRewriter.NET provides similar IIS Rewrite capabilities that the Apache web server provides with mod_rewrite and .htaccess. You don’t need to install an ISAPI Rewrite filter to use the component. Best of all, UrlRewriter.NET is free and licensed with a very permissive MIT-style licence.

I found it to be all of the above and the install/configuration to be very straightforward not to mention it has good online help and a support forum.

One caveat that I ran into though was that once installed at the root I started seeing this error in my other ASP.NET applications:

Server Error in '/blog' Application.

---

Configuration Error

Description: An error occurred during the processing of a configuration file required to service this request. Please review the specific error details below and modify your configuration file appropriately.

Parser Error Message: Could not load file or assembly 'Intelligencia.UrlRewriter' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. (E:\web\xxxxxxx\htdocs\web.config line 11)

Source Error:

Line 9:    <system.web>
Line 10:     <httpModules>
Line 11:       <add name="UrlRewriter" type="Intelligencia.UrlRewriter.RewriterHttpModule, 
                     Intelligencia.UrlRewriter" />
Line 12:     </httpModules>
Line 13:   </system.web>

Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.1433; ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.1433

The Fix

To fix this I added the following to the web.config files of my other ASP.NET applications removing the new assembly dependency:

1 <system.web>
2     <httpModules>
3         <remove name="UrlRewriter" />
4     </httpModules>
5 </system.web>

If you’re aware of other options that don’t require changes to every web.config I’d love to hear about them. At any rate, while I haven’t decided to switch blog engines yet I now have the pieces in place to do just that.

I started blogging June of 2004 on Borland's blog server which eventually morphed into CodeGear blogs. In October of 2006 I decided to "go it alone on stevetrefethen.com and shortly thereafter started using FeedBurner to track subscribers. Here’s a graph of subscriber count:

Here’s a graph of the matching Google Analytics over the same period:

In early 2007, there was a bunch of activity surrounding Borland’s CodeGear announcement not to mention I was featured on CodeGear’s home page for awhile.

Lastly, what would a post like this be without the obligatory call to action...

If you haven’t already, Subscribe now! 

* - Btw, I fully grok the fact that FeedBurner’s count may not be entirely accurate but it’s a fairly standard metric widely used on blogs so I’ll take it.