My laptop is back from Dell in working order today.  Note to self: keep a Virtual PC with Visual Studio and some other necessities on it in case this happens again.  I should be able to get back to some pending articles now.

Yesterday, two days after my fairly new Dell shorted itself, my not so new desktop PC at home decided to die as well-either the motherboard, the power supply, or both took a dump.  I was working on some discrete tasks from home since it would save me the trouble of setting up VS and the various messengers and tools.  Two computers in 3 days, what are the odds?

My 3ish month old laptop decided to utterly fry itself, the USB ports went while I was looking at a PDA and then I was greeted by the very brief blue flash of a HARDWARE FAILURE screen before it retired and would not be reawakened.  The degree to which this puts me out of commission is disgusting.

You may try to open an SQL Mobile database with the query manager tool, or you may get error messages trying to compact, repair, or shrink an SQL Mobile database.  The solution is to install the SQL Mobile replication CAB appropriate for your device platform.  If you installed Visual Studio to the default folder you will find this in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SmartDevices\SDK\SQL Server\Mobile\v3.0\wceX00 and sqlce30.repl.phone.wce5.armv4i.CAB is the file you're looking for, or the appropriate version for your platform.  You may not have installed this file if you are not using replication, but it contains a DLL (sqlcecompact30.dll) that the managed SQLMobile code will be looking for if one of the aforementioned operations is attempted.  It also seems that deploying from Visual Studio will not install this CAB file when you are using code that depends on it. 

The original series of articles on hosting the Visual Studio designer shall be wrapped up in the next installment.  The designer stuff is mostly done anyway, but I had planned on following up with a great deal of obscure Windows Forms tricks involved in interacting with the design time environment.  I've reevaluated the worth of this in light of the coolness of WPF and I think I'll shelve that effort for the forseeable future.  Messing around with the Orcas designer surface for a WPF window today, I realized I need to get on the ball with the Orcas design-time environment.

A friend of mine asked me to do an Architectural Review for him, and since I have had my eye on some home theater recliners I agreed to help.  This is something I've done several times in the past in an ad hoc fashion: in conversations with developers, stakeholders, infrastructure experts, and users, the areas that require more rigid review than other areas make themselves known quickly.  This client had the audacity to want to know ahead of time what is usualy contained in an Architectural Review, which forced me to sit down and think about things that I haven't been at for a while, such as different viewpoints as to what exactly is entailed in the idea of software architecture and what people are really after when they bring someone in to review the architecture and implementation of a software system.

The latter question is often overlooked but is of paramount importance.  What are they after, bringing in an outsider who does not know their business and their politics to critique what is often the collective work of an entire department and a fair amount of involvement from other departments as well.  I have a friend who despite being a world class software architect is regularly subjected to reviews by people who were not out of diapers when he began working with the high level structure of integrated systems.  What are they after?  In some cases (though this does not seem to be the norm) there are clear problems with a system's ability to scale or with the difficulty in making changes to a system and the architect is brougt in to show the way forward. I will propose some answers with a few articles I am working on, culminating with my humble offer for a blueprint of what is involved in an "Architectural Review."

Dear Sony,

Thank you for punishing your early adopters.  Revisions in console hardware and specifications are no doubt unavoidable, however cutting the price on the PS3 mere months after it was released, along with offering a new version containing an 80gb HD and the full version of Motorstorm so soon seems like a bit of a slap to the 6million or so people who just bought these things.  The loud and clear message is to not buy consoles at launch. 

There are various talks online about ClickOnce improvements in Orcas.  I installed a Vista Virtual PC and Orcas Beta 1, which took a rather long amount of time since I had work to do on this PC while VPC was fighting for resources.  Details were scarce but I had hoped the gaping hole of no authentication mechanisms being supported by ClickOnce would be in some way addressed out of the box with Orcas and .NET 3.5.  No Joy, at least not without a little bit of work and digging.  There are references to the ability to customize the User Interface you see while downloading the application files, ostensibly for branding but I have some hope that this may also allow one to provide a user interface to responde to an authentication challenge.  If not, I'll begin brainstorming some kind of frankenstein solution that may end up being no easier than home rolling the whole shebang.

My day was off to a late start today as my wife and I were both standing up in a wedding last night.  Nonetheless, when I finally waded through my email I was pleased to see that I have officially been awarded the 2007 Microsoft MVP award in the category "Visual Developer - Solutions Architect."  Thanks go out to my nominator (you know who you are) and I hope to keep living up to this title over the next year.