Don't mind the geek!

MSMQ Studio 0.9.4 is released

Kjell-Åke Andersson — Mon, 10 May 2010 02:05:29 GMT

In this version I have added public queues support.

Archonaut.se is moving

Kjell-Åke Andersson — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 19:16:52 GMT

I decided that I wanted to move http://www.archonaut.se to another hosting provider. The reason for this is that I am fed up with PHP at the moment. It’s not that I do not like it, but it is to much context switching for me when I need to fix something on the site. I mainly do development in C# and that’s what I am mostly comfortable with and when I have to do something in PHP I need to think for a while before I remember how to do it.

When I move the site to another hosting provider I will be able to use and learn development techniques that I can re-use in my day-job as a software architect and developer at Sogeti.

I will also be able to get a more streamlined release process for MSMQ Studio as well so I get less friction when I release a new version and it gets automatically published on the website. The current process requires to many manual steps for me at the moment. Although all this is also possible to do in PHP, but it will be easier for me to do it in .NET.

So if you experience any downtime at the http://www.archonaut.se it is due to the move and it will soon be online again.

Mix Session Viewer for Windows Phone 7

Kjell-Åke Andersson — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 00:54:50 GMT

I was at Microsoft TechDays in Sweden last week and got some inspiration to create an application for Windows Phone 7. The week before I found the oData API for accessing the session data for MIX 2010. And when Tim Heuer released the MIX10 Online Silverlight Viewer I got the idea that it would be really cool to the make the same but for WP7!

I started by using the Windows Phone List Application template in VS2010 where I populated the list of sessions using the oData SDK for Windows Phone 7.

When you select a session you will get to the details page where the video is displayed in a MediaElement, which can be controlled by a play and a pause button in the application bar.

You can download the sample code at MIXSessionViewer.zip.

MSMQ Studio 0.9.3.0

Kjell-Åke Andersson — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:14:40 GMT

This release contains new functionality for setting a filter on a queue to only display messages that was received within a certain date range. There is also a bug fix for a crash that happens when connecting to a remote computer and the user has insufficient access rights on the computer.

Download at http://www.archonaut.se

MSMQ Studio 0.9.2.0

Kjell-Åke Andersson — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 22:39:44 GMT

In this version there is a new feature added which allows you to search in any queue for text in a message. This may come in handy when you have a lot of messages in a queue and need to find a specific message. It will search both in the label and the body of the message. At the moment the search functionality is very basic and does not handle any language specific encodings.

Download at http://www.archonaut.se

Purchase license for MSMQ Studio

Kjell-Åke Andersson — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 14:57:08 GMT

Now it is possible to purchase a beta license (30% off standard price) for MSMQ Studio. When your order is completed a license file will be sent by e-mail to you.

Visit http://www.archonaut.se to purchase a license!

MSMQ Studio BETA Trial Version Released

Kjell-Åke Andersson — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 02:50:39 GMT

I just released the 14-day trial version of MSMQ Studio BETA now. With this version I will be able to deliver updates more frequently and you will be able to purchase a license that will remove all time limits from the product. MSMQ Studio is still in BETA, so until I release a final version there will be a 30% discount on the licenses.

For more information see http://www.archonaut.se.

No conversation at all!

Kjell-Åke Andersson — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 23:04:56 GMT

I just read Joel Spolsky’s article A Little Less Conversation, which is a good article. Although there is another problem which can arise from having a manager who is co-ordination the conversations and that is when he is stopping all conversations until he decides that they are needed!

In my current assignment I have been brought into a project to make a revision of the current software architecture. This project is about migrating a legacy application to .NET, but in the 9 years the project has been going on this has not yet been finalized. The guy who is now managing the project has been in it almost all the time, but he shows us over and over that he has no understanding about software development at all.

The biggest mistake he does at the moment is that he has taken total control over who should discuss what and with who! When we finally get to meet the key stakeholders, he has spent a large amount of time on inventing solutions for the topics that we are discussing and quite early in the meeting we all dismiss them because they are totally wrong! He spends so much time controlling the project and the work that we do, most of it he hasn’t got a clue about what it is, so that we feel like we have got our hands tied behind our backs. And when something goes bad, he blames us for it!

This and a lot more issues we are having with this project manager is very frustrating and it does not make you perform your best! If there is another assignment coming up I will not hesitate to move on!

InstallShield LE for VS 2010…..

Kjell-Åke Andersson — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 20:14:55 GMT

That is a product I will never use!! I have been using WiX for the last 4.5 years building setup packages for all my projects and I am very happy with it!!

If you also are disappointed that Microsoft dropped WiX from VS 2010 and now introduces InstallShield LE instead, then please join me and others in telling Soma Segar that at http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2009/12/14/building-setup-and-deployment-packages-in-vs-2010.aspx?!

Silverlight 4: System.Xml.Linq.dll is missing?? Well, sort of…

Kjell-Åke Andersson — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 10:07:19 GMT

I have played around a little with Silverlight 4 the last couple of days and I was consuming a REST service but when I wanted to use XLinq for querying the response I couldn’t find it in the References dialog.

And when I searched on the internet for a solution to this I found out that many others had the same experience. But they solved it by copying the System.Xml.Linq.dll assembly from the Silverlight SDK to the Reference Assemblies folder.

The reason for the absence of System.Xml.Linq.dll in Silverlight 4 is actually that the Silverlight team wanted to keep the Silverlight 4 runtime as small as possible (~4 Mb) even though they added more functionality that in Silverlight 3. What they did then was that they removed assemblies that can be seen as “luxury” to have in the runtime and put them into the SDK instead so that if you want use XLinq have to distribute it within your own .XAP-file.

MSMQ Studio 0.9.0.1

Kjell-Åke Andersson — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 22:13:18 GMT

I just discovered today that you cannot add private queues to the local computer using the context menu when you right click on “Private Queues”. So this is a minor release just to fix this issue.

You can download the new version here.

MSMQ Studio 0.9.0 is released!!

Kjell-Åke Andersson — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 23:37:05 GMT

Now you can download MSMQ Studio 0.9.0 from http://www.archonaut.se!! This version has big improvements in working with remote computers. You can now see subqueues on remote computers and also move messages between queues and subqueues and all the other usual operations.

This is probably the last beta of MSMQ Studio and I have extended the timebomb in it to 2010-02-01 so it will not stop working during the holidays.

Website problem for www.archonaut.se

Kjell-Åke Andersson — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 02:35:05 GMT

I just discovered that there are some issues with http://www.archonaut.se that makes it impossible to download a new version of MSMQ Studio at the moment. I also have some issues with an e-commerce site that I am responsible for. These issues are most probably related to that the hosting service updated PHP from 5.2 to 5.3 today and for some reason this made the menu system on the site to fail. I will dig into this problem this evening when I get home from my day job and the kids are put to sleep.

These issues was very unfortunate as I should have released a new version of MSMQ Studio today and the previous version will stop to work today as well. Unfortunately I will not be able to release the new version until tomorrow and I am very sorry if this will cause you any problems.

MSMQ Studio 0.8.6

Kjell-Åke Andersson — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 22:38:44 GMT

Version 0.8.6

Added:

Support for browsing private queues on remote computers.
Display more message properties.

Fixed:

Improved Active Directory integration.

Known issues:

Cannot delete messages from remote private queues.
Cannot browse remote private queues when the queue has subqueues
Cannot remove remote computers from list.

MSMQ Studio 0.8.5

Kjell-Åke Andersson — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 14:08:27 GMT

Version 0.8.5

Fixed:

Send messages to private queues when in AD-mode.
Deleting messages will now delete the correct messages.

Changed:

Send messages using path syntax instead of direct format syntax.

WiX Service Account Dialog – part 2

Kjell-Åke Andersson — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 13:51:40 GMT

I got the question on how I put the username and password from the service account dialog (see part 1) back into the ServiceInstall element. The way I did it was to create two properties to hold default values (at the moment I do not remember if it was necessary).

   1:          <Property Id="ACCOUNT" Value="<DOMAIN\username>"/>

   2:          <Property Id="PASSWORD" Value="<password>"/>

And then I set up the ServiceInstall element to use these properties.

   1:  <ServiceInstall Id="MyServiceInstall" Name="MyService" Type="ownProcess" Account="[ACCOUNT]" Password="[PASSWORD]" Start="auto" ErrorControl="ignore" DisplayName="MyService" />

MSMQ Studio 0.8.4

Kjell-Åke Andersson — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 23:49:46 GMT

Version 0.8.4

Fixed:

Support for Actived Directory-integration.
Delete selected and purge all messages from a journal queue.

Automatically stop the build for a solution when a project has failed to build

Kjell-Åke Andersson — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:15:19 GMT

I am working on a project now which has 155 projects within its solution in Visual Studio 2008. When one of these projects fail to build I have to wait a long time before the build finishes unless I press CTRL + Break.

But now I have found a really nice solution to this here. The solution is to add a macro that handles the OnBuildProjConfigDone event and execute the DTE command “Build.Cancel” when a project has failed to build.

MSMQ Studio 0.8.3

Kjell-Åke Andersson — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 11:03:34 GMT

Version 0.8.3

Fixed:

Improved performance when loading messages into the listview.
Added checkbox 'Send transactional' to send message form.
Refresh message count for parent queue when messages are moved or deleted from a subqueue.

Download

MSMQ Studio has moved!

Kjell-Åke Andersson — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:54:19 GMT

Today I moved MSMQ Studio from geekproject.com to my new company site Archonaut Solutions. I started this company so that I can spend more time on developing MSMQ Studio so that it will be the MSMQ management tool of choice!

I also released a new version of MSMQ Studio there as well.

MSMQ Studio: Subqueues and outgoing queues

Kjell-Åke Andersson — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 23:28:28 GMT

Just did some work on implementing support for subqueues (Vista +). So there will be a possibility to view messages in subqueues and to move them to other subqueues. At the moment I will only display a list of outgoing queues and the number of messages in each queue. Later on I will add the possibility to view the messages in outgoing queues.

No new release of MSMQ Studio yet!

Kjell-Åke Andersson — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 08:58:12 GMT

I’m still doing a lot of changes to the internals of MSMQ Studio so there hasn’t been a new release of it yet. The post MSMQ Studio: Show number of messages in a queue just described a new feature that was added to MSMQ Studio. As soon as I am done with the internals I will release a new version.

Now Twittering

Kjell-Åke Andersson — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 08:51:27 GMT

I decided to try out Twitter so you can follow me on @archonaut.

MSMQ Studio: Show number of messages in a queue

Kjell-Åke Andersson — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 01:03:33 GMT

Tonight I added the possibility to show the number of messages in a queue although it will also include any messages that you might have in subqueues of the queue. This might look a little bit strange but at the moment I cannot or will do anything about it.

Windows 7 RTM is released on MSDN

Kjell-Åke Andersson — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 21:59:47 GMT

Finally they released Windows 7 RTM on MSDN! At the moment I am downloading it so that I can replace Windows XP x64 on our family computer. The biggest challenge though is to migrate everything as there is no upgrade from XP x64 to Win7 x64....

Download Windows 7 RTM from MSDN (http://www.msdn.com).