September 2007 Archives

Visual Studio had been crashing on me when I attempted to get the latest code from TFS. A helpful developer (thanks, Steven!) tipped me off on a service pack for Visual Studio that would cure its ailment. However, he warned that it would take a whole day to install this service pack so it would be wise to wait until I didn't have any pressing deadlines before I fixed this problem.

Today I discovered why. After installing the service pack, I got the following error message when I attempted to open the solution I was working on:

The project file cannot be opened. The project type is not supported by this installation.

I Googled for a solution and came across some forum posts with promising suggestions.

I tried all the easy fixes first.

1. running

   devenv /setup

   at the Visual Studio Command Prompt


2. running

   devenv /ResetSkipPkgs

   at the Visual Studio Command Prompt


3. running

   regsvr32.exe "%vs80comntools%\..\IDE\projectaggregator.dll"



4. installing Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 - Update to Support Web Application Projects (KB915364)

But none of these tricks fixed my issue.

Finally I gave one last suggestion a try. I reinstalled Visual Studio 2005 Team Explorer - ENU Service Pack 1 and it worked like a charm. I can open my solution without any error messages once again. I'm hoping that Visual Studio won't crash when I update my local copy of the code. (So far I haven't seen any crashes yet.)

If I should ever find myself in Hong Kong again in the future, I would like to take a cooking class at Coup Kitchen. I want to learn how to make those dense but fluffy and moist Swiss roll cakes that you can buy at Chinese bakeries.

I have been a long time user of Evite. In the past few months, Evite has been on a fritz... undergoing personality changes, gaining new features that don't work, breaking features that did work and popping up ads all over my desktop. It's like a distressed child's cry for attention and help.

I was annoyed when the carpool feature did nothing but spam my inbox. Okay fine, I used Evite before they had that feature. I can get along without it.

I thought it was the last straw when they introduced the flip-book style invitations where you had to turn the pages of the e-card to see all the details of the event. But they repented and rolled back that "upgrade" so I forgave them.

But then they mangled my recurring event for Game Night at my place. First they sent a notification that my recurring event had ended and that I would have to schedule another series of recurring events to continue it. Okay, fine. I was going to stop using Evite anyway.

But the week after, Evite sent out an invitation for the event. Okay, whatever. I was going to have the event anyway.

And the invitations kept going out after that, all on their own, even though the recurring event for Game Night had supposedly ended. Unfortunately, sometimes the invitations inexplicably went out for 3:00 AM (Game Nights happen on Fridays at 8:00 PM) and other times Evite would randomly invite my friends to come and play on Wednesdays. I tried to cancel the events, but all I could do was cancel the invitations one by one as Evite automatically spewed them out. There was no way to cancel the entire series of events (because it had supposedly ended.)

And then just last week, the rogue invitations finally stopped. Yay!

Now I can dump Evite for a better alternative that doesn't require invitees to sign up for an account in order to respond to invitations. So far I've tried Renkoo, Crush3r and setdot.

Renkoo is cute but it is really buggy and it doesn't work for some of my friends due to the AJAX platform that Renkoo is using.

Crush3r is simple and promising. They added a recurring event feature when Mike requested it, but it doesn't really allow you to be lazy and schedule a series of regularly recurring events à la Microsoft Outlook Calendar.

setdot also works but the closest thing they have to a repeating events feature is an event cloning feature, which allows you to create a new invitation by copying an existing event. Again, I don't want to have to think about what day of the month it's going to be a week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks,... 52 weeks from today.

If anyone knows of an event invitation web application that doesn't require invitees to sign up for an account in order to respond to invitations and has a feature to easily manage regularly occurring events, please let me know.

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web discusses the discrimination that women in technology face.