lex parsimoniae

Best. Logger. Ever.

Logging is one of those “system” components that always seems to either be left out or way over-engineered (glares at Microsoft‘s Enterprise Application Blocks). Today, I’d like to introduce you to a logging framework that’s everything it needs to be and nothing it doesn’t. The .Net Logging Framework from The Object Guy is powerful enough [...]

NDepend review

Introduction There’s no question that Visual Studio is a class-leading tool for building large applications.  The IDE is incredibly helpful to coders, and the .Net framework lends itself to managing dependencies among components and classes in large applications.  In addition, Visual Studio is designed to be extended by third-party tools that can make it even [...]

The Great Lies of Software Architecture

I was staggering through my RSS feeds tonight, wondering how many more blatant insanities our elected officials would be able to unleash on us this week, when Jeremy Miller‘s blog post tonight reminded me that we’ve no further to look than our own trade.  Take a minute and go read it – it’s a narrowly-targeted [...]

Free .Net Development

I saw an interesting question a couple of days ago on a Joel-on-software forum: http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.668628.7 A poster lamented that his company had a rather “mature” IT platform, with a bunch of classic ASP code, Windows Server 2003, SQL Server 2005, and Office 2000, and the maintenance of the ASP code was getting prohibitively difficult.  He [...]

Migration headache: MSDataSetGenerator failed

Here’s a real treat.  I’m working on yanking some old .Net 1.1 code forward to 2.0, including a bunch of DataSets, so I was grabbing these old 1.1 DataSet XSD files, pasting into the new project directory, doing an "Add Existing" in the new project, and letting VS2005 re-generate all the "accessory" files that accompany the XSD.  This wasn’t really exciting, but it was easy, and it was working really well until I got to one that just wouldn’t import cleanly.
The first thing I noticed was a build error:

Custom tool error: Failed to generate code. Failed to generate code. Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. Input string was not in a correct format. Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. Input string was not in a correct format.