Okay, here’s what 330 miles, 3 CDs, a tank of gas, 10 homebaked cookies, and 4.5 hours driving taught me about Iowa:

• There’s some truck driving around with the license plate “BUDDY” that has tail lites that make it look like he’s driving in reverse. I chalk this one up to poor design by Toyota (or whatever company made the car, it was dark and I was going fast).
• Weigh stations for trucks in Iowa state that you have to stop if your truck is over 6000 pounds. In Illinois, you have to stop if your truck is over 8 tons. Now, I don’t know what the conversion is (and I don’t want to find it on dialup right now), but those darn truckers sure have know know how much their truck weighs.
• 3 guys dressed in black hooded sweatshirts standing on a weigh station roof are definately not weighing themselves, or a truck for that matter. My guess is they we’re drinking beer and got stuck up there, or they’re fixing some problem with the roof…you decide.
• The gas station “Kum & Go” is just a bad name (this actually got me to call my girlfriend to share and get a chuckle)
• Driving at 80 MPh 300 some odd miles is boring, but the slight hills and lots of turns make it fun in Iowa. Illinois is flat…I mean, really flat. Ask Kent, he came for a visit, and that was one of the things he mentioned.
• There are a lot of Dodge Neons out there that like to drive 65 MPh in the left lane. Staring at them when you pass them on the right only enrages them to go slower (which is odd since I’m not following them anymore!)
• Cars that like to follow you on your tail going 80 MPh that look like they want to pass you, will only slow down to 65 MPh once you move to the right lane so they can get by. Seriously, this confused me on multiple occasions.
• The Iowa car dealer plates are way cooler than Illinois’ tan pieces of crap that just have “DL” written down the left side.
• Plastering Christmas lights all over your 3 sheds, house, trees and bushes on your farm makes you just an awesome person that my girlfriend would like to meet. Seriously, this one farm looks like it took 2 full days to get Christmas lights all over.

Seriously, all the above statements came from my trip over. It kept me amused, but I mean, come on Iowans (is this the actual term for Iowa people?), use some common sense!

As an aside: You probably realized that I’m now at the Holiday Inn. This place is pretty fricking cool, but my room smells like that “New Rubber Smell” that we all so love. Our Microsoft sponsored get together is starting at 8 PM, and its now 7 PM, so I think I’m going to head down to Damons to grab some chow. If you’re in the building reading this (and didn’t pay the $9.95 fee for high-speed internet until 12 AM Friday morning) come down and eat with me. I’ll be dressed in a gray t-shirt and will probably have a beer in my hand.

Like several others have mentioned, I’ll be taking off later today heading to Iowa for the Heartland Developers Conference. I, however, won’t be presenting but enjoying those that are. If you’re attending, make sure you look for me. I’ll be the geek carrying the laptop bag, hmm…thats not descriptive enough…I’ll be the geek carrying the laptop bag and wearing a Microsoft .NET T-Shirt, hmm….nope, still not enough…I’ll be the geek carrying the laptop bag, wearing a Microsoft .NET T-Shirt, and …. well heck, here’s a picture of me…that will be easier.

BTW, if you’re attending the “get-together” tonight, make sure you look for me. I figure I’ll be arriving between 6–7 PM to the hotel. Otherwise, shoot me an email so we can meet up. I’d like to meet anyone and everyone!

So I decided to bite the bullet this afternoon and purchase 2 gold support licenses from SourceGear to obtain Vault 3.0. The upgrade went really, really smooth (I still have doubts that its properly working, but it looks and acts like v2.0.6 (close)), surprisingly. I always fret major updates to programs I use daily that could corrupt the integrity of my well being, code. I do have to say, it seems to be a loooot faster, and I loooove the new add files dialog.

The only gripe I had, was when upgrading my 1.x and 2.x licenses to 3.x licenses: it upgraded but didn’t send them to me via email! And because I figured they would, I closed my browser. Upon realizing this, I tried resubmitting my licenses and it told me that they’ve already been upgraded. So, after a support email (using my Gold status!) & a few hours, I had my licenses. SourceGear: take my subtle hint and send those bad boy’s out via email, otherwise you’re going to get a flood of support requests just like mine.

Thanks to Jackie pointing to this entry, I now realize the importance of using throw versus throw ex. How many of you actually realized that?

I’ve recently sent out a new beta to my beta group requiring them to fill out a survey. However, that group is limited, and I wanted to get a more broad input on Unleash It. So, please, if you use Unleash It, take a few moments to fill out the following survey using the “Contact” link to the left. Also, if you would like to become a user in my beta group, please indicate this as well!

Survey Questions:

1) How often do you use Unleash It, and is your use for personal or professional deployments?

2) If your use is within your profession, do other team members use Unleash It?

3) Have you utilized any of the included plugins, or have you created some on your own? If you've created some, do you find the documentation provided sufficient? Are there any additions or changes you would like to see with the plugin architecture?

4) What feature do you find most useful? What feature do you find least useful?

5) Are there any other features left lacking that Unleash It can enhance or implement?

6) Have you experienced any problems with the current version of Unleash It, or any previous versions? If you have, were your problems satisfactorily resolved?

7) Would a enterprise edition of Unleash It be something your corporation would use? This would involve having a central repository for profiles, logging of deployments, user authentication, and role based security, etc.

8) Any other comments?

I found this article (via Larkware News) on how to run a beta test. Very insightful, and I’ll definately take some pointers based on the results. I’ve also been taking part in another beta test for a piece of software that follows some of the same pointers that I was going to implement myself. All-in-all, its a good read if you ever need to do a beta test.

This is just an FYI for users of Unleash It 2.3.1: There was a memory leak found in the latest version that only affects users who test their FTP settings.

If you are a user who tests their FTP settings, and then exit Unleash It, viewing the Task Manager will indicate that “UnleashIt-GUI.exe” is still running. Just kill that process and you’ll be on your merry way.

I have fixed the problem, but due to the nature of many people not using this on a daily basis it is not going to be rolled as an urgent fix. If you’re afflicted with this problem and cannot handle killing the process, please contact me and I will get the updated assemblies to you.

It’s time for a service release that fixes issues with using the Multiple Profile deployment settings. It was brought to my attention that many things were broken with this, and so I took it on to do a service release, one that I don’t normally do, to just get these bugs hammered out so people can continue to use them. Also in this release is an updated version of VisualStyles which will hopefully solve various error messages received when configuring a profile. However, since these are few and far between, please report any problems you’re continuing to have with these. So, here’s the changelog:

• Fixed: Multiple Deployment only deploying the active profile indicated in single deployment.
• Fixed: Deleting multiple profile configurations always deleted the last profile.
• Fixed: Message on multiple profile tab not representing the actual problem why deployment can not continue.
• Changed: A new process dialog indicating the progress of testing your FTP settings and allows you to cancel has been put in place.
• Changed: Updated Skybound.VisualStyles to version 1.5.4

This release breaks any previously used plugins built on the 2.3 bits, and will need to be recompiled against the 2.3.1 bits. I will strive in the future to refrain from having to rebuild plugins with new releases, however sometimes this is an issue because many components are updated.

Visit Unleash It’s site to download the 2.3.1 service release!
Visit the Unleash It Forums!
View the Submitted Plugins for Unleash It!

Well, not my family, but my work family. A co-worker’s house caught on fire yesterday morning severly damaging it. Luckily they were out getting family pictures, and only the dogs were there, who were rescued. You can read more at our local newspaper. My company will be starting to take up a collection here to help out. They’re currently staying at the husband’s parents house, but unfortunately, they have very little of anything left. Please keep them in your thoughts.

Update: It has been asked where you can submit your own donation if you feel inclined. If you wish, please send a check / cash / money order to:

Integrity Technology Solutions
Attn: Julie DeMay, Fire Donation
816 S. Eldorado, Suite 4
Bloomington, IL 61701

If you choose to submit a donation through PayPal, please send it to mhawley AT integrityts DOT com with the subject of Fire Donation.

Again, thank you to all who do donate, our co-worker and her family of 3 (will soon be 4 as there’s one on the way) will greatly appreciate it.

If you’ve ever used the Regions Add In for VS.NET 2003, you may have noticed a few annoyances (at least, what I call annoyances because it isn’t the way I program). These include:

• When adding a new region, it adds a blank line above and below the region.
• When adding a new region, it doesnt add any blank lines between the region declaration and your code.

To me, this was just a complete annoyance since I like to put spaces between my methods already, and if I come back later to add regions, it starts messing up my source code so that I have several line breaks between my regions. Not to mention its a bit hard to read what the method signature actually is when the region declarations are contained right above your code.

So, with that in mind, I set out this morning (for about 15 minutes) to fix these annoyances. And so, you now have a build of the Regions Addin without these annoyances if you find them to bug you to the end and back.

Download it here! If you need to source, well good luck finding it, its already deleted. However, I modified only a few lines to remove carriage returns and add carriage returns. Something I’m sure you could figure it out too.