A slightly older .Net 2 application I wrote for a client to upload files to Amazon S3 makes use of the Amazon S3 SOAP API. The SOAP API has the advantage over the REST API of being able to stream large files as DIME attachements when uploading to the S3 servers, rather than trying to load them up in one go, which is handy when uploading large files. The S3 WS API requires Microsoft’s Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 2.0 though, rather than the later WSE 3.0, because in WSE 3.0 DIME is replaced by MTOM (which Amazon doesn’t support - in typical WS-* way).
However, when I tried to install this, I got the following error:
Error 1001.InstallUtilLib.dll: Unknown error in CorBindToRuntimeHost
The workaround (a reminder to myself) is to use the WSE 2.0 SP3 installer rather than the older versions that come up when searching for WSE 2.0 on google.
I’ve been using Vim for about 4 months now, and I must admit that I’m not sure how I did without it. Modal editing seems like a natural paradigm to me (similar to lifting your hands off the keyboard to perform operations with the mouse, except without lifting hands from the keyboard :-), and the movement commands seemed intuitive and somehow logical, much easier than remember all the different keybindings Emacs has. Vim is a great text editor; however, it isn’t as well suited to more specific tasks, such as being an IDE or a document editor, as dedicated software such as IntelliJ IDEA or Word/OpenOffice are. The problem with those, in turn, is that text editing isn’t half as smooth as with Vim.
So, I was quite pleased when I stumbled upon this:
http://jvi.sourceforge.net/
A Netbeans module for Vi-like editing in Netbeans. I’ve been playing with it a bit and it definitely looks promising; this goes at least some way to resolving the IDE question, as I’ve found Netbeans to be great for Ruby/Rails and second only to IntelliJ as a Java IDE. For work, I’m thinking of splashing out on this:
http://www.viemu.com/
I’ve had a go with the demo and it works great. They have a version for Word/Outlook too, which is definitely very enticing - even though I already find editing text with Vim a lot more efficient than with a traditional editor, I still feel like I could be quite a bit more productive, and the more I get to practice, the easier this should hopefully become. Now if only I could find an equivalent for Open Office and Thunderbird…
One of the main limitations of Microsoft’s Remote Desktop client (Terminal Services Client) was its inability to span multiple monitors. This limitation has been fixed in the latest version of Remote Desktop client (v6.0); in my case, this means I can connect to a remote Windows workstation from my home machine and have the remote desktop span both of my monitors, which helps productivity no end. To do this, the latest version of Remote Desktop client is required:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=26F11F0C-0D18-4306-ABCF-D4F18C8F5DF9&displaylang=en
(for Windows XP - it is bundled with Vista)
You can then start remote desktop up to span multiple monitors via the command line:
mstsc.exe /w:2560 /h:1024 /v:<server>
Or by editing the .rdp file in Notepad:
desktopwidth:i:2560
desktopheight:i:1024
Gives this:
