There are few things in life that can really calm my Chicago road rage; maybe it's the small town upbringing or maybe I'm just a jerk. I have, however, found a temporary cure: The audiobook A Short History of Nearly Everything (unabriged) really has impressed me, and definitely taken my mind off the traffic.
The author Bill Bryson, known for his travel books, attempts to learn as much as he can about a wide array of scientific fields, including chemistry, astronomy, anthropology, biology & geology. Bryson does a terrific job of making these topics not only interesting but captivating. I found myself looking forward to the evening commute, so I could hear more about the details of the Manson Crater (not kidding). What I liked most was that he always seems to go the extra step to make the story so intriguing; for example, when researching this topic, he didn't just go online or call geological experts to get his facts, he also went to the Manson library to interview locals, and to the Iowa geological group that worked on the project. (I grew up about 5 miles from the crater, btw, so I'm biased towards this topic... although knowing how flat the area is now boggles the mind that this event ever took place).
I love books like this, mainly because I feel like the everyday routine we all live within doesn't challenge the brain to learn new topics or explore different theories. A Short History of Nearly Everything reminded me just how much information is out there waiting to be discovered.
One interesting point Bryson continues to return to is just how lucky we are that Earth and its human race evolved to exactly the conditions needed to support advanced life. He does a great job of exploring just how many events had to go our way over billions of years in order for us to be here. The main vibe the book left me is that we are "living on a knife edge", so we should enjoy our current circumstances... now if I could just get around that semi...
Arrgh! Perhaps the most irritating project scenario I can imagine: Today is a "Build Day", so you're fired up to deploy your sweet new code... Hmm, I wonder if the client will buy us "Sweet Baby Ray's BBQ?". All I need to do is compile the latest code, label the code, deploy to staging, test, and deploy to prod; no sweat. WTF? What does "Unable to update the dependencies of the project. The dependencies for the object 'DataEngine.dll' cannot be determined" mean?!? I told my manager this would only take two hours! (TIP: Don't ever do that during builds, too much can go wrong.)
I hit this error this week doing our usually silky deployment process. At first go, this doesn't seem all that complicated, but trust me, this one went from trivial to annoying in a hurry. And I had to buy my own lunch. This error apparently occurs due to a bug within the Visual Studio IDE: setup project dependencies can be bugged up by checking them in to source control. Most people say rebuild the setup projects from scratch, but come on, there has to be a better way, right? Plus, the last time we rebuilt these, our custom actions were overwritten. There is just too much hassle involved in rebuilding from scratch for every build: directory creation, shortcuts, custom actions, registry settings, remembering every associated project that needs to be added, etc.. the risk is greater than the reward.
The issue has very little support out there, so I wanted to post a few fixes I read about, and their result. I'll post what fixed it for me, but I'm still searching for the all-encompassing solution. Maybe some of the fails below could fix your issue... Please post if you have ideas:
- Tried: Removing and re-adding setup projects: Result: fail
- Tried: Removing my database project and restarting VS: Result: fail
- Tried: Many, MANY, cleans and rebuilds of my solution: Result: fail
- Tried: Reinstall of VS Service Pack 1: Result: No immediate effect
- Tried: Remove and re-add of all project outputs and custom actions: Result: fail
- Tried: Opened the setup projects .vdproj file via Notepad, and removed references to offending project. Re-added my project outputs as usual using File Editor: Result: SUCCESS!
Good luck with this one, somebody post if you hear of a fix for the bug...