Day 2
So tonight’s work involved installing the Visual Studio 2005 Extensions .NET Framework 3.0 WCF & WPF which came with the “companion” CD. I decided to get it off the web to get the latest and greatest. I was only able to find the CTP from 2006 for download from Microsoft, after having to make sure “I got the genuine Advantage” …. gag me. I hate Microsoft sometimes. The only thing that did is add 3 more pages I had to mess with to “verify” my copy for the 30 billionth time. Which is why I am writing this from a Mac Book, that just happens to have Vista on it. Yes I feel dirty right now.
At any rate, back to the book. The other thing that was prominent was the extensions for WF for VS2005. I installed that for giggles…. Man the user experience here just sucks. I just had to “Register” to download the next portion needed. The Microsoft Enterprise Library… that was painfull, the registration page title told me I was going to download the January 2006 version while the download page that sent me there was telling me I would get the April 2007 version. For crying out loud! This is why I quit doing this on the side … it is all half assed. I have the sudden urge to give up and go play a board game with my wife, that would provide a de-stress. Seeing junk pushed out from such a large company stresses me out.
Moving on… The last part I have to do since I am running Vista Super Duper Edition, is to set up the Adventure Works database. That actually went incredibly smooth. I expected some SQL errors when attaching the database but things just worked. Amazing…. The one thing I will say is that they have you run the following command:
C:\….\osql -E -S .\SQLEXPRESS -i [sriptname].sql
that is fine if you are using SQLEXPRESS however if you actually went to the 2005 launch ( like I did ) and got the Standard Edition ( /clap Microsoft ) you need to run this :
C:\….\osql -E -S . -i [sriptname].sql
If you are wondering what the . means it just means the local default instance. If you named your instance it would be :
C:\….\osql -E -S .\[YOURINSTANCENAME] -i [sriptname].sql
So… Aside from some major pain in the ass using Microsoft.com, and shady user experience things went well.
I am going to go switch back to OSX, shower , and burn my clothes….tune in tomorrow for a summary of Chapter 1 
command lines suck.
how are we still using command line prompts in the year 2007?
Yeah I know right! I would have thought he would have had readers use Management Studio to attach the database. However some were just using SQLEXPRESS I suppose…
I suppose it is nice to have the option without management studio. But the author could have mentioned that there is a management studio express for free!
In other news I just played with automator for the first time in osx. I’ve never had a great use for it but damn, talk about nice simple workflow utility. I had to resize a bunch of images, rename them and toss them in a different directory and the “script” took less than 5 mins to set up and execute. It was a HUGE time saver!