.NET Framework 4 Beta 2 Install Errors?

If you’re like me and you run both Windows and OS X, you might find yourself in a odd predicament if you try to install Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 – it may not install!!!

It turns out there is a fairly ridiculous bug in the .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 setup. The basics is that it tries to find a drive to extract out the setup file (why the current drive isn’t good enough is beyond me) and extract out the files there… well, on my setup with Bootcamp that gives me a 160GB partition with OS X and an 80GB partition for Windows. Well, the setup finds the E drive (I have Snow Leopard so I can read HFS drives in Windows) which is my OS X drive and the drive with the most free disk space. Next it tries to extract itself out to it but fails as the HFS partition is read-only.

The workaround is fairly easy to do and the bug should be fixed by the time RTM comes. To fix it, simply remove the drive letter mapping from your OS X drive in Windows, install the .NET Framework 4 Beta 2, and then add the drive letter back to your OS X partition.

After that, all should be happy.

Hi Google

What, it took like a day for me to switch back? I still despise the large font for the search but I’ve found that Bing just doesn’t do a good enough job for my programming related searches. I figured I’d let everyone know that I’ve thrown in the towel for now and have gone back to my good ‘ol google.

Bye Bye Google

Well, it’s time for me to move on from Google. With their recent changes to the “UI” or should I rather say the humungous buttons and text, I’m off to Bing land. Bing’s results have been getting better and better, so there’s really not much reason for me to stay with Google. I’ve also been able to update my search engine in Safari 4 thanks to Glims (if you’re on Snow Leopard you want to get build 21 – currently in RC – or later). Also, I’m looking forward to some of the cool Bing 2.0 features.

So there we have it… we’ll see how long it lasts.

Dungeons and Dragons!

So it’s been a while since I’ve been able to actually play and DnD with my friends and I didn’t realize how much I missed it until a friend of mine showed me Dungeons and Dragons: Tiny Adventures. As I’m looking for my next project, this really got me thinking. I really would like to be able to create a DnD-esk game for the iPhone and also have a browser/desktop component so you can play at home as well… now, if the GSL (Game System License) wasn’t so flipping restrictive…

Anyhoo, check it out, it’s a fun little game. Though don’t go expecting a conversion of your typical PnP experience.

Clang!

If you haven’t read the Ars Technica review of Snow Leopard yet, you should do it!! It’s got a great break-down of the new features and even talks about the changes to the development environment. After seeing the breakdown of the new compiler shipped (Clang LLVM) with Snow Leopard, I fired up Xcode 3.2 and opened up my Plexer source code.

Build and Analyze… waiting, 17 issues!!! Oops!

Here’s a quick shot of one of the issues that it found:

So I’m sure all of you seasoned Objective-C programmers are laughing out there at me right now, but what can I say, I’m still learning this whole retain-count memory management.

Needless to say, I was astounded that the compiler was able to figure this out for me. This will obviously be extremely handy for all of those new Objective-C programmers (and even veteran) that forget to release that memory when you’re done with it.

Clang is able to find other types of issues as well, like coding standards violations. For instance, I had a message named withName:(NSString*) and Clang realized that I was returning an instance and control of the memory and that my message name didn’t start with ‘copy’, ‘new’ or ‘alloc’.

Overall, I was actually quite impressed at what Clang was able to do. So yeah, if you have Snow Leopard and you’re a developer, you should definitely switch your projects to use the Clang compiler (unless your projects are C++, Clang doesn’t currently support that language).

For more Clang information, check it out here: http://clang.llvm.org/.