You have to like Opensource products … at Devbymonkeys we’re starting to rely on them.  For online shops there is http://www.oscommerce.org, for bulletin board/forums there is http://www.phpbb.net, for blogs (like this one) there is http://www.wordpress.org, for photo galleries there is http://www.coppermine-gallery.net and for all singing all dancing websites that might have photo galleries, calendars, content management and all sorts of other things we’ve recently used http://www.joomla.org for the first time.  Templates tend to be free and there are always extensions to plug-in and meet your requirements.

Here in the office we have one of those Magnetic Poetry games for managers so we thought we’d use it to come up with those dodgy marketing speak slogans for Devbymonkeys as we have no marketeers of our own.  Our first effort after approximately 15 seconds was

“See us integrate excellence, implement synergy and productize (sic) business vision.”

Feel free to use that little gem any time and we’ll get to work on more ;-).

I received a copy of an application, a windows service, written in VB .Net as a wrapper to an old VB style COM component.  My old Visual Studio 6.0 apps won’t load anything like that unfortunately my Visual Studio 2003 wasn’t quite new enough as the customer’s project was built with VS 2005.  MSDN licences aren’t as easy to come by in the office anymore but I found Visual Studio Express Edition was free : http://www.microsoft.com/express/ - latest version is 2008 but that’ll do I thought and it’s free!!

Only I ran into some installation problems.  Ones like this to be exact:

[02/11/08,17:27:44] ExpressUI: [2] Return for Microsoft Windows SDK for Visual Studio 2008 Express Tools for Web (x86) indicates a failed installation. DepCheck indicates the component is installed.

and

[02/07/08,10:44:22] vs70uimgr: DisplayMessage_START:Error 1935.An error occurred during the installation of assembly ‘CppCodeProvider,version=”8.0.0.0″,publicKeyToken=”b03f5f7f11d50a3a”,processorArchitecture=”MSIL”,fileVersion=”8.0.50727.813″,culture=”neutral”‘. Please refer to Help and Support for more information. HRESULT: 0×8002802F.

To fix my problems it took about a week.  I mistakenly removed my VS 2003, I re-installed .Net Framework 1.1 and 3.5, installed a seperate copy of Web Designer Core and finally found the blog of Aaron Stebner.  In fact I visited Aaron’s blog several times (http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/) over the next few days until I finally followed a tip of “repairing” my .Net Framework 2.0 installation, not that I thought anything was wrong with it.  To cut a long dull story short, my mscoree.dll seemed to be missing from .Net 2.0.  Re-installing .Net 1.1 had put in an older version of the dll and finally after repairing 2.0 I had a valid copy of it and the install of VS 2008 Express Edition went smoothely.

Unfortunately, by this time my need for VS 2008 had been overcome as I’d found the issue I was looking to fix in some standard ASP pages in use by the customer.

This is really just a technical blog to go along with our Developed By Monkeys website.  It’ll suck in google and yahoo to help us get placed in the search engines and all part of the grand scheme.  Along the way though, maybe you’ll find some interesting information appear on these pages.
Enjoy!

A new blog is born - just what the world needed - another blog - along with the millions and millions of others.