AnkhSVN issue

Well, after reinstalling my IDE (Visual Studio .NET 2005), database (SQL Server 2005), and getting the latest Subversion and Tortoise SVN Client, I went to reinstall my Ankh SVN plugin.

For anyone who is not familiar with AnkhSVN, it's basically a plugin for Visual Studio .NET that allows VS.NET to be "subversion-aware". When you open a VS.NET solution (.sln) file that has artifacts being managed by Subversion, it will ask you if you want Ankh to help manage the project.

After reinstalling everything and attempting to run VS.NET, I get the following error upon startup ...

I've tried both the stable version (1.0.2) and the pre-release (1.0.3) and get the same error message for both.

I'm going to do a bit of research and troubleshooting, and then post to the Discussion forums for Ankh if I can't get it resolved.

Recovery mode

Urgh. Been in recovery mode all weekend.

My development machine's HDD went kaput. Fortunately I have an extended warranty with Dell. They actually did pretty good ... they overnighted me a new hard drive and sent me a waybill label so I could ship the defective drive back to them.

Unfortunately, that means I have to completely reinstall / reconfigure my development environment.

Several annoyances about doing .NET development on Windows XP:

1. IIS doesn't come installed out of the box. You have to go into Control Panel->Add or Remove Programs->Windows Components and install it, which means having to dig up your Windows XP media (unless you're installing from the hard drive).
2. IIS 5.1 doesn't support multiple virtual servers without this nifty IIS hack.

I'm trying to get back to the point where I'm doing development, instead of installing apps and configuring stuff.

Tampa Java User Group Meeting: Hibernate, My Experience

Well, I went to the Tampa Java User Group meeting last night. Didn't get back home until close to 10 PM ... long day.

However, I'm definitely glad I went ... it was a very positive experience. I was impressed by our speaker, Ed Lance from nTier Training (note: I am not affiliated with them in any way, but I figured I'd give them a shout because they provided their time). I've been to courses in the past where the instructor's experience had been going through the coursework as a student, and perhaps doing the labs. This was not the case at all with Ed.

Ed definitely worked in industry, and I can tell that he's someone who is very passionate about technology and programming, and digs into this stuff during his own time. There really is a difference ... you really can tell when someone's passionate about their subject, and it makes all the difference.

I've worked a lot with Hibernate, so most of it was review. However, one thing that stuck out was that he placed a lot of emphasis on Hibernate object states, and had a nice diagram that hammered this home. Also, he called his methods (if I recall correctly), makePersistent (instead of save) and makeTransient (instead of delete). This really placed a strong emphasis on what was happening to the Object State.

I did get 2 lotto tickets out of it (Ed was giving out lotto tickets to people who answered questions or initiated discussion, to keep the group engaged). This was an interesting approach. Maybe I'll get lucky.

Localization in ASP.NET

Working on my International BlogEngine.NET theme helped me round out my understanding of the System.Globalization namespace, specifically the nifty CultureInfo class.

I have been working with CultureInfo on a current project in order to display content in English and Chinese WITHOUT having to make multiple copies of each .aspx file. Originally, I had used this article (which coincidentally the author is localizing for Chinese): Localization in ASP.NET 2.0. This was a great help in getting started.

However, I learned a bit more while working on the International BlogEngine.NET theme (which made me go back to my current project and restructure a few things):

The key to understanding Internationalization in .NET is the CultureInfo class and how Cultures are named.

• Three important types of Cultures: Invariant, Neutral, and Specific. The Invariant is a default, and is represented by an empty String.
• Neutral Cultures are usually represented by a lowercase two-character String, such as en (English), fr (French), es (Spanish), and represent a language, with no information about location.
  
• Specific Cultures represent a language and a location and are usually represented by a lowercase-two character String (language), plus an uppercase two character String (Country), separated by a dash. Some examples include: en-GB (English, Great Britian), en-US (English, U.S.), fr-CA (French, Canada).
• The Culture Names for Chinese are a bit odd. zh-CHS represents Simplified Chinese, the form of written Chinese used by the mainland. zh-CHT represents Traditional Chinese, used by Hong Kong and Taiwan. There is no culture with the name of just zh to represent Chinese in general. I learned this the hard way when attempting to simplify the names of my Resource files (.resx files) so that they did not represent a specific culture and tried to use just zh for my Simplified Chinese, which needless to say did not work.
  
• There are a handful of other exceptions to be aware of.

Here is a table (pulled from MSDN):

Culture Name	Language-Country/Region
"" (empty string)	invariant culture
af	Afrikaans
af-ZA	Afrikaans - South Africa
sq	Albanian
sq-AL	Albanian - Albania
ar	Arabic
ar-DZ	Arabic - Algeria
ar-BH	Arabic - Bahrain
ar-EG	Arabic - Egypt
ar-IQ	Arabic - Iraq
ar-JO	Arabic - Jordan
ar-KW	Arabic - Kuwait
ar-LB	Arabic - Lebanon
ar-LY	Arabic - Libya
ar-MA	Arabic - Morocco
ar-OM	Arabic - Oman
ar-QA	Arabic - Qatar
ar-SA	Arabic - Saudi Arabia
ar-SY	Arabic - Syria
ar-TN	Arabic - Tunisia
ar-AE	Arabic - United Arab Emirates
ar-YE	Arabic - Yemen
hy	Armenian
hy-AM	Armenian - Armenia
az	Azeri
az-AZ-Cyrl	Azeri (Cyrillic) - Azerbaijan
az-AZ-Latn	Azeri (Latin) - Azerbaijan
eu	Basque
eu-ES	Basque - Basque
be	Belarusian
be-BY	Belarusian - Belarus
bg	Bulgarian
bg-BG	Bulgarian - Bulgaria
ca	Catalan
ca-ES	Catalan - Catalan
zh-HK	Chinese - Hong Kong SAR
zh-MO	Chinese - Macao SAR
zh-CN	Chinese - China
zh-CHS	Chinese (Simplified)
zh-SG	Chinese - Singapore
zh-TW	Chinese - Taiwan
zh-CHT	Chinese (Traditional)
hr	Croatian
hr-HR	Croatian - Croatia
cs	Czech
cs-CZ	Czech - Czech Republic
da	Danish
da-DK	Danish - Denmark
div	Dhivehi
div-MV	Dhivehi - Maldives
nl	Dutch
nl-BE	Dutch - Belgium
nl-NL	Dutch - The Netherlands
en	English
en-AU	English - Australia
en-BZ	English - Belize
en-CA	English - Canada
en-CB	English - Caribbean
en-IE	English - Ireland
en-JM	English - Jamaica
en-NZ	English - New Zealand
en-PH	English - Philippines
en-ZA	English - South Africa
en-TT	English - Trinidad and Tobago
en-GB	English - United Kingdom
en-US	English - United States
en-ZW	English - Zimbabwe
et	Estonian
et-EE	Estonian - Estonia
fo	Faroese
fo-FO	Faroese - Faroe Islands
fa	Farsi
fa-IR	Farsi - Iran
fi	Finnish
fi-FI	Finnish - Finland
fr	French
fr-BE	French - Belgium
fr-CA	French - Canada
fr-FR	French - France
fr-LU	French - Luxembourg
fr-MC	French - Monaco
fr-CH	French - Switzerland
gl	Galician
gl-ES	Galician - Galician
ka	Georgian
ka-GE	Georgian - Georgia
de	German
de-AT	German - Austria
de-DE	German - Germany
de-LI	German - Liechtenstein
de-LU	German - Luxembourg
de-CH	German - Switzerland
el	Greek
el-GR	Greek - Greece
gu	Gujarati
gu-IN	Gujarati - India
he	Hebrew
he-IL	Hebrew - Israel
hi	Hindi
hi-IN	Hindi - India
hu	Hungarian
hu-HU	Hungarian - Hungary
is	Icelandic
is-IS	Icelandic - Iceland
id	Indonesian
id-ID	Indonesian - Indonesia
it	Italian
it-IT	Italian - Italy
it-CH	Italian - Switzerland
ja	Japanese
ja-JP	Japanese - Japan
kn	Kannada
kn-IN	Kannada - India
kk	Kazakh
kk-KZ	Kazakh - Kazakhstan
kok	Konkani
kok-IN	Konkani - India
ko	Korean
ko-KR	Korean - Korea
ky	Kyrgyz
ky-KG	Kyrgyz - Kyrgyzstan
lv	Latvian
lv-LV	Latvian - Latvia
lt	Lithuanian
lt-LT	Lithuanian - Lithuania
mk	Macedonian
mk-MK	Macedonian - Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia
ms	Malay
ms-BN	Malay - Brunei
ms-MY	Malay - Malaysia
mr	Marathi
mr-IN	Marathi - India
mn	Mongolian
mn-MN	Mongolian - Mongolia
no	Norwegian
nb-NO	Norwegian (Bokmål) - Norway
nn-NO	Norwegian (Nynorsk) - Norway
pl	Polish
pl-PL	Polish - Poland
pt	Portuguese
pt-BR	Portuguese - Brazil
pt-PT	Portuguese - Portugal
pa	Punjabi
pa-IN	Punjabi - India
ro	Romanian
ro-RO	Romanian - Romania
ru	Russian
ru-RU	Russian - Russia
sa	Sanskrit
sa-IN	Sanskrit - India
sr-SP-Cyrl	Serbian (Cyrillic) - Serbia
sr-SP-Latn	Serbian (Latin) - Serbia
sk	Slovak
sk-SK	Slovak - Slovakia
sl	Slovenian
sl-SI	Slovenian - Slovenia
es	Spanish
es-AR	Spanish - Argentina
es-BO	Spanish - Bolivia
es-CL	Spanish - Chile
es-CO	Spanish - Colombia
es-CR	Spanish - Costa Rica
es-DO	Spanish - Dominican Republic
es-EC	Spanish - Ecuador
es-SV	Spanish - El Salvador
es-GT	Spanish - Guatemala
es-HN	Spanish - Honduras
es-MX	Spanish - Mexico
es-NI	Spanish - Nicaragua
es-PA	Spanish - Panama
es-PY	Spanish - Paraguay
es-PE	Spanish - Peru
es-PR	Spanish - Puerto Rico
es-ES	Spanish - Spain
es-UY	Spanish - Uruguay
es-VE	Spanish - Venezuela
sw	Swahili
sw-KE	Swahili - Kenya
sv	Swedish
sv-FI	Swedish - Finland
sv-SE	Swedish - Sweden
syr	Syriac
syr-SY	Syriac - Syria
ta	Tamil
ta-IN	Tamil - India
tt	Tatar
tt-RU	Tatar - Russia
te	Telugu
te-IN	Telugu - India
th	Thai
th-TH	Thai - Thailand
tr	Turkish
tr-TR	Turkish - Turkey
uk	Ukrainian
uk-UA	Ukrainian - Ukraine
ur	Urdu
ur-PK	Urdu - Pakistan
uz	Uzbek
uz-UZ-Cyrl	Uzbek (Cyrillic) - Uzbekistan
uz-UZ-Latn	Uzbek (Latin) - Uzbekistan
vi	Vietnamese
vi-VN	Vietnamese - Vietnam