beyond measure

I’m getting old. Really. And I’ve only realized this not too long ago. ^_^x I’m turning 27 this year and I haven’t mastered, I mean really hardcore, any programming language or field. I’m always into so many things trying to be a jack of all trades. I don’t think that’s possible. Possible only if you have nothing else to do in your life but programming. Luckily I’ve come to realize that life is never about work. We work only to live.

So, I’ve decided to focus more on these technologies > .Net, Ruby on Rails, and AJAX. And maybe a little Java here and then. To start with that focus, I’ve just recently transferred to a .Net hosting and I’m currently looking in to transfer this Wordpress blog to a .Net alternative. Probably a CMS or another blog engine. From all my extensive research, I’ve reached to these final three: DotNetNuke, Umbraco, and BlogEngine.NET.

DotNetNuke seems to have a large following, but it seems to be bloated and I had a hard time trying to find an installation manual. Looks like the manual is greatly hidden in their forums. Well, I’m not going that road. Forums are just too messy for my taste. Even though I got it installed in the end, that took a lot of google searches. Well, the default theme isn’t exactly presentable in this Web 2.0 age. I think they really need to update that one.

BlogEngine.NET seems to be a very powerful blogging engine. My friend John got it installed here, and I didn’t hear any complaints about the installation so I think this is really a good candidate. It even has a “tag” feature already. I’m pretty sure my default install of Wordpress didn’t have that.

My last and looks like will gonna be my choice in this dilemma is Umbraco. I’ve just gone up to reading everything in their site right now and I’m liking it already. Next step is to try and get this installed in my machine. Let’s see how easy it’s gonna be and if it’s compatible with my hosting. I’m looking forward to a CMS than a blog-focused software cause I’m gonna put up a site in a subdomain for an open source software that I’ve been planning on working for months now.

Edit: This is also applicable for desktop apps or dlls. Just attach to the name of the “exe” process or in the case of dlls, just attach to the name of the “exe” process that is using the dll.

I just found out about this trick a week ago. Saves time when debugging an ASP.NET web application. Another way to debug an ASP.NET application in Visual Studio is to use the Attach to Process function available in the Debug menu. This would, like the name says, attach to and debug a currently running process in your machine that is outside of Visual Studio. To debug an ASP.NET application, it should first be setup as a local website in your machine (i.e. http://localhost/mywebsite). Browse to that website using your favorite browser. Open your solution in Visual Studio if you haven’t opened it yet. Put in breakpoints anywhere you need them. Click on Debug > Attach to Process and find the ASP.NET process running in your machine. The process name should be aspnet_wp.exe in Windows XP. Click the Attach button and you should be in debug mode without the Visual Studio compiling anything. That’s it. Visual Studio will break/pause if you hit a breakpoint while browsing through your site in the browser.

I find this trick relatively faster than using the default Start Debugging function. This is especially useful if you have multiple projects in your solution which is the case in an AspDotNetStorefront project. Remember though that by default, Visual Studio will only be able to debug a process if the code version is the same as the website that you’re debugging. So don’t forget to compile referenced projects (dll) that changed before debugging.

Another way to save time is configuring your build process in the Configuration Manager of your solution’s property page. But I like attaching to ASP.NET process better cause it’s more straightforward and flexible.More info about attaching to a running process can be found here.