Aaron Lerch

A while ago I "released" the Symbol Server Transaction Manager. It was a binaries-only, quick-and-dirty GUI wrapper utility I wrote on top of the symstore.exe command-line tool, at the prompting of John Robbins. If you’re not familiar with Symbol Servers, symstore.exe, or John Robbins, get up to speed by reading John’s still-relevant 2002 Bugslayer article […]

If you haven’t heard of it yet, just google “one laptop per child“. Or better yet, visit their website: laptop.org. The “XO” laptop is definitely a unique machine - check out some specs on the hardware, software, and interface. The software approach is admirable:
XO is built from free and open-source software. Our commitment to […]

(Or, "What I did today")
Oh the weather outside is frightful,
But the fire is so delightful,
And since we’ve no place to go, (I’m on vacation and my car is in the shop.)
Let us code! Let us code! Let us code!

I frequently get emails containing links to file shares on various servers. Most people just grab the path from windows explorer and paste it into the email which is a shame, because it ends up auto-linking only the first part of the path. For example, “\\server\share with space in the name” auto-links “\\server\share” only.

Tip: […]

I’m at Indy InstallFest 2007 right now - I’ve eaten some good food, had a few laughs with friends, installed VS2008 (thanks Microsoft for the free copy), and did my demo in front of the world. I demo’d creating a syndication service using a REST-based WCF service. I planned for about a 20 minute demo […]

Thanks to Dave Bost who hooked me up with a blog at http://weblogs.asp.net/aaronlerch!
I spent the last few days trying to decide how this was going to work. I want to post at weblogs.asp.net, I mean I’m just one path away from the likes of ScottGu, Roy Osherove, and Eilon Lipton. Not that it makes my […]

Best quote this year, from an internal email thread this morning:
‘Just Say No’ to collocated file dependencies at run time.
Loading file dependencies (like images, etc.) at runtime in a dynamic way can be tricky without resorting to a global information store like the registry. How do you know where your .NET application is “executing from”? […]

If you installed IIS on Windows Vista after you installed .NET 3.0, like I did, you’ll notice that any references to the .svc file will fail, typically with a 404 not found. It’s easy to see that the .svc mappings aren’t installed, but without consulting some documentation it’s not abundantly clear how to install them. […]

If you blog, and haven’t checked out FeedBurner yet, you should. Not only can it offload the majority of the bandwidth from a busy blog (not mine), but the stats it collects are impressive. They do a lot of work to display meaningful and correct stats, and even with that effort it’s always “approximate” […]

Did you know you can use most of the new C# 3.0 language features in VS2008 under a project that’s targeted at .NET 2.0? How cool is that? And it makes sense, too, since there’s nothing new for the 2.0 runtime, it’s all compiler magic. I found it by accident - I found Daniel Moth’s […]