Changing the namespace of a Windows Workflow project

Today i modified the namespace of a workflow project. A little further down the track when it came to hosting the workflow the workflow runtime puked with the following message:

"Cannot initialize 'StateMachineWorkflowActivity' that does not define a valid 'InitialStateName' property."

The state machine workflow had the initial state set but as i has messed about the with the namespace i had a hunch what it was.

If you come across this error simply open up the workflow.xoml file with an XML editor and change the 'StateMachineWorkflowActivity x:Class' attribute to match your newly modified namespace, save and close.

Now when you build it will run fine. Hopefully VS2008 will fix this as i see it as a bug in the IDE. Changing the namespace should change the namespace in the xoml.

TrainingSpot.com

The team behind LearnVisualStudio.net have been hard at work behind the scenes again and produced another fine training website TrainingSpot.com. This site is tailored to SQL Server, Sharepoint, TSQL, Biztalk and Relational Database Design and Implementation. I'm sure these categories will also expand over time.

As a member of LVS they are currently offering a voucher code for 25% off the price which you will find on the member pages. If you are not a member click one of the banners at the top of my blog to take you to the sign up pages.

Ive gone through approximately 50% of the initial content releases on TrainingSpot.com (and they have already released the next set of videos on SQL Server 2008) and i must say im impressed again by the quality of the video training on offer. The thing that beats me is the price - its SOOOOO CHEAP! I think these guys are selling themselves short but on the other hand its nice to see someone offering a quality service for an amazing price.

If you are interedted in software and database design and development then i cannot recommend learnvisualstudio.net and trainingspot.com enough. For the price of a good book you will receive a LIFETIME of training!!

Google Adsense Marketing

Dived into my first adventure in internet marketing to promote a website ive been working on. Im impressed by the whole adwords/adsense stuff that google has set up. It also quite exciting the first time you set somethign like that live - will we get some new business, how many visitors will we get... etc..

The results after a week of advertising are pretty good. The website was new and therefore very low traffic. Its turned a handful of visitors into over 200 per week with several good business enquiries arising from it. We had a page impression count of around 15,000 from quite a niche market so on the whole very pleased.

Heres hoping it continues to improve and we get some quality leads from it. Even just one good transaction should pay for the campaign!

Onwards and upwards.

Microsoft Hoards 20% of your bandwidth for itself!

Today, i was astonished to find out that MS reservs 20% of the available internet bandwidth on your PC for its own applications - windows update etc... I found this reading Liquid Boys blog here:

http://advertboy.wordpress.com/2007/07/08/increase-your-internet-speed/

Here is what he suggested you do to get around it:

Click Start then Run and type “gpedit.msc” without quotes.

This opens the “group policy editor” and go to: “Local Computer Policy”

Then “Computer Configuration” Then “Administrative Templates”

Then select “Network” then “QOS Packet Scheduler”

After that select “Limit Reservable Bandwidth”.

Double click on Limit Reservable bandwidth. It will say it is not configured, but the truth is under the ‘Explain’ tab i.e.” By default, the Packet Scheduler limits the system to 20 percent of the bandwidth of a connection, but you can use this setting to override the default.”
So the trick is to ENABLE reservable bandwidth, then set it to ZERO. This will allow the system to reserve nothing, rather than the default 20%.