Windows 7 Beta plus Visual Studio Express Editions: Happiness!

I installed Windows 7 Beta on a virtual machine as soon as it came out, and have been impressed with the clean feel and low resource utilization.

To actually test it a little bit I decided I should use it for some real development, and so I installed the C# and Web versions of Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition and checked out a couple of existing projects from svn.

I'm impressed with both Windows 7 and the Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions (I had never actually tried to use them before)!  Other than missing Resharper, I'm not sure that I really use that much functionality in Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite at all...

Best of all it seems really fast on a VM with only 1gb of ram!

Deleting 4,000 Gmail groups... (or: Repairing Soocial replication damage)

I tried out Soocial.Com last week. Soocial is a new service that advertises "Hassle-free contacts". It claims it can synch ALL your contacts across multiple applications and multiple platforms while it perfectly toasts your morning bagel.

In reality it's a young beta application that launched a little too soon, and you should use it with extreme caution. I'm sure it's going to be great when they work the bugs out, but today it still has some "issues".

In my case it created over 4,000 groups in my Gmail account over the space of a couple days before I noticed. NOT a happy thing!

Gmail doesn't have any sort of bulk delete option, and deleting all 4,000 of them one at a time could have taken years... So I downloaded the Google API and wrote a little .NET application to do it for me. Nerd overkill, but it was a good excuse to learn something about the Google API.

If you have this problem too you can download my application here:

http://scrappydog.com/GoogleGroupCleanup/publish.htm

Note: This is a very simple brute force application. It will delete ALL your email groups (no way to keep the 10 you REALLY care about).

You can read more about the issue here on their support site:

http://getsatisfaction.com/soocial/topics/synchronization_creates_duplicate_groups

UPDATE: Soocial is currently offline. I get prompted for a password when I try to access their site... I would guess the are busy fixing bugs... :-)

UPDATE2: This tool still gets a surprising number of downloads, and today "Ben" asked if I would share the source code. No problem. Here is the link: http://blog.scrappydog.com/2010/02/souce-code-for-deleting-googlegmail.html

"Failed to copy file" Error when publishing VS2008 application via FTP

I need to share a little .NET console application with a couple random people, and instead of emailing it I thought I would publish it to my web server as a "Click Once" application.

Simple right? Wrong! I'm trying to publish via FTP and getting the following error:

Failed to copy file 'C:\Projects\scrappydog_projects\Google\libgoogle-data-mono-1.3.1.0\src\GoogleGroupCleanup\bin\Debug\app.publish\Application Files\GoogleGroupCleanup_1_0_0_0\Google.GData.Client.dll.deploy' to 'ftp://scrappydog.com/GoogleGroupCleanup/Application Files/GoogleGroupCleanup_1_0_0_0/Google.GData.Client.dll.deploy'. Unable to add 'Application Files/GoogleGroupCleanup_1_0_0_0/Google.GData.Client.dll.deploy' to the Web site. Could not find a Web server at 'scrappydog.com' on port 21. Please check to make sure that the Web server name is valid and your proxy settings are set correctly. If you are sure that everything is correct, the Web server may be temporarily out of service.

I can watch the files being created on the server with a ftp client, and so I know it's connecting, but somewhere at the end of the process something else fails, and rolls back the whole process and deletes the files... aargh...

I've found lots of references to the same problem, but no solutions... anyone? anyone?

UPDATE: This issue seems like it may be firewall related. Publishing the same project from a different computer on a different network works fine...