Hunt Blog

Ten digit dialing and roaming are a PITA to the end user. It solves a problem for the service carrier, but certainly doesn't deliver any value to the consumer. Long distance is something I can live with. Local ten digit dialing is simply a waste. When I am roaming and I enter into a zone that has some of my contacts in it, I now have to either modify my contact entries or try and remember their 10 digit phone number to dial it, now, without the country code.

Wanted: A phone dialing application on the iPhone that determines the area code I am in (using location services) and appends the area code to the seven digits I dial. If the contact I am trying to dial in my contact list, is not in the same area code as me, append their country code (remember that country field in the contact list?) to their phone number. This way I can roam and just dial 7 digits and let the phone figure out whether I am roaming, calling long distance, whatever. All I have to do is enter in their 10 digits into the contact list one time and have the phone do some smarter dialing.

When installing Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, install .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 first.

The Visual Studio 2008 SP1 installer tries to install .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 as part of its installation and seemed to hang my Windows XP SP2 machine during installation. Canceling the installation seemed to do nothing. I had to kill the process.

I love how, if you put an address in on one of your contacts, you click the address and, shazam, Google Maps opens up and shows you the location. You can then get directions from your current location. *Nice integration!*

Now; I'd like to choose a song (THAT I'VE ALREADY PAID FOR) from my iPod listing to be a ringtone. Oh.. yeah.. and why does it have to be only 30 seconds in duration? *Not nice integration!*

Here's a list of some findings about Active Directory (From a .NET perspective: Is the only reason it's not backed by SQL server to legitimize the DirectoryServices namespace?):

1. When clearing a value, setting it to an empty string doesn't work. When you want to clear a value (using DirectoryServices), set it to null rather than empty string or you'll get a DirectoryServiceCOMException (with the dreaded HRESULT: 0x8007200B) for your troubles. If you're doing it in script, here's a better explanation. I believe this is because Active Directory does not store empty values. It's a big ol' property bag.
2. Documentation on Active Directory seems difficult to find. Here's a collection of a few links I have found helpful:
   1. Active Directory Schema
   2. Active Directory Explorer. GET THIS!
   3. Active Directory Users and Computers. Pretty essential
   4. Remember, you're working with COM under the hood (DirectoryServices is just an interop layer on top of the COM interfaces). DirectoryEntry and DirectorySearcher implement IDisposable. Employing the using statement to ensure proper disposal is just good form.
      
   5. User Attributes. good list though pay attention as the schema may have changed slightly for the version of AD you are working with.
3. Some properties are not single-valued (they're an array). Use PropertyCollection.IDictionary.Add to add values to the property and set the value at the index to null if you want to clear one of them (see finding #1 above).
   

There's been a lot of news regarding the iPhone application NetShare by NullRiver and it's appearing/disappearing act on the Apple AppStore. A quick search revealed a post providing both written and video step-by-step instructions on how to tether NetShare with your PC. *sweet* ... if you can get it during a time it's actually available.