Be careful with magical code

Just a link to a wonderful article, a must read for any developer who have that strange uncomfortable feeling working with another "silver bullet" framework.

How should development of a game ends

This one is a good example (there is also part 2). Terraria is incredibly good game. Actually it's the best game I played in a last year, and I mean all games, not just indies. But. You should be honest to your players and youself, you should not be a pusher. There were, clearly, big possibilities to continue further development of Terraria. But it would be a fake. If developer is making only money on it. I think modern game development suffers pretty much from make money goal. So such an action may seem absolute madness to them. If it was, say, Blizzard, then we would see Terraria 2, 3, World of Terraria etc. But with such pusher behaviour, your game idea, your game world, is on steroids and will always results in unnatural and very predictable games. Starcraft II is an example. It's a very good game, but it doesn't have a soul, it's a pure marketing product. I think large game studios became hostages of themselves, they just can't work another way now, or they will go bankrupt. This is the part there indie studios have major advantage over them. This explains why indie games are so popular lately: they have soul. Like an old games, then there wasn't unstopabble sequels, addons, prequels. There is exception though. Valve managed to fight temptation to make money, and continued to make good games. But that's a personal opinion. 

Anyway, there is some very interesting game in develppment now from some other creators of Terraria. It could be a hit, it could be a failure, but I'm most certanly will try it!

Update. An interview with Andrew "Redigit" Spinks the creator of Terraria. I'm glad to find this particular answer which just says that I meant to say, but in some fewer words:

What is your take on the future of indie games vs. the big-name developers?
It’s not my intention to bad mouth the big-name developers, but from my perspective the recent rise of indie gaming is due to big-name developers losing touch with what gamers want. Gaming shouldn’t be treated like a business. If you genuinely enjoy your product, then there is no risk involved because others will as well.

Configuring BizTalk 2006 R2 on cluster

Then you try to configure BizTalk 2006 R2 in cluster environment, you can get error similar to:

The SQL Server 'SERVERNAME' cannot be used with the SSO Administrator account 'SSO Administrators'. Local accounts cannot be used with clustered SQL Servers. (SSO)

To fix this (which worked for me) add you domain to user groups like "DOMAIN\SSO Administrators" and "DOMAIN\SSO Affiliate Administrators". Of course you also must use domain user which belongs to both this groups. And here comes nasty trick, you need to deselect and select again "Enable Enterprise Single Sign-On on this computer" checkbox, only then error goes away.

Holographic code

Wow, this is great article. I've worked with such code, but always wasn't sure how to call it.

PowerShell: script permissions

If you try to run a PowerShell script you can get something like Script.ps1 cannot be loaded because the execution of scripts is disabled on this system. Yet after running:

Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted

you still get the same message! Then I bet you are running x64 system. That's because there is two versions of PowerShell on the x64 systems, both x64 and x86. And both must be set to desired execution policy to achive desired effect.

SharePoint: Service unavailable

If you receive "Service unavailable" then you try to open SharePoint 2007 Central Administration then it means your application pool for it (usually "SharePoint Central Administration v3") is stopped. But if you start it and it stops again, as you try to open administration page, then it means that you farm credentials are corrupted. This worked for me as a fix:

stsadm -o updatefarmcredentials -userlogin DOMAIN\login -password password

then run:

iisreset /noforce

and have a nice day.

How to force full backup for BizTalk backup job

Sometimes you need to force a full backup of BizTalk backup job. For example, then you reconfigure BizTalk, you can receive an error on some of the BizTalk jobs saying something about that backup is not possible without full backup. To trigger full backup on next job run you need to execute BizTalkMgmtDb.dbo.sp_ForceFullBackup stored procedure. More details can be found here.