Silverlight Xmas meetup

This month, I was toying with not actually having a meeting due to how close to Christmas the normal date falls.

My laptop has failed and I've been flat out with work. However, the room has been booked and I thought it would still be cool to meet up and chat about the newly launched Silverlight 4 beta, and have some Christmas drinks.

TOPIC: Christmas Drinks plus Silverlight 4 beta cheer
DATE: Wednesday, December 23rd, 6:00pm
VENUE: 43Below. 43 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All welcome

Be great to catch up.

Failed laptop

Ouch. My Dell m1730 which has served me fairly faithfully for the last 18+ months has died. The graphics card has always run really hot and it killed the battery some time ago. I replaced the battery (not knowing it was most likely the exessive heat) a few months ago.

My machine hung a few times and so I logged a call with Dell. they came and replaced the motherboard which is when the technician noticed the heat of the graphics card. 6 weeks later they replaced the graphics card. That was yesterday.. The technician left and one reboot later the machine would not boot. It would sit at 80% on the BIOS screen. I couldnt even get into the BIOS. So I called Dell and asked for my old graphics card back and the answer was no. ow!

The replacement graphics card is due in February which is probably another 6 week wait. I use this thing for work so that's not good for me. The option given to me by Dell was to replace the whole machine. I have a mate who had 7 faults in 9 months with this machine and they gave him an Alienware M17x of equal specs so that would be an excellent alternative for me.

Would be nice if I could add a few extras to it but I suspect they will choose the specs (equal or greater specs I was told). Thanks Dell!
My thought on Dell's is they are pretty good, but always get as much warranty as you can because faults can become very expensive. Lifetime of a laptop is 2 years for me so more than that is a bonus. I always get 3 years of cover.

Will let you know what I end up with.

EnqueueConditional never passing

I came across a unit test that seemed to hang. Problem was with the EnqueConditional() method which essentially never became true. A quick search turned up this blog post which has a solution.

Making sure asynchronous donesn't cause a deadlock

EnqueueConditional(() =>
{
// SP: Added timeout on checking the IsBusy
Assert.IsTrue((DateTime.Now - startTime) < TimeSpan.FromSeconds(30), "Timeout on condition 'StudImpVM.IsBusy == false;'");
return StudImpVM.IsBusy == false;
});

Adding this Assert into the conditional check causes it to fail the unit test rather than sit waiting for something that may never happen.