This month, the "Friends" (Yaran), a group of informal national Bahá'í leaders in Iran, began their third year in prison. The charges against them are specious, e.g. "corruption on earth", and the Iranian government will not even give them the dignity of holding a trial. I know that the Iranian people are better than this. I pray that their government will come to recognize their duty to respect the freedom to worship, and release this group. Last weekend I attend a devotional gathering in honor of this group, and others, who are imprisoned in Iran. I opened a particular Bahá'í prayer book with which I am not familiar, and this was the first prayer I encountered:

I beseech Thee, O Thou Who art the Lord of all names, to guard Thy loved ones against Thine enemies, and to strengthen them in their love for Thee and in fulfilling Thy pleasure. Do Thou protect them, that their footsteps may slip not, that their hearts may not be shut out as by a veil from Thee, and that their eyes may be restrained from beholding anything that is not of Thee. Cause them to be so enraptured by the sweetness of Thy divine melodies that they will rid themselves of all attachment to any one except Thee, and will turn wholly towards Thee, and extol Thee under all conditions, saying: “Praised be Thou, O Lord our God, inasmuch as Thou hast enabled us to recognize Thy most exalted and all-glorious Self. We will, by Thy mercy, cleave to Thee, and will detach ourselves from any one but Thee. We have realized that Thou art the Beloved of the worlds and the Creator of earth and heaven!”

Glorified be God, the Lord of all creation!

~ Bahá'u'lláh, Prayers and Meditations, LXI

I wonder how many others didn't think to scroll down further on the Pex download page, and find this link? Visual Studio 2010 Moles - Isolation Framework for .NET. Moles is available for free, while the full Pex environment requires MSDN.

Once again I've learned the hard way that it pays to read the release notes. After installing Pex v0.91.x, suddenly I was having trouble running my tests in a particular solution. It has been driving me nuts - Visual Studio was throwing "object reference not set to an instance of an object" errors every time I tried to run tests, and the Test View was refusing to load any test names.

Finally, I noticed that I had a few tests that were still instrumented with HostType "pex" instead of "moles". I changed these around, and still got the error. Closed Visual Studio, restarted, and voìla, the tests can run, and Test View is populated again.

Pex and Moles - Release Notes

Can someone please tell me why Visual Studio 2010 no longer has the "Promote Local Variable to Parameter" refactoring? I use this every day. Thankfully CodeRushXpress has it, but the current version is a bit unstable, causing VS2010 to crash periodically.

I've been using AccuRev, including AccuBridge integration in Visual Studio, for close on two years now. And I like it. I don't know anything about the licensing fees, but for the enterprise that is interested in spending some money, it is certainly a good option. So, for anyone considering using AccuRev for source code control, and who happens to stumble across this site, here are a few points to consider:

I am using the latest edition of Service Factory - Modeling Edition (VS2008). I've created a number of FaultContracts in my DataContract model, and utilized them in my ServiceContract model. The generated code for the ServiceContract does not include the namespace or action for the FaultContract, e.g.

Had an exciting morning in Texas: fifteen new-to-me bird species seen this morning on the lagoon/intracoastal waterway side of Padre Island across the bridge from Corpus Christi:

• Long-billed Curlew
• Marbled Godwit
• Vermilion Flycatcher
• Brown Pelican
• Willet
• Tern (Royal or Caspian, unsure)
• Laughing Gull
• Reddish Egret, white-morph
• White Ibis
• Snowy Egret
• Osprey
• American White Pelican
• Little Blue Heron
• Roseate Spoonbill
• American Oystercatcher

Also seen: Great blue heron, great egret, ring-billed gull, double-crested cormorant, northern mockingbird, great-tailed grackle, song sparrow.

It's about time. That was my first thought when I heard, late last year, that the Bahá'í International Community had endorsed the Interfaith Declaration on Climate Change. My next thought was: when will this trickle down to us, the people, as a meaningful directive to change our habits? A few weeks ago, the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá'ís of the United States sent a letter to all American believers, calling their attention to the Declaration, and to a Seven Year Plan of Action on Climate Change. They encouraged us to actively incorporate sustainable practices into our community life, in a manner more direct than ever before.

One should work hard to avoid Cursors in T-SQL — for instance, by using recursive common table expressions &ndsh; but when you need to call a separate stored procedure in a loop, you're stuck with them. I recently came across an excellent guide to the subject, Performance Tuning SQL Server Cursors, which includes the following enlightening piece of advice:

This is why it is so important to buy meat raised without antibiotics. Buying cheaper meat, that used antibiotics, is literally poisoning our future by helping to breed this horrible strains of bacteria — accelerating their evolution. Nick Kristoff, New York Times, The Spread of Superbugs.