abi.exdream.com - Benjamin Nitschke's Blog - Polynapping

Quick Tip: Getting rid of the "Unable to copy file" error in Visual Studio

Benjamin Nitschke (abi) — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 18:59:03 GMT

I had often the problem that after a while of using Visual Studio 2005 (especially in beta) and now with Visual Studio Orcas that when the solution grows and grows to many projects you encounter the following error quite often:

Unable to copy file "obj\Debug\<projectname>.dll" to "bin\Debug\<projectname>.dll".

The process cannot access the file 'bin\Debug\<projectname>.dll' because it is being used by another process.

This can be caused if you have not closed the app yet or use the dll/exe somewhere or even if a unit test is still running and does not quit. But these cases are not the problem, that is easily fixed by killing the process. More often this is caused by some bug in Visual Studio. Some designer locked the file, some resource was not released, etc.
The usual "solution" to this problem was to close Visual Studio and start it up again, then it worked for a while until you end up with the same issue. Just having 2-3 projects in a solution is not very problematic because this error just occurs once in a while. With 5+ projects and using a lot of unit testing, starting tests all over the place, and compiling every couple of minutes (or seconds) this is really an annoying problem that can slow you down.

The easy fix is to delete the <projectname>.dll.locked file in the bin\Debug\ directory, after that compiling works again and it can copy the file now.
A better and more clever solution is to add the following lines to each Pre-Build-Events texbox in each project:

if exist "$(TargetPath).locked" del "$(TargetPath).locked"
if exist "$(TargetPath)" if not exist "$(TargetPath).locked" move "$(TargetPath)" "$(TargetPath).locked"

After doing that no more "Unable to copy file" errors anymore :)

BTW: My last attempt to polynap recently (1.5 hours sleep every 6 hours) failed after doing it for about a week, have to find a better schedule, maybe every 4 hours was a better idea because it was more strict.

Pizza Commander released!

Tue, 02 May 2006 20:50:39 GMT

Hey Rocket Commander players, a new Mod is out: Pizza Commander. It is a lot of fun and the most advanced mod released yet. More information and the downloads can be found on www.RocketCommander.com/Mods.html#PizzaCommander.

Features:

Lots of new models, check them out with the ModelViewer
New sounds, very funny ;-)
New camera controlling and better collision detection
The fly (tm) ^^
Lots more, just check it out.
Almost 20 000 Rocket Commander played online games right now, Wow!

No more Rocket Commander mods for me now, if you want more: Write some yourself :-)
I'm working on my Boo addin for VS now (in my free time, this blog is always about stuff I do on my free time, sorry can't tell you the ubersecret real projects yet ^^).

Btw: My polynapping attempt this weekend failed. I couldn't stay awake for more than 1-2 naps and had headaches after staying up too long. Have to try it again sometime in the future.

Pizza Commander:

Visual Studio 2005 SDK V2 (April 2006) released

Wed, 26 Apr 2006 21:27:59 GMT

Microsoft released a Visual Studio 2005 SDK update this week and it contains a lof of updated features:

Updates to the IronPython sample (very useful for me because of syntax highlighting stuff for my addin)
Visual Studio Team System integration (yeah sure, like I'm will ever be able to affort VSTS)
Domain Specific Language (DSL) Tools (sounds interessting)
Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA) (cool for office stuff, but not important for me)
Reference samples for C# and C++ Editors, Version control integration, XML designer, and many others! (thats always good)

Why am I telling you this? Well, I'm going to continue my Boo Language plugin for Visual Studio I started earlier this year. I never had time to continue it, but now with the new VS SDK out I will give it another try.

Other news: Steve Pavlina blogs this month about stopping polynapping. Steve was one of the most known polynappers of our time, he was polynapping (sleeping only 2 hours per day) for almost 6 months. I was polynapping in february this year too, but because of many fairs and meetings I wasn't able to keep the schedule and switched to bi-phasic sleeping and after a while I was back to monophasic sleeping (just sleeping once per day). Steve Pavlina had similar reasons and said that he had problems with social events, you can't go to sleep every 4 hours in our society that easy.

I will give polynapping another try this weekend. I'm not expecting it to last, but maybe I will do it I month from time to time, just for the fun of it. It was also interessting to see the reactions from other people, when I tell them about polynapping.

Visual Studio SDK:

Coding4Fun.de Launch with the Rocket Commander and www.RocketCommander.com coming soon

Fri, 10 Mar 2006 21:01:08 GMT

I bought an XBox 360 Controller yesterday just for fun. I'm not a console player and I'm not very comfortable with console controllers (they are not very good for RTS or Shooter games), but I thought maybe it would be fun to play Rocket Commander with the new XBox 360 Controller. Especially the rumble feature would make sense if hitting an asteroid.

I've implemented support for the XBox 360 controller this morning with help of XInput, which was pretty easy (there are just 4 methods, I only need 3 of them, thats it). The only annoying thing is that XInput is not available for Managed DirectX yet, only the c++ dll supports it and the beta Managed DirectX for .NET 2.0 dll, which isn't used for Rocket Commander. But importing the 4 methods with DllImport is no biggy. If you want to know more about implementing XInput either check out the new Rocket Commander V1.1 source code or this link:
http://www.brains-n-brawn.com/default.aspx?vDir=mcexinput

I was on the CeBIT today and it was pretty interessting, I will be there the next couple of days too. I can be found either running around on the Microsoft booth in hall 4 or on our own booth in hall 27/C29 (esports and entertainment). At microsoft you might see the presentation about Coding4Fun.de and ClubSite4Fun and GameDev4Fun, which contains the Rocket Commander and Flower Commander too. I haven't finished the website for www.RocketCommander.com yet, but hopefully I will finish most of it this night.

Thanks to Polynapping I still have some extra time these days, but it isn't easy with the CeBIT and staying awake for longer than 10 hours most of the time. I usually sleep after the fair in the evening for 1.5 hours and before going to it again 1.5-3.0 hours. Also every 4 hours 20 minutes of sleep in the night. Most people ask me if I feel tired all day and here is the answer: No! I'm even more awake most of the time because I feel refreshed after napping or sleeping for a short while.

Back to the CeBIT: On the right you can also see a picture of me in the new Volkswagen car "Eos". Tomorrow I will make some more pictures.

I will post another blog entry later today when the new Rocket Commander website is finished.

The XBox 360 Controller

and Rocket Commander working together now :)

That's me in the new Volkswagen car "Eos" on the CeBIT 2006:

CeBIT 2006 in Hannover

Mon, 06 Mar 2006 15:04:32 GMT

exDream entertainment will be at the CeBIT again this year. You can find us at the CeBIT 2006 in Hannover: Hall 27/C29 (Digital Media by nordmedia). The CeBit starts at 2006-03-09 and ends 2006-03-15.

Polynapping: I think I will adjust my polynapping schedule for this week to stay awake for 8 hours over the day. I have several meetings and I don't think it would be cool to fall asleep there ^^ I would bet the CeBIT is also not very polynapping-friendly. Instead of sleeping 6 times 20 minutes I will sleep now only 4 times 20 minutes (evening and night) and before I go to work I sleep 3 hours straight. This will keep me awake for 8 hours (at least it worked today :-) ), then 4 polynapps follow and the same thing starts over the next day. Thats now twice as much sleep as before (4 hours instead of 2-3), but still only half the amount normal people sleep.

Coop Commander: Looks quite good, the game physics and ship control are finished now and it is quite fun to shoot around and see everything exloding. There are still 2 major issues left: Good enemy unit AI (they move pretty stupid right now, either straight ahead or on a collision path) and multiplayer syncronization. Dunno if I can make it this week, but I should have some time at nights with my new schedule to keep working on that.

Coop Commander, New Arena Wars boards and Polynapping Update

Sat, 04 Mar 2006 17:40:59 GMT

Ok, I have a lot on my mind right now, hopefully I will get to most of it ^^

First of all: Here is a new screenshot of Coop Commander. I've implemented laser effects for the ships and improved some of the effects. Today I will finish up the game physic and damage system and tomorrow some multiplayer code will hopefully bring this game to life. While it may not be realistic to release the game together with Rocket Commander, at least not in its final version, I still plan to finish most of the issues till thursday, when Rocket Commander is released. Maybe I will just release an alpha version and then go from there.

I also registered the domain Coop Commander today, maybe this will make me think more seriously about Coop Commander ^^ I will start coding the website when the game is released.

As some Arena Wars players have noticed the Arena Wars boards had a lot of troubles the last couple of month (lots of spam, hacks, etc.). I installed a fresh new shiny version of the boards and copied a spam-free-version (couple of months old) of the board over it. Updating to the newest sql, phpBB, etc. versions was a lot of work. Those open source guys just don't know how to make an easy installer. The most annoying part was php, which is incredible incompatible (versions 4 and 5). First the site worked, but the board didn't, then the board was updated and worked, but the site wasn't compatible to that again. After modifying a lot of php files finally I got it working, but php is no fun at all.

There are also new discussion boards for Rocket Commander and its Mods. Hopefully they will find some use since Microsoft isn't planing to implement any boards on its german Coding4Fun site, where Rocket Commander will be hosted.

Polynapping: What happend? Well, it went ok for 2-3 weeks and I overslept only a few times, but never more than 2-3 hours per day and max. 1-2 times per week. Well it happens, especially if you stay awake for too long. That can really mess up your polynapping sleeping schedule. Then last week I crashed after a party and slept for nearly 8 hours. Must have something to do with the huge amount of alcohol I drunk (again: not good for polynapping) ^^

Then I went for a biphasic sleeping pattern (2*1.5-3 hours of sleep per day) for a couple of days and that didn't work out. I slept monophasic (thats normal 7-8 hours of sleep) for few days and then decided this wednesday I had to go back to polyphasic sleep. More time, more fun and hell, I know what to expect now.

Next week will be very hard for me because of the CeBIT fair (exDream will be there on several booths, I will post some info about that next week). Sleeping somewhere else isn't an easy thing for me, I still have some troubles getting to sleep as it is. That is also the main reason polynapping over a long period of time wasn't succesful for most testers. It is hard to get to sleep every 4 hours. Not only physically, but especially socially.

The last nap I took (only 20 minutes) was incredible refreshing, maybe I sometimes sleep to long (30-40 minutes since I don't know if I fall asleep right away or stay awake for 10-15 more minutes). Steve Pavlina posts here that 20 Minutes worked best for him too and he also gives a lot of tips and information about polynapping. He even was interviewed by the NY Times. I guess he is currently the most famous polynapper.

I nearly forgot to mention that Frederic Schneider wrote a nice article about me on GamePorts (in german). It is about Rocket Commander and my current project Coop Commander. Check it out here: http://www.gameports.net/cms/Kommentare-zu_Der-Erfolg-eines-Deutschen_966.html

Coop Commander: The new ion cannon effect.

ArenaWars.net Boards back up again.

German article about me on GamePorts.net:

Coop Commander - First sneak preview

Thu, 16 Feb 2006 22:27:07 GMT

This is a very early screen of Coop Commander. The modeler is complaining that I show it on my blog because most of the textures are still missing (all the ships in the backgroud ^^). But I think it looks promising. The Effect system and all basic units are implemented and some of the game logic is working too. Basically it is just a bunch of unit tests right now, not a full game.

Today I started with the Multiplayer coding. I hope I can finish the Game Server by tomorrow. Usually this takes a couple of weeks (chat lobby, player management, game lobby, game server), but I will try to minimize the features and do it as quickly as possible (I still want Coop Commander to be finished in roufly 1 week). By the end of the week the game should be playable. Next week we plan some final balancing and finetuning of the effects and units.

The game will be released together with Rocket Commander in 2-3 weeks, stay tuned!

Polynapping: Little note to self: I worked way to much the last 2 days and missed a couple of naps and then was too excited to sleep sometimes. Then last night I overslept for 3 hours and can't even remember turning off the alarm clock. I guess I have to pay more attention keeping my polynapping schedule. Also working too much, like I do at the moment, isn't that good for polynapping, the body needs some rest. Relaxing in 1-2 phases is a good thing. I will report back next week how I'm doing with my Polynapping.

Sneak preview of Coop Commander:

More Commanders

Tue, 14 Feb 2006 03:15:25 GMT

Last week I've finished up the Rocket Commander Game Programming Video Tutorials. They will be released on the german Coding4Fun Site together with the Launch of Rocket Commander. I guess that will be at the end of this month or in the beginning of march. Anyway, for the last Tutorial I made a cool Mod (Game Modification) called Flower Commander. You can see a screenshot of that game in action on the left side. It took less than 1 day of work. The gameplay is somehow similar to the original game. However the graphics are very different.

This week is the last one for my interns (little shoutout to Christoph Rienäcker and Enrico Cieslik) and we thought we could do something cool. My current projects are mostly finished. For example today I finished the 3ds max exporter and importer for my engine, now I hope I don't have to do c++ for a long time. Maybe next week I can teleport myself back to reality with some boo coding and finishing my Visual Studio Boo Language Extension ...

Since I have so much time every day (22 hours thanks to polynapping), it is time to do something. We plan to make another Mod called Coop Commander and it will be finished by the end of this week. Basically it is a multiplayer cooperative shoot'n'up with rpg elements. Kinda Diablo2 in Space ^^ I will post some screenshots from time to time. It uses the basic engine of Rocket Commander and will be freely available like the original game. This are the basic game principles: Similar to Rocket Commander you fly through the space and try to accomplish each mission. There are 6 different kind of enemy units in the game and you can choose from 3 units, which all get stronger over the time and have completly different abilities (rpg elements). The game will be balanced for up to 3-4 players. You can also play it with just 2 players, but it will be hard. Singleplayer is considered to be impossible, you have to meet with other players to be able to fight off all enemy unit types (each unit class has it weaknesses).

Obviously Coop Commander will not be able to compete with any AAA title, but we would like to see if this idea works out and maybe it is a lot of fun to play with your friends some challenging missions. Additional elements, more beta testing, more levels and enemies can be added later. I like the idea of finishing the game in 1 week, but it will be a lot of work (there is no effect system, no unit system and no multiplayer in Rocket Commander and that need to be added).

Polynapping, the second week: Nothing special to report. The last couple of days I slept regulary every 4 hours for 20-30 minutes (never more) and I'm very awake after few minutes when staying up. Going to bed has been easier too, but I still can't go to sleep immediatly (takes up to 5-10 minutes). Another strange thing is the fact I can't remember any dreams, no lucid dreams, no day dreams, nothing. Sometimes I feel like I have slept for several hours and then I look on the clock and it was just 25 minutes. I'm very awake at day and night and neither myself nor anyone else seem to notice anything different about me except the fact that I have go to sleep every 4 hours. But that is only annoying at work (sleeping there is hard because of noise, driving home and back is a pain in the ass).

Thanks for all the emails and concerns other people have with this. I'm not telling anyone to try this for yourself and I was not expecting for this to work. I just was curious and I think it is a very cool alternative sleeping pattern, especially if you are in need of time or want to experiment around. Maybe I will keep doing this for a couple of months and then switch to a biphasic sleep pattern and go back to polynapping from time to time. I'm not going to post much more about polynapping because I think most of the blogs I've posted last week cover all the interessting stuff and I agree with most of it.

Rocket Commander in action:

Flower Commander main menu:

Flower Commander in action:

DirectX 9 SDK February 2006

Sun, 12 Feb 2006 10:53:48 GMT

As many of you propably already know this Friday (10. February) the DirectX 9 SDK February 2006 came out. It includes many updates of the DirectX 10 SDK for Windows Vista (you should use the Vista Feb 2006 CTP to use DirectX 10). But since DirectX 10 is c++ only and there is no hardware available to test (only software rasterizers) I'm not testing all that stuff out yet. But I can tell you the Help and the samples are really nice (they are prerendered into videos for seeing them without having to get Vista).

Another nice update in the SDK are the Managed DirectX for .NET 2.0 samples, most .NET 1.1 samples are now converted and it really makes sense to start using MDX 2.0. The only VERY ANNOYING fact is still the missing help for MDX 2.0 and the Tutorials are not converted either. What the fuck? Seems like we have to find out everything with the Object Brower in Visual Studio again. Oh my god, does MS have no resources to get this together? This is the third MDX 2.0 beta already.

I told you last time in my post about the December 2005 DirectX 9 SDK that I couldn't update the NormalMapCompressor tool to MDX 2.0. The main issue was the missing Texture Save method, but I had some other problems too. A quick look into the classes and methods of the new SDK indicates that most of this stuff has been resolved (many thanks to Tom Miller and Co. for implementing that).

In my next polynapping phase I will try to convert the NormalMapCompressor to MDX 2.0 and post the results here if that works.

As a sidenote: Polynapping works fine for me. I overslept again on friday a bit. I was trying to sleep at work, but it was too loud and when I finally was sleeping I wasn't waking up to my alarm clock and noone wake me up ^^. Yesterday I was a little bit more tired than the days before, but today I feel better again. I can also fall asleep more quickly now. Strange thing is I remember nothing after sleeping and it feels much longer than 30 minutes when sleeping just 30 minutes (or less if it takes some minutes to fall asleep). Maybe the REM sleep is still deprived and will kick in tomorrow (then 1 week has passed).

Polynapping: Day 4 and 5

Fri, 10 Feb 2006 06:57:20 GMT

Yesterday night it was somehow hard to stay awake, but I kept my schedule. However, later that day I overslept 3 hours and thought I had messed everything up. But I was able to keep all naps after that, getting to sleep goes easier day by day. Strange thing is that I get really tired after staying awake 4 hours and when sleeping more than 20-25 minutes I often wake up by myself. It seems to be true to be more alert after sleeping, but I think I don't dream anything right now (no REM?), can't remember anything and it is still early (could take 7-10 days till polynapping fully kicks in). After 3 hours awake I get a little bit weaker and after 3.5-4 hours I'm getting tired. But I can't sleep right away, I never could sleep on command. But maybe this effect increases, which would be good. Wasting 10-20 minutes in bed waiting to go into sleep really sucks if it has to be done 6 times a day (especially if there is only 10 minutes left to sleep then).

Today nothing special happend, I took all scheduled naps and are feeling good. I overcome my cold and I think my appointment with my dentist yesterday went fine too. She is trying out soft lasers and it seems to work very well (unlike all those root canal operations).

The time I've got each day is amazing, it feels like being awake around the clock. I think I'm also eating more healthy and doing more things I have no time for. Maybe I will do work at daytime and relax, play games, etc. at nighttime. Feels like a weekend every day, hehe.

I hope there aren't bad side effects to this polynapping thing, but I think doing it for a couple of months should be fine (lot of ppl have done that already).

Day 3 on Polynapping

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 15:04:16 GMT

Alrighty, this is my thrid day awake with only a couple of successful naps since I started this on monday. My main problem is getting to sleep. Even after 3 days of almost no sleep at all. I slept only 3 times in my 11 naps, yesterday it was more like not sleeping for a day (which is quite usual for me from time to time). But today it really feels like a very long day. This isn't negative, I have plenty of time and after 2 successful naps this night I was fit enough to code a little, then after that I went to work and did some stuff there too (wouldn't say I'm less effective, coding went fine). Overall I would say everything goes well, at least I didn't oversleep yet (but I have taken naps a bit longer than 20 minutes, maybe 40-50 minutes one time, I will reduce that later when I can get to sleep fast enough).

But again, my problem is getting to sleep and also I had a cold (and still have) before I started polynapping and I read on some other blogs that people aborted their polyphasic sleep pattern just because of that. I drink a lot of water as suggested by the folks at PolyWiki and the Polyphasic sleep forum and didn't eat heavy food or drink coffee or any alcohol. Instead I'm eating a lot of fruits, vetegables, milk, etc. (not my main food usually ^^). I also bought some medicine against my cold.

Getting up is also no big problem, I'm sometimes very tired and want to stay in bed, especially if I didn't got any sleep. But sleeping would kill this whole schedule and I want to see if this works out or not.

I hope I see some more sleep to the end of this week and maybe I get some REM sleep again and some lucid dreams maybe?

Uhh, it is 4 o'clock, time for a nap. Lets hope I get some sleep this time.

Trying out Polynapping / Polyphasic sleep

Tue, 07 Feb 2006 13:44:29 GMT

I was listening to Mondays and checking out the toys presented by Richard. This toy (sleep phase alarm clock) was looking very interessting, but I usually don't wake up by my alarm clock anyway. But I continued to read comments and sites reporting if this works and after I while I found out about some crazy people using Polynapping to only sleep 2 hours per day. This sounds really interessting, doesn't it?

So whats this about? As you can see on the right side instead of sleeping in one large block (7-8 hours), thats called monophasic sleep, polynappers only sleep every 4 hours for 20-30 minutes. This is called polyphasic sleep. The theory is basically that the body doesn't get any REM (rapid eye movement) sleep for the first week, which is important for dreaming and generally for refreshing the body. Then the human body adjusts to this schedule and instead of the normal sleep phases (4-5 times going through the sleep stages 1-5 including NREM and REM sleeping in 90 minute intervals, check out this link about that) the Stage 4 NREM and REM sleep phases will be started very soon after beginning to nap.

This technique is used by boat racers, astronauts in crises, by the military (training?) and some reasearchers and bloggers (a lot of self-testers like me). Most people attempting to try this out fail in the first days and only very few get to the first 2 weeks the body might need to adjust to the new schedule. For example the character Kramer in Seinfeld tried this in the Episode "The Friar's Club" and failed "on" his girlfriend ^^. As I'm writing this I'm already awake for 2 days and have 4 polynaps behind me (but I didn't really sleep in any of them except the last one a bit), lets see how long I can take this. I don't expect anything special out of this, maybe it sucks bad time and I will feel tired all the time even after the first 14 days. Maybe this is a cool technique for a while to be more productive and maybe I suck and won't even keep up with the schedule.

I will try to post every couple of days how this is going. I just finished my last project (video tutorials for Rocket Commander, they will come out in a month or so when microsoft starts their german coding4fun website) and got a little free time right now. I also wanted to finish the Boo Language Plugin for Visual Studio, which I started in the beginning of this year (but I never continued to work on it). There are also 1 million other things on my TODO list, so I should not get bored.

The main problem I have right now is simply getting some sleep. I go to bed at the scheduled times, but I couldn't really sleep because I'm not tired most of the time (even when awake for more than 30 hours), at least not tired enough to start sleeping right away. I bet this will change this night and I will get more tired from nap to nap and the hard part will become getting up again. I only have one simple alarm clock, I hope it doesn't fail on me (I should program something else to ring too).

Time to get some coding done. I will report in a couple of days how this works out ... greets fly out to all fellow polynappers and thanks for all your blogs and reports on the net, that was a lot of interessting text to read last weekend.

Btw: dyn.ee is down for 2 days right now (thats why this site might have been unreachable yesterday), which is really annoying because I have to route the IPs myself now. I hope they work again very soon, I don't want to switch to another service.

Here are a couple of more links for Polynapping: