My lack of posts over the past few days can be directly attributed to the fact that I had a bit of a mishap with my work computer...
Long story short, I basically deleted all of the files on my PC...
I was working on setting up some automated build & deployment scripts, and a mistake in my MSBuild script caused everything on my PC to be deleted.
I have no way of knowing for sure (because everything is deleted), but I think what happened was this...
I was wanting to delete all of the files in the destination directory for the build.
Then somewhere in my "Deploy" target, I would have done something like this..
Basically, delete all of the files in the $(DeploymentPath) directory. Perfectly acceptable, and worked fine in testing.
I think what happened though, is that I forgot to SET the $(DeploymentPath) variable! So in essence, it was saying:
Delete all the files below the \ (or c:\) directory...
You can imagine what happens next. Basically my computer went haywire, and of course wouldn't boot back up. When we took a look at the drive, everything was gone, except for anything that was read-only (VSS files), or in was use (system files). Luckily, I had checked in all of my code earlier that day, so it was all on the server somewhere.
Moral of the story:
Be extra careful when delete files with MSBuild scripts. Ensure that all of your variables have the correct values BEFORE deleting recursively :-)