Friday, October 19, 2007

If you have not seen it yet Patrick Smacchia is showing off his free library to handle common and complex file path operations.  Its on CodePlex NDepend.Helpers.FilePathDirectory

Here is Patrick's class diagram

image

It nicely done some thing that MS should have offered in the DotNet Base Class Library.

posted by Aaron Fischer on Friday, October 19, 2007 5:29:23 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)   #    Comments [0]
 Thursday, October 11, 2007

Over on Carlo's blog(Gacutil not supported in production?) there is a small discussion about how to register an assembly into the GAC.  Microsoft Recomends using Windows Installer 2.  Gacutil is not really supported on production ( explains why its part of the sdk) but with the proper command line args /i and /r it can be used to register an assembly in to the GAC, however the license for Gacutil, only allows internal redeployment.  So an ISV would need a windows installer.  In the past I have seen System.EnterpriseServices.Internal.Publish.GacInstall used to foster GAC registration in an install shield ( install script). Not sure if it works the same as windows installer but it get the job done. Also of intrest System.EnterpriseServices.Internal.Publish.GacRemove

posted by Aaron Fischer on Thursday, October 11, 2007 5:47:18 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)   #    Comments [0]

If your a lender and you tell the Press/Public that Foreclosures are bad and that your doing every thing you can not to foreclose, follow through.  The Truth about Mortgage reports a survey by California Reinvestment Collation "survey says few lenders making loan modifications".  The survey finds that while lenders have the intent to avoid foreclosure they are none the less avoiding loan modifications and foreclosing.  

posted by Aaron Fischer on Thursday, October 11, 2007 2:52:28 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)   #    Comments [0]
 Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Since I deal with a large VC++ of native-managed code I am glad to see Somasegar's list of VC++ performance enhancements in Visual studio 2008

· Editor responsiveness – Updating IntelliSense, displaying the QuickInfo tooltip and processing AutoComplete requests won’t degrade editor experience.

· Goto Definition improvements – Significant reduction in the time required to “Goto Definition”.  One customer reported that a 2 minute delay dropped to 10-20 seconds.

· Load solution performance – Load time of large Visual C++ solutions is much better.  Some customers are reporting speed ups of 25%-70%.

· File lookup in projects – Provides improvements to several scenarios such as adding files to projects, changing configurations, etc.

· Changing configuration options – Modifying options, such as adding an include directory or changing the active configuration, are much faster for large solutions.

· Reduced CPU consumption – We now process low-priority background items (such as IntelliSense population) using 20% less CPU time.

I have had to deal with slow IntelliSense and solution load times. All of these issues affect my daily use of VS.  Its great that the VC++ is finally able to address them.  Its even better to hear there will be a patch for VS 2005.

posted by Aaron Fischer on Wednesday, October 10, 2007 6:07:08 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)   #    Comments [0]
 Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Scott Gu announced the releasing of .Net framework libraries (Microsoft Reference License).  This is good news its some thing that i miss very much when not working with the MFC libraries.  Truth be told you could already view and to some extent debug the .NET Framework with reflector but first class support in VS 2008 is defiantly great news.  Scott Hanselman appears to already have a Hansel Minutes relating to this announcement.

posted by Aaron Fischer on Wednesday, October 03, 2007 8:55:29 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)   #    Comments [0]
 Tuesday, October 02, 2007
posted by Aaron Fischer on Tuesday, October 02, 2007 8:31:27 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)   #    Comments [0]
 Monday, October 01, 2007

In July Microsoft released Security Bulletin MS07-040-Critical Vulnerabilities in .NET Framework Could Allow Remote Code Execution (931212) 

A Security Update for Microsoft.net Framework 2.0 (KB928365) was released for  windows server 2003

this updates System.web.dll

I have found this security update to crash IIS and any asp.net 2.0 web site/web service w3wp.exe to be restarted on every web request.

It looks like this is only a problem when this security patch is automatically installed via windows updates.  Once I uninstalled the security update the crashing issue went away.  When I manually reinstalled the security update and rebooted IIS and ASP.NET continued to function correctly with out error.

 

Also updated was,

 940521 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940521/) The behavior of UTF8Encoding, Unicode Encoding, and UTF32Encoding changes to comply to the Unicode 5.0 requirements for Unicode encodings after you install the security update for the .NET Framework 2.0 that is described in security bulletin MS07-040

this seems to affect how ASP.NET generates its web control names.

posted by Aaron Fischer on Monday, October 01, 2007 9:27:40 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)   #    Comments [0]
 Friday, September 28, 2007

There just doesn't seem to be any love for the Visual Studio 2005 Web Sit Project.  I know I have none.  I' am  sure its fine for an internally developed web sites, but who cares about those.  For an ISV we need dll's.  It's simpler and your customer can't make unauthorized edits to your code.  So if like me your looking for a simple way to update some of your older asp.net projects Peter Bromberg just posted a nifty trick to get your visual studio 2003 class library project to convert to a visual studio 2005 web application project.  I recommend you take a look and save your self a migraine.

posted by Aaron Fischer on Friday, September 28, 2007 6:07:40 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)   #    Comments [0]
 Wednesday, September 26, 2007

How not to access an asp.net Repeater control's data 

 

It would appear that between some .net updates Microsoft likes to change how Asp.net names controls.

>
For i As Integer = 0 To ilsn - 1       
 Dim controlname As String = "repGrid:_ctl" & i + 1 & ":txtOrder"
 Dim controlnameVal As Int32 = Request(controlname)
 StoreVal( ControlNameVal)
Next

This approach is safer

>
For Each di In repGrid.Items       
 Dim controlnameVal As Int32 = ConvertToINT( di.FindControl("txtOrder"))
 StoreVal( ControlNameVal)
Next

 

When your using an asp.net Repeater control you need to call find control on the given row in order for it to properly resolve the name.

Also of interest is this little nugget found on The Scripts forum:

.net Changing $ to _ ?

http://www.thescripts.com/forum/thread703070.html

ms went down a rat hole with names and ids. they started with ":" as

separator, but found this was illegal in an id or name, so replaced it

"$". then they realized "$" was illegal in an id when they wanted xhtml

compliance, so they changed it to "_" in an id.

posted by Aaron Fischer on Wednesday, September 26, 2007 2:05:47 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)   #    Comments [0]

I finally got tired of visiting the Calyx Support Message board today.  So a took a couple minutes to craft a little Regex to parses out all the RSS feeds ( there is not master feed). http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/RssFeed+[\d]?[\d]-0-0-1\.aspx+

Then created an OPML file

>

<opml version="1.0">
	<head>
		<title></title>
	</head>
	<body>
		<outline title="Calyx Message Board" text="Calyx Message Board">
			<outline text="Calyx Software Message Board / Calyx Point / Cardex" title="Calyx Software Message Board / Calyx Point / Cardex" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/RssFeed34-0-0-1.aspx" htmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/"/>
			<outline text="Calyx Software Message Board / Calyx Point / Citrix / Terminal Server" title="Calyx Software Message Board / Calyx Point / Citrix / Terminal Server" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/RssFeed7-0-0-1.aspx" htmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/"/>
			<outline text="Calyx Software Message Board / Calyx Point / Communications / E-Mail" title="Calyx Software Message Board / Calyx Point / Communications / E-Mail" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/RssFeed13-0-0-1.aspx" htmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/"/>
			<outline text="Calyx Software Message Board / Calyx Point / Custom Forms" title="Calyx Software Message Board / Calyx Point / Custom Forms" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/RssFeed9-0-0-1.aspx" htmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/"/>
			<outline text="Calyx Software Message Board / Calyx Point / Fannie Mae" title="Calyx Software Message Board / Calyx Point / Fannie Mae" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/RssFeed16-0-0-1.aspx" htmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/"/>
			<outline text="Calyx Software Message Board / Calyx Point / File Management" title="Calyx Software Message Board / Calyx Point / File Management" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/RssFeed10-0-0-1.aspx" htmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/"/>
			<outline text="Calyx Software Message Board / Calyx Point / Forms / Regulations" title="Calyx Software Message Board / Calyx Point / Forms / Regulations" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/RssFeed11-0-0-1.aspx" htmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/"/>
			<outline text="Calyx Software Message Board / Calyx Point / Installation / Network Setup" title="Calyx Software Message Board / Calyx Point / Installation / Network Setup" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/RssFeed5-0-0-1.aspx" htmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/"/>
			<outline text="Calyx Software Message Board / Calyx Point / Lenders in Point" title="Calyx Software Message Board / Calyx Point / Lenders in Point" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/RssFeed15-0-0-1.aspx" htmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/"/>
			<outline text="Calyx Software Message Board / Calyx Point / Miscellaneous" title="Calyx Software Message Board / Calyx Point / Miscellaneous" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/RssFeed18-0-0-1.aspx" htmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/"/>
			<outline text="Calyx Software Message Board / Calyx Point / Printing" title="Calyx Software Message Board / Calyx Point / Printing" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/RssFeed8-0-0-1.aspx" htmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/"/>
			<outline text="Calyx Software Message Board / Calyx Point / Reports" title="Calyx Software Message Board / Calyx Point / Reports" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/RssFeed12-0-0-1.aspx" htmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/"/>
			<outline text="Calyx Software Message Board / General Discussion / General Chat" title="Calyx Software Message Board / General Discussion / General Chat" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/RssFeed22-0-0-1.aspx" htmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/"/>
			<outline text="Calyx Software Message Board / General Discussion / Industry Chat" title="Calyx Software Message Board / General Discussion / Industry Chat" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/RssFeed23-0-0-1.aspx" htmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/"/>
			<outline text="Calyx Software Message Board / General Discussion / Message Board" title="Calyx Software Message Board / General Discussion / Message Board" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/RssFeed30-0-0-1.aspx" htmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/"/>
			<outline text="Calyx Software Message Board / Point Data Server (PDS) / Point Data Server (PDS)" title="Calyx Software Message Board / Point Data Server (PDS) / Point Data Server (PDS)" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/RssFeed19-0-0-1.aspx" htmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/"/>
			<outline text="Calyx Software Message Board / WebCaster / Suggestions &amp; Requests" title="Calyx Software Message Board / WebCaster / Suggestions &amp; Requests" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/RssFeed32-0-0-1.aspx" htmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/"/>
			<outline text="Calyx Software Message Board / WebCaster / WebCaster" title="Calyx Software Message Board / WebCaster / WebCaster" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/RssFeed20-0-0-1.aspx" htmlUrl="http://messageboard.calyxsupport.com/"/>
		</outline>
	</body>
</opml>

copy the above to notepad and save as a .xml file.  You can then import it into your rss reader of choice.

posted by Aaron Fischer on Wednesday, September 26, 2007 1:11:28 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)   #    Comments [0]