Half Baked

How to change permissions on Vista Home so you can update your hosts file

Tim Huffam — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 03:38:05 GMT

Windows Vista Home edition has some funny quirks - and this one is a prime example...

When trying to update my hosts file I get permission denied. That's odd - so I check the permissions and sure enough Administrator group has write access - yet I am the only administror on the system. How's that for tricky - so I'm an admin with no admin rights - go figure. Then I tried deleting the file then readding it.... wow - delete worked but could not re-add.

It appears the only way around this little gem is to turn off user access control (not recommended - but there seems to be no other option as the security is fairly random and not what it used to be in earlier verisons of windows).

To do this go into Control Panel, select User Accounts then choose "Turn User Account Control On or Off" and turn it off (uncheck the checkbox then click OK) - you'll need to reboot for this to take effect.

Now you can change the files.

*** Just remember to undo the security by-pass - but turning back on the user access control (same as above - checking the checkbox). ***

**** Updated: As Joe suggests below - yes the correct way would be to start your editor by using right-click - 'Run as administrator'. However this still does not explain the bug with Vista's security model that does not allow an admin user to update the hosts file without turning off UAC.

HTH

Tim

Script to remove unchanged files in TFS/VS2008

Tim Huffam — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:31:34 GMT

TFS has a wonderful feature whereby it marks files as changed, even though there are no changes. These files show up in the Pending Changes window in Visual Studio (VS 2008).

To work around this, add the following external command to your VS tools:

First you need to install TFS Power Tools
In VS go into Tools - External Tools and click Add
Enter the following details:
Title: Unchange
Command: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2008 Power Tools\tfpt.exe
Arguments: uu /recursive /noget
Initial Directory: $(SolutionDir)
And check 'Use Output Window'
Click Ok

That's it. To test, view the Pending Changes window - usually after a 'Get Latest' is when it lists unmodified files as changed - then click Tools - Unchange.

Thanks to Duncan Smith for this gem of info.

The fact they created a tool for this makes you wonder!

HTH
Tim

ASP.NET 3.5 controls not being rendered

Tim Huffam — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 03:50:56 GMT

For some reason some controls/tags within ASP.NET do not always get rendered/passed to the client.

This has happened to me on a number of occasions. It seems limited to <style> and <script> tags - but happens for both raw HTML (within the aspx designer) and dynamically created tags (eg using new HtmlGenericControl("style")...).

This is happening to controls/tags within AJAX updatepanels within, webforms and usercontrols.

Sometimes I can work around this by simply placing these controls/tags some where else within the page structure. But the most consistent way to get around this issue is to place a non-blanking space before the tag eg:

 <style>...

Another half-baked solution hit's the road ;-)

Update:

After some investigation, I have found a not-so-half-baked solution - for getting javascript loaded and run on a page during an AJAX postback...

The solution is to not try and add a script tag by adding it to a control within the page - but rather use the ASP.NET AJAX ScriptManager class's RegisterStartupScript() method. There are two overloads for this, one loads/registers the script and runs it just once (initial page load) and the other on each asynchronous postback (the latter suited my needs).

HTH
Tim

Cannot select images in Microsoft Word?

Tim Huffam — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 09:42:02 GMT

For some reason, sometimes you cannot select images within a Microsoft Word document.

This has baffled me on an off for some time - and I still do not know the reason why it behaves like this.

Today I stumbled across a very simple (and maybe obvious to some) solution... right-click on the image (instead of trying to left-click to select it). This causes the image to be selected and pop's up the context (right-click) menu. Just press the Esc (escape) key to close the context menu, and the image remains selected.

Simple huh.

Tim

Manually writing to the same windows event log as log4net

Tim Huffam — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 20:47:00 GMT

This is something I wanted to do as a quick work around (rather than writing my own log4net appender) to being able to write SuccessAudit and FailureAudit events to the event log (something which log4net does not support out the box).

Here's the method I used:

private static ILog _Log = LogManager.GetLogger(MethodBase.GetCurrentMethod().DeclaringType);
private static log4net.Appender.EventLogAppender _eventLogAppender = null;

// This only works if you have an EventLogAppender configured.
public static void WriteToEventLog(string Message, System.Diagnostics.EventLogEntryType Type)
{
    if (_eventLogAppender == null)
    {
        log4net.Appender.IAppender[] appenders = _Log.Logger.Repository.GetAppenders();
        foreach (log4net.Appender.IAppender appender in appenders)
        {
            if (appender is log4net.Appender.EventLogAppender)
            {
               _eventLogAppender = (log4net.Appender.EventLogAppender)appender;
               break;
            }
        }
    }

if (_eventLogAppender != null) // Confirm an EventLogAppender has been configured
System.Diagnostics.EventLog.WriteEntry(_eventLogAppender.ApplicationName, Message, Type);

}

Tim

SQL Server datetime set blank or null = SQL Server error: System.Data.SqlTypes.SqlTypeException: SqlDateTime overflow. Must be between 1/1/1753 12:00:00 AM and 12/31/9999 11:59:59 PM.

Tim Huffam — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 02:32:00 GMT

This error (System.Data.SqlTypes.SqlTypeException: SqlDateTime overflow. Must be between 1/1/1753 12:00:00 AM and 12/31/9999 11:59:59 PM.) will occur if you try to pass an uninitialised DateTime value into an SQL Server stored procedure from .NET code (in my case C# in an ASP.NET app).

To work around this you must pass in a value - null will not work.

In my case I have a generated class that passes a System.DateTime variable into the System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.ExecuteNonQuery() method. So my only easy option was to make sure I pass in a valid DateTime value (I couldnt be shagged in altering my codesmith templates).

I decided to go with just setting the DateTime to a mimimum value (and just handling that in any code that had to look out unset dates) - however of you try to using System.DateTime.MinValue you'll be shit out of luck - as this equates to: 00:00:00.0000000, January 1, 0001 - which SQL Server does not support.

Instead set your DateTime variable to System.Data.SqlTypes.SqlDateTime.MinValue.Value - which equates to the lowest date value that a SQL Server datetime can store (01/01/1753 00:00).

Problem solved (for now) - this is the kind of hack that makes half-baked software possible ;-)

Update: 9/11 *** Special explanation note for those who didn't read or understand paragraph 3:

This is a workaround (read: "half-baked" or "hack") based on two constraints:

existing code that requires a valid System.DateTime value
a lack of time, motivation or it's a non-production crappy piece of half-baked software that'll never be used by anyone else but yourself.

However, if you are building a commercial/decent system that will be used and/or maintained by others, you *could* pass DBNull.Value to SQL Server (if you don't have a datetime value to pass) - however that would just be another hack (because if you dont have a value to pass, you'll potentially be overwriting an existing value with null) - so a proper, fully-baked solution, you should not be passing anything but instead change your db entry point to either provide an sproc or sql that only updates db columns as required (no shit Sherlock).

Uninstall IE 7

Tim Huffam — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 17:14:00 GMT

Those of you wanting to know how to remove this annoying version on IE - click here.

However, if you are as unfortunate as myself, and have had another user has install it (IE 7 beta) on your PC, then you will get this error:

"Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 cannot be uninstalled from this user account. Please log on to the same user account from which it was installed and try again."

Even if you belong to the local administrators group. Brilliant!

*** Update: For those of you wanting a far superior browser that has none of the IE problems - I strongly recommend FireFox - which I now use all the time.