Someone asked on one of the Microsoft .NET newsgroups how he could check whether or not SP1 for Visual Studio .NET 2003 was installed. Service Pack 1 is published in the Microsoft Knowledge Base as article number 918700 so in order to check whether SP1 is installed you could check for the existance of the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Updates\Visual Studio\7.1\S918007
Even better would be to check if the value for the DWORD value "Installed" under this key, is set to 1 which means off course that SP1 for Visual Studio .NET 2003 is installed.
Cross-posted from
The .NET Aficionado
In case you need to find out the version of the SQL Server installed on a server you could execute the following statement:
SELECT @@VERSION;
Which returns on my development sandbox the following string:
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 - 9.00.2047.00 (Intel X86) Apr 14 2006 01:12:25 Copyright (c) 1988-2005 Microsoft Corporation Developer Edition on Windows NT 5.1 (Build 2600: Service Pack 2)
Cross-posted from
The .NET Aficionado
One of our .NET developers had problems with a ASP.NET application on his machine. Looking at the event viewer there was the following entry:
Description: The description for Event ID ( 0 ) in Source ( .NET Runtime ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able to use the /AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and Support for details. The following information is part of the event: unable to open shim database version registry key - v2.0.50727.00000
There is a hotfix for this problem and this behaviour is caused because the ASP.NET application needs read/write access to a specific registry key but has only read access. You could also Registry Monitor to check which registry key(s) is causing this behaviour.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918642
Cross-posted from
The .NET Aficionado
Or at least that's what the emails say (Doh!). If I have to believe those e-mails I won about 37 times $1,000,000 that makes me propably one of the richest persons in Belgium!
Government Accredited Licensed lottery promoters.
International Promotions/Prize Award Department
This Lottery is approved by the Netherlands Gaming Board and also
Licensedby the The International Association of Gaming Regulators (IAG
international emails. held on the 29th November, 2006.all winnings must be
claim
not later than Decembre 11th, 2006, after this date,unclaimed funds will
bereturned to the Lotto. NL
Your email won the lottery.For a total pay out of €1,000,000
no tickets were sold but all email addresses were assigned to different
ticket numbers for representation and privacy.
Please remember to quote your reference number and batch numbers:
1, Batch 9484-9006-0076
2, Ref: 637409467-Nll
3, lucky numbers 1-0960-31-444
To file for your claim, please contact
**************************
Advocate Faber Dutchs
Tel: +31 -619 255 090
Fax: +31-84-728-9686
email- bejesbejes200@aim.com
law & Associates
**************************
In other to claim your €1,000,000.00 prize winning, you will have to
fill the form below and send it to Advocate Steven Cox for verification and
then you will be directed how to get a ticket in your name.
NAME:.....................................
AGE:........................................
SEX:........................................
ADDRESS:...............................
EMAIL:....................................
PHONE:...................................
OCCUPATION:.........................
COMPANY:..............................
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|
CONGRATULATIONS!
CALL NOW TO CLAIM YOUR WINNING PRIZE
Advocate Faber Dutchs
Tel: +31 -619 255 090
Fax: +31-84-728-9686
bejesbejes200@aim.com
Yours faithfully,
Mrs Eava Van Boer
Online coordinator
Sweepstakes International Program.
Cross-posted from
The .NET Aficionado
Microsoft released a new version of the Remote Desktop Connection application aka as v6.0 of the Terminal Services Client. It contains several new features:
- Network Level Authentication
- Server Authentication
- Resource Redirection
- Terminal Servers Gateway
- TS Remote Programs
- Monitor spanning
- Visual Improvements (32-bit color depth, ClearType)
Read all about these new features and the download links in the Microsoft Knowledge Base article 925876. Please note that you will only be able to use all these features when connecting to a Windows Vista or a Windows Server Codename "Longhorn" machine.
Source
Cross-posted from
The .NET Aficionado
GameTrailers.com has posted two videos that show in-game footage of CoD 3 played on an Xbox 360, PS3 and the Nintendo Wii and the differences are astonishing, I guess that me saying that I need to ask my girlfriend a Xbox 360 for X-mas says it al? The video quality on the Wii is a bummer.
http://www.gametrailers.com/gamepage.php?id=2650
Cross-posted from
The .NET Aficionado
A couple of days ago one of our .NET developers asked me to help solve an issue on his machine. He said that his breakpoints were not being hit due to missing symbol files. I asked him to close Visual Studio and show me step by step how he debugs.
- He started Visual Studio 2005
- He opened his solution
- He publishes his site to c:\inetpub\wwwroot\<project>
- He navigates to the website using IE
- He sets a breakpoint
- He attaches to the worker process
The breakpoints will not be hit and I explained him why. Publishing your web site cause your web site to be pre-compiled using the executable apsnet_compiler.exe. The problem here, if you can even call this a problem, is that by default the debug info will be omitted.
There are several ways to solve this:
- Use Visual Studio 2005 Web Application Projects which shares the compilation semantics known from ASP.NET 1.1
- Do not publish your site instead xcopy deploy the site
- On your dev machine you can point the virtual directory to your ASP.NET project directory
- Pre-compile manually with aspnet_compiler.exe -d to emit the debug info
Cross-posted from
The .NET Aficionado
Tom Hollander, a Product Manager working for the Microsoft patterns & practices group, discusses the new Validation Application Block that will be released in Enterprise Library for .NET Framework 3.0. It looks promising with the possibility to take a declarative or imperative approach. It would be nice if the validators could inherit some of the pre- and post conditions semantics from Spec#, I am not talking about heap checks but just a simple implementation using reflection but I will already be happy if these validators can be used to validate method arguments.
Read all about it here.
Cross-posted from
The .NET Aficionado
The team behind ReSharper released after several nightly builds EAP Build 312 which is the first Release Candidate for ReSharper 2.5. There is a known issue that you need to remove all your caches when you revert back to ReSharper 2.0.
ReSharper 2.5 Build 312 (Visual Studio 2005)
List of fixes
Cross-posted from
The .NET Aficionado
I guess that we could somehow expect that are going to be a lot of issues trying to run existing products on Microsoft's latest Windows platform. So far I have tested 3 online banking solutions offered in Belgium and so far there was only 1 of them that works flawlessly in Windows Vista.
So like I mentioned I tested 3 online banking solutions:
- KBC Online
- Dexia Direct Net
- Fortis PC Banking
1. KBC Online
With KBC Online I tried to import an existing key and that's where the problem start. Under normal conditions importing a key will result in the creating of a BCM file in the \Program Files\ directory. This does not work in Windows Vista thanks to the new security features. Running Windows Internet Explorer as an administrator is a possible workaround but not recommended. A better solution would be if the people from the KBC created the BCM file in the user profile's directory where it belongs in the first place. Anyway I have reported this issue.
2. Dexia Direct Net
When you click on the link to start Dexia Direct Net it will open a new windows but the page cannot be retrieved. I have tried running Windows Internet Explorer as an administrator and I have even tried disabling UAC. I had to install Firefox to be able to use Dexia Direct Net so maybe this is not directly a Windows Vista issue. I will try this on a seperate machine running Windows XP + IE 7 to see if the problem lays with IE7. Reporting this problem cannot be done using an online form but I will contact the helpdesk tomorrow during the office hours.
3. Fortis PC Banking
Last but certainly not least is the PC Banking solution provided by Fortis. This one works without any issues, you don't need to run IE as an admin and you don't need to disable UAC.
Cross-posted from
The .NET Aficionado
When I open certain media files they will no longer be opened in the Windows Media Player because the file associations were changed during the installation of Nero 7. In Windows XP when you start Windows Media Player and open the options screen there will be a tab where you can choose the file type associations. In Windows Vista however you will not find this tab. In Windows Vista file associations can be changed through a control panel applet.
Click on the Windows Logo button (start) and click on "Control Panel" and then click on "Programs":
Then click on "Default Programs":
Then click on "Set your default programs" (you are almost there):
Select "Windows Media Player" from the list and then you have two options:
- You can either click on "Set this program as default": this will associate all the file types that can be opened by Windows Media Player to Windows Media Player
- Or you can click on "Choose defaults for this program": this allows you to choose the file types
When you choose for the second options just select all the file types that you want to be associated to Windows Media Player and click on "Save". That's it!
Cross-posted from
The .NET Aficionado
Today someone asked me if I had told developer X that having a lot of if statements was better than a having a switch statement. I guess that developer X misunderstood what I told him a couple of weeks ago.
I told him that if you have only 2 conditions that you need to check you can consider using an if statement. If you have more than 2 conditions use a switch statement instead and if you have more than 5 conditions then you should reconsider your design and make use of the command pattern or make better use of inheritance.
When you use a switch statement the C# compiler performs several optimizations. It can rearrange the conditions when needed depending on the frequency and it will also determine whether to implement a jump table (the switch IL instruction) over a if statement instead. Therefore in almost 100% of the cases it is always better to use a switch statement where possible.
Cross-posted from
The .NET Aficionado
Just in case you haven't read about this on all the other blogs: Michael Swanson, a Technical Evangelist on "Avalon" related tools and components, released a version of his SWF2XAML which is a Flash to XAML converter.
You can read more about it here.
Cross-posted from
The .NET Aficionado
Why doesn't the IntelliSense show the Closed event of a form in WinForms 2.0 application?
You don't see this member because it is decorated with the EditorBrowsable attribute passing the enum value EditorBrowsableState.Never to its constructor. The IntelliSense engine in Visual Studio doesn't show members that are marked as Never. This doesn't mean that you can't use this event because you can.
Why did the designers decide to mark the Closed event as being never browsable?
The answer to this question is that the events Closed and Closing too by the way are obsolete and that the events FormClosed and FormClosing should be used instead.
Why are the events Closed and Closing obsolete?
I don't know exactly why but using Reflector I could easily determine that they have also added two new delegates and two new classes for event data:
The only addition to the new classes for the event data is a CloseReason property of the enum type System.Windows.Forms.CloseReason. The enum type shows some interesting values like ApplicationExitCall, WindowsShutDown and TaskManagerClosing.
When you use the Closed event you need to know that when you call Application.Exit() the events Closed and Closing will not be raised. The events FormClosing and FormClosed however will be raised and now you have the opportunity to have different execution paths depending on the reason why these events were raised.
Cross-posted from
The .NET Aficionado
David Litchfield, a well known security expert, has created a report that compares the security flaws found in Oracle with those found in SQL Server. According to his report SQL Server 2005 is more secure than Oracle 10G Release 2 and he says that this is tanks to the Security Development Lifecycle.
Although there are indeed no known security flaws in SQL Server 2005 you must know that SQL Server 2005 uses several components that are not directly part of the SQL Server core and it in these components there were several security flaws found. Imho these flaws should have been taken account for in the report because a chain is as strong as its weakest link.
You can read the report here
Source
Cross-posted from
The .NET Aficionado