DotNet

BlogEngine.Net 1.1 Released

CodeCanvas — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 17:51:17 GMT

Originally posted at my personal blog

BlogEngine.Net 1.1 has been released. It's quite amazing how fast these guys have churned out the new release.

With my recent experiences in porting, chewing, and digesting dotnet projects, I kind of think that coding for Dotnet Framework V2.0 from scratch is lot easier than porting a complex system and maybe that is one of the few reasons for the quicker releases of the product (of course having an active development community and passionate project lead helps a lot).

Anyhoo, these guys are doing a fantastic job and I am planning to move to BlogEngine.NET after evaluating it out. Good going guys!

Well started with SubText (was done in framework 1.1), then moved to Wordpress (good community but had trouble with MySQL connection), then to DasBlog (still in V1.1) now finally to BlogEngine.NET (finally v2 product with source code, yipee). People! Man evolved from monkey! Any doubts there? :)

Opening for DotNet Dev with 2+ Yrs Exp (Web)

CodeCanvas — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 20:40:00 GMT

Candidates who are looking for an opening at Abu Dhabi with 2+ yrs exp in Dot Net (Web) contact me at the earliest possible.

The One with the Bad DataSet/XSD day

CodeCanvas — Sun, 21 May 2006 16:50:00 GMT

Original post at my blog

As if usual problems arent complex enough my Visual Studio 2005 stopped displaying DataSet's that were designed and were working very recently. When I open my visual studio solution / project which already has an DataSet open I will get the following error dialog

[
Load DataSet Error
Failed to load dataset because of the following error:

Value cannot be null.
Parameter name: project
]

and the following error message

	One or more errors encountered while loading the designer. The errors are listed below. Some errors can be fixed by rebuilding your project, while others may require code changes.
Value cannot be null. Parameter name: project Hide
at Microsoft.VSDesigner.VSDesignerPackage.GlobalConnectionService.Microsoft.VSDesigner.VSDesignerPackage.IGlobalConnectionService.GetConnections(IServiceProvider serviceProvider, Project project) at Microsoft.VSDesigner.DataSource.DesignConnection.GetConnectionFromAppSettings(String objectName, String propertyName) at Microsoft.VSDesigner.DataSource.DesignConnection.get_ConnectionStringObject() at Microsoft.VSDesigner.DataSource.DbSource.set_Connection(IDesignConnection value) at Microsoft.VSDesigner.DataSource.DesignDataSource.SetConnectionProperty(Source source) at Microsoft.VSDesigner.DataSource.DesignDataSource.ReadXmlSchema(DataSourceXmlTextReader xmlReader) at Microsoft.VSDesigner.DataSource.DesignDataSource.ReadXmlSchema(TextReader textReader) at Microsoft.VSDesigner.DataSource.Designer.DataSourceSerializationService.DeserializeToDataSource(String filePath, Object serializationData) at Microsoft.VSDesigner.DataSource.ProjectDataSourceDescriptor.LoadDataSource() at Microsoft.VSDesigner.DataSource.ProjectDataSourceDescriptor.Init(IServiceProvider provider, IVsHierarchy primaryHierarchy, UInt32 primaryItemId, Object primaryDocDataObject, UInt32 docCookie, IVsInvisibleEditor invisibleEditor, IDesignerHost host) at Microsoft.VSDesigner.DataSource.ProjectDataSourceStorage.EnsureInvisibleEditor(ProjectItem dsProjectItem, Boolean ensureWritable, Boolean createInvisibleEditor) at Microsoft.VSDesigner.DataSource.ProjectDataSourceStorage.GetDataSourceInternal(Object caller, ProjectItem dsProjectItem, Boolean ensureWritable, Boolean createInvisibleEditor) at Microsoft.VSDesigner.DataSource.Designer.DataSourceDesignerLoader.HandleLoad(IDesignerSerializationManager serializationManager)

Occording to SOP, first I closed the dataset file (xsd) and tried opening it again in the editor, at which time I would get another error message in the following format:

[
Load DataSet Error
Failed to load dataset because of the following error:

Object reference not set to an instance of an object
]

and the following error message

	One or more errors encountered while loading the designer. The errors are listed below. Some errors can be fixed by rebuilding your project, while others may require code changes.
Object reference not set to an instance of an object. Hide
at Microsoft.VisualStudio.DataTools.Providers.OleDB.OleDBUtilities.GetRegisteredProviders() at Microsoft.VisualStudio.DataTools.Providers.OleDB.OleDBUtilities.ExpandProvider(String provider) at Microsoft.VisualStudio.DataTools.Providers.OleDB.OleDBUtilities.GetDataSource(String provider) at Microsoft.VisualStudio.DataTools.Providers.OleDB.OleDBDataSourceSpecializer.DeriveDataSource(String connectionString) at Microsoft.VisualStudio.DataTools.DataServices.DataProvider.DeriveDataSource(String connectionString) at Microsoft.VSDesigner.Data.ProviderManager.GetVsDataSource(String invariantName, String connectionString, Boolean encrypted) at Microsoft.VSDesigner.Data.ConnectionString..ctor(String providerName, String connectionString) at Microsoft.VSDesigner.VSDesignerPackage.AppSettingsHelper.GetConnectionsViaDataEnvironment(IDataEnvironment dataEnvironment) at Microsoft.VSDesigner.VSDesignerPackage.GlobalConnectionService.Microsoft.VSDesigner.VSDesignerPackage.IGlobalConnectionService.GetConnections(IServiceProvider serviceProvider, Project project) at Microsoft.VSDesigner.DataSource.DesignConnection.GetConnectionFromAppSettings(String objectName, String propertyName) at Microsoft.VSDesigner.DataSource.DesignConnection.get_ConnectionStringObject() at Microsoft.VSDesigner.DataSource.DbSource.set_Connection(IDesignConnection value) at Microsoft.VSDesigner.DataSource.DesignDataSource.SetConnectionProperty(Source source) at Microsoft.VSDesigner.DataSource.DesignDataSource.ReadXmlSchema(DataSourceXmlTextReader xmlReader) at Microsoft.VSDesigner.DataSource.DesignDataSource.ReadXmlSchema(TextReader textReader) at Microsoft.VSDesigner.DataSource.Designer.DataSourceSerializationService.DeserializeToDataSource(String filePath, Object serializationData) at Microsoft.VSDesigner.DataSource.ProjectDataSourceDescriptor.LoadDataSource() at Microsoft.VSDesigner.DataSource.ProjectDataSourceDescriptor.Init(IServiceProvider provider, IVsHierarchy primaryHierarchy, UInt32 primaryItemId, Object primaryDocDataObject, UInt32 docCookie, IVsInvisibleEditor invisibleEditor, IDesignerHost host) at Microsoft.VSDesigner.DataSource.ProjectDataSourceStorage.EnsureInvisibleEditor(ProjectItem dsProjectItem, Boolean ensureWritable, Boolean createInvisibleEditor) at Microsoft.VSDesigner.DataSource.ProjectDataSourceStorage.GetDataSourceInternal(Object caller, ProjectItem dsProjectItem, Boolean ensureWritable, Boolean createInvisibleEditor) at Microsoft.VSDesigner.DataSource.Designer.DataSourceDesignerLoader.HandleLoad(IDesignerSerializationManager serializationManager)

On the quest to solve this headache I hit google and came up with the following pages which kind of had content related to the problem:

http://www.darrellhawley.com/2006/05/value-cannot-be-null-parameter-name.html - He was lucky to have the problem sorted out on the first step of SOP, but as you know our problems never are that easy to solve, are they? :)

http://www.kbalertz.com/kbNamed_894438/Describes.problem.that.occurs.Microsoft.Visual.Studio.When.open.project.that.contains.inherited.user.receive.error.aspx - Even though this page had a similar error message tackled, it was not the same as the current one.

Then finally hit on this forum post http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=133896&SiteID=1 it is quite long (4 pages), but was worth it. After a to and forth conversation which spanned 3 pages Stephen Provine had nailed the problem to a missing registry key value.

The culprit was Windows Live Safety Scanner - "Clean Up Scan", yup! the safety centre had cleaned out the unwanted registry keys, which is usually good for the system in most cases but this time it was not one of those "most" cases.

To fix the problem please follow the following steps:

To examine the registry:

1) Run regedit.exe;
2) Browse to the location "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{F9AE8980-7E52-11d0-8964-00C04FD611D7}" in the tree;
3) If there is a child node in the tree called "ProgID", then you are indeed experiencing a different problem - let me know if this is the case.

Otherwise, follow these steps to modify the registry:

1) Right click the node and select "New > Key";
2) Enter "ProgID" as the name;
3) Go to the main window and double click "(Default)";
4) Enter the value "MSIDXS.1";

Now if you run Visual Studio, it should be working.

Hope this helps out a fellow developer who is on his way to becoming a hairless monk!

Update: Because of the use of tables and stylesheets the article was not showing up properly, now I have fixed them and updated the post, hopefully this works good.

Note for self : Attribute not recognized 'minRequiredNonAlphanumericCharacters'

CodeCanvas — Sat, 13 May 2006 17:49:00 GMT

Change the minRequiredNonAlphanumericCharacters to minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters. Local MSDN document not up-to-date!

UrlMappings a Boon or a Pain in the neck?

CodeCanvas — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 18:59:00 GMT

Recently was trying out the new urlMappings options of asp.net v2 framework. Though the concept is old and it has been beaten to death through various implementations, it is heartening to see finally the framework is providing a inbuilt solution. But the catch is that the overall support for url mapping is very basic, for instead you cannot use wildcard or regex expressions for url substitution which means you will have to figure out a way to manually enter all the possible mappings.

One more headache which I came across when trying to use url mapping is that it does not allow you to provide mappedUrl's which point to anchored names. For instance if I want to map ~/Category/Car.aspx to ~/Categories.aspx#Car it wont work coz the framework is trying to validate the availability of file named "Categories.aspx#Car" ... duhh!. One workaround I employed for this is to provide a redirection page which will then redirect the user to the proper location;
For example lets take the above example, I create a new Redirect.aspx which just does a Response.Redirect(Request["TargetUrl"]) in the Page_Load and in the mappedUrl section I have provided the url as ~/Redirect.aspx?TargetUrl=/Categories.aspx#Car

The drawback with this approach is that the client should have allowed automatic redirection and also you have to make sure that the redirector page is not used for any other phishing purpose.

Problem with assembly:FileIOPermission

codecanvas — Mon, 25 Oct 2004 15:59:00 GMT

I am working on a web based generic mailer component that I am planning to reuse for all the projects. After completing it, I ran it through FxCop and in the many suggestions given by FxCop one was to mention a default FileIOPermission. I set the following in AssemblyInfo.cs

[assembly:FileIOPermission(SecurityAction.RequestOptional, Unrestricted=true)]

The project compiled without problem, but when I tried to access the page I kept getting the error message:

Parser Error Message: Could not load type 'VJ.RND.GenericMailer.Global'.

Source Error:

Line 1: <%@ Application Codebehind="Global.asax.cs" Inherits="VJ.RND.GenericMailer.Global" %>

This error message was removed after removing the FileIOPermission setting from the AssemblyInfo.cs

I am trying to find the exact cause of the error.