Digital Fugu

We are moving!

2008-04-30T08:06:00.002-06:00

I've decided to move the blog to a new hosting service, blog platform and domain name.

The new address is http://blog.digitalfugu.com

I've moved all our posts and comments to the new site. Too bad I can't get Google to map it's existing spider records to point to the new site.

See you at the new place.

.NET 2.0 App Recomplied after .NET 3.0 Installed Crashes

2008-04-22T10:12:00.004-06:00

We've been working with .NET 2.0 for a while now and having a grand old time with it but have started to look at some of the .NET 3.0 and 3.5 technologies lately. We found that one of our Click-once applications was having problems after being recompiled. The error we received when we tried to launch the application through Click-Once was:

Could not load file or assembly 'WindowsBase, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

At first we didn't notice that this was a version 3.0 assembly and thought that .NET 2.0 SP1 might fix it. Of course, it didn't. We checked all of our dependencies with Dependency Walker and Process Explorer but couldn't find any reference to WindowsBase.dll. We also found that if we had .NET 3.0 on the client or on the click-once web server it worked fine. If both the client and the click-once server didn't have .NET 3.0 installed, then it failed horribly. This lead us to think that maybe, just maybe, it wasn't really our application but the Click-Once assemblies created by Visual Studio 2005.

The real problem turns out to be something completely not what we expected. It was the Windows Workflow Foundation Extensions for Visual Studio 2005 that caused the problem. For some reason, the WF Extensions for VS 2005 caused the Click-Once assemblies to require WindowsBase.dll from the 3.0 framework.

The solution was simple:

Close the solution
Uninstall the WF Extensions (I rebooted afterwards just for kicks.)
Re-open the solution
"clean" the solution
Re-build the project
Re-publish to our Click-Once server

After that we were home free. I suspect that we might also have gotten away with openning the solution in Visual Studio 2008 and targeted the 2.0 framework for the build.

What reference am I missing?

2008-04-18T08:58:00.004-06:00

Wow. I've just started working with VS 2008 and WF and I ran into the coolest thing. I tried to build my solution and got the following error:

Error 2 The type 'System.Workflow.Activities.ExternalDataEventArgs' is defined in an assembly that is not referenced. You must add a reference to assembly 'System.Workflow.Activities, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35'. C:\Documents and Settings\xyz\My Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Projects\p1\p1\p1PageFlowService.cs 13 62 p1PageFlowService

I've never had any version of Visual Studio tell me which reference was missing.

As much as I hate to sound like I've been drinking the Kool-aid... Good going Microsoft!

WebEx Alternative: Microsoft SharedView

2008-03-19T12:07:00.004-06:00

I just ran across a little advertised free Microsoft application called SharedView. I suspect that this might be Microsoft's attempt at a WebEx killer.

SharedView is a desktop sharing application that allows you to share specific applications or your entire desktop with other SharedView users. It uses Microsoft Passport or Microsoft Live accounts. One party shares and the others can view. However, my favorite feature of Shared View is that viewing parties actually get their own mouse pointer and are able to highlight on the shared application or desk top. No more trying in vain to explain what area you are talking about when you can just point and highlight. Additionally control of the shared application or desktop can be requested participants and delegated by the sharer.

From my brief test drive with it, my only complaint is that it doesn't do voice over IP. A colleague of mine pointed out that it can be advantageous to do audio over the phone any way to avoid network latency. Good point.

You can download it for free from http://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=94

Did I mention that it was free? Check it out for your next online collaboration or product demo.

Click-Once Applications and Minimum Version Requirements

2008-03-07T08:41:00.004-07:00

So we are working on Click-Once from web only. This means that the minimum requirement fixing that we did in the last post wasn't needed. We actually had to remove that requirement because web only deployments' manifests can't take a minimum version. I suppose this makes sense because if you are running from the web, you control the version that is posted live at given time.

Cool.

Publishing and Minimum Required Version Settings

2008-03-06T13:41:00.005-07:00

Wow, more fun with publishing. I grabbed a new source copy of one of our projects to enable click-once query string parameters and tried to build it but got the following error:

Specified minimum required version is greater than the current publish
version. Please specify a version less than or equal to the current publish
version.

Huh? What was that supposed to mean. I immediately suspected that it was something to do with the publish properties configured in the project properties since I had already been mucking around in there earlier in the day on a different project. I checked out the publish "Updates..." section of the properties which set the minimum required version to be 0.0.0.10. Logically I changed the publish version to 0.0.0.11 and tried to build the project again. No dice; Same error.

As it turns out, it is a bit convoluted, but simple to resolve this. There doesn't seem to be a lot via Google search on it, but I did eventually find it on a Microsoft news group archive. Credit for this goes to David B with discussions.microsoft.com.

Go to the project's properties and click on the Publish tab.

Click on Updates; note the version numbers listed here

Turn off "Specify a minimum required version for this application" and
click OK

Update the Publish Version to match or exceed the Update version numbers.

Save the new properties and Build the project

Go back and turn on "Specify a minimum required version for this
application" and click OK.

Thanks Mr. B.

Click-Once Applications and URL Parameters

2008-03-06T11:12:00.004-07:00

We have a number of .Net 2.0 Windows applications that are to be converted to Click-Once deployed applications. The problem that we had was that these applications are launched with command line parameters, which are not available when running off the web using Click-Once deployment. So the solution was to grab the same parameters from the URL query string parameters. No problem just use the following code to grab and parse them. The real problem came later.

public NameValueCollection GetQueryStringParameters()
{
NameValueCollection nameValueTable = new NameValueCollection();

if (ApplicationDeployment.IsNetworkDeployed)
{
if (ApplicationDeployment.CurrentDeployment.ActivationUri != null)
{
string queryString = ApplicationDeployment.CurrentDeployment.ActivationUri.Query;

if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(queryString))
{
nameValueTable = HttpUtility.ParseQueryString(queryString);
}
}
}

return (nameValueTable);
}

When I went to run this code on my local machine as Click-Once, I wasn't getting any thing in the ActivationUri. It was null all the time. As it turns out you have to modify your project properties to allow it like so:

Right-click your project
Select "Properties"
Select the "Publish" tab
Click the "Options" button
Check "Allow URL parameters to be passed to application"
Click "OK"
Re-publish your application

Your application should now be able to get the ActivationUri.

Back from Asia

2008-03-06T11:06:00.002-07:00

Wow, been a while since I've added a new entry. I had a great 5 week break in Asia and am back at the grind. Look for new posts soon.

Contacts don't show up in Exchange 2007 Global Address List

2007-10-17T12:26:00.000-06:00

It's been quite some time since our Global Address List has worked properly. All of our employees used to show up in there just fine, that was under Exchange 2003. After we upgraded to Exchange Server 2007 everything went sour. New mailboxes and users showed up in the GAL but not the mailboxes and users that existed before the upgrade. We'd looked into this a couple of times, but did not find a resolution to the problem until yesterday.

In the end our problem was that the Mail attribute for our users didn't match the default SMTP address configured in Exchange. The fix was relatively easy, make them match. This can be done one of two ways. The first, is to use adsiedit.msc to edit each user's Mail attribute so that it matches the default SMPT address. adsiedit is included in the Windows 2003 Support Tools and can be installed from the Tools folder in your Windows 2003 CD.

Start -> Run -> Adsiedit.msc to start adsiedit
Expand the Domain node until you get to your users
Right-click on each user and select properties
Scroll down to the Mail attribute
Click "Edit" and an edit dialog will pop-up
Enter in the default SMTP email address configured in Exchange
Click "OK", "OK
We are done

This is fine if your company is a small-ish start up like ours. If you have more than 10 employees, you'll want to do the following instead.

Start the Exchange 2007 Management Shell
Type the following to find out who has this problem:

get-mailbox -resultsize unlimited | Where-Object {$_.PrimarySMTPAddress -ne $_.WindowsEmailAddress}
And then the following to fix it:

get-mailbox -resultsize unlimited | Where-Object {$_.PrimarySMTPAddress -ne $_.WindowsEmailAddress} | foreach { set-mailbox $_.identity -windowsemailaddress $_.primarySMTPAddress }

Now you can either wait for Exchange to do its update thing or you can force it to update the GAL. If you have a large number of users I would suggest that you just let Exchange do its thing on its schedule, but if you would like to see it right away, do the following (By the way, I'm assuming that you are using Outlook as an email client)

Start the Exchange 2007 Management Console
Expand the Organization Configuration node, select Mailbox, then click the Offline Address Book tab
Right-click Default Offline Address Book and select Update from the pop-up menu
Click Yes in the dialog that comes up to confirm that you want to update
Wait.
Open Outlook
Click Tools -> Send/Receive -> Download Address Book
Make sure that "Download Changes since last Send/Receive" is checked
Click OK
Check that you can see all the addresses you think you should see in the GAL through Outlook.
We are done

Update: Showing Form Without Stealing Focus

2007-10-12T16:08:00.000-06:00

Remember I was using an API call to ShowWindow to show our custom window w/o stealing focus but had to set the visibility property programatically to get the form working properly? No? That was what we were doing but we've found something much cleaner.

More digging through MSDN showed that you can override a form's ShowWithoutActivation property to always return true to get the same effect. This allows you to use the normal Form.Show() method and all it's automatic goodness. However, this is only available in .Net Framework 2.0 or later. If you are in the 1.0 or 1.1 world, you'll need to do the P/Invoke to call the ShowWindow API.

The code looks like this:

protected override bool ShowWithoutActivation
{
get
{
return true;
}
}

It is like magic. I'm liking it a lot.

Calling ShowWindow from WinForm causes form loading to stall

2007-10-12T08:11:00.000-06:00

In our quest to draw custom windows for our application we are using the WebBrowser control provided by .Net Framework 2.0, to display messages with rich formatting. However, our custom form drawing requires that we know the form dimensions before the form is initialized which presented us a problem because our messages can be user defined and allow line breaks, as well as some limited formatting options such as bold and italics and as such will vary in height when it is rendered in the WebBrowser control. So the problem became: How can I pre-render out the html and measure how tall it will be so that we can have the required window size in the constructor before form initialization?

We discovered that we could use a scheme of "splitting" up the constructor of our form so that we could load up the web browser control, then handle the DocumentComplete event for the "second" part of the constructor which includes the normal call to InitializeComponent(). If we don't wait for DocumentComplete() the Document associated with the browser control isn't null, but also doesn't have correct size information because it hasn't rendered yet. That was great. We could use WebBrowser.Document.Body.ScrollRectangle.Height.

An additional complication was that we didn't want the form to steal focus when it showed up and were using the ShowWindow api call with the SW_SHOWNOACTIVATE parameter. This meant that to keep the parent thread running we needed to use Application.Run() with no params instead of the normal Application.Run(FormObject) and we called the ShowWindow api from part two of the form constructor to prevent strange window ghosting. This caused a strange side effect that the form would load up part way and then not seem to respond. This was a mystery.

Strangely enough since we could see the form we assumed that it was fine, but why wasn't it responding to inputs and coding properly? Thank goodness for MSDN. After some research into the normal Form.Show() method call we found out that if we didn't set the form visibility to true, then some windows events wouldn't get processed. So as soon as we added this.Visible = true to the end of our "2 part constructor" every thing seems to run like it is supposed to.

Culture, Globalization and Headaches: International Application Development

2007-10-11T13:21:00.000-06:00

If you will never develop software that is to be used in any location except North America, then no need to read this post. However the reality of the software industry is that the global economy rules and with the internet, even free software has become a global product. Though you may not have immediate plans for releasing your software to other countries that your own, it is prudent to consider globalization in all phases of development.

The application that we are currently working passes XML messages back and forth between processes, computers and servers. When we lined up a beta customer from Germany, we discovered that while we had thought about globalization we didn't realize how deep the hole really was. We always thought that we'd just go back and add other language translations. But it is never that simple is it?

As we've discovered, all communications that can cross language barriers must be done in invariant culture. This is especially important for our product because XML is essentially a big string and strings can be interpreted in different ways in different cultures. By keeping all communication invariant you ensure that things like numbers and dates are interpreted properly when they get to their destinations.

Take the invariant representation of the number 1234.998 for example. In the US english (en-US) culture the numer would be displayed as 1,234.998. In german from Germany (de-DE) the number would be displayed as 1.234,998 (the germans use a "," for the decimal separator and a "." as the thousands separator). Interesting isn't it? One can see how globalization and localization could cause some very serious and big problems. If the number was stored in the en-US culture and then intrepreted in the de-DE culture, the number would possibly become 1.234998 in invariant culture.

Consider globalization and localization at every stage of development. Some c# methods that we've found useful are listed below.

Going from invariant string representation to numbers

public static decimal ParseDecimalInvariant(string value)
{
return decimal.Parse(value, System.Globalization.NumberStyles.Number, System.Globalizaton.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture.NumberFormat);
}
public static double ParseDoubleInvariant(string value)
{
return double.Parse(value, System.Globalization.NumberStyles.Number, System.Globalizaton.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture.NumberFormat);
}
public static int ParseIntInvariant(string value)
{
return int.Parse(value, System.Globalization.NumberStyles.Number, System.Globalizaton.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture.NumberFormat);
}
public static long ParseLongInvariant(string value)
{
return long.Parse(value, System.Globalization.NumberStyles.Number, System.Globalizaton.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture.NumberFormat);
}

Going from numbers to invariant culture string representation

public static GetInvariantString(byte value)
{
return value.ToString(System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture.NumberFormat);
}
public static GetInvariantString(intvalue)
{
return value.ToString(System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture.NumberFormat);
}
public static GetInvariantString(long value)
{
return value.ToString(System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture.NumberFormat);
}
public static GetInvariantString(decimal value)
{
return value.ToString(System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture.NumberFormat);
}
public static GetInvariantString(double value)
{
return value.ToString(System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture.NumberFormat);
}

Also check out MSDN for info on globalization classes (System.Globalization Namespace) and articles such as this one CLR Inside Out: Windows Vista Globalization Features

Wow. That was long.

Just remember: "You can pay now or you can pay later, but sooner or later you still have to pay."

Install A .Net Service Via Command Line

2007-10-02T09:21:00.000-06:00

I've been working with .Net services for the last year or so and it is often convenient for debugging to be able to install your debug version. For us we have a number of services that interact with each other. So we install the service we aren't working on, but that the one we are working depends on, and debug using the IDE. Since it is a major pain to build an installer every time we want to test, we used the command line utility InstallUtil.exe that comes with the .Net Framework to install and uninstall our services in batch files.

If you've installed .Net in the default location InstallUtil.exe lives in C:\Windows\Microsoft.Net\Framework\v2.0.50727\InstallUtil.exe
in the respective framework version directory.

Below is an example batch file.

C:\Windows\Microsoft.Net\Framework\v2.0.50727\InstallUtil.exe C:\Dev\Server\SourceCode\bin\Debug\server_service.exe
pause

and to uninstall, use the /u flag

C:\Windows\Microsoft.Net\Framework\v2.0.50727\InstallUtil.exe /u C:\Dev\Server\SourceCode\bin\Debug\server_service.exe
pause

Using these batch files we just create short cuts to them and can double click the short cut to install or uninstall. Of course you can install/uninstall more than one service in the batch file.

Be sure to also check out the other flags available for InstallUtil.

Detect Desktop DPI Settings

2007-10-01T14:32:00.000-06:00

Our application was working great. We were using GDI+ to draw custom windows. I've now fought more with GDI+ and half know more than I ever wanted to know about window drawing X_x. I had thought that I would never have to touch that code again for a long time. Things were great until our awesome QA Army of One decided to change from their default resolution of 96 dpi to 120 dpi and then to old school 72 dpi settings "just to see" and did we ever see! There were big black holes all over the place, text was getting cut off and our image banners were all the wrong size plus they were not crisp and clear.

We needed to check for dpi settings and initialize our custom window drawing routines accordingly. I was hoping to heaven that someone at the Microsoft .NET Framework development team had thought of something for that. My prayers were answered by the DpiX and DpiY properties of the System.Drawing.Graphics object. The following is a quick C# example for using these properties. What it does is check to see what resolution the desktop is set at and retrieves an image at that resolution with a method called GetImage. And in the special case that the desktop is running some really strange dip setting we do the else case which takes the 120 dpi image and scales it appropriately.

System.Drawing.Bitmap bmp;
System.Drawing.Graphics g = this.CreateGraphics();

if ((g.DpiX = 96) && (g.DpiY = 96)) // this is now the defacto resolution for most systems
{
bmp = (Bitmap)GetImage("banner(96dpi)");
}
if ((g.DpiX = 72) && (g.DpiY = 72))
{
bmp = (Bitmap)GetImage("banner(72dpi)");
}
else if ((g.DpiX = 120) && (g.DpiY = 120))
{
bmp = (Bitmap)GetImage("banner(72dpi)");
}
else // this is where we take care of the really strange stuff
{
System.Drawing.Image img = GetImage("banner(120dpi)");
Size sz = new Size((int)(img.Width * (g.DpiX / img.HorizontalResolution)),
(int)(img.Width * (g.Dpiy / img.VerticalResolution)));
bmp = new Bitmap(img, sz);
}

So ends another adventure... except we need to apply this to all our forms that have image banners. Yay.

Becoming a Patient Parent

2007-09-20T14:01:00.000-06:00

This post may be a little off topic, but after reading Dumb Little Man's post "How I Turned Myself From An Impatient Dad To A Loving One", I couldn't help but share it with you.

I am a new-ish dad of a now 11 month old baby boy. His name is Gideon. I love him very much. I have also experienced many moments, many during the middle of the night, of extreme frustration and had my patience tested by the little guy. I'm sure it never helps when exhaustion is setting in because he's been getting up twice a night for days on end.

I found that DLM's comment about being empathetic to be the most helpful for me. Every one, including children, toddlers and babies do everything for a reason, even if they don't know the reason themselves. For me, this morning at 4 am, a mere 1.5 hours before I get up to get ready for work, when the boy was up I considered what was going on in his world. Unfortunately for me Gideon can't quite speak in sentences yet. Some words, but not enough to be able to tell me what was bugging him. In the end, we ended up with Gideon sleeping peacefully between my wife and me. He had a cold and the house was cold (found out in the morning that the furnace pilot blew out during the night) and was probably feeling pretty crummy.

None of it his fault. None of it our fault, at least not explicitly. It just was. And in the end we worked it out.

Nice.

MSN Messenger Virus/Scam

2007-09-18T16:01:00.000-06:00

There has been some viral behaviour spreading through MSN Messenger of late. If you get an instant message or email with something similar to...

This web http://www.statusinspector.t tells you who blocked you in their MSN :)

or

Did someone delete you from their MSN? Check http:www.tips-msn-status.t it's really good and it works!!

For the love of MSN don't go there and dont sign up!

The site asks for your msn login and password, then uses that to access your contacts and sends them the message as well. It is unclear whether this is just to collect email addresses or something more malicious

If you got snaked, make sure you change your MSN password as soon as possible. Oh, and do make sure you email your contact to let them know what the heck is going on.

Looks like it is worse than we initially thought. Watch out for any out of character IM's with links that ask for your password. My good friend Mark just got one having to do with smurfs of all things!

Got your back.

Outlook Web Access Inbox Always Empty

2007-09-14T14:40:00.000-06:00

We've been using Outlook Web Access (OWA) for quite some time and it seems to work quite well. I could check my mail with Outlook 2003 at work and at home (dread the thought) I could use OWA over the web and all my email, contacts, and calendar were available to me through my web browser. This was wonderful until my workstation at work decided to poop out and required a re-install of Windows XP Pro. I had backed up my mail and bookmarks before nuking out the old OS and then proceeded with the OS install and all my software. I installed Outlook 2003 and restored my mailbox and contacts, and everything seemed fine.

Fine until I tried to access my email at home via OWA. I fired up OWA on Firefox, logged in, and whoops, no mail in the inbox. This wasn't the way it was before.

The solution seems silly now that I know what happened. It has everything to do with the "Deliver new e-mail to the following location:" setting. So my problem was that it was setup to deliver new messages to my personal folder and what I really wanted was for new messages to be delivered to my Mailbox. To find this setting:

Open Outlook 2003
Click the "Tools" menu and select "E-mail Accounts"
Check out the drop down in the lower left hand corner
Pick "Mailbox - xxxxxxxxxxx"
Clicked "Finish"

The last thing I did was to copy all the messages in my Personal Folders that I wanted in my Mailbox back.

Visual Studio 2005 SP1 security update not recognized by windows update

2007-09-13T08:40:00.000-06:00

Recently, a security update (kb937061) for VS2005 SP1 was released by Microsoft through Windows Update. I opted to apply the patch. However, not two minutes after applying the update, Windows Update popped up again with the same update. I figured that maybe a reboot was in order. So I applied the update and rebooted. Lo and behold! After the reboot Windows Update popped up the update request again!

KB937061 is an update for Crystal Reports for VS2005. If you don't have it installed, which I don't, the updater reports that it has updated properly, but Windows Update does not recognize the update. Currently, to get rid of the notifications, you can do one of two things:

Mark the update to not notify. This causes Windows Update to say that you have hidden updates
Install Crystal Reports for VS2005 from your VS2005 DVD.

I ended up just installing Crystal Reports because I have plenty of disk.

Supposedly Microsoft is working on a fix for the fix.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Management Tools

2007-09-04T11:33:00.000-06:00

In my crusade to only use remote desktop when I absolutely need to, I've downloaded and installed the Exchange Server 2007 Management Tools so that I don't have to use remote desktop to manage our Exchange Server. The download from microsoft is non trivial at 685 MB and 990 MB extracted (we got it in 38 minutes ^_^).

The Management tools require the following pre-requisites

After having installed the pre-requisites, we started up the installer from the Management tools download. It turns out that this download is actually the installer for Exchange Server 2007. Interesting. We only wanted to install the Management Tools so we picked "Custom Exchange Server Installation, clicked next, checked Management Tools and clicked next again. From there it double checked the pre-requisites and started the install.

So now no more having to log into the exchange server I can do it all from the newly installed Exchange Management Console on my workstation.

.Net Memory Usage Explaned

2007-08-30T14:40:00.000-06:00

Have you ever struggled to understand the way that .NET manages memory and uses it? If you've ever used the Task Manager to check out how much memory your simple hello world application is using you know what I'm talking about. Even a simple hello world application will look like it is sucking multiple megabytes when such a simple program really shouldn't.

A friend of mine recently discovered this great blog entry .NET Memory usage - A restaurant analogy by microsoft blogger Tess. Tess uses the analogy of a restaurant to describe the way .NET manages memory. It is well written, easy to read and understand.

Take a look, you'll be amazed that you too can understand .NET Memory management.

Creating Windows 2003 Trusts: The VMWare connection

2007-08-29T08:31:00.000-06:00

We've been testing our software for Citrix compatibility lately and wanted to try out some Domain Trust situations to make sure that we either worked, not work and schedule a new feature, or could document a known issue.

Creating trusts between Windows 2003 domains is usually pretty easy.

Start up MMC
Add the Active Directory Domains & Trusts snap-in
Select your domain, right click and select "properties"
Click on the "Trusts" tab
Click "New Trust" and follow the wizard to create your trust.

This time however, I was having problems. I was creating the trust between a VMWare hosted domain, let's call it P, and a MS Virtual Server hosted domain, let's call it O. When creating the trust, I was getting the error "Local Security Authority is unable to obtain an RPC connection to the domain controller". I verified that DNS was working, RPC services were running on both domain controllers of domain P and O. So what the heck?

Enter Citrix Tools Shared Folders. It appears that if you have Citrix Tools installed with the Shared Folders option, it interferes with the trust creation. The fix is a simple as removing the option from the Citrix Tools install and then creating the trust.

Open Add and Remove Programs
Select Citrix Tools and click Modify
Mark Shared Folders to be removed and complete the wizard.
Create your domain trust

Now we haven't been using the Shared Folders option in Citrix Tools so we haven't added it back in, I suppose that you could re-add it after having created the trust and it'll probably just work. If you know for sure please chime in!

ASP.NET Can't write to output file ... The directory name is invalid

2007-08-24T11:56:00.000-06:00

We just re-purposed an old dual P3 xeon box to be an external web server so that we can test our web application without driving our mission critical hosting costs through the roof with bandwidth charges. This server is an old chassis with three HDDs. We put IIS, .Net frameworks 1.1 and 2.0, and SQL Server 2005 on there. Ran our server installer and were quivering with anticipation of the oodles of tests we were about to perform.

Alas this was not to be. When we browsed to our site, we were greeted with an error "Can't write to output file ... The directory name is invalid." We checked and the asp.net network_service accounts both had full access to the directory mentioned in the error message. After some digging, it turns out that the network_service wasn't having an issue with the named directory. What it really had a problem with was the system defined TEMP and TMP environment variables. They were pointing to some erroneous location that didn't even exist. So the fix is like this.

Open the Advanced Tab in "System Properties"
Click "Environment Variables"
Under "System variables" check out TMP and TEMP. These should point to a proper location. You can either modify them to point to an existing directory or create the directory that they point to.
Configure security so that Network_service has full control on those locations.
Restart IIS

Just so.

Mouse Fix for Ubuntu 7.4 on Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1

2007-08-23T13:35:00.001-06:00

This is the fix and credit belongs where it is due. I'm just posting it here for easy reference.

1. reboot in recovery mode by pressing ESC on the GRUB screen
2. wget http://librarian.launchpad.net/7583925/unsupported-patch-for-87262.sh
3. chmod +x unsupported-patch-for-87262.sh
4. ./unsupported-patch-for-87262.sh
5. reboot

You can find the whole thread on fixing the mouse support on Arcane Code.

Props to paperino.

Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Stopped Working? Missing MSXML6?

2007-08-22T15:22:00.000-06:00

So we've been working with the Visual Studio 8 Beta via the Microsoft provided VHDs, which seems to be working quite nicely except if I'm running that vm on my workstation, that's pretty much all I can run. Any way I rebooted my machine after removing SQL Server 2005 and went to start up my VS8 beta vm and BOOM! It wouldn't start at all. After checking the Virtual Server Event Log we found the following error:

Virtual Server encountered an unexpected error, 0x00000003.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Dang! After some digging it turns out that when I remove SQL Server 2005 it also removed my already registered MS Xml parser 6 dll which is required by Virtual Server... Gah.

So the fix is easy, either download Microsoft Core XML Services 6 from Microsoft or otherwise get a copy of msxml6.dll, copy it into your Windows\System32 directory. On the command line type:

regsvr32 c:\windows\system32\msxml6.dll

And then like magic when you go to start the Virtual Server service it should start up like it should have in the first place.

Thanks for nothing SQL Server installer.

Convert All Your PC Media

2007-07-25T10:12:00.000-06:00

Divx Machine has an awsome app that integrates into Windows XP shell for converting Audio, Video and Images.

http://www.divxmachine.com

Virtual Portable OSs under XP

2007-06-14T15:02:00.000-06:00

I've been looking for an light weight OS that will run off of my 1GB usb flash drive and came across MojoPack. Although that looks really cool and admittedly 30.00 a pop isn't bad, I'm just cheap and don't want to pay if I can get it for free. Introducing PortableApps.com a suite of apps that live and breath on your usb flash drive. Everything that they do is saved on your drive. I'll post back to let you know how it goes.

Know of any other solutions? Post a comment.

Administering Win2003 from XP Without RDP

2007-05-29T08:42:00.000-06:00

I wanted administer Windows 2003 systems from Windows XP with out using remote desktop because it is in remote administration mode and didn't want to tie up rdp sessions. I tried just copying dsa.msc from a Windows 2003 machine to my XP workstation but that failed miserably. The ticket I was looking for was the Windows 2003 Administration Pack.

Download and install to get all the Administrative Tools usually only available on windows 2003 machines such as:

Active Directory Domains and Trusts
Active Directory Management
Active Directory Sites and Services
Active Directory Users and Computers
Authorization Manager
Cluster Administrator

No more need to use remote desktop just to administer AD.

Access ASP.Net Web Service test pages remotely

2007-05-25T08:50:00.000-06:00

I strongly dislike having to RDP into our webserver, thereby tying up an RDP session (only 2 in remote admin mode), to test webservices via the automatically generated test pages to debut whether our app is consuming the data wrong, or the web services are returning the wrong data.

If security is not a concern then you can enable the HTTP-POST and HTTP-GET protocols so that you can get to the test pages remotely not having to be localhost.

From MSDN:

HTTP GET and HTTP POST may be enabled by editing the Web.config file for the vroot where the Web service resides. The following configuration enables both HTTP GET and HTTP POST:


<configuration>
<system.web>
<webservices>
  <protocols>
      <add name="HttpGet"/>
      <add name="HttpPost"/>
  </protocols>
</webservices>
</system.web>
</configuration>

Alternatively, you can enable these protocols for all Web services on the computer by editing the section in Machine.config. The following example enables HTTP GET, HTTP POST, and also SOAP and HTTP POST from localhost:


<protocols>
<add name="HttpSoap"/>
<add name="HttpPost"/>
<add name="HttpGet"/>
<add name="HttpPostLocalhost"/>
<!-- Documentation enables the documentation/test pages -->
<add name="Documentation"/>
</protocols>

Perfection

2006-04-11T16:17:00.000-06:00

I heard something interesting over the weekend. "Perfection is doing what something was designed for." Consider a tooth brush and toilet paper. Tooth brushes are designed to clean teeth, and toilet paper is designed primarily for cleaning the little bits we often don't like to speak of. They both do their job quite well. Most tooth brushes do a decent job of cleaning your teeth and toilet paper... well does a good job at cleaning you too, if the proper techniques are applied. Now if you have them switch places, a tooth brush just isn't designed to clean the unmentionables and toilet paper isn't going to stand up to the abuse of cleaning teeth. You could say that a tooth brush used to brush teeth is "perfect" and accordingly toilet paper used for it's intended purpose seems quite "perfect".

Are you doing what you have been designed for? How often are we slogging through life doing something other than what you have been created for? Is it time to take an inventory of your life to see what is essential and what is optional, what can you ax and what must you keep? As for me, I know there are a lot of things that I should probably let go of that I haven't been able to yet, but I do know that I am a family man and that is a must keep and working to cut off the dead or dying "imperfect" branches.

How about your path to "perfection"?

Focus

2006-02-07T20:57:00.000-07:00

Remember when you were 16 or 17 years old, had your learners license and were taking drivers training? They always told you to look ahead and to focus on where you want to go. While driving, if you focus on where you don't want to go, you'll inevitably end up going there. I can just imagine trying to drive while looking only in the rear view mirror. It would be madness. It occurred to me... Does your career, emotional and spiritual health follow where you are focused?

If we constantly complain about how poopy our bosses/co-workers/jobs are, will we only see the position of failure we have ended up in? If we wallow incessantly in emotional turmoil, will we find the emotional lows overwhelming the highs? If we beat ourselves up in the depths of spiritual darkness, will we find nothing but emptiness inside?

Maybe when we focus on the awful things that life has given us we will inevitably end up in self destruction. But when we look beyond, we will rise above the dark beneath the clouds to discover the bright lights in our lives that we could never see before because we'd been too occupied looking down. And the rear view mirror will only be a reminder of where we once were and drive us to keep looking up and beyond.