The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘Development’ Category

Two great articles from ploeh blog on temporal compatibility (Rangers and Zookeepers, Zookeepers must become Rangers)

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/12/19

Must read: why you want temporal compatibility.

  1. ploeh blog – Zookeepers must become Rangers.
  2. ploeh blog – Rangers and Zookeepers.

–jeroen

Posted in Development, Software Development | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

batch file example: Redirect stderr and stdout through pipe

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/12/19

I knew that 2>&1 was needed to redirect both stderr and stdout, but for piping, it cannot be at the end of the line. This works in the categories shown at the bottom of the post.

Rob van der Woude again to the rescue in redirection:

(4) Redirecting both standard output and standard error to the same file or device is done by adding 2>&1 to the command line. This will only work in OS/2 and NT, not in MS-DOS.
Where you put 2>&1 is rather critical. It will only do what it is supposed to do when placed at the end of the command line (as Jennie Walker pointed out to me) or right before the next pipe ( | ).

Example: batch file that checks if a few NarrowCast machines are indeed on-line and logged on with the right user.

It uses PsLoggedOn to verify who is logged on, and Explorer to show a hidden share.

The pipe is needed to verify there is indeed a domain user logged on.

@echo off
  for %%m in (Machine1 Machine2 Machine3) do call :show %%m
  goto :pause

:show
  echo %1
  %~dp0PsLoggedOn -L \\%1 2>&1 | find /I "MYDOMAIN\"
  start explorer /e,\\%1\NarrowCast$
  goto :end

:pause
  pause
:end

–jeroen

Posted in Batch-Files, Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 7, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, Windows XP | 4 Comments »

Happy 25th birthday Perl!

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/12/18

Wow, Perl turned 25 today, it seems my first use was like yesterday!

–jeroen

via: The First Twenty-Five Years – The Perl Foundation.

Posted in Development, Perl, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

.NET/C# – How to create a file and its parent directories in one method call? (via: Stack Overflow)

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/12/18

Ever since .NET 1 there has been no built-in way to create a file including all its parent directories.

Hence small FileHelper class far below.

The fundament of the class is this CreateUnderlyingDirectory method, that uses System.IO.Path.GetDirectoryName to obtain the parent directory of a path, and then System.IO.Directory.CreateDirectory to create it (and any parent directories) if needed.

        public static void CreateUnderlyingDirectory(string path)
        {
            string directoryPath = Path.GetDirectoryName(path);
            Directory.CreateDirectory(directoryPath); // NOP if it exists, will create all parent directories if not
        }

A few helper methods get you a StreamWriter either empty/appended, or always empty Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, .NET 3.5, .NET 4.5, C#, C# 2.0, C# 3.0, C# 4.0, C# 5.0, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

.NET/MSBuild: A solution for Skipped Build: Project: MyProject, Configuration: Debug Any CPU; Project not selected to build for this solution configuration

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/12/12

One of our solutions would not completely build.

An console application that was hardly used, was not built.

No warnings or hints in the “Error List”.

This is what the build log would show:

------ Skipped Build: Project: App404.UI, Configuration: Debug Any CPU ------
Project not selected to build for this solution configuration
========== Build: 21 succeeded or up-to-date, 0 failed, 1 skipped ==========

None of the suggestions at the Stack Overflow question visual studio 2005: skipping builds for unknown reason? would work (not even running msbuild with the highest verbosity level, you get so much information that it is impossible to weed the useful from the useless information).

Luckily, About | WishMesh pointed me in the right direction: inspect your solution file for anomalies. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, C#, C# 4.0, Development, Software Development, Visual Studio 11, Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio and tools | Leave a Comment »

x64 debugging on Windows: usually not directly by the IDE, but trough a debug helper process (msvsmon / PAServer / dbkw64_16_0)

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/12/07

While developing x64 applications, most Windows development tools are actually running in x86 mode, and use an intermediate x64 layer to debug the x64 process even for local debugging.

For Visual Studio 2008 and up, this is msvsmon.exe (for Delphi XE2 and up it is PAServer.exe for remote debugging or [WayBack] dbkw64_16_0.exe for local debugging, other tools use a similar mechanism).

The fun thing with Visual Studio is that when msvsmon.exe fails to load locally, you get a misleading error message:

[Microsoft Visual Studio]
Error while trying to run project: Unable to start debugging.
The Microsoft Visual Studio Remote Debugging Monitor has been closed on the remote machine.
[OK]

I found two workarounds myself :

  1. Kill msvsmon.exe if it is running but Visual Studio cannot talk to it
  2. Restart Visual Studio if it cannot start msvsmon.exe

I learned the why from Steve Steiner: he posted the StackOverflow answer explaining msvsmon.exe is also used for local x64 debugging.

Delphi XE2 and up sometimes have a similar cryptic message (I forgot to jolt it down, next time I come across it, I will edit this blog post) and usually killing PAServer.exe or dbkw63*.exe or restarting the IDE solves it.

–jeroen

via:

Posted in .NET, Debugging, Delphi, Delphi x64, Development, QC, Remote Debugging, Software Development, Visual Studio 11, Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio and tools | Leave a Comment »

C#: any c# – .NET Enumeration allows comma in the last field – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/12/06

Thanks Nick Craver for answering this on StackOverflow.

Array initializers can be specified in field declarations (§17.4), local variable declarations (§15.5.1), and
array creation expressions (§14.5.10.2).

The array initializer can end in a comma, which makes some things way easier (boy, I wish I had this in other programming languages).

From Nick’s answer:

It has no special meaning, just the way the compiler works, it’s mainly for this reason:

[FlagsAttribute]
public enum DependencyPropertyOptions : byte
{
Default = 1,
ReadOnly = 2,
Optional = 4,
DelegateProperty = 32,
Metadata = 8,
NonSerialized = 16,
//EnumPropertyIWantToCommentOutEasily = 32
}
[/language]By comment request: This info comes straight out of the ECMA C# Specification (Page 363/Section 19.7)

“Like Standard C++, C# allows a trailing comma at the end of an array-initializer. This syntax provides flexibility in adding or deleting members from such a list, and simplifies machine generation of such lists.”

–jeroen

via c# – .NET Enumeration allows comma in the last field – Stack Overflow.

Posted in .NET, C#, C# 1.0, C# 2.0, C# 3.0, C# 4.0, C# 5.0, C++, Delphi, Development, Java, JavaScript/ECMAScript, PHP, Software Development, VB.NET | 5 Comments »

If you think CSV is easy; think again!

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/12/05

Lots of people think CSV is easy: it’s just a bunch of values separated with commas. But in practice it is not. Various reasons can make CSV very hard, especially since “CSV” is not a single, well-defined format. As always importing is always harder than exporting. A few reasons that make it hard:

A few links that helped me a lot getting input and output of CSV right in C#:

Thanks to Jabulaza:

–jeroen

via: Comma-separated values – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, CSV, Development, EBCDIC, Encoding, Event, Software Development | 4 Comments »

.NET/C#/WinForms: small code snippet to enable Ctrl-A for select all in a single/multi-line TextBox

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/12/04

WinForms does not automatically enable Ctrl-A as “Select All” action.

The below code snippet works when you bind it to the KeyDown event of a TextBox (actually the event is on Control).

The e.SuppressKeyPress = true suppresses the bell sound in a multiline TextBox, as e.Handled = true won’t.

        private void textBox_KeyDown_HandleCtrlAToSelectAllText(object sender, KeyEventArgs e)
        {
            TextBox textBox = sender as TextBox;
            if (null != textBox)
            {
                if (e.Control && e.KeyCode == Keys.A)
                {
                    textBox.SelectAll();
                    e.SuppressKeyPress = true;
                }
            }
        }

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, .NET 1.x, .NET 2.0, .NET 3.0, .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, .NET 4.5, C#, C# 1.0, C# 2.0, C# 3.0, C# 4.0, C# 5.0, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Be aware of the three valued logic when NULL gets involved: SQL Server: JOIN vs IN vs EXISTS – the logical difference

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/11/29

Great post: SQL Server: JOIN vs IN vs EXISTS – the logical difference.

Be aware of the three valued logic when NULL gets involved.

EXIST comes closes to what you expect.

And be aware that with IN, you cannod pass one parameter containing more than 1 IN value: sql server 2005 – Passing multiple values for one SQL parameter – Stack Overflow..

–jeroen

Posted in Database Development, Development, SQL, SQL Server, SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2012, SQL Server 7 | Leave a Comment »