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 ‘.NET’ Category

How to hang Visual Studio <= 2013

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/04/15

Simple steps on how to hang visual studio:

  1. Debug a piece that throws an uncatched System.Net.WebException (probably works with many more kinds of exceptions)
  2. In the “WebException was unhandled by user code” pane, press “View Detail…”
  3. In the “View Detail” modal dialog, press the * key on your numeric keypad (this is the “Expand all” command for a TreeView)

This will get you a nice box (and no way to close Visual Studio except killing it from the task manager):

Microsoft Visual Studio is Busy

Microsoft Visual Studio is waiting for an internal operation to complete. If you regularly encouter this delay during normal usage, please report this problem to Microsoft.

There seems to be no bounds checking for the “Expand All” functionality.

–jeroen

Posted in Development, Software Development, Visual Studio 11, Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio and tools | Leave a Comment »

Windows Explorer – copying path/name of files and folders (full/short; regular/UNC; unix/cygwin): Path Copy Copy – Home

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/04/11

This Explorer extension is brilliant: Path Copy Copy – Home.

It works in Windows XP and up (including 7, 8 .x, 20xx Server, etc).

The Open Source is done in Visual Studio with C++.

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in C++, Development, Power User, Software Development, Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio and tools, Windows, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »

.NET UI Automation examples: The managed way to retrieve text under the cursor (mouse pointer) (via: The Old New Thing)

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/04/10

Some interesting UI Automation examples: The managed way to retrieve text under the cursor (mouse pointer).

  • find the text under the mouse cursor
  • run a the calc command
  • showing automation properties under the mouse cursor

–jeroen

via: The managed way to retrieve text under the cursor (mouse pointer) – The Old New Thing – Site Home – MSDN Blogs.

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

Big Ball of Mud | Jeroen on software

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/04/09

Just bumped into this Big Ball of Mud article by (another) Jeroen on software (this Jeroen is Jeroen De Dauw).

It is a very nice article with annotations on the (very old, but still very prevalent Big Ball of Mud design pattern of which a lot of software projects suffer).

I didn’t know about the design pattern yet, but have seen it in so many places, and even helped quite a few of them to become less big, and contain less mud. If the article and paper are tool long, you can read a WikiPedia BBM abstract.

I’m glad that the .NET/Delphi based suite of projects I landed on recently – though containing quite a bit of legacy – is different. Still a lot of improvements to be made, but it is very manageable.

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, Delphi, Development, Software Development | Tagged: | 1 Comment »

The C language specification describes an abstract computer, not a real one – The Old New Thing – Site Home – MSDN Blogs

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/04/09

Interesting read:

The C language specification describes an abstract computer, not a real one – The Old New Thing – Site Home – MSDN Blogs.

In other words: any language that merges null behaviour in the underlying storage will have a problem somwehere.

So if you want to have true nullable types, your null flag should be stored outside the underlying storage.

The .NET framework 2 and up, most database management systems and many other environment support that.

But most languages don’t support it for pointer types. So there will be portions of address spaces either inaccessible, or only accessible when skipping the null pointer checks.

Note that the thread above contains some very interesting bits, for instance this one:

Matt 28 Mar 2013 5:58 PM #

@MarkY “Dereferencing null is undefined?  Cool!  I thought it was guaranteed to crash, just like a false assertion or something.  So crashing is the OS guarantee, not the language guarantee apparently.”

Nope. It’s not an OS guarantee either. The OS won’t ever normally allocate memory at address zero, but there’s nothing to stop you telling it to. Try doing “VirtualAlloc(1, 4096, MEM_RESERVE | MEM_COMMIT, PAGE_READWRITE)” on your pre-Windows8 machine.

In fact, this is the reason why null-dereferences in kernel mode are often exploitable as elevation of privilege attacks. The null-page is mappable and within the user-addressable region of memory, so if the kernel dereferences a null pointer, it reads attacker controllable data.

And btw, this is the reason why on Linux and Windows8+ you can’t map the null-page.

–jeroen

via: The C language specification describes an abstract computer, not a real one – The Old New Thing – Site Home – MSDN Blogs.

Posted in .NET, .NET 2.0, .NET 3.0, .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, .NET 4.5, Borland C++, Borland Pascal, C, C#, C# 2.0, C# 3.0, C# 4.0, C# 5.0, C++, C++ Builder, Database Development, Delphi, Development, Pascal, Quick Pascal, Software Development, Turbo Pascal, VB.NET, VB.NET 10.0, VB.NET 11.0, VB.NET 8.0, VB.NET 9.0 | Leave a Comment »

Getting Microsoft Product Keys back from the registry (via StackOverflow and various other sources)

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/04/02

Every once in a while, someone hoses their computer far enough that it has to be reinstalled, but the original Microsoft product keys are misplaced, and some creepy anti-virus tool disallows the running of standard product key recovery tools like nirsoft’s.

Well, there is enough sourcecode that does recover it, just look for any of these strings:

Some hits:

The below full executables can trigger a virus warning (ordered from less often to most often):

–jeroen

 

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

TFS/Visual Studio: View Pending Changes in Other Workspaces

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/04/01

For my reminder list: lots of people forget to checkin/undo changes in TFS of stuff automatically checked out by Visual Studio when investigating a problem in their program.

This shows how to view changes made by other users (always in other workspaces because they are not you).

You can do it from Visual Studio, of with the tf command line tool.

View Pending Changes in Other Workspaces.

–jeroen

Posted in Development, Software Development, Source Code Management, TFS (Team Foundation System), Visual Studio 11, Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio and tools | Leave a Comment »

Charset Detector :: Summary

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/03/31

In case I ever need it: [Wayback] Charset Detector :: Summary.

It is empirical (you cannot 100% reliably find out what character set / encoding a file is), but has a good score.

A similar problem is detecting the language. There too you can get a good score.

–jeroen

via:

Posted in .NET, C#, Delphi, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Delphi XE5, Development, Encoding, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

smallestdotnet.com via: shanselman/SmallestDotNet (thanks @shanselman)

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/03/29

Brilliant piece of open source:

SmallestDotNetSmallestDotNet.com is a single page site that does one thing. It tells you the smallest, easiest download you’d need to get the .NET Framework on your system.

Even on Mac OS X it is helpful and recommends Mono and on iOS it recommends looking at MonoTouch.

Thanks Scott Hanselman for making this available!

–jeroen

via:

Posted in .NET, .NET 1.x, .NET 2.0, .NET 3.0, .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, .NET 4.5, Apple, Development, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, MacBook, MacBook Retina, MacBook-Air, MacBook-Pro, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Power User, Software Development, Windows, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista, Windows XP | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

WinForms Container Controls 5: FlowLayoutPanel

Posted by jpluimers on 2014/03/24

When using a FlowLauyoutPanel, I always forget on which control the FlowBreak design time property / SetFlowBreak run time method operates.

Then I always end up writing a short demo program like Container Controls 5: FlowLayoutPanel.

It operates after the control on which you set it.

It is like text in a Word Processor: it breaks after the place where you set the break. Read the rest of this entry »

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