Posted by jpluimers on 2012/08/20
Hoping this is the most recent version: Download: Office 2003 Update: Redistributable Primary Interop Assemblies – Microsoft Download Center – Confirmation.
http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/3/a/83a40b5a-5050-4940-bcc4-7943e1e59590/O2003PIA.EXE
–jeroen
Posted in .NET, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/08/18
A question like How do you clear your MRU list in Visual Studio? is why I still like Stack Overflow.
The answers explain how to solve this in a version neutral way, including other MRU lists, and as a bonus point you to handy Visual Studio tools.
–jeroen
via: registry – How do you clear your MRU list in Visual Studio? – Stack Overflow.
Posted in Development, Software Development, Visual Studio 11, Visual Studio 2002, Visual Studio 2003, Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio and tools | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/08/16
The .NET 4.5 beta has a bug that manifests itself as an AV or an FatalExecutionEngineError in certain circumstances of String.Empty handling, which is fixed by the .NET 4.5 RTM that shipped earlier this month followed by Visual Studio 2010 RTM today.
Thanks both to the original poster for reporting it here, and to Michael for his excellent analysis.
My counterparts on the CLR tried to reproduce the bug here and discovered that it reproduces on the “Release Candidate” version of the 64 bit CLR, but not on the final “Released To Manufacturing” version, which had a number of bug fixes post-RC. (The RTM version will be available to the public on August 15th, 2012.)
They therefore believe this to be the same issue as the one that was reported here:
Many apologies for the error.
–jeroen
via: c# – What’s the cause of this strange bug? – Stack Overflow.
Posted in .NET, .NET 4.5, C#, C# 4.0, C# 5.0, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/08/16
If anyone knows a better solution than string search/replace, please let me know:
I’m required to write a tool that can handle the below XML fragment that is not well formed as it contains XML declarations in the middle of the stream.
The company already has these kinds files in use for a long time, so there is no option to change the format.
There is no source code available that does the parsing, and the platform of choice for new tooling is .NET 4 or newer preferably with C#.
This is how the fragments look like: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in .NET, .NET 2.0, .NET 3.0, .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, C#, C# 2.0, C# 3.0, C# 4.0, Development, Software Development, XML, XML/XSD | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/08/15
A few weeks ago, Bill Karwin did a must watch webinar on the prevention SQL Injection titled “SQL Injection Myths and Fallacies“.
Bill Karwin (twitter, new blog, old blog, Amazon) is famous for much work in the SQL database community, including InterBase/Firebird, mySQL, Oracle and many more.
He also:
Anyway, his webinar is awesome. Be sure to get the slides, watch the replay, and read the questions follow up.
Watching it you’ll get a better understanding of defending against SQL injection.
A few very valuable points he made: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in .NET, .NET 3.5, .NET 4.5, .NET ORM, ASP.NET, Batch-Files, C#, C# 1.0, C# 2.0, C# 3.0, C# 4.0, C# 5.0, C++, Cloud Development, COBOL, CommandLine, Database Development, Delphi, Delphi for PHP, Delphi x64, Delphi XE2, Development, EF Entity Framework, F#, Firebird, FireMonkey, History, InterBase, iSeries, Java, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Jet OLE DB, LINQ, LLBLGen, MEF, Microsoft Surface, Mobile Development, PHP, PowerShell, Prism, Scripting, SharePoint, SilverLight, Software Development, SQL, SQL Server, SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2012, SQL Server 7, VB.NET, VBS, Visual Studio 11, Visual Studio 2002, Visual Studio 2003, Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio and tools, Web Development, Windows Azure, WinForms, WPF, XAML, xCode/Mac/iPad/iPhone/iOS/cocoa | 1 Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/08/09
A while ago, I needed a way to defer settings to environment variables in a .NET application written in C#.
The easiest way to do this is to keep the same syntax as for expanding environment variables in batch files: use the %ENVIRONMENTVARIABLE% syntax (not the delayed expansion !ENVIRNMENTVARIABLE! syntax).
The reason is that there is a Windows API function ExpandEnvironmentStrings that handles all the expansion magic.
Don’t P/Invoke that function yourself, as there is already a very nice Environment.ExpandEnvironmentVariables wrapper since the .NET framework 1.1 that handles all the gory details for you (like marshalling the strings, making sure that lpDst contains enough space for the expansion).
–jeroen
Posted in .NET, C#, C# 1.0, C# 2.0, C# 3.0, C# 4.0, C# 5.0, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/08/08
CodeRush has a nice refactoring to extract a C# string into a resource.
There is a small glitch that when you press undo after that, and there was no string file in your project, then the empty resource file is not always saved.
Upon building your project, you will get an error like this:
---------------------------
Microsoft Visual Studio
---------------------------
The item 'Resources.resx' does not exist in the project directory. It may have been moved, renamed or deleted.
---------------------------
OK
---------------------------
The Resources.resx file is not visible in your Solution Explorer, so you cannot delete it there.
You have to manually edit your .csproj file and remove the Resources.resx reference there.
I’ve had this happen only a couple of times, and cannot yet reproduce this. Until I can reproduce, this is a workaround to remedy the effects.
–jeroen
Posted in .NET, C#, C# 1.0, C# 2.0, C# 3.0, C# 4.0, C# 5.0, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/08/02
Your CodeRush SolutionCache folder (which is in your roaming profile, how bad!) can grow to multi-gigabyte proportions as it is not auto-cleaned.
This can lead to very long times for doing logon/logoff in a corporate network.
Mike Christian describes how to clean it.
Note that as of a few versions ago, the AssemblyCache is now a subfolder inside the SolutionCache folder.
Another reason to clean it is when CodeRush starts acting weird.
–jeroen
via: The Curly Brace: How to Clear DevExpress CodeRush Assembly and Solution Cache.
Posted in .NET, C#, Development, Software Development, VB.NET, Visual Studio 11, Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio and tools | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/08/01
Computing on not so common platforms it so much fun, especially when you can use familiar tools for it.
A couple of years ago, I did a fun project with an USB WebCam, a Pololu USB servo controller, two servo motors, a servo relay and a laser pointer. The device would point the laser pointer at the biggest moving object in the WebCam view, and flash the laser pointer at it.
All code was C# running on Windows.
Basically there are two classes on “small” devices that run .NET code (apart from smartphones and tablets):
This might be a chance to lift it to a new level and embed everything in one device (:
The cool thing about the .NET Micro Framework is that you can do real time stuff.
–jeroen
via:
Posted in .NET, Arduino, Development, Hardware Development, Raspberry Pi, Software Development | 2 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2012/07/31
From the category cloud it is hard to see that the categories are organized as a hierarchy. The combobox on the right shows that, but does not have room to properly show the hierarchy. Since WordPress.com does not allow you to deploy your own code, I worked around it in this way using a small .NET C# console program:
Future posts will show more logic on how to handle the imported information, and generate nice category overviews. Preliminary source code is at the BeSharp.net source repository.
The HTML is not fully accurate (see my post on HTML and XML escapes from last week), but it is fairly easy to extract. Most web browsers allow you to view the source of your web page. Do that, then search for “All Categories”. Now you see HTML like this:
</pre> <h2 class="widgettitle">All categories</h2> <pre><select class="postform" name="cat"><option value="-1">Select Category</option></select><select class="postform" name="cat"><option class="level-0" value="256">About (66)</option></select><select class="postform" name="cat"><option class="level-1" value="64"> Personal (60)</option></select><select class="postform" name="cat"><option class="level-2" value="20254983"> Adest Musica (7)</option></select><select class="postform" name="cat"><option class="level-2" value="32122"> Certifications (2)</option></select><select class="postform" name="cat">...</select><select class="postform" name="cat"><option class="level-0" value="756">Comics (3)</option></select><select class="postform" name="cat"><option class="level-0" value="780">Development (473)</option></select><select class="postform" name="cat"><option class="level-1" value="872460"> Database Development (55)</option></select><select class="postform" name="cat">...</select><select class="postform" name="cat"><option class="level-0" value="9280">User Experience (3)</option></select>
I don’t need the H2 heading line, but the rest I do need to generate XML from. I saved the HTML into a text file for processing by the console app.
The HTML contains loads of , but XML does not allow for that entity. So the & ampersand needs to be escaped into &This also solves other uses of & in the HTML. The rest of the HTML is XHTML compliant, so does not require change, which results into this C# conversion method:
private static string toXml(string inputHtml)
{
string result = inputHtml.Replace("&", "&");
return result;
}
Given my comparison of tools for generating XSD from XML, so I used the XmlForAsp XML Schema generator, with the “Separate Complex Types” option.
(Note: I will link to the XSD before/after, as WordPress – yet again – screws the XSD sourcecode in the post; this should do for now). That gives me XSD like this (XML is also at pastebin):
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <xsd:schema attributeFormDefault="unqualified" elementFormDefault="qualified" version="1.0" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"> <xsd:element name="select" type="selectType" /> <xsd:complexType name="selectType"> <xsd:sequence> <xsd:element maxOccurs="unbounded" name="option" type="optionType" /> </xsd:sequence> <xsd:attribute name="name" type="xsd:string" /> <xsd:attribute name="id" type="xsd:string" /> <xsd:attribute name="class" type="xsd:string" /> </xsd:complexType> <xsd:complexType name="optionType"> <xsd:attribute name="value" type="xsd:int" /> </xsd:complexType> </xsd:schema>
Which is not complete, but gives a good start. The actual XSD it needs to be like this with a more elaborate optionType complex type that also defines it’s own content as deriving from xsd:string, and adds the class attribute (XML is also at pastebin):
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <xsd:schema attributeFormDefault="unqualified" elementFormDefault="qualified" version="1.0" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"> <xsd:element name="select" type="selectType" /> <xsd:complexType name="selectType"> <xsd:sequence> <xsd:element maxOccurs="unbounded" name="option" type="optionType" /> </xsd:sequence> <xsd:attribute name="name" type="xsd:string" /> <xsd:attribute name="id" type="xsd:string" /> <xsd:attribute name="class" type="xsd:string" /> </xsd:complexType> <xsd:complexType name="optionType"> <xsd:simpleContent> <xsd:extension base="xsd:string"> <xsd:attribute name="class" type="xsd:string" /> <xsd:attribute name="value" type="xsd:int" /> </xsd:extension> </xsd:simpleContent> </xsd:complexType> </xsd:schema>
You can generate C# wrapper classes using the XSD.exe tool that ships with Visual Studio, but XSD.exe is hard to use, is hard to integrate into Visual Studio (despite Microsoft Connect request for it), the XSD.exe generated code still needs work for deserializing, and XSD.exe has very limited generation options (heck, after it changed from .NET 1.x to 2.0, it hasn’t been updated for about a decade). XSD2Code has some great reviews, to I used that in stead. And indeed, very well integrates into Visual Studio 2010, and generates very nice C#, especially when you use the options (see also the screenshot on the right):
That way, loading the HTML, converting it to XML, then deserializing it into object instances is as simple as this:
string inputFileName = args[0];
string inputHtml = getHtml(inputFileName);
string xml = toXml(inputHtml);
selectType select = selectType.Deserialize(xml);
More on actually working with the loaded instances in the next episode, including the great benefit of XSD2Code: it generates C# code as partial classes.
–jeroen
Posted in .NET, C#, C# 4.0, C# 5.0, Development, SocialMedia, Software Development, Usability, User Experience (ux), Web Development, WordPress, WordPress, XML, XML escapes, XML/XSD, XSD | 2 Comments »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 