I am getting settled in my new project, and it only took me a week to get rights to install anything on the laptop! A lot of people would say "Wow, a billable week with no work!" but personally, the days just drag by. I'd much rather be buried in code. I did make some good use of the time though, digging into what documentation I could find and creating a new Functional Specification Document. I did finally get my rights, so tomorrow will be spent installing things and looking into code again.

I did get some reading done though, and I saw that in VS2010 C# will have optional and named parameters. I know the VB crowd (of which I come from) will chuckle a little at that, as that feature has been around forever. Until now, it's required C# developers to overload functions. Nothing Earth-shattering about this feature, other than as part of it, C# will support named parameters and default values as well as part of the implementation (the default values are part of the defiinition of the function).

There's a pretty useful feature (IMHO) in the .Net 2.0 Exception object which I hadn't noticed before. The Exception object contains a new Data interface, which is essentially an IDictionary for applying additional values to the exception object. I am currently using it with my integration of the new VS2005 Enterprise Library into our framework.

I want to log exceptions to a database, but I have found it useful in the past to have an Error #. In the old days (VB 6, for example) I could usually look at the error number of an application and tell exactly what the problem was. When .Net came into being, we lost the error number, and there was no easy way to get around it. You could roll your own exception classes of course and add these properties, but this is only a limited solution because other exception handlers wouldn't be capable of handling the additional features by default.

Now this feature is going to allow me to take advantage of error numbers by classifying each exception type, and appending an error number to the exception object. I can use this information in my database to classify and group errors by type to identify weak areas in an application as well. Not Earth shattering, but still a useful feature full of all kinds of possibilities.

So it has been hit or miss posting here, but I am trying to correct it by bringing on some additional help. I set up a new blog, developernation.net, and begun getting some content on there. Likely I'll crosspost on here too (my content anyways) but likely most new entries are going to be there first. I figured if I could get someone else on there helping doing some content, it will have more regular posts. This blog will continue, just a lag a few days on the content of theother site, and contain more personal observations.

So swing on by and pop in. I've started off with a bang, and I am in the process of posting a web service design I created and tested which handles paging and sorting of data on the server, which my initial tests have shown to be highly efficient. I am walking through the entire design, and by the end of the weekend I hope to have the series done and the code posted. If not, you can wait a few days and I will post it all here as well.

Thanks!

A year ago, I completed my MCSD for .Net. One of the attractive
benefits of this certification (as well as the MCDBA) was a $500
discount on a one-year MSDN Universal subscription during the first
year of certification.

Although the MCSD benefits page still lists this benefit
( http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/mcsd/benefits.asp ), they
quietly removed it as of April 2005. The text on the page still
states the following:
Rebates or discounts on a one-year subscription to MSDN during the
first year of certification.

If you call or write to get the certificate as I did, you'll get the
terse response it's no longer available, and they just haven't
updated the site. I figured I would help them get the word out since
they didn't deem it important enough to change on their site or
announce. It would be a shame if anyone expected this benefit based
on the MS web site information.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Above is what I posted to our local .Net community group on Yahoo. Now I am going to add some personal comments. Once again, MS has dropped the ball in supporting the developer community. Earlier this year, MS announced the MSDN Universal would not include the new .Net Team Development system (or some name like that -- I am too lazy to go look it up). Fortunately, enough of an uproar went out that they reversed that decision. Their waning support of VB also caused a petition/uproar. Likely, since the MCSD/MCDBA community is a lot smaller, there isn't likely to be a huge outcry on this issue.

This is a HUGE mistake on MS's behalf. Someone that is likely to spend the extra time and money to get certifications are the ones MS should really cater to. There's always been a criticism that the certifications are worthless, and that benefit alone made it real easy to justify spending the money on books, training materials and exam costs for achieving the certification. I won't argue the merits of the certifications here, but I have a lot of them -- MCP, MCDBA, MCSD for VB, MCSD for .Net (C#), and MCAD. Will I continue? I may have to given I am an Independent Contractor and it helps to get me in the door. Will I recommend it to someone not in my position? Not likely.

Don't get me wrong, the MSDN Universal is still a great deal. My disgust over this situation is that the benefit is still listed, as well as no announcement in April 2005 when they made this decision (or if they did, I sure didn't see it). I have been one of the most stalwart supporters of Microsoft over the years, and I have personally been involved in projects which have generated millions in licensing revenues for Microsoft in the last 10 years. The past 1.5 years I have watched MS anger the core base of developers.

I think this is indicative of the internal problems at MS, and why Google is going to be a viable competitor to MS. In a paraphrase of the words of Stephen King, and the Dark Tower series, MS has forgotten the face of their father. One of the reasons MS dominated the market over Apple was that MS supported developers way beyond the norm. In the name of profit, I think we are seeing this slowly change.

Once again I have disappeared from blogging. Let's face it, I rarely get to do it. I also need to upgrade this DasBlog but I have been so busy I haven't been able to do that, even though someone kindly wrote me and told me it would solve my spam comment problem. Maybe this weekend...

But I wanted to blog because I found a weird problem, with a weirder solution. I wrote a Windows service in C# which periodically loads some data, based on the time since the last load. So dates are a bit important in this process.

First, the cryptic message: “Internal Query Processor Error: The query processor could not produce a query plan. Contact your primary support provider for more information”.  A Google search turned up several solutions, but most of them relied on a service patch. What's wierder is that the error was intermittant. The procs would run fine in Query Analyzer, but not from C#.

Finally, I tried the unlikely. Instead of passing in my parameters as  DateTime values, I passed them in as SqlDbType.Varchar, and in the proc made sure and converted them to DateTime values. Lo and behold, the problem went away.....Go figure!

Extremes in anything (IMHO) are typically not good. Extreme temperatures, religeons, attitudes -- you name it, likely there is a downside. In programming, it's no different. Now, while not a big fan of Extreme Programming, there's a couple of extremes from it that bother me. One is that you shouldn't include documentation. The other, which I suspect  was someone's personal preference, was not to use the “Region” directives in C# (or I guess VB.Net either). Here's a little history...

This guy was a former Java programmer working for a large chip manufacturer. He was supposed to be a XP guru, so he was transferred to the local site to help a team in it's transition to the XP methodology.

Strike 1 -- he knew the methodology well, but he was by no means an expert in the language of the group. Why was this a strike? I guess technological bias in that his preferences to his other language directed him to want to make the .Net environment the same as a java environment.

Strike 2 -- It was his way or the highway. The environment was such that one or two developers had 95% of the say on development decisions. Part of the reason for this is that wacky trend in which everyone is ranked from best to worst in terms of raises, options and promotion (for more info what I am talking about, read this article, which is the same process -- Saying Goodbye). No one would ever argue with the two for fear of getting a bad ranking for being considered a troublemaker.

Regardless, I digress, but I do think it's important to understand why sometimes these extremes come about in an environment. I was a contractor brought on to bring some quick wins for a project, and it was my first (and likely last) venture into the XP methodology. They needed code, and they needed it fast.

One problem I addressed was the lack of uniformity on the project. We had three developers, which meant three different styles of programming. Even with XP, that meant one of us was alone, and the other two would spend the pair time arguning over which style was a standard and best (even though standards existed -- they were just never used because of informal rules imposed by the 2 'chiefs'). I decided to create a template which would standardize (and speed up) our development. I organized the code within the controls into regions, and deployed them onto our machines with anticipation I easily saved our team15-20 minutes each time we created a new control.

Alas, it was scrapped instantly. Why? Well, it seems in my templates, I placed the code into logical “regions” -- e.g. Public Properties, Public Methods, Private Methods, etc. I was “informed” (even though I had been using regions for a couple of months now) that regions were not allowed, because all they did was hide bad code. WHAT???!! Well, I liked the contract, and knew the results if I stood up to them, so I bit my tongue and moved on. It has bothered me ever since, but I never took the time to formulate an argument as to why regions are actually a good idea.

Why bring this up today after a year has passed? Well, I was coding something, and the constructor was hidden by a region. I was thinking “Hmm, if we just left the constructors out of regions, it would be easy to read, because the regions would hide the internal implementations I don't care about, yet at a glance I can see how to instantiate the object” (hmm, I think they call that encapsulation) and use it. Now that right there justifies the use of regions alone.... I can actually think of a lot of reasons to use regions, and I do it religeously where my client has no opition about it.

Just a flashback from the past.... anyone got a counter opinion? Regardless, it just goes to show extreme anything typically isn't a good thing in my mind. You have to be flexible in your approach to life if you plan on growing...

Tentatively, my current project is set to end in October. No big deal there, as I have had absolutely no bench days in the past 10 years as an Independent Contractor. In fact, during most of those 10 years I have been working 55-80+ hours per week and having a great time doing it. I don't do the book thing or magazine article thing because quite frankly, I don't have time because I am busy doing billable work which pays a lot more. I havn't needed self-promotion thing either because almost all my business comes from referrals from current or past customers.

Then along come kids, and dang if you don't suddenly want to spend more time at home and improve their quality of life (and mine). My current project wants to bring me on full time, and we've had some preliminary discussions on it, and I am willing to take the pay cut in my pay for one simple thing: I want to work remotely and raise my kids in the country. Their attitude is like mine, which is that should be fine since I have a strong work ethic and can get things done, what does it matter where I work as long as I have a phone and internet connection. However, there are data security concerns and management concerns which would need to be overcome.

I have plenty of time, since barring disaster, the contract won't be over until October sometime. But I figure I will start self-promoting just in case someone from a company who doesn't mind remote employees stumbles on this blog. Towards October, I will go full bore trying to close something out, and in the meantime I plan on blogging much more so I can display what talents I can bring to the table.

If any companies out there that come up on this, and want a great employee (C#/VB developer with lots of SQL Server and architect/designer/coding and full-life cycle development) that brings a lot of experience, a great professional attitude and presence as well as the ability to code like the wind (and good code at that..), then drop me a line and let's talk.

Here's a resume just in case..

If you are using DIME attachments, and you want to use them in a Windows client, this tip will save you some time. I created a File Upload/Download web service for a client I am currently working with, and until this week is was used solely on a web front end. However, there was a request for a Windows client, so I set out to create one using the same code.

All seemed well, until I went to compile. My Web Service is called FileService (for the purposes of this discussion), and in order the use DIME attachments after setting a web reference, you need to use the FileServiceWse version of the web reference (the wse class). The problem was, one wasn't generated in the proxy. I debated using the proxy for the web application, but then decided to try something a little different.

I removed the existing Web Reference, added a reference to System.Web to my project, then added the Web Reference again. Viola! My wse version was available now, and my code compiles! I decided to post this to save someone else a bit of time, as well as a reminder to myself in the future.

I have a large ASP.Net project I am working on, and the solution contains about 6 projects. Periodically, it won't compile, but when I look in the Task List there are no errors listed. After a lot of trial and error, I finally found a solution which restores the missing error notations, so that I can fix the problem and move on.

Right-click in the “Task” screen, and select the “Show Tasks/Comments” option. Try compiling, and of course it will fail again. Then, right-click on the “Task” screen again, and select the “Build Errors” option, and they should appear. It seems to work fairly consistantly so I think this “workaround” may actually work.

As an alternative (although not as easy to work with), you can just look at the output window, and filter through the text output. Take your pick, you should be able to see what the problem is!

ADDENDUM: It happened again, and these steps didn't work exactly. To make it work, try to compile again between “right-clicks” and they should appear.

I am currently trying to go through a Code Review at a large bank to get our code approved for release on the internet. One thing that came up was in some situations, we are displaying the raw exception message which was listed as a no-no, which I disagree with. While it's not particularly informative to the user which is potentially an issue, I can't see where “Invalid use of null” is going to be particularly useful to a hacker, but to a developer, that tidbit may help identify the problem when the user calls for help (good application logging aside in this example). Ironically, when errors weren't handled because the developer forgot, this passed code review.

So my intent was to enumerate all the default error messages to determine if there are any which would be particularly helpful to a hacker. While I am still looking to find or create an application which will enumerate all the default messages that .New throws out, I did come across a great article which lists the various error handling philosophies, and tries to weigh out the pros and cons of each. Here's where to get this pearl of wisdom:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnbda/html/exceptdotnet.asp

One of the things I use this blog for is to keep track of tips which I may need while out at the client site. I have a fairly extensive CodeLib library I use, but for some reason, I didn't have this in my library.

If you're new to javascript, which I am definitely still in the learning stages of, at some point you are going to access the control which called a function. I did a few searches, and it turns out, unless you know what you are looking for, it's tough to do a search like “javascript determining control which called a function” and similar searches. So here goes, and hopefully this simple tip will save another developer a little time. It IS a basic function, I will be the first to admit, but it is also useful to know for an ASP.Net developer. And the code is:

document.activeElement

There you go! Simple, but for some reason, it's assumed you should know it, which to a degree, I agree with. But I would also have to say online there seems to be an assumption that everyone already knows the DOM!

Do you have a routine which you know works, and you don't want to have to step into when you're debugging? Granted, you could you the hotkeys to do it, but why bother? The System.Diagnostics namespace provides some neat functionality for helping you in your debugging process. Here's some examples:

//This attribute prevents the debugger from entering, as well as no breakpoints within

<System.Diagnostics.DebuggerStepThrough()>

private string MyRoutine()

{

//Don't step through this

}

I am actually not sure what the difference between that and the DebuggerHidden() attribute is though. The description in the help is the same. Anyone know?

OK, so you're looking at some really obscure code, so it's time to step in and see exactly what it's doing, and the best way to do it is use the debugger. Actually, if I have to give you a reason to use the debugger, you probably shouldn't be reading this in the first place. You fire up the VS IDE, hit F5, and viola! You see the following scary message:

What the heck? “Error when typing to run project: Unable to start debugging on the web server. Catastrophic failure.”

Likely you won't see this unless you don't have Admin privledges on the box. Right now, I am doing a project for a large bank, and trying to get rights to do anything is like trying to pry a “Magic” card from a freshman engineering student. My rights are so messed up, I actually have to do the following steps at the start of every day I plan on debugging. If you see this message, here's the steps you can try to get rid of it and get on with your debugging.

First, you're going to need to change one of the local security policies. Open up your admin folder, and select Local Security Policies. You should see something similar to the image below. Next, select User Rights Assignment.

Locate Impersonate a client after authentication, and double click on it. You should get a dialog similar to the following. What you'll need to do is add the IWAM_ (and I add the ASP.Net worker thread just for good measure to the policy) like below. For the record, I believe only IWAM_ is required.

 OK, you've taken the first step to fixing the problem, but that's not it. You've got to get IIS and the rest of the system to recognize the new policy. So, first, open up the “Run “ command from the Start menu) or command prompt, and type the following:

Type

secedit /refreshpolicy machine_policy /enforce

This will refresh the security policy for the local machine. Next, type this command to restart IIS now that everything is set.

iisreset

That's it! Assuming the IIS application workspace is set to allow debugging, and everything else is good on the machine, hopefully you'll be debugging like the Orkin man!

-- Daryl

Someone on the project I am currently working on stumbled on some documentation for WinCV, and in that documentation, it tells you how to add Assemblies which aren't in the GAC. Here's the link from the MSDN, and then I will point out the interesting part:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cptools/html/cpconwindowsformsclassviewerwincvexe.asp

By using a response file, you can issue the necessary the parameters to look at one or more files. From the documentation:

The following code shows the contents of a response file myFile.rsp. Using a response file eliminates the need to individually type the commands at the command prompt.

          /r:myAssembly.dll /r:myOtherAssembly.dll
        

The following command reads the response file myFile.rsp and executes the commands specified in the file.

          wincv @myFile.rsp
        

          So,
you could set up a standard response file which holds all the names of assemblies
to search! 
        

Pretty neat!

Not sure where I got this, so my apologies to the original author, but it's been a pretty useful function. Of course, you might want to wrap this with some error handling and validation code, but here's a good start for you...

            private
            string GetRomanNumber(int number)

{

            string[]
ArabicNums = newstring[] {"1", "4", "5", "9", "10", "40", "50", "90", "100", "400", "500", "900", "1000"};

            string[]
RomanNums = newstring[] {"I","IV","V","IX","X","XL","L","XC","C","CD","D","CM","M"};

            int ArabicUpper
= ArabicNums.GetUpperBound(0);

            int ArabicLower
= ArabicNums.GetLowerBound(0);

            string Output
= "";

            for (int i
= ArabicUpper; i >= ArabicLower; i--)

    {

            while (number
>= Convert.ToInt32(ArabicNums[i]))

        {

            number -= Convert.ToInt32(ArabicNums[i]);

            Output += RomanNums[i];

        }

    }

            return Output;

}

Enjoy!