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Taken from the SysInternals website: The SysInternals web site was created in 1996 by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell to host their advanced system utilities and technical information. Microsoft acquired Sysinternals in July, 2006. Whether you’re an IT Pro or a developer, you’ll find Sysinternals utilities to help you manage, troubleshoot and diagnose your Windows systems and applications. One of the must-have SysInternals tools for a developer is DebugView.

Earlier this week the Microsoft Research Faculty Summitwas held. On 10was on the scene, and has a nice movie about the Sphere. For the entire article @ on 10, have a look over here: https://on10.net/blogs/laura/Sphere-multi-touch-computing/. This is just another sign that the best is yet to come… Good times 🙂

Rob Enderle, columnist at TechNewsWorld, gives a new/changed view on Microsoft, Google, Apple and Linux in his article The Fall of Google, the Rebirth of Microsoft and the Changing Face of Apple and Linux. A nice read… One of the cool quotes from the article: …but it becomes risky for anyone to depend on the other guy screwing up as they typically don’t forever.

Avanade Netherlands released a new website[1]. Unlike the previous one, this one is here to stay 😉 The website holds information about events, career possibilities, publications, videos, links to blogs of Avanade Netherlands employees and more… Have a look! It is in Dutch, by the way. [1] https://www.werkenbijavanade.nl (Dutch)

When you want to implement a custom stsadm for SharePoint, all you realy have to do is implement the Microsoft.SharePoint.StsAdmin.ISPStsadmCommand interface. Because I develop on a machine with no SharePoint installed, I (only) copy the assemblies I need to develop locally. For the stsadm command I was working on recently (more on this in a future post) I only needed the Microsoft.SharePoint and Microsoft.Office.Server assemblies. Or at least I thought so…

While writing a custom stsadm command for SharePoint (more on that in a future post) and having to do something based on the command the user typed in, I used ToLower(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture) on the command string to be able to check without the hassle of differences in casing. When I ran code analysis on my project, I got this somewhat cryptic message: CA1308 : Microsoft.Globalization : In method ‘CommandParser.Run(string, StringDictionary, out string)’, replace the call to ‘string.

One of the posts that is being read quite frequently over here is HOWTO: Encode a password using MD5 in C# (or: howto calculate the MD5 hash for a string). One of the (many) reactions to that post was from one Simucal, stating: Also, to the original poster, Rick van den Bosch… shame on you for using ASCIIEncoding.Default.GetBytes(). You do realize that would seriously restrict the usefulness of your method to working only in languages that ASCII has the character sets for, right?

The situation I talked about in my previous posthad one very big issue: LINQ sometimes just is too dynamic… 😉 The fact that I changed the value for the Ranking property for each SpecificObject that got matched, made the primary LINQ query have a different outcome. LINQ uses lazy evaluation and because of that, the contents of finalGroups and exitGroups changed every time I changed the Ranking value for one of the SpecificObjects.

While developing an algorithm to match preferences to possibilities, I had to sort a generic list of a specific object type (SpecificObject). The first x objects would be matched, the rest would be excluded because of the number of available places. To determine the group of objects that would be matched and the group that would be excluded, I did something like this: IEnumerablesortedObjects;IEnumerablefinalObjects; IEnumerableexitObjects; sortedObjects = from SpecificObject specificObject in AllSpecificObjectsorderby specificObject.

After developing a custom Web Service to be hosted in SharePoint (based on this HowTo article on MSDN) and deploying it on a testing environment, I got some entries in the EventLog over there, stating: “Unable to connect publishing custom string handler for output caching. IIS Instance Id is ‘xxxxxxxxx’, url is ‘https://internalsharepointserver/somesubfolder/services.asmx“ The PublishingHttpModule trying to cache an unmanaged path seems to be the problem here. When enabled for a custom web application (such as my web service), it causes the eventlog entry each time certain requests like web service calls or static CSS files are made.

I only had time for a quickie: The page containing all my online profiles has been updated… When interested, have a look at them{.null}.

After extending a textbox with a NumberUpDownExtender, which comes with the AJAX Control Toolkit, I recieved the error “the number of fractional digits is out of range”. This happened when debugging my web application and using the extender. When using the web app in non-debug mode, nothing happened. This included the value change ’not happening'. Fortunately, this one was REALY easy, but it is not to be found on the web.