Rick van den Bosch

Betatalks

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Betatalks is a long-running video and podcast series I created to make useful technical conversations available to the wider developer community.

More than 130 episodes in, the format is still straightforward: invite people who know their subject, ask practical questions, and leave enough room for the interesting parts of the conversation.

Switching Gears 2023 edition

Wed, 16 Nov 2022 09:59:54 +0100

(banner image: Microsoft Azure December 2022 hero image)

Past September marked my ten-year employment at Betabit. And it has been one wild ride! I’ve been blessed to be able to do some awesome things like helping customers make the transition to the cloud, organizing the internal Hack Yourself First workshop by Troy Hunt, speaking at conferences internationally, becoming a Microsoft Azure MVP, recording the Betatalks videos and most recently Betatalks the Podcast with lots of great guests, among who Scott Hanselman!

Recent certifications

Tue, 19 Jul 2022 10:28:00 +0200

The past couple of months I pushed myself to get some Azure certifications, so here’s where I am right now:

Exams #

AZ-900: Azure Fundamentals
AZ-104: Microsoft Azure Administrator
AZ-204: Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure
AZ-305: Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions
AZ-400: Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions
DP-900: Azure Data Fundamentals
DP-203: Data Engineering on Microsoft Azure

Certifications #

Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals
Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate
Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert
Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert
Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Fundamentals
Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Engineer Associate

Not sure what’s next, since there’s so much to learn! Currently I am looking at Security and Power Platform.

Website migrated to Static Web App

Thu, 14 Jul 2022 12:26:34 +0200

When I first moved my website to Hugo I hosted it on Static website hosting in Azure Storage. And although it’s a good way to host your website, there are some extra steps you need to take as soon as you need more than just a place to put your static assets. For instance:

API Management: advanced usage quota

Mon, 11 Jul 2022 14:42:42 +0200

Introduction #

Azure API Management is a hybrid, multicloud management platform for APIs across all environments.

For more information on API Management, check out Microsoft Docs: About API Management.

Building a Discord bot with Azure Logic Apps

Thu, 06 May 2021 08:57:59 +0200

The Betatalks Discord #

A few months ago we’ve started a Betatalks Discord server to build a community and enable our friends to discuss all the Betatalks content we put out there. Think about the Betatalks videos on YouTube, Betatalks live events and the most recent addition: Betatalks the podcast.

Using Azure App Configuration in .NET 5 Functions

Thu, 01 Apr 2021 09:19:00 +0200

Azure .NET 5 Functions #

A lot has been said about .NET 5 support for Azure Functions. The most important news: it is now officially supported! 🥳 To enable running Azure Functions with .NET 5, the new Isolated Model enables Functions to run as an out-of-process language worker separate from the Azure Functions runtime. This way you’ll have full control over the Function’s dependencies on one hand, and new features like a middleware pipeline on the other. For an awesome write-up about everything around this, check out Oscar van Tol’s post Azure Functions in .NET 5 and beyond.

Microsoft Certified Trainer 2021 - 2022

Thu, 04 Mar 2021 09:30:00 +0200

Early this morning I recieved an email that stated I qualified as a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) for 2021/2022! It’s a great honor and I am happy to be part of this community.

September 2020 update

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 09:30:05 +0200

There has been a lot happening this month! Most of us are back after summer holiday and are ready to get going again. Unfortunately COVID seems to be getting a renewed grip on the country, so it’s kind of uncertain where we’re going. Let’s hope for the best. But for now, let’s go!

Azure Static Web Apps: UPDATE

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 16:11:00 +0200

After my two previous posts Azure Static Web Apps: a first look and Azure Static Web Apps: quirks & gotchas, let’s have an updated look at ASWA in this post.

Support for new languages 👩🏻‍💻 #

Announced at Microsoft Ignite this year, Blazor and C# APIs now supported in Azure Static Web Apps. This enables .NET developers to build and deploy full stack .NET applications with Static Web Apps.

Serverless: Power Automate

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 08:40:55 +0200

It’s Serverless September! The one month a year in which we can keep talking about Serverless to our friends without feeling bad about it. So here goes … 🤓

In this post we’ll have a look at Power Automate. Because of the low code / no code nature of the service, it’s a great fit for citizen developers to automate (business) processes. And although I love to code, it’s good to also look at these other types of services that expand the Serverless universe.

Azure Static Web Apps: quirks & gotchas

Tue, 15 Sep 2020 15:28:22 +0200

After playing around with Azure Static Web Apps (ASWA) for some time I found some quirks and gotchas. Of course Static Web Apps are still in preview. Most of these are probably because of that fact. Despite that, it might still be interesting to know about them. That way if you run into any of them, you’ll at least know it’s not you … 😉

Azure Static Web Apps: a first look

Fri, 17 Jul 2020 10:04:14 +0200

Although the two have a lot in common, even including parts of the name, there are a few very clear differences between Static website hosting in Azure Storage and Static Web Apps. We’ll have a look at what those differences are and take a first look at the most recent of the two: Static Web Apps.

Azure MVP 2020-2021

Thu, 02 Jul 2020 17:23:34 +0200

Yesterday I recieved the awesome news I will be a Microsoft Azure MVP for another year! Another very big “thank you” to everyone who has helped me get here. 🙏🏻

Hosting your Hugo website on Azure - Part I

Wed, 01 Jul 2020 00:01:02 +0200

This post is part of a series on hosting your Hugo website on Azure. Keep an eye on this website for future articles.

Intro #

As you might have seen or read somewhere, I’ve migrated the previous version of my personal website, which was in WordPress, to the current one that is made in Hugo. One of the reasons for migrating away from WordPress was the fact that due to a vulnerability in one of the WordPress modules, spammers were able to use my account to send out a lot of mails.

About Rick

Mon, 29 Jun 2020 21:30:00 +0100

I have been building software professionally since 1999. That has taken me from writing application code to leading teams, designing software systems, and helping organisations make architecture decisions that still work after the first diagram.

Contact

Mon, 29 Jun 2020 21:30:00 +0100

For speaking invitations, technical conversations, or questions about something I have published, email is the most direct route.

For speaking enquiries, include the event, audience, preferred format, and date when possible.

Speaker

Mon, 29 Jun 2020 21:30:00 +0100

I have been speaking at software conferences, user groups, and community events since 2012, both in the Netherlands and internationally. I speak as an engineer and architect: the goal is to give people ideas they can use when they return to work.

Migrated to Hugo

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 09:19:00 +0100

Way back when I started blogging, I started out with Blogger. The use of that didn’t last long, because I was contacted by a colleague at the time to move over to BloggingAbout.net, which I did. They ran Community Server for over nine (9!) years before switching over to WordPress.

The right tool for the job: data store

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 09:51:10 +0200

Intro #

The possibilities for software development have changed tremendously over the past couple of years. Actually, it’s better to say that the number of options has increased tremendously. With the final breakthrough and continuous expansion of the cloud, the supply of different types for resources like compute and data store is larger than ever before. And while you can even find a decision tree for selecting the right type of compute to use in for instance Microsoft Azure, selecting the right type of data store to use for your application is no simple feat. This article tries to give some background on why this is the case, and to give you a direction for making that choice.

Added news section

Tue, 02 Jun 2020 12:55:27 +0200

To better distinguish between technical content and news I’ve added a news section to my website. This enables me to add information to my website that’s (temporarily) interesting but not blogworthy.

Using (Table Storage) Bindings in Azure Functions

Fri, 28 Feb 2020 18:10:00 +0100

My post Using Triggers & Bindings in Azure Functions V2 drew quite some attention over the past months. But there is a lot more to say about them. Time for a small follow up 😁

Azure App Configuration with .NET Full Framework

Mon, 17 Feb 2020 12:00:00 +0100

This post on using App Configuration using .NET Full Framework was based on a contribution by Steven Hack.

My last post Azure App Configuration: an introduction received a lot of good feedback. And one of those pieces of feedback was a question if it’s also possible to use App Configuration if you’re using Full Framework.

Azure App Configuration: an introduction

Thu, 06 Feb 2020 12:17:00 +0000

Azure App Configuration is a powerful way to manage and store application configuration on a central location. Integrating it into for instance ASP.NET (Core) is pretty straightforward. This post gives you an introduction to Azure App Configuration and a simple example of how to integrate it in ASP.NET Core.

Azure Functions: binding to a property

Wed, 29 Jan 2020 16:22:13 +0000

Here’s a short post I didn’t want to hold from you. As you may already know I wrote a blogpost on Using Triggers & Bindings in Azure Functions. It handles quite a few nice possibilities of using triggers and bindings in Azure Functions (if I may say so myself… 😳). Fortunately, you learn something new every day. So I learned about Property Binding recently…

Creating a custom JsonNamingPolicy

Mon, 28 Oct 2019 17:37:00 +0000

Probably there’s no need for me to say why .NET Core 3.0 is a big deal. There are enough articles on that. For a great write-up see Announcing .NET Core 3.0.

Front Door incomplete first request

Thu, 10 Oct 2019 15:20:35 +0000

Yesterday I was working with one of our customers to fix an issue with an ASP.NET application throwing an error. That application threw the error on the first request coming in through Azure Front Door. When we sent a request to the original (back end) URL, the application worked fine and never threw the exception. 🤔

Managed Identity – Part III

Wed, 02 Oct 2019 12:54:19 +0000

This post is part of a series on Managed Identity. For an introduction, see Managed Identity – Part I. For a post that shows you how to connect your application to different types of Azure resources using Managed Identity see Managed Identity – Part II. Stay tuned for future posts.

Techorama 2019

Thu, 19 Sep 2019 16:58:00 +0000

Next week my colleague Daniël te Winkel and I will do a session at Techorama 2019 titled Getting sh*t done with Azure Functions (on AKS!). Or GSDwAF for short 🤓

We will talk about running Azure Functions in a Kubernetes deployment using Managed Identities and implementing Dependency Injection. And, even better, we’ll show you how!

Video content 📹

Tue, 17 Sep 2019 18:17:10 +0000

Some time ago Oscar van Tol and I started creating video content for the community. We call them #Betatalks and create them because of two very important reasons:

We believe in sharing knowledge
It’s. So. Much. Fun. 🤣

We talk about a lot of developer stuff: from “Microsoft Build 2019 Highlights” in episode 1 to “C# 8, What’s new?” in episode 4.

Managed Identity – Part II

Fri, 13 Sep 2019 14:25:52 +0000

This post is part of a series on Managed Identity. For an introduction, see Managed Identity – Part I. Stay tuned for future posts.

Introduction #

Elaborating on Part I, this blog post will show you how to connect your application to different types of Azure resources using Managed Identity.

Managed Identity – Part I

Thu, 11 Jul 2019 09:11:00 +0000

This post is part of a series on Managed Identity. Stay tuned for future posts.

Introduction #

Connecting your application to a resource like Storage or a SQL database used to involve a connection string. This isn’t very secure. These settings are available through the Azure portal. So they might get compromised.
With the introduction of Azure Key Vault, we got a way of separating these secrets from our application configuration. We can store them in a safe, secure place. There’s only one downside: you need a connection string to connect to Key Vault. So the problem isn’t solved; we only moved it. We can still get to the connection string the application uses to get secrets from Key Vault. So anyone with access to that connection string can still access those same secrets.

HowTo: Call an API with cookie authentication from a Logic App

Fri, 03 May 2019 19:13:41 +0000

Calling an API from a Logic App is pretty straightforward. You open up the Logic App Designer and add an HTTP Action. Specify the method to use and the URI you want to call and you’re good to go!

Microsoft Azure MVP

Wed, 01 May 2019 18:23:04 +0000

I am humbled and very proud to be awarded a Microsoft Azure MVP award today. A big “thank you” to all who helped me get here. 🙏🏻

A special thank you to my employer Betabit who supports me putting lots of effort into the community and helps organize or sponsor events.
It’s strange but very cool to see social media ’explode’ (at least according to my standards) after my announcement. But I’m still just Rick, a guy who loves to do fun things with code, in the cloud.

Dynamic output bindings in Azure Functions

Tue, 16 Apr 2019 21:02:18 +0000

Last week one of my colleagues had a question: Is there a performance penalty when you add multiple Azure Blob storage bindings in an Azure Function? Or is the connection only established when you access one of those blobs? Answering this grew into a way to have Dynamic output bindings in Azure Functions.

Dutch VS2019 launch event

Tue, 05 Mar 2019 16:33:23 +0000

We’re hosting a VS2019 Launch Event at the Betabit The Hague office. Join us for some Visual Studio 2019 goodness! And maybe even some swag… ?

Join us on April 2 for the launch of Visual Studio 2019. Learn about how Visual Studio 2019 is more productive, modern, and innovative, participate in live Q&As, and be the first to take the latest version for a spin.
https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs2019-launch/

Using Triggers & Bindings in Azure Functions V2

Thu, 28 Feb 2019 13:57:19 +0000

To start things off: yes. There’s some pretty decent documentation on all the available Triggers & Bindings in Azure Functions. Like this overview page. And you can also find documentation on specific bindings, like the Service Bus Binding. Nevertheless, I wanted to add to that documentation with some simple, real-world examples using triggers & bindings. So here goes.

NPM publish to Azure Artifacts fails

Fri, 07 Dec 2018 11:39:58 +0000

The issue #

While trying to publish an NPM package to our artifacts registry in Azure DevOps, we got an error:

Azure Thursdays december 2018

Mon, 03 Dec 2018 15:07:52 +0000

This Thursday December 6th I’ll be speaking at Azure Thursday - December 2018. The last of the regular Azure Thursdays this year.

This is a group for all developers, consultants, architects and IT professionals who want to dive into for them unknown topics related to Azure. Azure Thursday are happening every first Thursday of the month and the format will be different every evening. From hand-on workshops to technical talks.
Azure Thursdays

Getting started with the teXXmo® IoT Button

Fri, 30 Nov 2018 11:19:32 +0000

A few weeks ago I ordered some teXXmo® IoT Buttons to play around with. I wanted to jump right in, but I had to look some stuff up to be able to get it up and running, connecting to the right WiFi and IoT Hub. Here’s a short recap of how to get started with the teXXmo® IoT Button.

Supercharge your web app with Azure

Sun, 10 Jun 2018 09:44:46 +0000

Here’s a quicky: Oscar van Tol and I are joining forces again on Thursday June 21st. This time we’re telling you everything there is to know on leveraging the power of different Azure services to supercharge your web application. And the session is appropriately titled Supercharge your web application with Azure ?. Or SCYWAWA for short (hint: this might become the twitter hashtag as well…).

Session @ TechDays Sweden 2018

Tue, 05 Jun 2018 12:47:04 +0000

This morning I received an e-mail with the following message: “Congratulations! Your session Working with Microsoft Graph has been accepted for Microsoft TechDays 2018!”

So it looks like I will be doing a talk on Microsoft Graph at TechDays Sweden October 24th and 25th later this year 🤓. There’s a few reasons for me to be looking forward to this. First of all: this will be my first visit to Sweden! It’s also my first time speaking at a conference in another country. And last but not least, I’m looking forward to meeting the attendees and speakers for TechDays Sweden.

HowTo: invite AAD user with Microsoft Graph

Tue, 22 May 2018 21:28:31 +0000

One of the time consuming tasks we’re facing at my current assignment is inviting users to our Azure Active Directory tenant. Especially since we (used to) do this in the Azure Portal. We’re using Azure Active Directory B2B to which external users are invited as guests. We investigated using Microsoft Graph to automate this process. Since there’s several things to take into account when implementing this, here’s a quick HowTo.

Unable to remove (native) app registrations in Azure Active Directory

Wed, 13 Dec 2017 16:22:49 +0000

While cleaning up the app registrations in my Azure Active Directory, I ran into two applications I couldn’t delete since the ‘Delete’ button is not clickable. I’ve had this happen for both application types: both Web app/API and Native.

Hands-on with Azure Event Grid

Wed, 08 Nov 2017 19:00:38 +0000

I’ve done another session on Serverless, this time at the Techdays in The Netherlands. The TechDays were held October 12 & 13 in the Amsterdam RAI. My session was partially based on the “Dude, Where’s my Server?” talk I did earlier this year. The main focus for the talk this time: Azure Event Grid.

Serverless computing: “Dude, Where’s my Server?”

Thu, 17 Aug 2017 09:43:25 +0000

Do you live in or near The Netherlands? Would you like to know everything there is to know about Serverless Computing? Join Oscar van Tol and myself on September 20th. We will be presenting the knowledge session “Dude, Where’s my Server?” organised by Betabit and Blaak Selectie. If you don’t need any additional information and just want to reserve a spot, send an email to evenementen@betabit.nl with your name and phone number. If you need a bit more context, keep reading.

So many new (.NET) goodies!

Wed, 16 Aug 2017 10:36:34 +0000

The people over at Microsoft have been working hard and have delivered a lot of stuff. That makes for a nice start after the holidays! So there’s a lot of cool stuff available to play with. I created some simple and easy to remember links for all of these goodies. Feel free to use and distribute these 🙂

TypeScript build error TS2322

Wed, 19 Jul 2017 10:06:10 +0000

In one of the projects I’m currently working on we’re using an ASP.NET Core Web API with an Angular front-end. We’re using ADAL.js as an Azure Active Directory Authentication Library and ng2-adal for integration with Angular. To get the type declarations for all these packages in TypeScript we use The Future of Declaration Files.

Security workshop: Hack Yourself First

Mon, 26 Jun 2017 14:48:34 +0000

My employer Betabit hosted a Hack Yourself First workshop by Troy Hunt on Monday 5th and Tuesday 6th of June. Because we are always looking to improve, this was a great opportunity to tune up our security skills. We had a great time, got terrified and most of all: we learned a lot.

Build 2017

Wed, 14 Jun 2017 16:41:38 +0000

Earlier this year two colleagues and I attended Microsoft Build for the first time. In short: it was amazing. For those looking for more info: here’s a short recap on what we saw and did while we were there.

IE shows binding in select instead of value using AngularJS

Wed, 05 Apr 2017 13:31:26 +0000

Part of the system we are developing uses AngularJS. Because we had an increase in the use of our system, and more diverse configurations were using our system, we got some new bugs filed. One of these bugs was about a select list showing the binding in stead of the actual value for several options. Since this ‘worked on our machines’ it had to be connected to the client’s configuration. As soon as stuff (options in this case) started moving around, it got even prettier…

.NET Core: not your daddy’s dotnet

Wed, 05 Apr 2017 10:10:08 +0000

We held a 2.5 hour presentation about .NET Core at the Betabit office in Rotterdam on March 29th. Where ‘we’ means my colleague Oscar van Tol and myself. We ended up having way too much content for the evening. We decided to host a hands-on workshop for those interested. At that workshop we will not only show .NET Core, but also enable you to have a go at it yourself. The location will most probably be the Betabit office in Utrecht because it’s located more central. Stay tuned for more info on the details of the workshop.

Creating Service Bus authorization rules with ARM errors out

Wed, 01 Feb 2017 12:42:23 +0000

Intro #

In my current project we use Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates to help with deployments across multiple subscriptions and environments. One of the elements of the ARM template is adding a couple of Shared Access Policies to enable Read and Write on the queues we have in place. The policies have been defined on Service Bus level because they span multiple queues.

Unable to attach remote debugger after Visual Studio 2015 Update 2

Wed, 06 Apr 2016 12:49:50 +0000

As the title states: I was unable to attach the remote debugger (for instance to an Azure Web App) after installing Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. I got an error with something about invalid memory access or something like that.

Unable to find specific NuGet packages after update

Tue, 05 Apr 2016 09:03:22 +0000

After updating Visual Studio 2015 (there was an update for GitHub Extensions, one for the NuGet Package Manager and, of course, there was Visual Studio 2015 Update 2) I tried to add the WindowsAzure.Storage NuGet package to a project I started about a month ago. I opened NuGet Package Manager, went to the Browse tab and typed WindowsAzure.Storage. The result: No Packages Found. OK, so then I’ll just….

Exception with EF code first migrations

Fri, 18 Mar 2016 08:38:42 +0000

Just ran into an exception when running both update-database and add-migration in the Package Manager Console for an EF Code First project. The Exception read:

The type initializer for System.Data.Entity.Migrations.DbMigrationsConfiguration\'1 threw an exception.

Running Visual Studio as an administrator causes ‘Save changes to devenv.sln’ when double clicking solutions

Thu, 16 Apr 2015 12:06:38 +0000

After making sure my Visual Studio always ran as an administrator by following my own post HowTo: Have Visual Studio always run as administrator on Windows 8, I got a message if I wanted to save changes to devenv.sln each and every time I double clicked a Solution. Since the problem kept occuring after installing Visual Studio 2015 CTP6, I wanted to solve it. So here we go!

Scheduled build launches an hour early on TFS 2013 (after installing Update 3 or 4)

Thu, 09 Apr 2015 09:39:44 +0000

‼ There’s new information in this issue. Please read the updates at the bottom of the article.‼

We use our own TFS server and were using TFS 2013 Update 2 up until last Tuesday. We have several build definitions for my current project, and most of them are scheduled at a specific time, because we have specific times for automatic deployment. Up until Tuesday, everything seemed to work well and the Builds ran at the specified time (both before and after Daylight Saving Time applied).

Error saving Galileo Wiring App in Visual Studio

Tue, 16 Sep 2014 08:04:47 +0000

Last week I received my Intel Galileo board (windowsondevices.com) and I started ~~playing with~~ developing for it yesterday. I created a first test project, but it didn’t run. Visual Studio couldn’t find the Arduino header file, which was probably due to a missing NuGet package (the Galileo C++ SDK). I tried to save the project, because you need to before you can manage NuGet packages, but to no avail. Visual Studio served me a ‘The operation could not be completed’ error without any additional information.][2]

Fixing the Remote Desktop Connection to a Virtual Machine in Microsoft Azure

Wed, 07 May 2014 06:19:17 +0000

A few minutes before my second session at the Dutch Techdays started I tried connecting to my Virtual Machine in Microsoft Azure through remote desktop. It didn’t connect… The RDP client tried to connect to the Virtual Machine, but nothing happened.

Techdays 2014 The Netherlands

Wed, 07 May 2014 05:58:07 +0000

As I wrote earlier I presented at the 2014 Dutch Techdays. The session content is now available online. Find it here (Dutch):

Error comparing historic versions of a TFS source controlled file

Wed, 12 Mar 2014 13:43:00 +0000

When working with Visual Studio 2012 on our current project, the error ‘These files are not text files and cannot be opened in the comparison window.’ shows up every now and again. I’ve tried several things to solve this problem.

Getting Bootstrap to work on Windows Phone 8

Fri, 21 Feb 2014 09:30:33 +0000

There are a couple of websites I manage that use ~~Twitter~~ Bootstrap*. These websites are fully responsive and work well on all devices. Or actually, almost all devices. The wrapping of columns in a container on a Windows Phone doesn’t work the way you’d want it out of the box. Windows Phone interprets device-width as the actual resolution size. Other mobile browsers use what the manufacturer (or browser vendor) has decided is the optimal viewport width.

Speaking at TechDays 2014

Fri, 07 Feb 2014 14:43:28 +0000

I’m proud to announce that this year I’ll be speaking at the TechDays in the World Forum in Den Haag, April 16 – 17. This session will be about High Performance Computing in Windows Azure.

Blog moved…

Tue, 04 Feb 2014 07:20:56 +0000

Bloggingabout.net has moved from Community Server to WordPress. One of the changes that comes along with this is that the URL of my blog has changed too. I went from bloggingabout.net/blogs/rick to rick.bloggingabout.net.

HowTo: sign out of Visual Studio Online (when deleting cookies won’t help)

Wed, 27 Nov 2013 08:58:02 +0000

When you have more than one Microsoft Account that you use regularly, you might recognize the scenario where your Visual Studio keeps you signed in to Visual Studio Online… with the wrong account. You keep getting messages that you don’t have access rights. Restarting Visual Studio, rebooting and even clearing all (Visual Studio) cookies doesn’t help. Here’s a quick fix:

ScriptErrors opening (a new tab of) IE10 on a Windows 7 machine

Thu, 04 Jul 2013 07:17:00 +0000

I’ve been running into the error message on the right (“Unable to get property ‘style’ of undefined or null reference”) when opening an instance or a new tab of IE10 for the past couple of weeks. It didn’t matter what start page I used, since I tried about:blank, google.com and approximately a dozen more. I found out McAfee SiteAdvisor was the cause of this error pretty quick, but since the company I’m currently in doesn’t allow users to disable SiteAdvisor and I needed IE10 for some testing purposes, I had to find a different solution to the problem.

Error: The Path ‘path’ is already mapped in workspace ‘workspace’

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 07:35:00 +0000

Just a quick little post today: I got the error “The Path ‘path’ is already mapped in workspace ‘workspace’” when I connected to a new Team Foundation Server and tried to map my workspace today. I had connected to a Team Foundation Services project a while back to get some shared code, but I already removed the workspace and the server binding. Even though Visual Studio didn’t see any other bindings, mapping my workspace to the same folder the previous TFS binding was mapped to served me this error.

Visual Studio 2012 crashes when opening an ASP.NET MVC project with a cshtml open

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 10:54:59 +0000

A rather long title for this post, but that’s exactly what happened: when I opened an ASP.NET MVC 4 project with a cshtml view open, Visual Studio would crash with the error messages seen on the right. This would only occur if the first project I opened had a cshtml file open. When I opened another (type of) project first and then opened a project with a cshtml file open, the problem did not occur. Debugging Visual Studio with a new instance of Visual Studio (Inception anyone?) made things a bit clearer. (Part of) the exception information:

How to add Next and Previous buttons to Twitter Bootstrap tabs

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 09:02:56 +0000

Just a quickie today: when working with ~~Twitter~~ Bootstrap tabs, like I am in my ASP.NET MVC 4 project, you might want to add Next and Previous buttons on the tabs to create something of a Wizard. Here’sa step by step overview of how I did this:

Debugging JavaScript with Visual Studio in an ASP.NET MVC 4 application

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 05:27:00 +0000

When debugging JavaScript in an ASP.NET MVC (4) application, it is not always enough to uncheck the ‘Disable script debugging’ checkboxes under ‘Tools’ – ‘Internet Options’ – ‘Advanced’ – ‘Browsing’. JavaScript inside a Razor view (a cshtml file) cannot be debugged from Visual Studio. To debug your JavaScript, move it to a separate .js file and link to that file from your Razor view. This way, breakpoints set in the JavaScript will be hit and you can debug from Visual Studio.

How To: Call a generic method with a runtime type

Sun, 02 Dec 2012 10:17:00 +0000

Problem:

Developing a generic class that maps datasets, datatables and datarows from a legacy system to my domain model, I ran into an issue. I wanted to call a generic method with a runtime type. Lets say the method looked like this: public string DoSomething<T>(string param). Because I use reflection to iterate properties on a type, the type of the properties was dynamic and only known at runtime. I wanted to do something like this:

Enable preview in Visual Studio 2012 after Update 1

Sun, 02 Dec 2012 09:50:00 +0000

After installing Visual Studio 2012 Update 1, my Visual Studio stopped opening files in preview mode when I clicked them in the Solution Explorer. This setting seems to have changed with the installation of Update 1. To re-enable opening files clicked (once) in the Solution Explorer in Preview mode, go to ‘Tools’ – ‘Options’ – ‘Environment’ – ‘Tabs and Windows’.

How To: Create an ActionLink with a Twitter Bootstrap icon in MVC4

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 18:16:00 +0000

~~Twitter~~ Bootstrap is a… “Sleek, intuitive, and powerful front-end framework for faster and easier web development.” One of the nice things in Bootstrap is you can use icons from Glyphicons. To use these, you can simply use this markup <i class="icon-fire"></i> to get a nice fire icon.

TIP: “Paste XML as Classes” in Visual Studio 2012

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 05:02:00 +0000

In the past, when you had some XML document that you wanted to translate into classes we had to create / generate a schema based on the XML file. Next, we had to generate a class based on the schema with an external tool. Not all too user friendly and somewhat time consuming.

Microsoft Touch Mouse, Visual Studio (2012) and scrolling

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 08:23:39 +0000

My Microsoft Touch Mouse stopped scrolling in Visual Studio on my Windows 8 machine some time ago. Because this kills productivity, I wanted to fix the problem. After trying some things I found that the problem only occurred when I ran Visual Studio as Administrator. Searching a bit further I found this bug to be added to Microsoft Connect. I found a workaround for the problem:

HowTo: Have Visual Studio always run as administrator on Windows 8

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 11:16:46 +0000

In my previous post about being unable to access the iis metabase I wanted my Visual Studio to ‘Run as Administrator’ on my Windows 8 machine. I only managed to get this working for the pinned taskbar icon and not for items in the jumplist or for items you open by double clicking them. The solution to check the box ‘Run as Administrator’ on the compatibility tab of the file properties for devenv.exe was not a solution, because there is no more Compatibility tab in Windows 8 :).

Unable to access the IIS metabase

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 06:48:00 +0000

I opened a solution in Visual Studio 2012 on my laptop running Windows 8, when I was presented with the error “The Web Application Project SomeWebProject is configured to use IIS. Unable to access the IIS metabase. You do not have sufficient privilege to access IIS web sites on your machine.” The user I was logged in with was a local administrator and was able to open up and use IIS Manager, but still I was presented with this error. The solution to this is simple: start your Visual Studio with ‘Run as Administrator’. You can do this by right clicking the shortcut and selecting ‘Run as Administrator’.

Coming home

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 10:10:00 +0000

Just a small post today: as of September first I joined Betabit (site is in Dutch).

After having had several employers in the last few years, this feels like coming home.

Ajax Control Toolkit Calendar doesn’t close when clicking outside the calendar

Thu, 24 May 2012 14:53:00 +0000

Just a quick one: if you have a textbox with a Calendar (extender) from the Ajax Control Toolkit and an associated PopupButtonID which is an image, the calendar won’t close when you click outside the popup. Use an input type=”image”or an ImageButton to solve this problem.

Documents.Open returns null, running Word automation under ASP.NET on x64

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 04:53:00 +0000

When building an ASP application that generates Word documents, it was working fine on the local machine: A Windows XP installation with Office 2007. When we deployed it to windows 2008 (64 bit) and Word 2007 we saw that Documents.Open returned null. Other than this, there are no exceptions.

Unhandled exception installing SQL Server 2008 R2 on a Windows XP / Windows 7 machine

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 04:46:00 +0000

When installing SQL Server 2008 R2 on a Windows XP (or, according to the comments, Windows 7) development machine that has been around for quite some time, I got an error stating an unhandled exception occured in the application (see image). The error showed up directly upon startup and read:

Error installing the Windows Azure AppFabric Tools for Visual Studio (CTP)

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 08:57:20 +0000

When installing the Windows Azure AppFabric Tools for Visual Studio (found here), you might get the error message shown at the top, stating that Windows Server AppFabric is installed and that it is not compatible with this release of Windows Azure AppFabric Developer Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 – June 2011 CTP. It asks to uninstall Windows Server AppFabric and rerun this setup if you want to install Windows Azure AppFabric Developer Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 – June 2011 CTP.

The Visual Studio 2010 Test Client for WCF services

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 05:21:00 +0000

When writing WCF services, most of us find ourselves writing quick test applications. To give you more time to do what a developer should be doing (adding business value to the project) the Visual Studio team added a WCF test client that can help you reach goals faster.

HowTo: Save a file from Silverlight using the SaveFileDialog

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 17:23:57 +0000

Saving a file from Silverlight using the SaveFileDialog, added in Silverlight 3, is easy. If you’re used to desktop development however, you might find yourself getting a SecurityException with the message ‘File operation not permitted. Access to path ‘xxx’ is denied.’. Here’s why:

HowTo: open all files from the Find Results window

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 05:49:00 +0000

Here’s a quick Visual Studio tip for you…

I frequently search for a specific text in my solution because I need to do something in all places where that text occurs. Today I found out how you can open all the files that are mentioned in the Find Results window.

‘Cannot find entry to delete’ deleting files from a Zip with (SL) SharpZipLib

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 11:37:05 +0000

For a project I’ll probably dedicate a post on this blog to in the future, I needed a ZIP library for Silverlight. After asking around on twitter (@rickvdbosch) I was pointed towards the SharpZipLib port on Codeplex, found on https://slsharpziplib.codeplex.com.

Patches available for scrolling context menu in Visual Studio 2010

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 12:57:43 +0000

The past couple of days I’ve been experiencing some issues with the context menu for my Solution Explorer in Visual Studio 2010. It contained scrollbars even when there was sufficient space on the screen to show the menu without scrolling.

Using Crystal Reports in ASP.NET on a 64 bit machine

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 16:20:51 +0000

The above scenario gave me the well-known could not load file or assembly error message. The assembly that couldn’t be found was log4net, Version=1.2.10.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=692fbea5521e1304. Or one of its dependencies of course… The situation in which I was getting this error message:

HowTo: have Visual Studio open XAML documents in code view

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 09:25:18 +0000

Just a small post to start the new year… and let it be a good one!

When opening a XAML document in Visual Studio, it opens in split view by default. This might become annoying when you have a large XAML document, because all the content needs to be rendered before you can get some work done.

Making Valid choices

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 07:34:00 +0000

As of December first I’ll be joining the ranks of Valid (www.valid.nl – Dutch website). I’m very excited to start over there and I am convinced we will be able to do great stuff together 🙂

Little-heard-of ASP.NET feature: app_offline.htm

Fri, 08 Oct 2010 07:43:00 +0000

Although the feature has been around since ASP.NET 2.0, I still meet people that don’t know and/or use app_offline.htm. Do you know (and use) the feature…?

When working on an ASP.NET web application, you should notify your visitors in a decent way that your application is down. There’s a nice default feature available for these purposes since ASP.NET 2.0. Somehow, however, this feature is not very well known and rarely used. The App_Offline.htm feature in ASP.NET 2.0 provides an easy way to bring down an ASP.NET application while you make changes to it. This feature kicks in as soon as you place a file called app_offline.htm in the root of the application. When ASP.NET detects the file, it will shut-down the app-domain for the application and won’t restart it for requests. The app_offline.htm file will be sent as the response to all new dynamic requests for the application. When you’re done updating the site, just delete or rename the file and your site it will come back online.

“AjaxControlToolkit is undefined”

Thu, 23 Sep 2010 08:02:00 +0000

Because we were still using an old Visual Studio 2005 solution which included a Web Site project, it was time to upgrade. We upgraded our Visual Studio 2005 solution to Visual Studio 2010 (and .NET 4.0), converted the Web Site Project to a Web Application Project and then, of course, the AjaxControlToolkit had to follow. I downloaded the latest build from their Codeplex site and updated the references in the different projects. I ran the website, and that’s where things got ugly …

Visual Studio: Zero-impact Projects & Cutting/copying empty lines

Wed, 19 May 2010 16:07:00 +0000

Yesterday I remembered two Visual Studio options Sara Ford told about in a presentation of her I attended a while back. Changing them made me happy… 🙂

Zero-impact projects #

When I have to test something real quick, I tend to create a new project in Visual Studio and scribble some code to test whatever I want to test at that point. This causes my project directory to be filled with projects named WindowsFormsApplication14 or something like that. To make this stop, go to Tools - Options - Projects and Solutions - General. Uncheck the option ‘Save new projects when created’. This way those newly made (and shortly used) projects aren’t saved untill you explicitly tell Visual Studio to do so. No more WindowsFormsApplication63 for you! Unless you want to name it that way intentionally, of course…

Visual Studio 2010: Close all documents

Tue, 04 May 2010 16:31:00 +0000

Sometimes it’s the little things that make you love a new product just a bit more.

I tend to close stuff I don’t use anymore fairly quickly. Sometimes I even close an Explorer window or an application right after I used it, only to find I need it again in a few moments… We all have our quirks, right 😉

Visual Studio 2010 and the web.config

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 08:00:00 +0000

While working with Visual Studio 2010, a new feature caught my eye that isn’t communicated (strongly) in the “What’s new” lists you can find online. As part of the Visual Studio 2010 supports multiple web.config files! Now we can create a separate web.config file for each configuration we have for our application. If you add a configuration through the configuration manager, you have the possibility to add a web.config file for the new configuration, too.

Changing lanes

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 15:41:00 +0000

As you probably know I’ve worked for my own company for quite a while (see my post ‘A new challenge’ of October first 2008). Because business was good, I had way too little time to keep this blog up to date. Sorry for that…

“The project location is not trusted”

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 17:55:26 +0000

After installing Windows 7 and Visual Studio 2010 on my laptop, I ran into the well-known message “The project location is not trusted”. I thought all I had to do was follow the instructions in this MSDN article to get my development share to be trusted again, but this doesn’t seem to work.

Running Windows Vista on a MacBook Pro

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 13:45:22 +0000

When installing Windows Vista on a MacBook Pro, the default driver for the Wireless Network Adapter doesn’t function properly. To get the Wireless Network Adapter to work, first install the Boot Camp Services by inserting your OS X DVD and running the setup. Next you need to install the Boot Camp 2.1 update. You can download that one by running Apple Software Update, which is installed as part of the Boot Camp Services. And that’s where things go wrong… The Boot Camp update installation downloads properly, but doesn’t complete.

Microsoft DevDays ‘09, I’m attending!

Mon, 18 May 2009 12:45:23 +0000

Thanks to our friends at Microsoft (and their great BizSpark program) I will be able to attend DevDays ‘09! We won tickets because we updated our company profile and added projects at the Discover Metro site. Normally attending this kind of event is not available to young startups like ours, but now it is!

Finally, a way to preview your site in all (important) browsers

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 09:22:09 +0000

I just read this great article by Mark Voermans: Expression Web SuperPreview: Look how your site renders in various Browsers.

I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve been waiting for this for a long, LONG time. I’ll give it a go this afternoon and let you know what I think…

Twitter

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 20:27:10 +0000

Of course, twitter has been around for quite a while. The popularity of the service is booming, because it is becoming more and more mainstream now. I myself joined somewhere in the end of 2007, when it was still underground … 😜

Article ‘de MediaGarde’ online

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 10:52:43 +0000

The article about our company that was placed in two Dutch magazines can now be found on our website (and of course, this one is in Dutch).

Fix available for IE8 asp:menu problem

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 22:09:29 +0000

I just read an interesting article on Bertrand Le Roy’s blog. The most important information:

It so happens that the menu control is making a bad assumption on what the default value for z-index should be. We debated this at length with the IE team, but it became clear as we did so that they were right and that we were wrong. We had to fix that.

Our company at frankwatching.com

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:48:46 +0000

Our company has been mentioned in an article at the (pretty well-known) blog www.frankwatching.com.

Read it over here (Dutch)

In this mode, command line arguments will not be passed to the executable

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 10:45:00 +0000

When trying to pass some command line arguments to a Console Application, I got the following message: “The current project settings specify that the project will be debugged with specific security permissions. In this mode, command line arguments will not be passed to the executable. Do you want to continue debugging anyway?” (see image)

Installing my laptop after a repair

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 23:45:05 +0000

I’m reinstalling my laptop after I got it back from a repair… EMPTY (grrr).

What tools shouldn’t I forget when preparing this laptop to be my development machine? Already have Visual Studio, SQL Management Studio, Office and the Windows Live tools installed… (and of course I have all kinds of tools at hand from my server like DebugView, Reflector and whatnot)

HowTo: Add a body onload script to a page that uses a MasterPage

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 05:57:00 +0000

When you use a MasterPage to define the design of your website, you might come across the problem that there is no body element in a web content form. This can be a problem when you want to add an onload script to a specific page. You could of course add the onload on the MasterPage, but you might not want the script to run on every page. There are several workarounds to fix this ‘problem’. The one I used last week was to do the following:

(Re)surface

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 09:49:00 +0000

I know it has been a while since my last post, but I’m about to resurface! I’ve played in a musical the entire month of December and (because of that) we were busy getting our company up and running again in the new year. So now I’ll be developing more and I’ll probably have more things to blog about. So keep posted to see more stuff over here …

Clicking ‘Choose items’ on the toolbox crashes Visual Studio 2008

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 11:25:37 +0000

I’ve had my current installation for a few months now, and I’ve used it for development purposes. Today I suddenly encountered an error when trying to add items to the Toolbox. Visual Studio 2008 simply disappeared… No errors, no warnings, it just went away.

Nice new addition to ASP.NET

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 12:49:35 +0000

Scott Guthrie posted about a cool new ASP.NET server control: Chart. It can be used for free with ASP.NET 3.5 to enable rich browser-based charting scenarios.

New website

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:01:10 +0000

Our company has (the first draft of) a new website online. We’re still working on the content, but the design is now online. Check it out @ www.mediagarde.nl (Dutch).

Inline wrappers & Response.Redirect() == Error

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 09:39:34 +0000

While developing a page that was to be used through an inline wrapper, I got an error: “Validation of viewstate MAC failed”. This error can usually be resolved by disabling event validation, viewstate encryption or viewstate for the MAC. In my case these solutions did not resolve the issue.

I will return…

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 17:05:00 +0000

I’ve been busy the last couple of weeks. Between (the announcements at) all the Conferences to follow like PDC and Tech·Ed, all the projects to do, the rehearsal for the musical I’m in in December (Dutch) and the start of our new company (Dutch), I didn’t have a lot of time to blog…

Ajax Control Toolkit controls don’t show up in Visual Studio toolbar

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 12:57:02 +0000

Because I stopped working at Avanade and started my own company (this web site is under construction and in Dutch), I had to buy and install a new laptop. Everything went great and I was up and running in half a day. Or should I say half an evening… 😉

A new challenge …

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 16:25:00 +0000

As of today, I am no longer working for Avanade. I had a good time over there, but my personal goals changed. I found a new challenge: I started a company with a good friend of mine. We’re still building the website, so the information is not there yet. But it will be soon. So check the website every now and again.

I’m a PC

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 07:42:00 +0000

We all know the “Get a Mac” videos from Apple. And to be honest, they’re pretty funny sometimes. Most of the time… 😉 After a horrible start with the Seinfeld commercials (no offence Jerry), Microsoft might be on to something with their new campain “I’m a PC” (Seinfeld commercials to be found there, too).
They got an actor that looks like the PC guy in the Get a Mac commercials and used him to introduce some new videos, telling us how many different kind of PC’s there are. And it wouldn’t be Microsoft if they didn’t put in some celebrities like Eva Longoria, Pharrell Williams, Deepak Chopra and of course bill’s there too. There’s (always) room for improvement, but they’ve made the first (big) steps.

An inline wrapper and having too much on your head

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 14:19:20 +0000

We developed an ASP.NET page (A) to be wrapped in an existing PHP page (B) using an inline wrapper. After a few days in which both pages displayed nicely, our page (A) suddenly got displayed twice inside the existing page (B). And even weirder was that the postbacks of the first occurrence didn’t work, and the postbacks of the second were executed outside of the wrapper.

iTunes 8 translation glitch

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:12:13 +0000

I installed iTunes 8 on our laptop, and connected an iPod to check if all worked accordingly. The iTunes was installed in Dutch, so the displayed information was also. Apparently, when you’re Dutch, you get some extra capacity on your iPod, free of charge!

StyleCop v4.3 now available

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:22:00 +0000

StyleCop version 4.3 was released last tuesday. A short summary of what version 4.3 brings us:

Various bugfixes, including fixes for VS integration issues
Rules documentation is included and integrated into VS “Show Error Help”
New rules, see blogpost for the rules
Branding change from Source Analysis to StyleCop **Links
** StyleCop blog: https://blogs.msdn.com/sourceanalysis/
Release announcement on the StyleCop blog: https://blogs.msdn.com/sourceanalysis/archive/2008/08/19/stylecop-4-3-is-released.aspx
StyleCop 4.3 download: https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=sourceanalysis&ReleaseId=1425

Cool tool: DebugView

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 08:47:13 +0000

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.

Microsoft Research: Sphere multi-touch computing

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 07:54:27 +0000

Earlier this week the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit was held. On 10 was 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/.

A new view on Microsoft, Google, Apple and Linux

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:31:48 +0000

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…

New Avanade NL website online

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:47:55 +0000

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!

Running code analysis on a custom stsadm command gives errors CA0052 and CA0055

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 18:45:03 +0000

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…

A not so clear Visual Studio code analysis message (CA1308)

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:33:00 +0000

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:

The absolute minimum every software developer …

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 04:54:42 +0000

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:

A scenario where LINQ is too dynamic (answered)

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 05:19:00 +0000

The situation I talked about in my previous post had 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. Each time the variable containing the outcome of the LINQ query is iterated through, the query is evaluated again. This made that the matching was all off, and I ended up with a bunch of exit groups that got matched!

A scenario where LINQ is too dynamic

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:57:00 +0000

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:

Unable to connect publishing custom string handler …

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 05:12:00 +0000

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:

Online profiles – update

Tue, 27 May 2008 05:18:00 +0000

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}.

The number of fractional digits is out of range?

Sat, 10 May 2008 05:41:00 +0000

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'.

Error connecting to undo manager

Mon, 05 May 2008 04:51:00 +0000

Image missing

While developing a web application for a friend of mine, I ran into a Visual Studio error message I hadn’t seen before: Error connecting to undo manager of source file ‘D:DevelopmentSomeWeb ApplicationDefault.master.designer.cs’.

EntLib Extensions to WSSF – Part 2

Sun, 04 May 2008 15:54:00 +0000

The EntLib Extensions to WSSF have gotten more and more attention lately. There now is a (very positive) announcement about the extensions on the WSSF site, and there is a complete article on MSDN explaining how to use the extensions. Check it out!

First release: Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit

Thu, 01 May 2008 08:03:02 +0000

It’s here: the Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit. This first release contains two tools, both supported on WSS 3.0 and SharePoint Server 2007.

Batch Site Manager
From the “Move, Lock, and Delete Site Collections” page on Applications Management you can schedule bulk operations against site collections in the farm—including moving site collections between content databases (!!).

Live Mesh, a first look

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 08:35:21 +0000

This morning I found a mail in my inbox telling me I was invited to Live Mesh. That’s a nice start of the weekend, so thanks Jan! The Live Desktop user interface looks pretty cool, and it almost feels like a real desktop. But that part of Live Mesh is pretty much like Live SkyDrive: a big online disk for you to put stuff on. Lots of stuff. 5 Gigabytes worth of stuf… 😉

Rick van den Bosch .net – part II

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 21:26:00 +0000

It’s been a while because I’ve been so busy lately, but the next (technical) step for my personal website is now online. When browsing to https://rickvandenbosch.net/blog/, the content of my blog here is displayed sort of mirrored over there. I used an OpenSource RSS component to read my private rss feed from blogging about, and display it from there.

Backing up and restoring Visual Studio settings

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 04:58:29 +0000

When roaming the MSDN forums for unanswered questions for me to answer, I come across a lot of questions about any of the following:

Intellisense acting weird
Intellisense not showing up at all
Menu items that are all garbled up
Missing buttons on toolbars
Complete toolbars missing
Keyboard shortcuts acting weird
Keyboard shortcuts not working at all
…

In most cases, resetting the Visual Studio settings to the default settings using devenv /resetsettings solves any problems that are in that list. But I can imagine you don’t want to go through the hassle of setting up Visual Studio exactly the way you want it again (and again, and…). There’s a solution to that: define your own settings file to restore settings from.

Selecting all the controls of a specific type, the (built in!) LINQ way

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 16:02:36 +0000

We probably all worked with dynamically generated controls on forms, ASP.NET pages or (user) controls. And I guess we’ve all written for-each statements to loop through the ControlCollection and filter out all the controls of a specific type, right? I wanted to do the same today, so I started by trying to use LINQ for this:
Image missing This, as you can see, generated a compile time error:
Could not find an implementation of the query pattern for source type ‘System.Web.UI.ControlCollection’. ‘Where’ not found. Consider explicitly specifying the type of the range variable ‘control’.

‘EntLib Extensions To WSSF’ released to CodePlex

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 20:59:00 +0000

Some of my (Dutch!) Avanade colleagues recently released ‘Entlib Extensions To WSSF’ to CodePlex. Quite a cool addition to the already rich Enterprise Library.

Entlib Extensions to WSSF (Web Service Software Factory) is an extension that enables WSSF to easily integrate with Enterprise Library. This extension allows you to very easily handle cross cutting concerns in WCF services like Validation, Exception Handling and Logging without much programming. The extension accomplishes this by using the policy injection application block of enterprise library.

Blu-Ray coming to the Xbox 360?

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 21:37:00 +0000

I’m not entirely sure about the article on Digitimes. One of the reasons is because it was posted on April first. Another reason is the way it is written. But if it turns out to be true, I’m going to have to get a Blu-Ray player for my Xbox 360… 😉

LinkButton inside UpdatePanel results in full postback, UpdatePanel not triggered

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 04:47:00 +0000

When you dynamically generate a LinkButton in code that will be placed inside an UpdatePanel, you’ll experience that the Click event for the LinkButton results in a full postback in stead of the UpdatePanel being triggered. There’s a rather simpel solution to this problem…

Error adding an OleDb Data Connection to Visual Studio Server Explorer

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 20:54:18 +0000

The error I’m getting when setting up an OleDB connection to an Access database* via the Server Explorer in Visual Studio 2008 is:

Image missing

‘Format of the initialization string does not conform to specification starting at index 0’. The screen doesn’t display the way it should be displayed, as you can see in the missing screenshot.

DropDownList SelectedIndexChanged doesn’t trigger UpdatePanel in SharePoint 2007 SP1

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 15:32:20 +0000

A week ago I had a nice page that was hosted in SharePoint and, among others, contained an updatepanel with a dropdownlist in it. Everything worked, and all was well. Because our testers had found some issues we had delivered two newer versions to our development environment. In the last version they found an issue that wasn’t there before: selecting a different value in the dropdown did not only update the updatepanel, but resulted in a complete postback. My first idea was: that’s an easy one, I’ll check the triggers. Boy, was I wrong…

ModalPopupExtender in SharePoint – part II

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 05:53:41 +0000

As I said earlier, we didn’t test our solution to using the ModalPopupExtender in SharePoint in all situations. Today we made a start to do so. To indicate our successrate: we now use window.showModalDialog with some extra pages…

Getting the ModalPopupExtender to work in SharePoint 2007

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 05:59:23 +0000

Getting the ModalPopupExtender from the Ajax Control Toolkit to work (decently) in SharePoint was not exactly a walk in the park. With a default SharePoint installation, the modal popup is partly positioned ‘outside’ of the page (you only see the bottom right part of the popup in the top left corner of the browser). Postbacks are not executed or executed poorly and the page gets garbled up. A possible solution for the positioning of the popup is to set the X and Y property of the ModalPopupExtender. Downside is you never know (for sure) if the popup is positioned inside the visible part of the browser because of things like non-maximized browser, different resolutions and so on.
Today we seem to have solved our issues with the ModalPopupExtender in SharePoint. We haven’t tested it in all scenario’s yet, but we’ll get to that. At this point everything looks the way it is supposed to. And it seems to work, too… ;).

New feature: subscription by e-mail

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 16:52:00 +0000

It is now possible to get updates from this blog through e-mail (nice feature, feedburner{.}). Updates will be sent once a day, but only when new items are available.

Curious? Subscribe here!

I8 converter – Download (sourcecode available)

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 21:31:00 +0000

One of my colleagues pointed out the new Fine-grained password policy feature in Windows Server 2008. As you can see in this post at The Sean Blog, some values have to be entered in the I8 format, which isn’t very user friendly. Because of that, he asked me if I could whip up a tool that converts days, hours, minutes and seconds to the I8 format. I quickly put together this small tool for him. It hasn’t been tested extensively, but I think it might be of some use to some of you.
For example, I used longs to store the info. When wanting to calculate huge values, this won’t work of course. This could be improved by using the multipliers divided by for instance 10,000,000 and add the appropriate amount of zeros (7) to the string after calculation, so the numerical value stays a lot smaller. Still, I think it does what it should do at this point. You can find the sourcecode [over here][2], or if you would like te change anything: be my guest. Let me know if you find bugs or add cool features: I would like to know.

(Single-Entry, ) Single-Exit, my 2 cents

Sat, 08 Mar 2008 11:20:39 +0000

As a reaction to this article at Peter Ritchie’s MVP Blog, I thought I’d give my two cents on having a single exit point for methods. Here we go…

When writing code, I always create only one exit point except for the occasional throwing of an exception. Most important for me is to always know where your code (really) stops. In case of long and complex methods there’s a chance you’re going to miss a return statement when scanning through a method. That way you could end up studying code not even applicable to the situation, while missing the real point. I do think there is no real reason to hold on to creating methods with a single exit point other than personal favoritism. This feels the same like using curly brackets with an if-statement that is followed by only one statement. I always use curly brackets, but there are lots of developers who don’t.

Now available: PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008

Sat, 08 Mar 2008 08:47:00 +0000

One of the most annoying things in Visual Studio (to me) was the fact that complete solutions (solution folders, projects, regulare folder) would be expanded upon opening. And with big solutions, that isn’t too much fun. There are macros available online, but the ones i found were pretty slow. This is only one of the things that the PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 solves for you. But there is more. Much more!

Short personal update – March 2008

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 09:13:00 +0000

This weekend we got back from a skiing trip we went on with the school my girlfriend works at. We had a great time! The kids were great, and so were the teachers and the Huski people who were there to teach the kids how to ski and snowboard. If they need an extra pair of hands next year, I hope they’ll consider me: I’d be happy to join them.

Upcoming: holiday!

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 20:32:00 +0000

I won’t be blogging for the next week. Tomorrow evening, we are going on a ski vacation! I was invited to join the skicamp my girlfriend is going on with her work. A nice opportunity to brush up my skiing skills. Let’s hope we’ll come back in one piece, but I’m counting on it 😉

Windows Live SkyDrive now available

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 11:10:00 +0000

Just a quick post: Windows Live SkyDrive is now available. It left the beta stage yesterday. You can now store 5Gb of data online, choose who has access to each folder you create and more. There is a maximum filesize of 50Mb.

PageRequestManagerServerErrorException (status code 500)

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 19:02:00 +0000

In a quick AJAX demo I had to create today, I ran into a (somewhat cryptic) PageRequestManagerServerErrorException. I needed a simple form of the Cascading Dropdown{.}, one that doesn’t use a (web)service for its data, but gets it from a simple method. Here’s the setup, and the cause…

.NET Framework versioning, or The impact of switching from Visual Studio 2005 to 2008

Sat, 09 Feb 2008 09:37:00 +0000

With the official release of Visual Studio 2008 coming closer and its release on MSDN last november, there are more and more people asking what the impact of migrating from VS2005 to VS2008 will be and if it will have as big an impact as switching from VS2003 to VS2005 had. The answer is pretty simple: no it won’t. Let’s see why, and what impact it will have.

Earphones gone bad

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 21:14:00 +0000

Until the Zune is available in Europe (when will that be, if ever…), I’m using an iPod. To be honest, I’m pretty satisfied with the product although iTunes still doesn’t feel like a solid piece of software… (understatement anyone?)

Hooray (x 2) for MSDN library Community content

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 19:11:00 +0000

There are several steps to creating a custom web service to be hosted in SharePoint. The MSDN library{.} has a walkthrough on creating a custom web service{.}. After having followed this walkthrough thoroughly, I though my web service was good to go. Unfortunately all I saw was an error: “Could not load type ‘ThisAndThat’ from assembly ‘SoAndSo’”. Just as I was about to search for an answer somewhere online, I remembered that the MSDN library features the Community content for little over a year now{.} (hooray!).

rick van den bosch .net – part 1

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 21:08:00 +0000

So that’s part 1: www.rickvandenbosch.net is now online. There’s nothing to be found over there yet, but the domain has been delivered. Oh, and there’s an easy redirect to my blog, so that goes back here ;). From now on, you can also use rickvandenbosch.net/blog as the url to find my blog. I’m currently talking to the bloggingabout.net admin to mirror my content over there, for now it’s just a redirect. Keep posted for more updates on the new domain.

.NET framework source code now available

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 07:29:00 +0000

As stated on ScottGu’s blog{.} in his latest post{.}, the .NET Framework Library Source Code is now available. A detailed blog post about the steps to follow to enable .NET Framework source access in Visual Studio 2008 can be found at Shawn Burke’s blog in this post{.}.

Finally getting some coding done

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 19:39:00 +0000

The last weeks have been filled with holidays and introductional days at my new employer{.}. Because of that, I haven’t had the time to realy dive into Visual Studio 2008, although I have played around with it since the RTM version was available. Since this week I’ve been writing some serious code in VS2008 for my new personal site (more about this later!). I can only agree with what Pieter de Bruin said in his post about the new line of developer tools and additions: “If you are building .NET 2.0 applications, you really should take a look at all of the above”.

BloggingAbout: we’re back

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 17:57:12 +0000

Dennis already blogged about it: we had some problems with the availability of BloggingAbout since last night. The error was fixed this afternoon, so everything should be back to normal. If you’re experiencing any difficulties, please let me know through the contact form, or mail me at rick.van.den.bosch[at]bloggingabout.net.

Blogging @ Almere

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 20:38:00 +0000

Today was the first of two introduction days at Avanade{.}. Maybe you missed it, but I started there today{.}. And that’s why I’m writing this blogpost from a hotel in Almere, using my new Avanade laptop. 😉

Best wishes

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 13:38:13 +0000

All the best for the year 2008!
I hope we will be hearing/reading a lot of each other this year 😉

Which blog software to use …

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 19:53:10 +0000

I’m thinking of hosting a blog myself. Most important reason would be that bloggingabout.net doesn’t allow some stuff like scripts, embedding flash and links to things like the ‘connect with me’ button and so on. Which is completely understandable by the way. What I’m not sure about is which software to use. Do you guys have any tips on which blogging software to use? Or maybe even on if I should or shouldn’t host it for myself? If you do, let me know.

Two more weird messages / mess-ups …

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 22:46:24 +0000

A Dutch web site, made in SharePoint, uses a specific ActiveX.
Only the name of that control is not really specific:
Image missing

The MSDN forums haven’t been available the last couple of hours.
The message isn’t so pretty:
Image missing

“Some of the properties associated with the solution could not be read”

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 20:43:57 +0000

Next to the message in the subject, one of the symptoms we encountered is that although the solution contains some test projects the ‘Create private accessor’ menu has disappeared. Also, selecting ‘Create unit tests…’ produces an error. And when editing a testrun config and selecting the ‘Code coverage’ option, the settings dialog simply closes, without any message.

Why elaboration should be done with a SMALL team

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 22:26:42 +0000

Image missing

A [wikipedia:RUP] project consists of 4 different phases. The elaboration phase (the second phase in the RUP project lifecycle) is normally done with a small team. One of the important reasons for this is that you want to define the basic form of your architecture. This means you think about concepts, elaborate on them, develop proof of concepts and select the ones that work best for your specific project.

Notepad translation error?

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 22:27:21 +0000

Have a look at this article at Worse Than Failure. That’s pretty funny. Or actually, pretty scary… 😐

Oh and, by the way, the Rick in the article is not me ;).

Technorati tags: Funny, Link

Sometimes even experts mess up

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 21:41:00 +0000

Today I received a mail from Microsoft with an invitation for an Expert session. As you can see, sometimes even the experts at Microsoft let a glitch through…

Image missing (Translation of the text inside the circle: Dear sir, madam [personalize],)

My games list

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 20:38:45 +0000

Recently I put up a list of my Xbox 360 games. I’ll try to keep it up to date. I must say it’s difficult to choose which game to get next. There are so many good titles out! Assassins Creed, Need for Speed ProStreet, Call of Duty 4 Modern warfare, and more…

‘100% code coverage, unless…’

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 19:48:00 +0000

When asked about my point of view about a guideline concerning code coverage, my answer always is: go for 100% code coverage. 100%, unless… Here is why.

When the guideline for code coverage is 80% (not an uncommon guideline) the devil is in the details. Or in the 20% which is not covered to be exact. When a developer ‘only’ needs to cover 80% of his code, you can expect him (or her) to start with the easiest scenario’s, and work his way towards the more difficult scenario’s until the coverage guideline has been met. This way, the scenario’s which are the most difficult to realize as a test aren’t hit. And, more important, the developer didn’t think about the most difficult scenario’s and how to test them. In that case the remaining 20% is completely unknown*. I know several testers and I can assure you: they don’t like that.

Spam frenzy

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 08:07:48 +0000

The last two weeks or so, my blog has been hit by a wave of comment spam. Every morning there are 20-something comments like ‘Nice’ or ‘Sorry :(’ to be deleted. Fairly pointless posts… The only link they contain seems to be in the URL field, and not in the message like they used to. Do they really think a blogger would see that kind of rubbish as a serious comment?

Project template doesn’t understand AssemblyName tag?

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 21:28:00 +0000

At my current project we made a project template for Visual Studio for our testers. We added all the references, folders and files a tester needs to add a new system tests project. One of the testers (!) extended our XML generator, which generated XML testcases based on data entered in Excel, to now generate a complete C# test class. Making (system) tests which are automatically run during the nightly build now really is just as simple as entering data in Excel.

Nerd alert?

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 20:55:45 +0000

I have lots of games for my Xbox 360 I still need to / want to finish, like The Orange Box and Bioshock. And despite this, I’ve been working ’non-stop’ behind my laptop for the last two evenings to prepare it for Visual Studio 2008, and to download and install it. It’s almost time… 😉

010108: a new challenge

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 14:52:37 +0000

As of 01-01-2008, I’m joining Avanade. You might have heard Avanade opened an office in the south of The Netherlands the first of November. I’ll be joining the ranks over there (Eindhoven!) and I am exited to get started.

This is NOT a test.

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 20:33:00 +0000

Test Driven Development is hot, just like unit testing your software and any other kinds of (automated) testing. And as we all know: sometimes stuff that’s hot is misinterpreted, explained wrong or just simply used in a really bad way. Unfortunately, testing is no exception to this rule…

HowTo: Set the Theme for a MasterPage (from code)

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 09:19:54 +0000

The MasterPage doesn’t have a property for setting the Theme at design time. Despite this, I wanted to set the Theme for a MasterPage, so I decided to set it from code. I was aware of the possibility to set the Theme through the web.config, but that wasn’t the way I wanted to set it. One of the reasons being it would result in the theme being applied to the entire website.

DreamScene is here! But what happened to the other Windows Vista Ultimate Extras?

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 15:15:07 +0000

Back in July, Barry Goffe (Director Windows Vista Ultimate) mentioned that the missing Extras identified in January would be released at the end of the summer. I just got a bit curious about when these Extras would finally be released, so I visited windowsultimate.com again. And there it was: DreamScene was released recently (September 25th). And although I’m not quite sure if I’ll use this ever day, it’s kind of a cool feature. Isn’t it?

HALO 3: my (first) 2 cents

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 07:24:00 +0000

WOW
The single player mode feels like a multiplayer game, with excellent gameplay. Certain parts of the game are pretty creepy, and I like it that there are some surprising elements in there. Sometimes you expect something to happen, which doesn’t. And when you least expect it…. So the (story in the) game is original. That makes a game interesting to play. One of the things I like a lot is that you can use almost everything your opponents use, like vehicles and weapons
The multiplayer part is just great. I played online with some friends this weekend, and we had a blast!

HowTo: Disable specific Code Analysis rules for a Team Build

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 17:47:00 +0000

Thanks to the MSDN forums{.} (and specifically one Hua Chen), I found a way{.} to disable specific code analysis rules for a team build. In this post I’ll combine the steps I followed earlier with the description given at the MSDN forum. I’ll start out with some steps earlier on in the process: how to quickly get a list of all the code analysis rules you want to disable (without having to type it all yourself 😉 ).

Blog silence – Is blogging getting less popular?

Mon, 03 Sep 2007 21:00:00 +0000

Sure, we’re still a bit in the holiday season. But the last few months it seems to get quieter in the [wikipedia:blogosphere], and specifically the technical part of it. Maybe I’m just imagining it, but it feels like blogging isn’t as popular as it used to be. How are you guys experiencing this?

Disable specific Code Analysis rules for a Team Build

Fri, 31 Aug 2007 07:15:00 +0000

After searching a bit, I found a way to disable specific Code Analysis rules for a team build. Or at least I thought so… The RunCodeAnalysis tag in my build.proj file is set to ‘Always’ to override the individual project settings, and I added the ‘CodeAnalysisRules’ tag to exclude some rules as a test. (See below for a part of the build.proj file.) I ran a few builds, but the tag doesn’t seem to do what is supposed to. But when you use that tag in a project file, Visual Studio does recognize it as a valid tag…

I’m baaack …

Sat, 18 Aug 2007 18:03:00 +0000

So, after some relaxing at home and a very cool holiday in Spain, I’m about to go to work again next monday. And with that, I’ll be picking up all my ’normal day’ hobbies and stuff. So, I’ll try and pick up blogging (and taking pictures) again, just for you guys ;). Stay tuned … !

Our postal service is like a service bus

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 19:17:28 +0000

I ordered some stuff through the internet a week ago. The packet was sent through the Dutch postal service. They have a track and trace website, that shows where your parcel is at that moment, and where it has been. And that website made me realise the postal service is much like a service bus. I’ll compare it to a single service, to emphasise the differences. Let’s have a look, shall we … ?

Opened a photo blog

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 16:22:00 +0000

As you may know, I started out at blogger. I haven’t used that blog over there for the last two years, but now it is up and running again{.}! This time, I’m using it as my photo blog. I recently got my new camera, and I didn’t want to mix picture-posts with my software development related posts over here. So if you’re interested, go take a look over there. Next to the link earlier in this post, you can find a link @ the news section of this site, in the left sidebar.

Just in: new toys!

Thu, 19 Jul 2007 17:51:00 +0000

Last tuesday evening I ordered them, and just over an hour ago they came in: my new toys. I’m talking about my brandnew Canon EOS 400D!!! I started out with the kit lens (18-55), and I’ll get going with that, trying some stuff with this lens. And I just might order another in the future, but you have to start somewhere, right 😉

Stephen Lawler on Microsoft’s Virtual Earth @ TED.com

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 19:12:00 +0000

The TED website actually explains for me why you should watch Stephen Lawler’s talk on Virtual Earth{.}:

Why you should listen to him:

Microsoft’s Stephen Lawler offers a tour of Virtual Earth that not only reveals the power and potential of the software itself, but also gives a global glimpse of the new virtual frontier of digital globes, the 3D Web and the metaverse.
Lawler also explores the enormous effort it takes to create the fluid blending and shifting between the multiple views and resolutions of Virtual Earth. From the satellites and airplanes that gather photo data for a top-down view to the ground vehicles and headgear-wearing pedestrians who canvas the ground for an eye-level perspective — all of it represents a monumental effort of logistics and mechanics.

Get maintenance involved in your project. Early.

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 15:07:00 +0000

Last week we had a meeting with our contact at the department that will be maintaining the software we’re going to be developing in our upcoming project. Normally, these kinds of meetings take place in the end of a project, sometimes even under some (release) stress. At least, that was the case for all the previous projects I was involved in at the customer I’m currently at. Most of the time this is because people want to start developing the software instead of thinking about things that are not necessarily their area of expertise.

So… those updates weren’t the problem. Or at least, not the REAL problem.

Mon, 02 Jul 2007 15:11:00 +0000

A while ago I wrote about my laptop not wanting{.} to connect to the internet or an Exchange Server. Two days later, I thought I found{.} the updates which were the cause of all this. It wasn’t exactly true, but in the end everything worked… Because of that, I let it go for a few days. But after a while, I couldn’t help myself: I had to know the real reason for the problem. So after thinking long and hard about the (configuration) differences between my laptop and my ’normal machine’, I could think of only one which could be big enough to have this kind of impact. My laptop ~~has~~ had (the trial version of) Norton Internet Security installed, and my ’normal machine’ did not.

Technology, Entertainment, Design

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 06:31:00 +0000

Because of (a movie on) Microsofts cool new projects SeaDragon{.} and PhotoSynth{.} (which doesn’t seem to run from behind the firewall over here), I found the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference website{.}. There are some pretty impressive talks to be found there. And some are plain hilarious. There’s one I enjoyed a lot: Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos’ talk “After the gold rush, there’s innovation ahead{.}“. In this talk he compares the internet hype to the 1849 Gold Rush, but goes even further by using more analogies to explain the current state of the internet. Have a look around the TED website, and see if there’s something for you…

We’re entering puberty …

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 14:57:00 +0000

I already stated it at Paul Gielens’ post about the SQL Server 2008 CTP: software (development) is about to hit puberty, if it hasn’t done so already. Looking at the rate (big!) new things are coming our way, you have to agree we’re entering a new level in software (development). Take a look at things like AJAX, the upcoming entity framework combined with SQL Server 2008, Acropolis, the upcoming versions of the .NET framework, Microsoft Surface and many, many more. Probably just like lots of you out there, I’m just happy to be in this business at these (exciting) times.

Found ’em!

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 20:19:00 +0000

I found the two updates which crippled{.} my laptop’s Windows installation. After uninstalling and re-installing lots of updates, it seems that these two updates caused the problem:
– ~~Update for Windows Vista (KB936825)~~ This wasn’t the one. The problem was back this morning. 🙁 I’ll be checking this out later today.
– Update for Outlook 2007 (KB933493)

Of Windows Live Writer Beta 2 and crippling Windows updates

Sat, 16 Jun 2007 08:11:33 +0000

This is my first post using Windows Live Writer Beta 2. I must say, it looks nicer than the first beta (having a Windows Vista-proof UI), but that’s not all… Some of the features that were added are pretty darn cool (auto-ping on post, table editing) or just plain good (use the same window for multiple posts, finally!). I am missing the spelling checker though… My first feeling: this is a pretty big step ahead for Windows Live Writer.

Binary

Fri, 08 Jun 2007 05:53:00 +0000

I took the test Adel blogged about. And guess what? I’m binary!
Does this mean I’m 1337? 😉

Which Programming Language are You?

Riddle me this…

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 15:49:00 +0000

I ran into a nice little riddle on thinkgeek.com{.} today (in the shirts section).
If you enjoy silly humor: take a look over there.

How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?

Build problem – Solved

Sat, 02 Jun 2007 09:41:55 +0000

Yesterday, I posted about a problem with MSBuild building our solution. We solved it, so I wanted to let you in on the ~~secret~~ solution.

We use the Enterprise Library V1.2 in some of our projects. And because some of the projects are being re-used from other internal projects, not all the references in thos projects were checked for versions. As it turned out, another project had a reference to an enterprise library assembly with a runtime version of .NET 2.0. And allthough this project compiled succesfully, local and on the build server, it broke the build of one of the other projects. This project (the one with the wrong reference) didn’t need the EntLib reference, so it ‘disappeared’ because of optimization. But reference resolving had resolved it, and pointed to EntLib 3.0. Later in the build the project which failed did need the EntLib file, and used the allready resolved assembly location.

Changed host

Sat, 02 Jun 2007 09:20:00 +0000

As I mentioned before, bloggingabout.net got a bit unstable recently. Our administrator saw this, and migrated us to a new host. All DNS servers should be updated by now, so the new host is fully operational. This should make us fully stable again. Together with this move, he also updated our community to Community Server 2007. And because we were into making changes, I updated the look of my blog (again… 😉 ).

MSBuild – Compilation error

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 12:35:00 +0000

Our current project uses the possibilities of MSBuild to have a daily build on a TFS server. This has been working up until yesterday somewhere around noon. Nobody knows what exactly happened, but it stopped working after our successful build of 11:42 am.

MSBUILD : warning : Specified cast is not valid

Mon, 21 May 2007 20:41:34 +0000

At my current project we use Team Foundation Server together with the possibility to have a daily build through MSBuild. Over the weekend, the build failed. Because our ‘build master’ called in sick this morning, I took it upon me to fix the build. But compiling the sources was no problem, because that finished without any errors. And there were no failing (unit)tests. Even better: there were no tests which had run at all! There were ’no test results to display’. The only thing I found in the build log (which is pretty big in a 70+ project solution!) that could indicate a problem was a warning from MSBuild:

Blog unstable

Mon, 21 May 2007 11:41:00 +0000

You’ve probably noticed it yourself. Bloggingabout.NET seems to be a bit unstable since a week or so. But it’s not just us: my rss reader indicates https://weblogs.asp.net has had some problems lately too. Is there any relation between these two sites? Do they happen to use the same database server? Or is it all just purely coincidence…

Halo 3 betalicious video

Fri, 11 May 2007 18:55:54 +0000

A Halo 3 video has been posted at the Microsoft website, which can be found through the Bungie website. The article containing the link starts out with this next sentence:

Maybe you’ve heard of him, maybe you haven’t… but around Microsoft, Mr. Jukes has established a name for himself as a tireless, hardcore and fanatical player of Halo who isn’t too shabby in the video production department either.

LogicaCMG open house (The Netherlands)

Thu, 03 May 2007 03:41:00 +0000

Thursday the 10th of May LogicaCMG The Netherlands organises an open house for ICT professionals. From 4 pm until 9 pm colleagues will be available to answer any and all questions you might have about (working at) LogicaCMG. People active in all of our competences will be present. The open house is hosted at some of our locations across the country. This time, the lucky locations are: Amstelveen, Arnhem, Eindhoven, Rotterdam and Rijswijk. I myself will be present at our location in Eindhoven. To sign up, just send me your info. Try to add your name, address, phonenumber, e-mail address and if possible your curriculum vitae. You can find more info at https://www.logicacmg.nl/openhuis (Dutch page).

Unit Test Adapter threw an exception

Tue, 01 May 2007 00:58:00 +0000

“Unit Test Adapter threw exception: System.Reflection.ReflectionTypeLoadException: Unable to load one or more of the requested types. Retrieve the LoaderExceptions property for more information..”

This error popped up at one of the testers of our project this morning. The unittests he selected worked fine on my machine, but all failed on his with the above message. After searching a bit we found that the only thing which was different between my testrunconfig and his was that he enabled code coverage for the assembly these unittests were pounding away at. As it turns out, this error appears when code coveraging (is that even a word?) a signed assembly without re-signing it.

My new configs, and more …

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 09:33:00 +0000

It took me a while, but in the end everything worked out and life’s good… Most important changes are I have my very own server now, containing all the general stuff like mail, music, development stuff and that kind of data.
My workstation received a small update (I was able to upgrade based on the ‘old’ machine of a friend) and is now running Vista quite smoothly. To be honest, I haven’t found any major issues yet.

Why would you?

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 11:47:00 +0000

Last week I ran into a variable called @continue in the sourcecode of a project I’m reviewing. At first I had to think a bit before I knew what the @ was for. Of course I knew it’s an escape character when used in front of a string value. But when used in front of a variable name? In that case, it is an escape character also, but this time for the name of your variable. This way you can use a reserved word as a variable name.

Quickie

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 07:14:00 +0000

It’s been a while since I blogged, because…
– I started a new (exciting but busy) project building a technical framework (and ‘proving’ a reference architecture along the way).
– it looks like I might become a published writer when I hand in my article for the Dutch .NET magazine anywhere in the next couple of weeks.
– we had lot’s of meetings @ LogicaCMG lately, like the yearmeeting, an architect meeting, a funmeeting (bowling can be cool!), and so on.
– I’m planning on doing more along the way of competence development for my team, so I have to do some research and come up with a plan on how to do so.
– I was part of the orgnisation for the reunion of the musical I played in. We’re having it this saturday.
– our house still needs some ‘home improvement’ and I’m the guy to do it (preferably not ‘Tim Taylor’ style).
– I haven’t even had time to use my Xbox 360 the past couple of weeks!

UIPAB with ASP.NET 2.0 – our solution

Fri, 16 Feb 2007 02:39:00 +0000

As I posted earlier we had some trouble with upgrading the UIPAB to be used in a ASP.NET 2.0 Web Application Project. Eventually, we solved the problem and life was good. Almost a week ago I received a mail through my blog from someone looking for the solution. So here we go…

Cannot create/shadow copy ‘your assembly info here’ when that file already exists

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 06:19:00 +0000

I encountered his error for the first time today. A Web Application Project I’ve been working on for the last months started throwing this error today almost every time I wanted to debug the project. The assembly info changed from time to time, but the error was the same. Most of the time I could ‘repair’ it by closing the ASP.NET development server. But sometimes, even that didn’t work.

Ping trouble

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 04:43:05 +0000

I signed up at technorati recently. Technorati uses ping to get the info from blogs. And BloggingAbout.NET (Community Server) supports that. Or it should… Some posts just don’t show up over there! I’ve searched a little, and saw other people were having trouble with this too. I’ll see if I can find anything and if I do, I’ll forward it to our community administrator.

Defensive programming

Thu, 08 Feb 2007 01:51:00 +0000

We all encountered them in the field somewhere along the way: pieces of code that are based on assumptions. There’s something fundamentally wrong in assuming when writing code. I can understand that, looking at the big picture, you sometimes have to make an assumption when developing software. Some things you just can’t know for sure. This might concern something simple like the resolution of the targeted audience. But most of the time these kinds of assumptions are based on experience or plain old common sense. When these assumptions fail to be true, most of the time a mitigation strategy is at hand. And the software usually keeps running.

Changed appearance

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 09:58:00 +0000

Today I changed the appearance of my blog. The header has changed, and the content part is much wider. Because of the self-made banner I think this is a little more personal. Or a little less ordinary, whichever you prefer. If you have any feedback, please let me know. I think it’s pretty sweet, although this won’t show up pretty in a resolution below 1280 x 1024… Ah well, I think most people in our line of work will meet this requirement.

Cool present

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 21:15:00 +0000

Image missing

It seems there’s something to be celebrated today, so my girlfriend went and bought this little gem for me called the Gear4 HouseParty II. Its design is pretty cool, and I must say the quality of the sound comming out of that little box (approx. 25 cm wide) is pretty stunning! It comes with docks for all iPods (except for the shuffle) and even has its own remote, which lets you skip songs, change the volume and even use the iPod menu. Thanks Kaatje, for this pretty neat present!

Tag, I’m it.

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 10:34:00 +0000

After managing to dodge tags for quite some time, I’ve been tagged twice this week. Both PJ van de Sande and Marcel Boersma tagged me, so here we go…

**We named our cat after a dog
** Our cat’s name is ‘Dribbel’, which is the Dutch name for the dog ‘Spot’. The most important reason for naming the cat like that, is because of a big white spot on its back and a smaller black spot on its nose. Next to that, ‘dribbelen’ is Dutch for a certain way of walking which Dribbel does too… And of course, we just liked the name ;).

ASP.NET (2.0) AJAX extensions version 1.0 released

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 08:27:00 +0000

Scott Guthrie announced it January 23rd: version 1.0 of the ASP.NET AJAX extensions has been released. Good news … !

Scott also added a post containing Links to ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 resources, and answers to some common questions. A good read for people who would like to get started on AJAX. It catches some of the common problems you might encounter when you get started with the ASP.NET AJAX extensions. I liked the addition 2.0 (ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX extensions), but that’s not used everywhere. Probably because it’s kinda weird using two (different) version numbers in a single products’ name after adding 1.0 for the version for the AJAX library… (full & difficult productname used here.)

We’re back!

Wed, 24 Jan 2007 12:17:00 +0000

This morning we landed in Amsterdam at approximately 7.30 am. We had a great week in America, starting of with the great sessions at Microsoft for LEAP. Together with a colleague of mine (Ruud Campsteijn) I stayed for a few more days, so we got to see some more than just the inside of the Microsoft building, like an NBA game, the Boeing factory, Downtown Seattle and so on. You will be hearing more about the LEAP sessions in a little while. Right now, I’ve been awake for 24 30 hours straight, so it might be a good idea to go sleep now…

Personal update – January 2006

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 14:15:00 +0000

It’s almost here… Next monday me and about 30 LogicaCMG colleagues will be heading to Redmond. I’m pretty excited: we’ll be attending some pretty cool sessions, and some of us will get the opportunity to take a look at Microsofts vision of the future home in their Microsoft Home. Besides that I’ll stay a few days longer, so I can see something of America. My first trip over there ever … !

Xbox 360

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 05:15:00 +0000

The past weeks have been busy for me, but especially in the evenings, with the musical I played in and all that… During the day, I had some spare time every now and again, and I wasted most of that on my Xbox 360. … loving it 😉 …

Low blogging activity – again

Mon, 18 Dec 2006 01:22:53 +0000

Maybe I mentioned it earlier: I play in a musical in the month December (Veldhovense Revue). We started rehearsing twice a week in March. Now, we’ve played 4 shows already, and we’ve got 10 more to go. We’ve been really busy the last couple of weeks to make it a great show, and I think we succeeded.

UIPAB trouble upgrading to ASP.NET 2.0 Web Application Project

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 12:26:44 +0000

We’re working to upgrade our current ASP.NET 1.1 project to an ASP.NET 2.0 Web Application project (so that’s not the new Visual Studio 2005 website model). We had some basic minor migration issues, which have all been addressed and are currently solved. The only problem we have right now is with the UIP Application Block. There are several people online stating they’ve got UIPAB working in a .NET 2.0 project. Unfortunately, we haven’t got it working… yet 😉

WLW – My first post

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 12:03:32 +0000

I tried using Windows Live Writer as soon as it got out, but because of proxy settings at the company I was working publishing posts wasn’t possible. I only now got time to try it at home, because I’ve been at home ill the past days. I’m still not 100% well, but I’ll keep quiet to get well soon. So maybe it’s better if I go and rest now…

Tech·Ed Developers 2006

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 05:47:00 +0000

Sadly, I will not be attending the 2006 European developer Tech·Ed. Fortunately, the reason I won’t be there is quite nice: I am currently attending Microsoft’s ‘LEAP for aspiring architects’ program, which enables me to visit Redmond next January! So although I will not be visiting Spain next week, America is whitin reach! I’m looking forward to visiting the Microsoft Campus. I’ll post all the interesting information over here …

There’s a lot to be taught by software developers

Fri, 13 Oct 2006 02:31:00 +0000

I used to think we (people working in software development) were far behind when it came to testing. Due to a few experiences over hte last few weeks this has changed… In waterfall projects, testing is at the end of the process, causing it to be the first thing to go when time gets short. In agile methods, test is evenly divided throughout the process. This combined with the popularity of agile methods make that test is getting more and more mature in software development. We all know we should test (although we do not always act upon the things we know), and we’re constantly trying to find ways to optimize our entire process. We are ahead of our times, I tell you.

Google code search

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 00:20:00 +0000

Google added another cool search to their labs: Google Code search. Find code written in almost any language, and under almost any license. Have a look at advanced code search and see the possibilities. If the codebase that is searched is big enough, this might be a good step into getting developers to use Google if they’re looking for a piece of code (when they’re that not doing that already…).

Getting the computername of the host of a VMware image

Fri, 15 Sep 2006 05:11:00 +0000

Because of a new way of working here at the customer I’m located at, two virtual machines will be deployed to each developer’s machine. These VM’s will be run using VMware player. The thing is, the VM’s should be able to access the network and all the ’normal’ resources. Because of this, all the VM’s should have unique (computer)names. But they have to be traceable to the host machine.

Basic .NET training

Tue, 12 Sep 2006 02:33:00 +0000

Together with a colleague, I’m giving basic .NET training for colleagues at this moment. Not at THIS moment exactly, because they’re doing exercises right now. But today is the second day of four days of training in total. Currently we already have two weird things popping up.

And so we’re back …

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 22:58:00 +0000

I’m back again. The past four weeks I’ve been entertaining kids on a summer camp (one week) and we’ve moved into our new house! After lots of painting, demolition and other stuff, our new house is ready (enough) to live in. In the near future, our new furniture will arrive and our bathroom will be renewed. So: lots of upcoming milestones!

Low blogging activity

Sat, 29 Jul 2006 23:34:00 +0000

The next couple of weeks there will be low activity on my blog. First, I’ll be guiding a total of almost 100 kids through a summercamp for a week (we’re leaving today), next we will start working on our new house! We get the key a week from monday, so that’s two days after we come back from camp. Two days of resting…… I hope 😉

Visual Studio 2005 SP1 to ship Q3 of this year

Mon, 24 Jul 2006 01:22:00 +0000

The Visual Studio servicing page is updated: VS 2005 SP1 will ship Q3 of this year. This date seems to have has slipped before, but at least it gives us an estimated time of shipping.

Microsoft Sandcastle – status update

Mon, 24 Jul 2006 01:00:00 +0000

Jan Schreuder blogged about it earlier, and the buzz around Sandcastle is growing…

Brenton House posted about Sandcastle last friday, stating that it might have been the day Sandcastle would be released. Unfortunately it wasn’t, so the waiting does not stop yet. It even looks like we might be waiting a little longer:

New MSDN Library provides IE7 Search provider

Mon, 17 Jul 2006 04:03:00 +0000

MSDN 2 Library has been online for a while now. When you visit the ‘old’ MSDN library, you see the following text:

“We’re upgrading the MSDN Library to a new publishing system which provides improved performance, better search relevance, XHTML compliance, URLs which don’t change after product releases, and more. During the next few months we’ll gradually move content over to the new site, although MSDN Search will work across both sites automatically. The first few levels of the Table of Contents (TOC) tree will be kept in sync across both sites; you can select the product/technology you want in the directory tree and we’ll redirect you to the correct library for that content.

Unexpected behaviour when calling overriden method

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 00:54:00 +0000

Since not too long ago, I joined the MSDN Forums. The MSDN Forums is a big community where lots of knowledge is passed around. I recommend joining.

Yesterday I ran into an interesting post. It’s about an overriding method that exactly seems to match the call, but doesn’t get called. In stead, the base method is called… Apparently this is because of override-resolution starting at the base working its way up, and a method declaration that matches more than you would think it does.

Consolas font – my 2 cents

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 05:14:00 +0000

“Consolas is a monospaced font (like an old typewriter) and good for programmers setting code (its core purpose).”

The above quote is taken from the Microsoft Design website, and specifically the part about ClearType fonts. It states the main reason for developing the Consolas Font Pack (download here) is to develop a better font for ‘programmers setting code’. Because of this, I primarily tested Consolas in Visual Studio, my editor of choice when writing code 😉

‘protected internal’ != (‘protected’ & ‘internal’)

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 03:34:00 +0000

Having a database management class called DatabaseManager, I wanted to make a property for this DatabaseManager in a BaseForm. This way, every form inheriting from BaseForm would be able to use the same instance of the DatabaseManager.

Assess your Microsoft skills

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 03:27:00 +0000

Recently I ran into the Microsoft Skills Assessment page. After singing in with your passport, you can take all kinds of skills assessments for various Microsoft products, from Visual Studio 2005 to Windows Storage Server 2003.

Personal update

Mon, 19 Jun 2006 03:33:00 +0000

Lots of stuff happened the past few months, so it’s time for a personal update. Here we go…

I’ll be attending an MSF4 Agile Masterclass @ Microsoft in July
In August my girlfriend and I will be the proud owners of a house in Grasrijk (a part of Eindhoven). We can’t wait … !

Houston, we have an upgrade…

Fri, 16 Jun 2006 03:43:00 +0000

BloggingAbout.NET was upgraded today! We are now CommunityServer 2.0 enabled. Because of this, I also changed the look and the description of my blog. Why not do everything at once 😉

On Risk-based Software Development (and a hint of Madonna)

Wed, 07 Jun 2006 23:55:00 +0000

Last night at eleven thirty, when I was taking a shower after playing volleyball for an hour and a half, I thought of a link between risk-based software development and….. a pop song*. Sometimes you think of stuff at the weirdest moments.

Error: Could not instantiate activex control ‘xxxx-xxx’ because the current thread is not in a single threaded apartment

Thu, 01 Jun 2006 23:27:00 +0000

At our current project, we have an application which is deployed using No Touch Deployment. Because of some SEHException we got a few months back, we started our application in a separate thread using a launcher class which contains the Main() method for the application. Recently we added functionality to display HTML pages our application generates, so we added the ActiveX webbrowser (in AxSHDocVw.dll).

IIS 7.0 on the MSDN .NET show

Sun, 21 May 2006 23:25:00 +0000

ScottGu blogged about IIS 7.0 on the MSDN .NET show. He and Bill Staples did an interview on IIS 7.0, which will ship with Windows Vista Beta 2. As Scott said: IIS 7.0 is a major, major update and improvement to the overall Microsoft web platform stack. See it. You can find it here.

HowTo: determine which object (and method) called another method

Fri, 19 May 2006 05:04:00 +0000

Sometimes when you’re inside a method you would like to know which method called it. Or even which object. For instance when you write a TraceListener, it might be pretty cool to make the TraceListener smart enough to find out what object called him and from which method. The StackTrace object in .NET makes this pretty easy. Here’s a howto…

House for sale!

Sun, 07 May 2006 01:18:00 +0000

I’m not blogging about the wellknown song by the Dutch band Lucifer from the year 1975, but to let you know we (my girlfriend and me) have bought a new house! Somewhere in August of this year, we will be the proud owners of a house in ‘Grasrijk’, a new part of Eindhoven right next to Veldhoven. After three-somewhat years in our current home we are ready for the next step. And now we can’t wait …. !

Cannot widen from target type to primitive type.

Tue, 02 May 2006 12:29:00 +0000

A few days ago we ran into the error in the subject of this post at my current project. Because it wasn’t easy finding any usefull hints pointing towards a solution, I’ll post ours here.

BloggingAbout .NET meeting? – Part 2

Tue, 02 May 2006 12:21:00 +0000

I’ve received lot’s of positive reactions on the post about organizing a bloggingabout.net meeting. I’ll try to squeeze in organizing a meeting in the near future. But see the near future somewhere between now and a few months. As you can image lot’s of stuff should be taken care of: a place to have the meeting, food & drinks, a decent agenda and maybe even guestspeakers. And to keep everything affordable for all the visitors: maybe we should consider finding a sponsor. But before we go there it’s important to make sure it’s possible.

BloggingAbout .NET meeting?

Thu, 20 Apr 2006 12:03:00 +0000

I’ve been thinking: would there be any interest for a bloggingabout .net meeting among the bloggers? We are all into .NET and most of us seem to enjoy a good discussion. Maybe we can organize a platform for those discussions in real life in stead of through posts and comments. It could be about anything, but has to have a predefined agenda to make sure the meeting has a goal.

SecurityException: That assembly does not allow partially trusted callers.

Fri, 07 Apr 2006 09:52:00 +0000

The exception mentioned in the title of this post was the one I encountered when using an ASP.NET control I had written.

**How I encountered the exception:

** Because I develop several websites, there’s a lot of functionality I need more than once. A possible solution for this is to write a control gallery containing the functionality I needed. And putting them in a seperate assembly makes it easy to dstribute them freely in the near future ;). I made the assembly (containing an image gallery and a download gallery) and used it in a website I am developing together with a good friend of mine. There were no problems and life seemed good. Until the day came we published the website. After putting the website online, one of the pages was not rendering correctly, displaying the message “Unhandled Exception: System.Security.SecurityException: That assembly does not allow partially trusted callers”.

Visual Studio 2005 IDE bug

Tue, 28 Mar 2006 11:06:00 +0000

Yesterday we ran into a bug in the Visual Studio 2005 IDE. To be precise: in Intellisense when writing a web.sitemap file. The Intellisense tells you the attribute which indicates whether a site map provider filters site map nodes based on a user’s role is called securityTrimmingEnabled. But when you use this attribute and run the website, you receive an error stating there is an Unrecognized attribute ‘securityTrimmingEnabled’.

BizTalk 2006 course

Fri, 24 Mar 2006 01:21:00 +0000

Wednesday and thursday I attended the first part of a BizTalk 2006 course at Class-A. Next week I’ll be finishing the course (tuesday and wednesday). I have to say that the trainer/coach who gives the course (Astrid Hackenberg) really knows what she’s talking about. At this point the 12 (?) people attending the course have not yet come up with a question she couldn’t answer.

Thank you, my friend …

Fri, 24 Mar 2006 00:35:00 +0000

After years of loyal service, I’m going to sell my current digital camera. I’m interested in buying an even better one (7.1 MP), although the Sony DSC-S85 I have now (4.1 MP) has brought me lots of great pictures.

DevDays 2006

Thu, 09 Mar 2006 00:07:00 +0000

I attended the DevDays 2006 and my overall impression was: cool. Allthough some of the sessions I attended weren’t good (or actually, were very bad), the overall feeling is good and I picked up on some great stuff. Meeting up with some smart people is also a good addition to attending the sessions.

Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices

Thu, 09 Feb 2006 23:01:00 +0000

Last week a book I requested arrived: Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices by Robert C. Martin. I haven’t had the time to dive in to it, but my first impression is this book is a good one. Nice quote I ran into on the first page, as one of the principles agile development follows:

HowTo: read your configfile when using no-touch deployment

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 01:37:00 +0000

Earlier I posted about reading a configfile when using no-touch deployment. Several people have contacted me to post the code, so here it is.

private static bool InitializeRemoting()
{
string configFile;

Media Center Trouble – Gone!

Fri, 30 Dec 2005 04:45:00 +0000

Sometimes things aren’t as difficult as they seem…

After some extra reading, and searching on gathering.tweakers.net, I found that everything I had done was correct. The only uncertainty was my graphics card. I went out and bought me a faster one (a Radeon 9550) and everything works well! As I am typing this, the same machine is playing a sweet K’s Choice song and recording a TV show, while displaying media center on my TV without any problems. Me likey.

Media Center Trouble – Part 2

Fri, 30 Dec 2005 01:12:00 +0000

Ramon’s tips helped me a bit further, because they enabled me to test some of the settings and try where the problem is.

I now encounter a very nice but weird phenomenon: when I use DualView on my NVidia card, I can drag Media Center to my TV. This works and shows up properly. When I maximize Media Center the image is all garbled up. But: when I open another window (this can be anything: notepad, display properties or the DirectX Control Panel (By the way: thanks for that one Ramon!)) and give this other window the focus, my Media Center display perfect. As soon as Media Center gets the focus, its image garbles up.

Media Center Edition trouble

Thu, 29 Dec 2005 00:23:00 +0000

It’s been a while since I’ve been blogging, because my project has been extremely hectic. Now I’m enjoying a week off, so I’ve got time for toys now… 😉

One of these toys was going to be Windows XP Media Center Edition. I installed it, bought a compatible TV card together with a MCE remote and yep: everything is working fine. At least, as long as I am watching it on my monitor. As soon as I switch to TV (through the TV Out on my GeForce Ti4800 SE) there’s trouble. I found that when Media Center is not maximized, it shows up on my TV. But when I try to maximize it, it garbles up the image up to a point where you cannot even recognize Media Center in it. It feels like the TV doesn’t support the refresh rate or something, but I can’t alter that in my NVidia driver.

ASP.NET 2.0 menu rendering differently in browser and at w3.org validator

Thu, 24 Nov 2005 13:24:00 +0000

I ran in to something strange today…

The ASP.NET 2.0 Menu control renders differently in a browser and in the W3 validator. Loading the page in a browser results in the usage of the correct attribute ‘vertical-align’ for the image which is used to indicate a menu has subitems. I checked this in IE and FireFox and both browsers rendered correct XHTML. When you copy the source of the rendered page and paste it in the validator-textbox at W3.org, it validates the XHTML. When you check the page directly by entering a URL, the menu renders using the non-correct attribute ‘valign’, causing my page to fail validation. But the copied source passes validation!

Binary .NET remoting over https: throwing errors serverside

Thu, 24 Nov 2005 13:18:00 +0000

As a follow-up to my previous post..

Eventually a colleague of mine pointed me in the right direction. The System.Runtime.Remoting part of a configfile can also contain a tag. Setting it to “Off” made that I got the expected exception. Thanks Jasper!

.NET remoting (http binary): passing (custom) errors

Wed, 23 Nov 2005 01:09:00 +0000

We are using binary .NET remoting over http for a client-server application. At the server, we have implemented custom error handling which results in the Service Interface (the facade layer) to throw a decent exception, with lots of information. The problem we encounter now is that most of the time the client displays these exceptions as BinaryFormatter exceptions, in stead of the ApplicationException or the normal Exception we throw serverside.

No-touch deployment & reading your config file

Tue, 08 Nov 2005 10:35:00 +0000

When you use No-touch deployment, reading your config file might cause some problems.

I experienced this when I received a ‘No message was deserialized prior to calling the DispatchChannelSink’ error last week. It took me quite some time before I found the problem, because of the strange error. After a while I thought about the way my app was starting: I started a separate thread which configured a remoting interface based on the config file: RemotingConfiguration.Configure(). This because of the non-standard binary formatter that was used. The thread didn’t throw an exception (I know, bad programming, but it was a proof-of-concept 😉 ) and so the app tried to communicate with the remoted object….. which resulted in the error above.

VS2005, a first look

Sat, 05 Nov 2005 00:18:00 +0000

Last week I played with VS2005 a little. My first overall impression is: sweet! Partial classes, nullable types, generics, master pages, new controls, great extra debug info… they all make our life a little easier.

IBM certified: Rational Unified Process

Fri, 28 Oct 2005 04:28:00 +0000

I’m having a good weekendstart today: I took an exam for Rational Unified Process this afternoon, and passed with a score of 91%! I am now an IBM certified Rational Unified Process professional. Sweet.

Howto: create a custom httpHandler

Thu, 27 Oct 2005 09:02:00 +0000

If you would like to (for example) make sure all the jpegs on your site are displayed including a copyright text or something like that, you could use the example I posted before. But it would be easier to write a custom httpHandler. Here’s a small howto:

Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar (Beta)

Sun, 16 Oct 2005 01:14:00 +0000

Today I stumbled upon the Dutch Microsoft blogs and found an interesting post at the blog of Robert Fransen: the IE Developer Toolbar beta is available! The Toolbar offers you lots of handy features:

HowTo: implement a list that sorts based on value ( not key ! )

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 06:34:00 +0000

Sometimes you need a sorted list. You would think in that case the SortedList class would help out, but unfortunately this one only sorts based on the key, while most of the time you would like to sort based on the value.

HowTo: Thread safe singleton implementation of a class

Wed, 21 Sep 2005 10:59:00 +0000

Normally, if you would like a singleton implementation of a class, you would go about it a little bit like this:

public class BloggingAbout
{
    private static BloggingAbout bloggingAbout;

    private BloggingAbout()
    {
    }

Structuring your projects

Fri, 16 Sep 2005 02:28:00 +0000

At my current project, I’m trying to bring some structure in our visual Studio projects. But I’m finding myself not sure about how far I should go. Maybe you should know I tend to be something of a purist. At the moment, we created a project with a single class, because it didn’t belong anywhere else. So we created a client specific ‘Common’ project and put the one file there.

Remoting, serialization error, CallContext, Clone()

Thu, 15 Sep 2005 08:34:00 +0000

I couldn’t come up with a decent title for this post, so I just spit out some keywords.

We got an error today, stating the Controller of some object we wanted to put on CallContext needed to be serializable. Not thinking about the weird content of this error, we tried what would happen if we made the controller serializable. We now got a different error, which was even more weird:

Design guidelines – again

Wed, 14 Sep 2005 08:46:00 +0000

I saw a presentation monday to explain the basics of .NET to some starting developers. In that presentation, I saw a piece of code design I don’t think should be showed. Ever. Especially to people who are about to enter the .NET world. In one cs-file, I saw a base class, two inheriting classes and then again two classes which inherited from on of the former mentioned classes. So there were 5 public classes in one file. A shiver ran down my back …

Advanced remoting – “No assembly associated with XML key”

Mon, 05 Sep 2005 11:14:00 +0000

For my current project I’m trying to implement a factory pattern using remoting. This seems to be more difficult than I imagined. I’ve done the following:

– Create an Interfaces project containing an IProductFactory and an IProduct.

Here we go – summer 2005 edition

Mon, 22 Aug 2005 04:27:00 +0000

We landed in Eindhoven this morning after a great holiday in Turkey. I’ve done some resting, got a tan and I’m ready to go for the rest of this year… And not only at my job: I’ll also pick up on blogging about .NET again.

Leaving on a jetplain…

Wed, 03 Aug 2005 05:52:00 +0000

I’m leaving for a 2-week holiday next sunday. Or actually, I’m going to a childrens camp as group leader for a week first, and after that I’m in need of a holiday ;). So then I’ll be leaving for 8 days of sun in Turkey. I’ll be back august twentysecond, but the two days after that are filled up with some in-house training, so my blog might be kinda quiet the next few weeks. But don’t worry: I’ll be back blogging my ass of before you know it 😉

JetBrains ReSharper 2.0 – First impression

Thu, 21 Jul 2005 04:35:00 +0000

Dennis blogged about it earlier today, and as soon as I saw that I couldn’t help myself: I had to try out ReSharper 2.0! Little did I know about the consequences…

Did you know: Visual Studio help ‘tabbed browsing’

Wed, 20 Jul 2005 05:27:00 +0000

Holding down the SHIFT key when you click a link in the Visual Studio help (using external help) opens the topic in a new tab in the help browser. So that’s a form of tabbed browsing. Sweet.

The conditional operator (? :)

Tue, 19 Jul 2005 22:07:00 +0000

Every now and again I see a piece of code where the author has used the conditional operator ? : . It might be my tidyness or it might take some getting used to, but I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all! My gut feeling says it’s nasty, because it’s not easy readable code. Lets look at an example. Imagine you have a property getter for the count of a collection. When the ArrayList you use internally is null, you want to return 0, else you want to return the count of the internal ArrayList. With the conditional operator, this looks like this:

New: post rating

Mon, 18 Jul 2005 07:05:00 +0000

Since we upgraded to Community Server, visitors are now able to rate posts. This way you can let the bloggers here at bloggingabout.net know what you think about the things they post. Give it a go!

DataSets vs Classes

Mon, 18 Jul 2005 01:22:00 +0000

Should I choose datasets or will classes do the trick? This is a question each developer probably asks himself (or herself) at the beginning of a project. And maybe even along the way…

If I had to answer that question, I wouldn’t now what to say because I think it depends on a lot of things which of the two will be better. Both of them have pros and cons. DataSets for instance are very easy to persist in a database. Classes on the other hand can enforce business rules more easily.

Barry Gervin started out with a list why datasets are so good, but in the comments there’s a big discussion going on about when to use datasets and when to use custom entities. I for one like datasets and classes. And I think we can use them both, even within the same system. On the other hand, that might get a bit complex.

Is Udi Dahan's comment right? Should dataset only be used in one-off situations, or can they belong in the center of a system’s architecture?

I don’t have a particular preference, although I seem to be inclined to start with classes more often. Do you have a preference? If so, drop me a line in the comments!

The importance of testing (or: The influence of a bug …)

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 21:51:00 +0000

We programmers know about bugs. We fight them now and then, create them sometimes but most of all try to keep them out of our software. At least, I hope you do too ;). Trend Micro has been the victim of a bug, and this had some nasty consequences for them. April 23rd this year, Trend Micro offered the update 'Official Pattern Release 2.594.00' on their website. This update allocated almost all system memory, making it impossible to work with the computer. Within two hours (!) a new version of the update was placed on the website and the erroneous one was removed. That two hours cost Trend Micro 8 million dollars! Tens of thousands of computers were 'infected' by the bug, more than 28000 customers called the callcenter that was rapidly put together.

I think this illustrates the importance of a few things I think every release in a software development project must go through:

– Unit testing
– Testing new features
– Testing old features
– Testing the influence of changes
– Regression testing
– TESTING!

Although testing is beginning to get more important in software development, I think a lot of companies are not up to par in that department. Where design and development of software have reached ~~maturity~~ puberty, testing seems to be strugling to get out of its diapers. Of course, there’s someone who is pushing the buttons and looking at the results, but that’s not enough. These days, software is very important. Like with Trend Micro, errors in software can cost you lots of money. I think the problem is that people don’t like to spend money for something when it’s hard to see if it pays off.

Maybe the problem is that good testing doesn’t show itself. When an error is found in a system through testing, that’s what the test was there for. But there’s no (easy) way to estimate what the influence (or the cost) of that error would have been if it wouldn’t have been found. Maybe what happened to Trend Micro was a good thing, because it illustrates the importance of testing.

I mean: it’s better to spend thousands of dollars more on testing than 8 million on repairing the trail of a bug later on, right?

ASP.NET 2.0

Wed, 13 Jul 2005 07:38:00 +0000

If you’re interested in Visual Studio 2005, and especially ASP.NET 2.0, visit this site: https://beta.asp.net/ It’s an official Microsoft beta site running ASP.NET 2.0. Including forum, a control gallery, tutorials, starter kits and many more!

Trying to find the right new look

Tue, 12 Jul 2005 11:13:00 +0000

We finally made the change to Community Server here at bloggingabout.net. Because of this, some stuff will change. One of them is the appearance of all the blogs. And I’m not entirely happy with the way my blog is looking right now. I guess it takes some getting used to. Maybe I’ll switch a little the next days. If you think I should keep a certain skin (or loose it!): drop me a comment…

CoolToolList.Add(CLRProfiler);

Tue, 12 Jul 2005 02:04:00 +0000

Microsoft's CLRProfiler is a tool you can use to analyze the behavior of your managed applications. I've used it a number of times and it can be pretty helpfull in profiling your apps. According to Microsoft, these are its strengths and weaknesses:

Highlights

CLRProfiler is a tool that is focused on analyzing what is going on in the garbage collector heap:

 <LI class="MsoNormal">
 <SPAN lang="EN-US">Which methods allocate which types of objects?</SPAN><br /> <LI class="MsoNormal">
 <SPAN lang="EN-US">Which objects survive?</SPAN><br /> <LI class="MsoNormal">
 <SPAN lang="EN-US">What is on the heap?</SPAN><br /> <LI class="MsoNormal">
 <SPAN lang="EN-US">What keeps objects alive?</SPAN>
 </LI></UL>
 <br /> <LI class="MsoNormal">
 <SPAN lang="EN-US">Additionally:</SPAN><br /> <UL type="circle">
 <br /> 
 
 <LI class="MsoNormal">
 <SPAN lang="EN-US">The call graph feature lets you see who is calling whom how often.</SPAN><br /> <LI class="MsoNormal">
 <SPAN lang="EN-US">Which methods, classes, modules get pulled in by whom</SPAN>
 </LI></UL>
 <br /> <LI class="MsoNormal">
 <SPAN lang="EN-US">The tool can profile applications, services, and ASP</SPAN><SPAN lang="EN-US">.NET</SPAN><SPAN lang="EN-US"> pages.</SPAN><br /> <LI class="MsoNormal">
 <SPAN lang="EN-US">The tool can control profiling:</SPAN><br /> <UL type="circle">
 <br /> 
 
 <LI class="MsoNormal">
 <SPAN lang="EN-US">You can add comments that can also serve as time markers.</SPAN><br /> <LI class="MsoNormal">
 <SPAN lang="EN-US">You can turn allocation and call logging on or off.</SPAN><br /> <LI class="MsoNormal">
 <SPAN lang="EN-US">You can trigger a heap dump.</SPAN>
 </LI></UL>
 <br /> <LI class="MsoNormal">
 <SPAN lang="EN-US">The log files produced are self-contained – you do not need to save symbol files and the like to later analyze the log file.</SPAN><br /> <LI class="MsoNormal">
 <SPAN lang="EN-US">There is also a command-line interface allowing log files to be produced in batch mode.</SPAN>
 </LI></UL>
 <br /> <P class="MsoNormal">
 <SPAN lang="EN-US"><A name="_Toc54579204"><STRONG>Lowlights</STRONG></A></SPAN>
 </P>
 
 <br /> <UL type="disc">
 <br /> 
 
 <LI class="MsoNormal">
 <SPAN lang="EN-US">CLRProfiler is an intrusive tool; seeing a 10 to 100x slowdown in the application being profiled is not unusual. Therefore, it is not the right tool to find out where time is spent – use other profilers for that.</SPAN><br /> <LI class="MsoNormal">
 <SPAN lang="EN-US">Log files can get huge. By default, every allocation and every call is logged, which can consume gigabytes of disk space. However, allocation and call logging can be turned on and off selectively either by the application or in the CLRProfiler UI.</SPAN><br /> <LI class="MsoNormal">
 <SPAN lang="EN-US">CLRProfiler cannot “attach” to an application that is already running.</SPAN>
 </LI></UL>
 <br /> <P class="MsoNormal">
 <SPAN lang="EN-US"></SPAN><SPAN lang="EN-US"><A name="_Toc54579205"><SPAN lang="EN-US"><STRONG>Internals overview</STRONG></SPAN></A><SPAN lang="EN-US"></SPAN></P><br /> 
 
 <UL type="disc">
 <br /> 
 
 <LI class="MsoNormal">
 <SPAN lang="EN-US">The tool uses the public profiling interfaces that the CLR exposes. These work by loading a COM component that then gets called whenever a significant event happens – a method gets called, an object gets allocated, a garbage collection gets triggered, and so on. </SPAN><br /> <LI class="MsoNormal">
 <SPAN lang="EN-US">The COM component writes information about these events into a log file (such as “C:WINDOWSTemppipe_1636.log”).</SPAN><br /> <LI class="MsoNormal">
 <SPAN lang="EN-US">The GUI (Windows Forms application) analyzes the log file and displays various views.</SPAN>
 </LI></UL>
 <br /> <P class="MsoNormal">
 <SPAN lang="EN-US">I also found <A href="https://msdn.microsoft.com/msdntv/episode.aspx?xml=episodes/en/20030729CLRGN/manifest.xml">this video</A> about the CLRProfiler, but I haven't had time to watch it yet...</SPAN></SPAN>
 </P></p>

Hair

Sun, 10 Jul 2005 10:23:00 +0000

Last weekend I went to see the musical Hair at the Stadsschouwburg in Eindhoven. It was played by an allmost all American cast: only the male lead was a Dutch guy, if I understood correctly. (Normally the female lead was Dutch too, but that role was played by someone else last saturday.) And I have to say: it was really great! Unbelievable vocals, great play and a pretty cool way to bring all those long forgotten beautiful songs back to life (Aquariuuuuus). Unfortunately last sunday was the last performance, so I would say ‘go see it’ but that’s not possible. It was their last performance in The Netherlands last sunday.

Howto: present a Crystal Reports report as a PDF in an ASP.NET web application (without using temporary files)

Fri, 08 Jul 2005 18:53:00 +0000

This one is actually quite simple: Crystal Reports supports exporting to a PDF. Exporting can be done to disk, or to a stream. And a stream can be written to the Repsonse property of a page. And there you go 😉

Developers! – Steve Ballmer on channel 9

Fri, 08 Jul 2005 17:22:00 +0000

View the interview Channel 9 had with Microsoft’s CEO: Steve Ballmer. The interview in short:

_Why does Microsoft care about developers?
01:11 Why does Microsoft have an evangelism team?
01:48 What is your call to action for developers right now?
02:44 Microsoft is a leader in transparency and blogging. Why did you allow blogging?
03:38 Time for some tough questions. On the blogs there are those that say that Microsoft doesn’t innovate, can you give us some examples of where Microsoft is innovating?
05:42 Coming up with tough questions for you is hard. If you were in my position what tough questions would you ask Microsoft’s CEO?
07:22 Since a lot of Microsoft employees watch Channel 9, what would you say to all the Microsoft employees around the world?
08:48 What do you want to be remembered as?

Online ClearType tuner

Fri, 08 Jul 2005 15:42:00 +0000

This Microsoft sites makes it possible to enable ClearType fonts in Windwos XP from a web interface (using Internet Explorer). Neat! There’s a powertoy available also…

ClearType is a special way of displaying fonts that makes fonts stand out more on LCD screens. It’s almost as if you’re looking at a piece of paper with the words printed on it. Click here for more information on ClearType.

ASP.NET – Configuration error. Parser Error Message: Access is denied: somename.dll

Thu, 07 Jul 2005 18:55:00 +0000

My last message was about this strange error I received. Today I got it again, which led me to believe a hardware failure was not the reason. So after some more investigation I found out Index Server was to blaim. Taken from support.microsoft.com (click here for full article):

ASP.NET error concerning referenced DLL

Mon, 04 Jul 2005 09:44:00 +0000

I’ve been using skmmenu for quite a while now, and I think it’s great! But last Friday I was fooling around in Visual Studio, trying to make some fun stuff in ASP.NET, when I got a strange error about a reference. The information part:

Upcoming change

Wed, 29 Jun 2005 07:04:00 +0000

Soon bloggingabout.net will switch to new (and better) blogging software. Because of this, the URL to my blog (and any other blog at bloggingabout.net) will change. In stead of bloggingabout.net/username, all blogs will become available through URLs like bloggingabout.net/blogs/username. Don’t worry if you can’t remember: the old URL will keep working for a while: it will redirect to the new one. I’ll keep you posted when the change is going to be done.

Did you know… Visual SourceSafe “Keyword Expansion Support”

Mon, 27 Jun 2005 12:35:00 +0000

Although we’re not using SourceSafe at my current project (yet), I found out about a cool feature recently: Keyword Expansion. It enables you to get information about the revision, date, author and so on of the version of the file you are looking at inside the file itself. This way you can see version information in the comments of your code-file, without even starting SourceSafe.

ComboBox trouble

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 11:27:00 +0000

The default ComboBox has some weird characteristics…

We created our own control which derives from the ComboBox because we wanted to create a ComboBox where the user could type (parts of) the value he or she wants to select, but would not be able to type something that was not in the list. So that’s kind of a combination between the DropDownStyles DropDown and DropDownList. The basics weren’t that complicated, so we created the controls pretty fast. But then came the next step: fine-tuning.

HOWTO: display your assembly @ Add Reference

Fri, 17 Jun 2005 14:15:00 +0000

You might want to be able to let your assembly show up in the Add Reference window in Visual Studio without the user having to browse for it. When you install your assembly in the GAC, it doesn’t automatically show up in the Add Reference window, because it doesn’t enumerate all assemblies in the GAC. Installing in the GAC only eliminates the need to copy assemblies localy when referencing them. Microsoft doesn’t recommend putting assemblies in the GAC by the way…

A failure occurred writing to the resources file. The system could not find the file specified.

Wed, 15 Jun 2005 09:32:00 +0000

We received the above error for the resx file of a form in our project today. So we checked the existence of the resx file it concerned, and it was there. So maybe the file was corrupt? We deleted the file, removed it from the project and let Visual Studio re-create it by editing the form in the designer. Building the solution gave the same error… again the file was right where it was supposed to be.

Microsoft releases ‘Acrylic’ beta

Sat, 11 Jun 2005 09:30:00 +0000

Microsoft has released a beta for the program codenamed ‘Acrylic’. According to some people this might be Microsofts attempt to compete with Adobe, because it is said the program is the ideal combination of vector based graphics (Illustrator) and pixel based graphics (Photoshop). Is this Microsofts answer to the domination of Adobe in the graphics department?

A custom SOAP fault handler and a ‘Reference not set to an instance of an object’ error …

Fri, 10 Jun 2005 21:38:00 +0000

Today we had a problem on the project I am working on. To be more precise: I had a problem, the other team members did not.

Quick explanation: We have a server component which uses a web service for some of the functionality we need. Other functionality can be found in a different system which is reachable through IBM WebSphere MQ. The server component is available through remoting, the objects are hosted in IIS. To get decent SOAP errors someone on the team created a custom SOAPFaultHandler and included it in the web.config of the server component. So far so good.

Tabbed browsing in IE6

Thu, 09 Jun 2005 19:01:00 +0000

Although I don’t like Internet Explorer toolbars at all, I’m thinking about installing one. MSN toolbar V1.2 now gives your IE5.1+ browser the cool feature of tabbed browsing. This IE7 preview kind of thing is available for download together with Windows Desktop Search functionality and some more stuff. Read about the functionality here, or just get it.

Visual Studio .NET Bootstrapper

Mon, 06 Jun 2005 22:37:00 +0000

Have you ever made an install for your application with Visual Studio and sent it out into the world, only to get complaints of people that your software wouldn’t run?

Controls disappear from the Windows Forms Designer in VS2k3

Mon, 06 Jun 2005 22:24:00 +0000

We recently ran into the problem mentioned in the title of this post at work. Microsoft has a knowledgebase article (kbid 842706) for this bug. The hotfix is not to be distributed freely, but I already spoke to some people who have contacted Microsoft and got the fix for free. It will be e-mailed to you.

Update

Tue, 31 May 2005 20:26:00 +0000

Sorry I’ve been away for a while, but there was hardly enough time between work, friends, birthdays and deadlines for me to blog… I’ll try and make up for lost time.

HOWTO: Encode a password using MD5 in C# (or: howto calculate the MD5 hash for a string)

Wed, 18 May 2005 12:40:00 +0000

The following method returns the MD5 hash for any given string. For instance for a password. It might be of some assistance when you’re trying to validate user credentials but you don’t want to store the password readable in the database.

Commenting your code – The sequel

Tue, 17 May 2005 21:19:00 +0000

As Ernst put it in the comments: we opened a can of worms here!
In my previous post about Commenting your code, I stated you should not comment your code. Of course, this is nonsense. The reason I stated that, however, isn’t. And I didn’t only say that because I would get some attention 😉

Commenting your code

Tue, 17 May 2005 12:08:00 +0000

There are several ways to comment your code. There’s the style where you place comments on the same line as the code. This might get less readable, because there’s some horizontal scrolling involved when your statements get longer. An example:

HOWTO: Draw your own string (URL, copyright) on each displayed picture in an ASP.NET website

Wed, 11 May 2005 22:34:00 +0000

The AdRotator .NET provides can be used to show a different image each time a page is visited. You could write a webpage which does this for you, but it’s probably not very useful. Although you need to change the XML file when changing the images to be showed when you use an AdRotator, but that’s not the issue here.
Something .NET doesn’t deliver is a control to add your own text to an image when it is displayed on a webpage. And that’s exactly what we will be doing in this HowTo.

HOWTO: create an animated GIF using .NET (C#)

Tue, 10 May 2005 08:33:00 +0000

.NET does not give you possibilities to create animated GIFs through GDI+. At least 1.1 doesn’t, they might incorporate it in 2.0. But there are ways to make them! This solution is one I used myself, and I’m very pleased!

Visit www.one.org

Tue, 03 May 2005 07:19:00 +0000

They don’t want your money, they want your voice…

Take ONE minute today to sign the ONE declaration and lend us your voice in the fight against global AIDS and extreme poverty.

Configuring an ASP.NET app for multiple login locations with forms authentication

Fri, 29 Apr 2005 21:14:00 +0000

The title isn’t descriptive enough for this post, but it will have to do. Today I was trying to get an ASP.NET application to allow me to define two different login levels. What I was trying to do was the following:

Visual Studio Powertoys!

Thu, 28 Apr 2005 09:53:00 +0000

I stumbled upon a great workspace at GotDotNet: Visual Studio Core Community Powertoys. Here you can find some pretty neat powertoys for the Visual Studio IDE. For example:

Go Back Visual Studio Add-In
The Go Back Add-in provides a Navigate Backward functionality that is different than the normal Navigate Backward functionality. (Which does some neat things like close a file if you happened to have opened it while navigating forward)

Regular expression tools

Tue, 26 Apr 2005 13:10:00 +0000

At the Powertoys Weblog, Sara Ford posted about a very cool tool which is available at gotdotnet: Regex Builder.

At gotdotnet it is described as follows:

A tool for building and testing Regular Expressions. It allows you to manipulate the expression and your source text, and shows you a tree with all of the Matches, Groups, and Captures found in the text.

Internet Explorer 7 – Beta

Sun, 24 Apr 2005 15:04:00 +0000

Last friday Chris Wilton posted about IE7 Beta on the Microsoft Internet Explorer Weblog (IEBlog). The two most important features for IE 7:

Support for the alpha channel in PNG images.
CSS standards compliance!

Furthermore, it’s nice to know not only Visual Studio 2005 will be released this summer…

I got starred!

Tue, 19 Apr 2005 18:24:00 +0000

Questa star-listed me on his blog (together with Frans Bouma!). He wrote:

De blog van Gump is nog jong, maar tot nu toe voor mij in iedergeval al de meest gelezen weblog

My first BIG Visual Studio 2003 crash – Update

Tue, 19 Apr 2005 07:35:00 +0000

The last couple of years I’ve had small Visual Studio crashes, where Visual Studio stopped and asked me if I wanted to restart and reopen the current project. These crashes never meant a loss of work. Today I had the first BIG VS2K3 crash and this time it did cost me. A lot…

Visual Studio .NET 2005 – Beta 2

Mon, 18 Apr 2005 19:22:00 +0000

Sure, I’m not the first one to blog about it. But I still didn’t want it to go unnoticed… Visual Studio .NET 2005 Beta 2 is out now. (Available for people with MSDN subscriptions)
For those of you who don’t have an MSDN subscription, the Express Editions can give an idea of the power .NET 2.0 will bring to you.

.NET Refactoring

Fri, 15 Apr 2005 08:55:00 +0000

Most of you probably know about the refactoring options Visual Studio 2005 will deliver to us. For those of you who would like to experience what refactoring, using optimization, partial code generation and more feels like without waiting for VS2K5, you should try JetBrains’ ReSharper. I installed it yesterday (after having downloaded it a few weeks ago) and it’s a great addition to the Visual Studio development environment.

Datagrid revised

Sat, 09 Apr 2005 11:46:00 +0000

Dino Esposito wrote an excellent article on the new and improved DataGridView control in .NET 2.0 in the .NET magazine of April this year. It explains the possibilities the newly built gridcontrol gives you. Finally a decent grid control…

Funny signature

Fri, 08 Apr 2005 09:31:00 +0000

Read on my favourite forum today, in someone’s signature:

In a perfect world… spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many men who have enlarged their penisses, taken Viagra and are looking for a new relationship.

Access 2003 now SourceSafe enabled

Fri, 08 Apr 2005 09:09:00 +0000

If you’ve ever worked with Access XP or earlier in combination with SourceSafe 6 and are now using Access 2003, you might miss the SourceSafe capabilities in Access. Out of the box, Access 2003 did not support putting your Access stuff in Sourcesafe. Microsoft has now released an Access 2003 add-in for this! So, if you would like your Access 2003 program to be taken into source code control: it now can. The add-in can be found here.

Source code control for Visual Studio 2005

Fri, 08 Apr 2005 09:09:00 +0000

The hype surrounding Visual Studio 2005 almost makes you not notice all the other upcoming Microsoft developer products which will accompany VS2K5. One of these products is the new source code control system. This January at the ASP.NET 2.0 roadshow in Amsterdam, Scott Guthrie (leading engineer on the ASP.NET 2.0 team) described the new source code control system as ‘SourceSafe done right’.

Internal MS coding guidelines

Wed, 06 Apr 2005 10:02:00 +0000

Brad Abrams posted the internal MS Coding guidelines on his blog earlier this year.
Interesting reading stuff!

I tested my own code against these guidelines. I think I would pass…. 😉

Converting string to Enum value

Wed, 06 Apr 2005 08:09:00 +0000

Questa posted a very usefull piece of code…
It’s possible to convert a string representation of an enum back to an enum!

private enum MyEnumeration 
{
 FooBar, 
 Foo, 
 Bar
}

... 

MyEnum foo = MyEnum.Foo; 
foobar = foo.ToString(); 
MyEnum bar = (MyEnum)Enum.Parse(typeof(MyEnum), foobar);

At the end of this code, the variable bar has the MyEnum value Foo, just the way it’s supposed to be…

“Object does not match target type” error calling a method on an assembly loaded using reflection

Wed, 06 Apr 2005 07:15:00 +0000

Actually, the cause for this error is very small and simple. But because the error doesn’t clearly state what’s wrong and there’s not a lot to be found about this, I’ll post it here anyway… Otherwise, you might be looking for this for a while, while it’s so easy!

Creating events using delegates

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 12:17:00 +0000

After promising you a post on using delegates to create events several times, I’m now using my break to post it. Because it will be a while if I wait until I can find the time… 😉

Creating events using delegates

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 12:17:00 +0000

Stored Procedures rule, because they facilitate manipulating the dataset you get from a database or the way you are inserting or deleting data in a database without changing your application. Or your business layer for that matter. But you can’t always use stored procedures for the actions you would like your application to take. Or maybe your database doesn’t support stored procedures. In that case it’s back to queries for you! And that’s what I would like to talk about… queries. And how to protect them.

A*%holes

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 09:11:00 +0000

They stole my leather jacket this weekend, containing my wallet and my keys. Assholes. First thing I learned as a kid: leave other people’s stuff alone!

Why is it some people simply don’t have the decency to work for the things they want? I do… Just like all of my friends. And although you might not be able to buy everything you like, it feels pretty good when you are, for instance, finally able to order the phone you’ve wanted for months. I hope they catch the bastard who did this, but I fear they won’t.

New phone on the way …

Fri, 18 Mar 2005 13:16:00 +0000

My new phone is on the way! I ordered it yesterday, and faxed all of the necessary info today. So if all goes well, I’ll be calling you using this baby next week!

Personal update

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 09:40:00 +0000

Just a quick personal update:

my carchoice has been approved and the car is currently on it’s way. Just a few more weeks…
I sold my bike, but will be looking for another one!
we had a wedding last friday, very good party!
the company party was great!
the bottom shelve of the cupboard in our kitchen broke: most of our muds and scales have crashed… 🙁
tonight we’re having a company yearmeeting!

As you can see, mostly positive news. I’ll be posting my story on how to use delegates for events in C# shortly.

Is my C# application running in debug mode? or: About pre-processor directives

Thu, 10 Mar 2005 16:36:00 +0000

All I wanted to do was check if my application was running in debug-mode or in release-mode. Searching MSDN library and Google (groups) both did not deliver the solution to me. I was about to let go when, out of the blue, a webpage showed up in my browser telling me the following:

Select a car …

Mon, 07 Mar 2005 12:38:00 +0000

It’s almost like playing Need for Speed: “Please select your car.”

But this time it was real! Last saturday I had two testdrives and I selected my future car. It is going to be the Citroën C4. I ordered it today and, when all goes well, I’ll be receiving it within just a few weeks! That is if my director accepts the order.

Microsoft DevDays 2005 – the day after

Fri, 04 Mar 2005 08:34:00 +0000

Yesterday I attended the Microsoft DevDays 2005 in The Hague. The MSDN TechNet briefings in Veldhoven I attended last year (was that October or November?) were great. Because the DevDays would (or should) be even greater I could hardly wait for DevDays 2005 to begin! Here’s my short opinion on the DevDays 2005. Interested in a more elaborate version? Comment!

Delegates explained

Tue, 01 Mar 2005 12:25:00 +0000

Delegates can be seen as interfaces for methods. Let’s look at an example of a delegate and what it really represents.

delegate double Calculation(double one, double two);

All this line of code really does, is tell the class it is in that there might be one or more methods with the given signature: a method returning a double and taking two doubles as parameters. You cannot call a method Calculation now, because it does not have a body, so it doesn’t have any functionality. It’s just a blueprint for future reference. You’re saying something like: “You might find one or more methods somewhere having this signature which do something for you, but don’t ask me where or what they are called. Just be ready!” Next, let us create a method with the same signature as the delegate.

C# XmlSerializer FileNotFound exception

Tue, 01 Mar 2005 12:19:00 +0000

When using XmlSerializer in .NET on a self-made class, you might receive the FileNotFound exception at runtime upon instantiating the serializer. You don’t get enough info to debug this problem, and the filename of the file it didn’t find can’t explain much either, because the dll-name is different ‘garbage’ every time.

DevDays 2005

Tue, 01 Mar 2005 12:16:00 +0000

My provisional program for DevDays 2005:

09:30 Keynote: Microsoft Developer Tools Strategy
Prashant Sridharan (Microsoft)

10.45 Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005
Lex Oskam (Microsoft)

13.15 Indigo update
Gijs de Jong (Microsoft)

ASP.NET 2.0

Tue, 01 Mar 2005 12:14:00 +0000

To be honest, I’m glad I’m not on an ASP.NET project right now. I saw ASP.NET 2.0 in action last Friday, and I would go crazy if I would have to do an ASP.NET 1.1 project now.
2.0 and the new Visual Studio 2005 (Whidbey) take a lot of ‘standard work’ out of the developers’ hands, making development much faster. It begins with something as simple as leaving the cursor where it is while switching between views. You’ve got button1 selected? Go to your HTML and the cursor is at the beginning of the button1 tag. In source view, select table3 and switch back to design view and, you guessed, table 3 is selected.

.NET eye opener

Tue, 01 Mar 2005 12:13:00 +0000

Currently I’m reading the Microsoft Press book “Developing web applications with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and C# .NET” by Jeff Webb. (This book is part of the very interesting “MCAD/MCSD Self-Paced Training Kit“.) I borrowed this book from the Microsoft Library here at my new job. They’ve got a very wide variety in books! Another plus to add to the list.

Here we go … !

Tue, 01 Mar 2005 12:01:00 +0000

This is the first in what I hope will be a lot of posts here on my newly created weblog. I started blogging at Google’s blogger, but then I wasn’t aware of the possibilities bloggingabout.net brings you! So now I moved my blog here, to be able to give my opinion about all kinds of (developer related) stuff, and off course just for the fun of it. I’ll try to keep you posted!