Dan Bright's .NET Weblog

New Open-Source Project Started

DanB — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 14:26:00 GMT

After spending a good amount of time playing with WiX I have decided to start a GUI installation designer project for it. It's called (creatively enough) WiXGUI, and can be found on SourceForge.

If anyone is interested in helping out, feel free to contact me via here or my SourceForge contact page.

Right now I am just compiling a list of examples and usages to try and nail down the specifics. If anyone notices anything cool please let me know.

I will post updates to my progress as the tool evolves.

"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." -- Pablo Picasso

Note To self: MSDE Problem

DanB — Thu, 25 Mar 2004 15:23:00 GMT

Note to self:

Server Error in '/AppName' Application.

Login failed for user 'db_reader'. Reason: Not associated with a trusted SQL Server connection.

When you install MSDE2000a and specify mixed mode authentication during setup it does not remember your choice. You have to go in manually:

SQL Server Enterprise Manager -> Console Root - > Microsoft SQL Servers -> SQL Server Group -> Properties -> Security Tab. Verify that the authentication mode is "SQL Server and Windows".

Just a minor annoyance, but I figured I might save someone the 5 minutes if they ever run into it.

OT: The end of an era

DanB — Sun, 11 Jan 2004 04:22:00 GMT

It is a very sad day for geekdom...

Slashdot is reporting that Lego is terminating production of it's Mindstorms product line. I have had the pleasure of working with these products (including a bit of work with .NET) and I must say that these things are COOL.

Now it will be even harder for me to bring myself to relenquish control of the set that I have borrowed from my advisor at school.

A bad day for me and spam...

DanB — Thu, 04 Dec 2003 00:29:00 GMT

I just noticed that SpamNet has blocked a very large number of messages...

It's only been 28 days since my reformat.

Just gives me the creeps.

Ported DanielBright.net to v1.2

DanB — Fri, 21 Nov 2003 04:11:00 GMT

I just completed the incredibly painless process of porting my web site from ASP.NET v1.1 and Wilson.MasterPages to ASP.NET v1.2 and it's integrated MasterPages.

All I can say is WOW.

I trimmed my 7 page site down from 57 files in 2 directories to an astounding 9 files (none of these figures are counting images of course). While most of the deprecated files were CodeBehind pages and .resx files, I'm still impressed. No more fooling around with UserControls at all when trying to seperate code from UI!!

While I'm on the topic I must also say that I really like inline code. I guess it's because of all of my classic ASP experience, but I find it easier to have everything right there in front of me.

Anyway, major kudos to the whole ASP.NET team!

Grr. Robert pointed out to me that there is no GoLive license for v1.2 yet, so until I get any clarification on this I went ahead and switched back to the 1.1 version of my site. I am interested to hear any clarification of this though, so I would appreciate any comments from anyone with more knowledge of this. I certianly don't want to upset anyone...

My precious (Yukon)...

DanB — Thu, 20 Nov 2003 04:34:00 GMT

A picture says more than words...

Now if only it would reflect against the current database and list all available tables...

Also, my more attainable wish: The ability to select a block of text in the workbench and comment/uncomment it via a menu or toolbar like VS.NET...

Up & Running with 1.2 - REDUX

DanB — Tue, 18 Nov 2003 03:34:00 GMT

I must admit that I was a bit hasty in my dismissal of the PDC Framework bits on my Windows 2003 Server box. I finally reinstalled everything after having repaved the box 2 weeks ago and everything is now running splendedly. In fact, my site (yeah, all 5 pages of it) seems a bit snappier after the first hit than it did with 1.1, but surely this is just my imagination.

Now I would like to ask the community of PDC'ers to recommend some of your favorite examples, labs, or basically anything at all that I can read/learn from about ASP.NET Whidbey. Since I don't actually have VS.NET Whidbey (working from the Yukon beta bits) I will be going about this the hard way (oh IntelliSense, I miss you already).

What happened to Windows Messenger 5?

DanB — Wed, 12 Nov 2003 03:51:00 GMT

When I went to the Windows Messenger site tonight to download Windows Messenger 5 (MSN Messenger is a bit to fluffy for me, and Trillian stopped working... more on this in a sec) I found that the download link there is for WM4.7. Now why would I want to download an old version that doesn't even work anymore?!

So after a bit of digging around I found the real link to get WM5, and I now see that my friends actually ARE online.

Could it be that Microsoft finally locked out all of the third-party clients who haven't taken the red pill?

New Face

DanB — Mon, 10 Nov 2003 23:30:00 GMT

Well we're back from regionals... We actually did better than I feared we might, but the Virgina Tech. teams pretty much showed us how it's supposed to be done. I want to congratulate all of the teams involved and thank UVa for hosting this years competition.

On the homefront, I have finally forced myself to redesign my personal web site. My two previous designs (read: MasterPage templates) were just barebones HTML with CSS for decoration. This time I decided to spend a few hours working on the presentation side, and (for now) I am quite happy with the results.

On a side note: In the process of changing my template (and playing with my Single-User Vault source control provider) I managed to break debugging on my web server. I want to thank Roy for his great ASP.NET debugging FAQ, which had me back up and running in all of 2 minutes.

The trouble with Longhorn...

DanB — Thu, 06 Nov 2003 21:15:00 GMT

It seems that I am not the only one who had a less-than-desirable experiance with the Longhorn bits. I was running this on my main machine, a P4 3.0Ghz 800Mhz FSB with a gig of ram, 512 of which I had given to VPC. It was horribly slow.

Whats worse, I had installed the 1.2 framework on my main machine, only to find that it took somewhere between 5-30 seconds for IIS to serve up any .NET content at all. This was only compounded if accessed remotely.

So now here I sit, typing from a freshly repaved machine... That will teach me to play with the bleeding edge. I can't wait until I get my other motherboard back so I can set up a testing server without frustraiting myself to death.

Getting Ready For Regionals

DanB — Wed, 05 Nov 2003 05:15:00 GMT

I've been playing with JCreator as I'm preparing for this weekend. This will be my first programming competition, so I'm not really sure what to expect. I've studied all of the previous problems, some of which are pretty tough, and I'm glad the rest of my team are great coders.).

Too bad C# isn't an option, but hey, Java is close enough, right

If anyone has any advice or experience with programming competitions, I would love to hear it.

Up & Running with 1.2

DanB — Mon, 03 Nov 2003 16:45:00 GMT

Well I finally installed the PDC framework bits on my machine, and my web site is now running .NET 1.2. Everything went very smoothly. The code “just worked” without any changes at all. I'm now looking forward to playing with the real MasterPages and replacing the setup I use now, which is a modified version of Paul's MasterPages.

One thing that I noticed though: The ASP.NET 1.2 Web Service Extension was prohibited by default on my installation. Has anyone else noticed this? I'm running Server '03 Enterprise if that matters.

OT: My first impression of Serial ATA

DanB — Sat, 25 Oct 2003 21:54:00 GMT

Well, today I was out at CompUSA and I saw a pretty nice deal on a 120GB Maxtor SATA drive with the 8mb cache...

Now I really don't *need* any more storage space on my machine (360GB is enough even for me), but I have recently been having some problems with my Promise ATA RAID card. The card is fine if you just want RAID to mirror or stripe and you are running Windows, but if you want to run Linux (mono anyone?), or (and this was my biggie) if you want to make a nice image using Ghost or Drive Image you are just plain out of luck.

So I decided that since my new motherboard has built-in SATA I'll give it a shot. I haven't really seen the performance yet, as the drive is formatting as I type this, but I must say, the tiny drive cable is nice. Especially coming from having to pay way extra for rounded IDE cables.

Once I finish this PHP project I have to deliver on Monday morning I will switch the new drive to my primary & install Windows on it. One of my good friends told me it took him about 15 minutes to install Win XP Pro on his new system with SATA drives. I can't wait to see this...

Crypto Random Numbers

DanB — Fri, 17 Oct 2003 02:57:00 GMT

Note to self (and anyone else it will help):

 public static int GetCryptographicRandomNumber(int lBound, int uBound)
{ 
  RNGCryptoServiceProvider rng = new RNGCryptoServiceProvider();
  // Assumes lBound >= 0 && lBound < uBound
  // returns an int >= lBound and < uBound
  uint urndnum; 
  byte[] rndnum = new Byte[4]; 
  if (lBound == uBound-1) 
  {
    // test for degenerate case where only lBound can be returned
    return lBound;
  }
  uint xcludeRndBase = (uint.MaxValue - (uint.MaxValue%(uint)(uBound-lBound))); 
  do 
  { 
    rng.GetBytes(rndnum); 
    urndnum = System.BitConverter.ToUInt32(rndnum,0); 
  } 
  while (urndnum >= xcludeRndBase); 
  return (int)(urndnum % (uBound-lBound)) + lBound;
}

Thanks to Kevin Stewart for this.

Transcending the MCAD exams?

DanB — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 02:28:00 GMT

Well I finally got around to getting the C# Transcender exams, and I just finished my first Web test. Much to my shock I did well. Much better than I thought I would in fact (I'm horrible at these darn tests).

Since I have seen many posts in the past about my fellow ASPNETWebLoggers taking these exams I wanted to pose this question to the community: Has anyone used these tests as a study tool for the MCAD/MCSD tests? If so how would you rate the practice questions compared to the real deal?

Also, a couple of my pals from work told me I missed a great user group meeting tonight. The topic was Flash Remoting, and my friend Ghayth IM'ed me this link to give me an idea of what it's been used for. All I can say is wow.

And of course (severely off-topic): Matrix Reloaded DVD's hit the shelves today... And this one has a whole DVD of special features!