Kevin Dente's Blog

The Blip in the Noise

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# CloudMark SpamNet@ Friday, February 07, 2003 4:16 PM

Thanks for the heads up - I'll check it out when I get home.

Personally, I've been using CloudMark SpamNet (http://www.cloudmark.com/products/spamnet/) for awhile, and it seems pretty good. It uses a whole trust system with individuals blocking and so on.

And my rules catch everything else :)



Tim Marman

# Another solution: WebServiceWrapper@ Friday, February 21, 2003 2:07 AM

When you want to expose your custom made business objects trough a webservice interface, and you want them to bind with a DataGrid, you have to problem that the generated proxy class exposes fields instead of properties. A possible solution is to generate at runtime a wrapper for your proxy class. See the article for more details and the full source code!

Jan Tielens

# re: Remote Desktop is the coolest@ Friday, February 28, 2003 5:29 PM

Are you familiar with the remote assistance feature in XP Home/Pro? Not exactly Remote Desktop, but, for assisting others, even better.

Jeff

# re: Remote Desktop is the coolest@ Friday, February 28, 2003 5:51 PM

Aha! I was under the impression that Remote Assistance also required XP Pro, but I was mistaken. Thanks for the tip.

Kevin Dente

# re: Remote Desktop is the coolest@ Saturday, March 01, 2003 12:00 PM

have you looked at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/downloads/rdwebconn.asp? You can host remote desktop (XP Pro) in a web browser, and not need to install anything client side... (Actually, an ActiveX control, but that's automatically done).

- Aaron

Aaron

# re: Remote Desktop is the coolest@ Tuesday, March 04, 2003 1:55 PM

Yeah, I saw the RD ActiveX control client. It's nice, but it requires a lot more setup work (ie need IIS). VNCs built in web server is super-light weight and takes no special setup.

Kevin Dente

# re: A chink in the side-by-side armor@ Monday, April 28, 2003 4:51 PM

Please don't overreact about stuff like that man. That kinda stuff really looks bad when newbies come in looking for information. Bugs are bound to come up just like anything else. There's no need to overblow it.

Robert McLaws

# re: A chink in the side-by-side armor@ Monday, April 28, 2003 5:36 PM

To me, this kind of stuff is a big deal. Customer's can be extremely skittish about upgrading production machines, and this kind of stuff fuels that fire. I mean, we're not talking about some obscure feature here - we're talking about something as basic as performance monitoring. And we're not talking about something that worked on 1.0 that's broken on 1.1 - we're talking about something still running on 1.0 that breaks merely because of the presence of 1.1. Avoiding these problems is the whole reason for side-by-side, so it's not good that it's broken right out of the gate. Credit to Microsoft for providing a fix quickly, but it's still troubling. It also kind of sucks that a) you have to call MS to get the fix, and b) the fix is for 1.0, not 1.1.

Kevin Dente

# re: Recently used applications....grrrr@ Saturday, May 03, 2003 2:22 AM

Use the classic start menu. :-)

JorgeCurioso

# re: Recently used applications....grrrr@ Saturday, May 03, 2003 4:41 PM

Oh sure, I could just disable the recent apps feature of the start menu (without even reverting to classic). But I want to have my cake and eat it too. :)

Kevin Dente

# Dan's .NET Brain Droppings@ Thursday, May 08, 2003 3:21 PM

Dan's .NET Brain Droppings

TrackBack

# re: Trick for command-line junkies@ Wednesday, May 14, 2003 6:13 PM

cd %userprofile%\my documents works as well.

--Brian

Brian Desmond

# re: Trick for command-line junkies@ Wednesday, May 14, 2003 6:14 PM

Sweet, thanks for the link! I too am a CLI junky, but I had been creating batch files for things like this. e.g. desktop.bat:

cd \documents and settings\%username%\desktop

Cheesy, but it saved me some keystrokes. This junction tool is a much better solution though.

Chad Osgood

# re: Trick for command-line junkies@ Tuesday, May 20, 2003 12:08 PM

Look out! :-)

I had a bunch of junction points in my filesystem for this sort of thing, but I removed them recently.

Why? I found that most programs, and in particular Sophos don't bother to spot the difference between a normal directory and a junction point. This turned out to be a real pain with drive scanning programs.

E.G. One of the junction points I was using was from "My Documents" to the root of a large source tree (on another drive). Having the JP there meant that Sophos scanned it twice. As it was set up (by corporate IT) to do the scan every lunchtime, it was starting to really p**s me off. Also, it turned out that the (v. frequent) updates of the Sophos software cause it to dicard any exclusion lists you have set-up. Argh!

James Chaldecott

# re: RSS - the bad@ Tuesday, May 27, 2003 12:30 PM

Laptop, baby! :-)

Greg Reinacker

# re: RSS - the bad@ Tuesday, May 27, 2003 12:32 PM

Got one. Unfortunately, the conference center that I was at had no internet access, if you can believe that.

Kevin Dente

# re: The stagnation of IE@ Tuesday, May 27, 2003 4:32 PM

Get MyIE2. The benefits of the IE render engine and the advantages of tabbed browsing, groups, and popup filters/add filters. Google will bring you to the site :)

Frans Bouma

# re: The stagnation of IE@ Tuesday, May 27, 2003 4:33 PM


http://www.crazybrowser.com/

duke

# re: The stagnation of IE@ Tuesday, May 27, 2003 6:26 PM

I looked at MyIE2 ages ago, and wasn't impressed. Looks like it's improved a bit since then - I'll have another look.

Never heard of CrazyBrowser. I'll have a look there too.

Kevin Dente

# re: ZIP in the .NET framework@ Tuesday, May 27, 2003 9:03 PM

I wonder if there were some features that Microsoft wanted in the core framework but excluded because they wanted to keep for core framework filesize down (I still wish that 21MB was smaller).

I'm not saying that adding ZIP compression would have made a massive change to this, just wonder if the framework size did impact on what was included in the core framework.

Ben Richardson

# re: ZIP in the .NET framework@ Wednesday, May 28, 2003 1:32 AM

Hi Ben,

Not sure that it was meant to keep the Framework small. For instance, the SharpZipLib assembly is only 45 Kb. So...

I think that like some other missing features, they weren't in the top priorities and we will have to wait until .NET Framework 2.0 to have them all implemented in managed code.

Christophe

Christophe Lauer

# re: ZIP in the .NET framework@ Wednesday, May 28, 2003 4:39 AM

This has always annoyed me. CAB compression was in the .NET Betas - it just got left out of the release. Not including compression is amazingly annoying - SharpZipLib is pretty good, but an in-framework compression would be better. Web services especially would benefit from this.

Scott Galloway

# re: Move to weblogs.asp.net@ Friday, May 30, 2003 6:24 PM

Yeah, I've been putting off buying it because of the dupes but I guess I'm just being thick. That was nice how it picked up the change.

I'll be shelling out my 30 bucks this weekend.


Paul

Paul Speranza

# re: Yukon release pushed back - what about Whidbey?@ Tuesday, June 03, 2003 6:40 PM

Wouldn't suprise me if that is the reason they are pushing Yukon back, not the other way around :-).

Jesse Ezell

# re: Yukon release pushed back - what about Whidbey?@ Tuesday, June 03, 2003 6:51 PM

I think that the Whidbey tie is hurting the schedule. But from what I know there is still more to do with Yukon also. I think the complexity of these two dependent initiatives is pretty high-- MS is doing the right thing by not rushing the release.

randy

# re: Yukon release pushed back - what about Whidbey?@ Tuesday, June 03, 2003 8:58 PM

Coupling those two massive releases seems like a highly risky project management proposition. I can't even imagine trying to coordinate those two schedules - each by themselves is ridiculously complex. Hopefully they can pull it off. As an ISV I'm vastly more interested in Whidbey than Yukon (I have to write fairly generic platform-independent SQL code anyway), so it would suck if Yukon is holding up the process. Sounds like it's some of both, though.

That being said, I won't be making any concrete plans around that schedule. Software schedules more than a year out are generally about as reliable as...well...Microsoft software schedules.

Kevin Dente

# re: Disabling request validation in ASP.NET@ Thursday, June 05, 2003 6:48 PM

Hi Kevin,

Each version of ASP.NET (and the overall .NET Framework) has its own Machine.config file. These settings run independently of each other (in other words a V1 app won't see the settings of the V1.1 machine.config).

You can fix the problem you mention above by changing the machine.config file of the V1.1 version to either have validateRequest off by default (not recommend) -- or add a <location> directive within the file to just turn it off for a specific application or directory.

Hope this helps,

Scott

scottgu@microsoft.com

# re: Disabling request validation in ASP.NET@ Thursday, June 05, 2003 8:05 PM

This breaks xcopy deployment, doesn't it? This really does break forward compatibility pretty handily.

Am I right in seeing that in code, once the flag has been set to validate the request, it can't ever be un-set? Doh! So no way to fix this in code and still use an .aspx page.

Philip Rieck

# re: Disabling request validation in ASP.NET@ Thursday, June 05, 2003 8:40 PM

Hi, Scott. Thanks for the response. I didn't realize that you could have custom machine.config settings per-application. Interesting tidbit.

However, I'm not sure how much that helps me. The Visual Studio .NET installer stuff doesn't have a way to change machine.config, as far as I know. And even if it did, requiring changes to machine.config is definitely something I'd rather avoid. I'd rather just document the required changes for 1.1.

These kinds of issues cause significant forward compatibility issues between the runtimes. I hope Microsoft will consider this in future versions of the runtime.

Kevin Dente

# re: Media Player 9 shuffling@ Monday, June 09, 2003 6:45 PM

Some other folks have disliked the shuffle model as well, although I haven't really noticed... so I built my music playing app (http://www.duncanmackenzie.net/musicxp) with support for a IShuffle interface that allows you to build your own shuffle algorithm. I think the one I provide is pretty good at shuffling as well.

Duncan Mackenzie

# re: Media Player 9 shuffling@ Monday, June 09, 2003 7:30 PM

I agree with the WinAmp statement. I still use WinAmp 2.8 as my mp3 player (Windows Media Player is great for some things but I don't think playing music is one of them). WinAmp 3.0 has some cool new features but the features I require aren't there, so I uninstalled it after about 30 minutes of heartache and headache.

sirshannon

# re: Media Player 9 shuffling@ Monday, June 09, 2003 10:20 PM

Sticking to Winamp 2.8 as well. Still the best, and nothing more required!
Media Player is bloated, and Winamp 3 is buggy and they exchanged the good features with useless ones.

Fabrice

# re: .NET Framework 1.2?@ Friday, June 13, 2003 12:00 AM

I am not a MS guy, but I am aware of this framework version. My understanding is that it has been used with Whidbey and Yukon internal builds. I was also under the impression that by the time Whidbey and Yukon are released, that the Framework version would be a 2.0 version. I have no confirmation of that however.

randy

# re: .NET Framework 1.2?@ Friday, June 13, 2003 12:11 AM

can you get specific on where you saw this?

Robert McLaws

# re: .NET Framework 1.2?@ Friday, June 13, 2003 12:35 AM

Hmm. Maybe it was two different posts in one blog:

http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/suzcook/permalink.aspx/b3f8138d-eecf-47c4-9055-3f6c2335f035

http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/suzcook/permalink.aspx/f9f7be1e-ef53-453c-af11-1ad81536edeb

Kevin Dente

# re: .NET Framework 1.2?@ Saturday, June 14, 2003 2:14 PM

As you know, Whdibey is still under active developement. Current builds are stamped with the 1.2 verision number, but we have NOT made the final call on that the version number will be. My personal bet is that it will be a 2.0.... but we will see.

Brad Abrams

# re: Ever get the feeling you're being watched?@ Tuesday, June 17, 2003 2:39 AM

The aggregate feed is my primary reading material! I think it's so cool that I can browse through the blogs of so many different people that I wouldn't otherwise "discover" and subscribe to... and y'all are all talking about what I love: .NET!

Kenneth LeFebvre

# re: The stagnation of IE@ Tuesday, June 17, 2003 10:24 PM

About mozilla, you can run multiple instances in linux, so I'm sure it's possible in windows as well. Just out of interest, what do you use this for? Espeically in windows, where it was my understanding that there was only ever one IE process running (as it is embedded into the OS in that strange and unholy marriage type situation).

As for pop up killing, I doubt you'll ever see it. That's something that sounds very "anti-commericial" and MS doesn't like to piss off companies. Personally that sort of thing has driven me to mozilla in windows, simply because I honestly can't stand surfing with IE. They have ugly UI bugs (forgetting state on the cookie verification dialog box for example) that drive people who are a bit paranoid about things like cookies crazy. Putting pop up blocking in there is just crazy talk!

Maybe try Mozilla Firebird, which is a lot lighter and snappier than mozilla itself, and a lot less piggish.

Arcterex

# Julia Lerman Blog@ Friday, June 20, 2003 9:00 PM

Julia Lerman Blog

TrackBack

# re: Media Player 9 shuffling@ Wednesday, June 25, 2003 11:03 AM

Yep, it really sucks... came here after a web search to see if anyone else had noticed. It's not hard to do random numbers... I presume it's a bug from a side effect to stop it repeating tracks if you're just shuffling one CD, but as I have 2200+ WMAs it seems to play about 10% over again - got the same sequence coming up twice in one morning

Martin Browne

# re: Bug in AxImp.exe@ Friday, June 27, 2003 12:31 AM

I have used aximp.exe for activeX controls that I need to embed dynamically into winforms. No problems encountered.

"Item" sounds like a good property for screwing automated processes up. It should probably be a protected name. So the converter was probably making some assumptions about it's existence there. (?)

I'm sure you'll hear from one of the interop pros on this one.

julie

# re: McWireless@ Wednesday, July 09, 2003 9:31 PM

A lot of us grew up thinking of a trip to McDonald's as a treat, something cool and fun. Even then the seats were too hard but I loved it anyway. I even had my 8th birthday party at the McDonald's in my town.
Now there is finally a reason for me to go back.
If only the cost of a meal really was a third of $4.95...

sirshannon

# re: McWireless@ Wednesday, July 09, 2003 9:35 PM

I had heard that they would give you like 30-45 minutes of wireless time with the purchase of a meal over like $3-4 or something. That would be cool... though it doesn't make their food taste any better.

Ken

# re: McWireless@ Thursday, July 10, 2003 12:24 AM

3 times the cost of a meal? certainly not in NYC!

Tim Marman

# re: McWireless@ Thursday, July 10, 2003 2:00 AM

You don't have kids do you?

This is the first I heard of this, but I can guarantee you that if they have this service here, I will be much more excited the next time my son asks to go play in the playground at McDonalds!

My Axim X5 + 802.11b will McRoxxor!!

Lance Hunt

# re: McWireless@ Thursday, July 10, 2003 3:50 AM

My understanding is that McDonalds makes money by selling their franchises equipment. Maybe they are not worried about who uses it.

bJoeyLouie

# re: McWireless@ Thursday, July 10, 2003 12:53 PM

1. I have two kids - we can stay at a mac donalds (with a play land) for HOURS. :-/
2. A happy meal is like 4 bucks

Paul

# re: HTML Editor synchronicity@ Friday, July 18, 2003 11:38 PM

Yeah. Pretty cool idea. I hope this gets finished.

Matt

# re: Personalization in RSS feeds@ Tuesday, July 22, 2003 9:42 PM

Just an idea...

On kbAlertz, have a number to represent each feed and call an rss.aspx page with a csv list of numbers which could represent what categories to get. This is nice, but would have a the URL length limitation.

Another solution, is to enable registered users to set up "RSS Preferences" which would contain what categorys they want in thier feed. Then, the user would request "rss.aspx?[SomeSortOfUserID]" and get a feed customized to them.

The downside to both of these solutions, is that a caching system would be difficult to implement.

Just some food for thought...

Tony Pino

# re: Blogvertising@ Wednesday, July 23, 2003 3:51 AM

what a freak

an

# re: Cell phone purgatory@ Wednesday, July 23, 2003 4:52 AM

hang on for a few more weeks.... soon you'll be able to take your cell phone number with you when you switch carriers.

Robert McLaws

# re: Blogvertising@ Wednesday, July 23, 2003 5:13 AM

That's right! I'm taking over!

First, my blog - Tomorrow, ad time during major sporting events!

I don't know why I do these things. Just for kicks, I guess.

Life is too short to not share images of your clammy chest with the rest of the world.

Rory

# re: Blogvertising@ Wednesday, July 23, 2003 12:25 PM

gotcha :-)

an

# re: Info on Whidbey and Beyond@ Tuesday, July 29, 2003 2:11 PM

WSE is a logical part of the framework, and is just an extension to ASMX handlers to add specifics like WS-Security and so on. They are complementary, not competing.

Generics / edit-and-continue features were mentioned again today at the VSLive! keynote. They sure branded them as language specific, though I would hope they're not. It might be a way for the "language divergence" so that certain languages can add specific value-add in certain realms - though I personally hope this isn't the case.

Tim Marman

# re: Info on Whidbey and Beyond@ Tuesday, July 29, 2003 2:47 PM

FWIW, generics are mentioned in the VB section, using nearly the exact same language as the C# section uses (minus the references to C++ differences and similarities).

"In addition, developers using Visual Basic will have access to a type-safe, high-performance, compile time-verified version of generics that promote code reuse across a variety of data types."

Dave Rothgery

# re: Info on Whidbey and Beyond@ Tuesday, July 29, 2003 2:52 PM

Oops. Must have skimmed over that generics comment in the VB.NET section. Thanks.

Kevin Dente

# <br> Jason Tucker's Blog@ Tuesday, July 29, 2003 4:02 PM


Jason Tucker's Blog

TrackBack

# re: Info on Whidbey and Beyond@ Tuesday, July 29, 2003 4:26 PM

The way I read the VB part is that you can consume generics, but not create them. Of course, I could be extremely wrong here.

Phil Scott

# re: Info on Whidbey and Beyond@ Tuesday, July 29, 2003 5:45 PM

That's what I thought at first, but, as I said before, the language is pretty much identical in the C# section. Besides, generics that you can consume but not create are pretty nearly useless.

Dave Rothgery

# re: Info on Whidbey and Beyond@ Wednesday, July 30, 2003 1:03 AM

We're under NDA for most details on language stuff for now, but I will say, starting over on the grid controls was a great decision, IMHO...they totally rock and help towards no compatibility issues! :D

HumanCompiler

# re: Info on Whidbey and Beyond@ Wednesday, July 30, 2003 3:35 AM

I second that, DC! (Aren't we also not allowed to say we're even under NDA? ;)).

About Edit/Continue: isn't that already available for C# in vs2003?

About 'new' winforms controls: there are new controls. I haven't checked if the set of controls also available in the current vs2003 crop is still build using Win32 controls and SendMessage(), which I hope not.

Frans Bouma

# re: Info on Whidbey and Beyond@ Wednesday, July 30, 2003 5:08 PM


> Web Services - what's the continuing role
> of ASMX vs WSE?

http://weblogs.asp.net/Yassers/posts/9118.aspx

Phil Weber

# re: SideBar@ Wednesday, July 30, 2003 11:40 PM

i downloaded desktop sidebar while the site was up and am really loving it. very nice tips kevin!

some google cache digging got me to the forums (http://www.tech-critic.com/forum/index.php?s=2ffee2c13f38e67c783c2eeda03e0330&act=SF&f=50) which are still running and explain the site is down due to "amount of consumed bandwidth" :)

russ

# re: SideBar@ Thursday, July 31, 2003 12:44 AM

Sounds a bit like Dashboard [http://www.snpsoftware.com/], which is written in C# by a friend of mine, Danny Smurf. I did a couple components for it a while back, and it's pretty nice. I recommend you check it out.

Dan Bright

# re: ZIP in the .NET framework@ Thursday, July 31, 2003 3:24 AM

Non

laogao

# <br> Ben's Blog@ Thursday, July 31, 2003 7:55 AM


Ben's Blog

TrackBack

# re: Red vs Blue@ Friday, August 01, 2003 5:21 PM

Totally agree! Been watching since about Episode 1 or so...bring on # 14! :D

HumanCompiler

# re: SideBar@ Wednesday, August 06, 2003 8:39 PM

The new Desktop Sidebar site can be found at:
http://www.desktopsidebar.com/

Neil Negandhi

# re: Poking around the VS.NET CodeModel@ Friday, August 08, 2003 4:00 AM

Hi, some time ago I did the same thing (but a little bit simpler I think, less features). If you are intrested you can find an article on the code project: http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/leaditwebservicewrapper.asp. Please let me know if you publish your solution.

Greetz
Jan

Jan Tielens

# re: Poking around the VS.NET CodeModel@ Friday, August 08, 2003 9:48 AM

Thanks !!
I was planning to do something similar over the weekend. Your post will definitely save me a few hours.

BTW Are you going to release the code?? That would save me a few more :)

Addy Santo

# re: Poking around the VS.NET CodeModel@ Friday, August 08, 2003 12:28 PM

Hmmm...Have you thought about doing it another way? The class that converts a WSDL to a client proxy class is available in the .NET Framework. It's called the ServiceDescriptionImporter and can be found in the System.Web.Services.Description namespace. For example, WSDL.EXE basically ends up using the this class to the real work. The cool bit is that the Import method of this class will generate just the code DOM for you given a System.CodeDom.CodeNamespace and a System.CodeDom.CodeCompileUnit instance. It is up to you to use an ICodeGenerator then to blast out the final code. But here's the thing then. Once you're finished calling Import, you should be able to go and party with the generated code DOM before calling the code generator. You should be able to, for example, remove the private field definitions, replace them with private ones and create properties to wrap 'em. It should work in theory, but I guess you'll tell me if it really does do the job. :-) Once you got that working, the next best thing would be to convert the process into a VS Custom Tool so that it can be used right from within VS. I've already written one such custom tool that would be a good starting point. Check out the following GDN Workspace: http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/Workspaces/Workspace.aspx?id=ef3d0a73-0468-46da-8780-ede0f12b6f22 and download build 4306 (very stable). See the class in the file WebServiceClientGenerator.cs. If you do end up going down this route, I'd love to hear from you. Perhaps you'd like to contribute a version of WebServiceClientGenerator.cs that does precisely what you're looking for. Anyhow, food for thought.

Atif Aziz

# re: Poking around the VS.NET CodeModel@ Friday, August 08, 2003 12:55 PM

Actually, originally I had looked into doing it exactly as you suggest, Atif. But I wasn't able to figure out where to hook in to the process. Thanks for the pointer to ServiceDescriptionImporter. I'll definitely look into it.

Kevin Dente

# re: Registration Free COM Activation@ Friday, August 08, 2003 3:23 PM

It doesn't work!

I've tried it with a VERY simple little set of projects, and it's not working. I challenge anyone to try. I'll give you a ZIP file with all of the source, so all you have to do is figure out what I'm doing wrong.

The sample has a .NET class library project (I'm aching to do interop this way), a VB6 ActiveX DLL project that interoperates, and a VB6 EXE project that shows the results.

Email me at jbuxton@nospam.appintell.com if you're interested in trying. I'll buy you a drink next time you're in Weldon Springs MO if you can pull it off.

Jason

jason

# re: Poking around the VS.NET CodeModel@ Friday, August 08, 2003 6:50 PM

My fingers got itchy so I had to try the theory out. Wanted to let you know that it worked without any issues (although I only tested against a simple WSDL). I made alteration to my WebServiceClientGenerator.cs but I haven't checked in the changes. If you want to check it out, download the latest release from Workspace (which contains the source code) and then send me a mail. I'll then ship the modified file to you.

Atif Aziz

# re: .NET naming conventions and protected members@ Wednesday, August 13, 2003 11:17 PM

When we were doing our coding standards for C# we came across this problem. We had a bunch of internal MS people pinged to see what they did. The result was there was no standard, apart from just using case in-sensitive fields.

We decided against that in-case we had some VB.Net development.

We now use m_, which works OK, but is not ideal.

Blair Stephenson

# re: .NET naming conventions and protected members@ Thursday, August 14, 2003 2:52 AM

Using a prefix (e.g. "m_") has its advantages when using intellisense, as shown here: http://weblogs.asp.net/rweigelt/posts/21741.aspx

(Whether to use full, i.e. type-dependent, hungarian notation is a matter of choice and also depends on what the majority of a development team decides on.)

Roland Weigelt

# re: .NET naming conventions and protected members@ Saturday, August 16, 2003 2:19 PM

Well, not excatly what you are looking for, but one fix here is to not have any public or protected fields. There is just no reason to expose those. You can always use a property to abstract them. That will save your butt some day when you change some implementation details without breaking client code.

Brad Abrams

# re: String concatenation - + vs StringBuilder@ Wednesday, August 27, 2003 7:58 PM

I read somewhere on MSDN, maybe a .NET show transcript or something, that said around 10 strings is when the performance of StringBuilder becomes significant over the other methods.

Darrell

# re: String concatenation - + vs StringBuilder@ Thursday, August 28, 2003 10:45 AM

Yeah, I've always gone with the rule of thumb that for anything less than 10 concats the stringbuilder is overkill.

I've also been using String.Format for a lot of string building too. Works fine. And when I need to build a bigger string, .AppendFormat on the StringBuilder is there.

Phil Scott

# <br> UnknownReference@ Friday, August 29, 2003 9:18 AM


UnknownReference

TrackBack

# re: New Microsoft Web Service@ Friday, August 29, 2003 12:28 PM

And ability to filter out that long long list of Microsoft products...

Aleksey Maksimov

# re: New Microsoft Web Service@ Wednesday, September 03, 2003 5:18 PM

If the KB UI really bothers you that much, you might want to consider creating your own UI to submit an appropriate get request to the KB search page. It would be a pretty trivial exercise, even if scraping of the product list from the live search page is included.

Nicole Calinoiu

# re: .NET Framework 1.2?@ Thursday, September 04, 2003 4:25 AM

Trust me, the next one should be 1.2 and available together with yukon beta 1

Derek L.

# re: New version of Process Explorer@ Wednesday, September 10, 2003 6:36 PM

True, these tools are indispensable

Phil

# re: Transparent image generation@ Saturday, September 13, 2003 1:07 PM

Wait a minute... IE supports transparent PNGs, just not directly. Check out this link: http://webfx.eae.net/dhtml/pngbehavior/pngbehavior.html

Dimitri Glazkov

# re: Transparent image generation@ Saturday, September 13, 2003 7:01 PM

Yes, that's the filter hack that I mentioned. I hadn't run across the behavior that your link references before, though. Thanks, it could be useful. It still limits me to IE 5.5 or later, but that might be good enough.

Kevin Dente

# re: .NET naming conventions and protected members@ Saturday, September 20, 2003 10:40 AM

A clarification on what Brad said: you use protected properties, instead of fields. This is the standard in .net and I it is in the guidelines as well.

As he said, you should not allow the public to ever see a field. It just causes problems.

Frank Hileman

# re: The Magic is gone@ Thursday, September 25, 2003 3:44 PM

Sad song. I just can't seem to locate the place where the free previous version is. Can you point me to it, I'd like to have a look at it's licence.

Christophe Lauer

# re: The Magic is gone@ Thursday, September 25, 2003 3:48 PM

It's on Sourceforge.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dotnetmagic/

Kevin Dente

# re: The Magic is gone@ Thursday, September 25, 2003 3:59 PM

Thx. Weird, since the site contained the following statement in the past: "There is no licence or royalty fee to be paid at any time. You may include the source into your own projects which may then be used for personal or commercial use. The only restriction is the code cannot be resold as is, nor modified and sold as a user interface library for C#.".

Christophe Lauer

# re: The Magic is gone@ Thursday, September 25, 2003 4:23 PM

Great library. It was fairly stable for community code. But now its commercial.

Drew Robbins

# How sad...@ Thursday, September 25, 2003 7:28 PM

Too bad...
I used this as an example of the values and features to be found in open source...

Can't blame them for wanting to make a buck, but still.

Time to branch it and continue on with an open source version. Looking at the comment from Christophe Lauer that seems do'able (as long as it stays open source/free)

Greg Duncan

# re: The Magic is gone@ Friday, September 26, 2003 5:13 AM

Have you tried http://www.sellsbrothers.com/tools/genghis/

Jay

# Genghis@ Friday, September 26, 2003 9:49 AM

Very nice...

Greg Duncan

# re: The Magic is gone@ Friday, September 26, 2003 1:20 PM

As an alternative Tim Dawson has numerous controls available on his site, free of charge: http://www.divil.co.uk/net/

Derek Stone

# re: Element behaviors@ Tuesday, September 30, 2003 9:38 PM

Element Behaviors are extremely cool, but yes they suffer from that defect. The way I handle it is to serialize the element behavior and use XmlHttp obbject in MSXML to do the post. This is an early version of Web Services. If you ever need any Element Behavior help, contact me.

On a side note, the concept of Element Behaviors is taken to the next level in Longhorn's new UI engine Avalon.

DonXML

DonXML

# re: Element behaviors@ Tuesday, September 30, 2003 11:30 PM

Element behaviors are also problematic for screen readers that parse HTML because they're rendered as namespaced custom elements that the reader doesn't know how to parse. Best to stay away from them.

Have you looked at "normal" (attached) behaviors?

In any case, pure .js "include" files are much more performant and have no weird side-effects.

Jorge Curioso

# re: Element behaviors@ Wednesday, October 01, 2003 9:01 AM

Element behaviors "suffer" from this inability becouse they all tend to be "isolated" from the outside page. You can always create hiddens in the parent document from your element behavior and thus include data for reply. This is like "registering" for data submission.
anyway, I found these behaviors very heavy-weight and didn't use them finally, becouse they require very good computer with a lot of memory on the client side (thin-client does not apply then :-))
it also work only with IE... obviously :-)

Jakub Skopal

# re: String concatenation - + vs StringBuilder@ Monday, October 20, 2003 7:39 AM

On my blog is a small entry I wrote about making the syntax of StringBuilder slightly easier. Might be of interest. Thanks.

Steve Dunn

# re: EIF@ Wednesday, October 22, 2003 3:17 PM

the link is not valid anymore. Do you have any copy of the article?
thanks AM

andre moraes

# Stay back@ Thursday, October 23, 2003 2:58 AM

TrackBack

# re: Microsoft's 99% Rule - or - sealed strikes again.@ Friday, October 24, 2003 12:42 AM

Your right on the money...

That was what I was looking at doing was creating a session state stored in Oracle when I ran into the same problem.

It is not inheritable... and does not implement an interface that I could.

ARG!!

Theron

# re: Whidbey PDC Questions@ Friday, October 24, 2003 6:58 PM

Hi Kevin,

Just posted a quick response to your questions: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/posts/33379.aspx

Hope this helps,

Scott

ScottGu

# re: Longhorn and Avalon@ Tuesday, October 28, 2003 10:00 PM

So, now we have X-M-L and X-AM-L... great :-)

Jesse Ezell

# re: Longhorn and Avalon@ Tuesday, October 28, 2003 10:57 PM

You think that's bad? Even worse - now we have XAML and SAML. :)

Of course, Microsoft isn't doing much with SAML, so I guess they're not worried about it.

Kevin Dente

# re: String concatenation - + vs StringBuilder@ Friday, November 14, 2003 5:37 AM

The problem here isn't the concatenation of 3 string many times, but the concatenation of many string a few times. I'm not sure, but I believe that in a few string concatenation the '+' could be better.

JC

João Cintra

# re: The trouble with web.config@ Sunday, November 16, 2003 8:16 PM

The Configuration application block allows you to have an external XML file from the web.config and not require a restart when its modified.

Its available on MSDN where all the rest of the application blocks are.

Paul Glavich

# re: The trouble with web.config@ Sunday, November 16, 2003 8:25 PM

I believe this will also mostly fixed in 2.0 as well. That is, there will be a number of sections where a change will not reset the application.

doug reilly

# re: The trouble with web.config@ Sunday, November 16, 2003 9:02 PM

This is fixed in ASP.NET 2.0.

But in the short-run, why not just store your own items in a custom config file and use your own CacheDependency to monitor changes?

On another note, how often do you really need to make changes? I always thought of the config section as a place to store machine/application related settings that really did not need change all that often.

-Scott

Scott Watermasysk

# re: The trouble with web.config@ Sunday, November 16, 2003 10:27 PM

Paul - I've tended to avoid the app blocks for non-internal applications. I've had the sense (perhaps unfounded) that there's a weaker commitment to ongoing maintenance and backward compatibility. Maybe that's just NIH syndrome silliness. :)

Scott - good news that it's fixed in 2.0. One of these days I hope to have time to really dig into Whidbey. Too busy right now, unfortunately.

Tracing is a good example of where web.config is changed on a running system. Debugging a production server by setting up trace switches to enable diagnostic logging is quite common. Dumping the cache to enable this is not ideal. BTW, that's also an example of where a custom config file isn't useful - the framework always uses web.config to control traceswitch behavior.

I like the idea of using a faux CacheDependency with a callback, though. That's a bit easier than setting up a FileSystemWatcher.

Kevin Dente

# re: The trouble with web.config@ Monday, November 17, 2003 6:05 AM

Not an issue because the use of Session variables is, overall, a bad architectual choice.

Wally

Wallym

# re: The trouble with web.config@ Monday, November 17, 2003 9:03 AM

You can always reference your appSettings from an external file:

http://weblogs.asp.net/pwilson/posts/5261.aspx

Kirk Allen Evans

# re: IE Favorites with Longhorn@ Tuesday, December 02, 2003 2:15 PM

What is superior about Netscape 2.0's bookmarking system?

You do realize the bookmark.htm is only a click away in IE. You can export your favorites pretty easily.

Jeff Gonzalez

# re: Duplicate cleanup...grrrr@ Tuesday, December 23, 2003 12:08 AM

This was more my problem. Url's, especially ones called "permalinks" should not change.

Under normal circumstances, I would have not made the change to the Urls, but since I turned on aggregator tracking most readers would have seen all of the of the posts as new anyway, so I seized the moment to clean things up a bit :)

Posts are now archvied at Archive / Year / Month / Day / PostID/EntryName

It sucks, but hopefully this will be the last time it happens.

-Scott

Scott Watermasysk

# re: Duplicate cleanup...grrrr@ Tuesday, December 23, 2003 6:56 AM

and I thought it was just me that was having problems. I'm using SharpReader and have had this problem for quie a while now. Couldn't work out what was actually changing. An example is Dino's asp.net weblog. Even though I'm subscribed to his independantly of the rest of the asp.net blogs I still keep getting them duplicated most times I refresh. I get the same problem with Mr Box's also.

Paul Edwards

# re: The stagnation of IE@ Tuesday, December 30, 2003 7:42 PM

Arcterex said:

About mozilla, you can run multiple instances in linux, so I'm sure it's possible in windows as well. Just out of interest, what do you use this for?

I say:

If two people want to share a computer and they need to login into the same web site with different user IDs, for example. Sure, I understand why there aren't multiple instances, but most people don't and it looks terrible.

As for Mozilla being "piggish", huh? Have you tried it lately?

G

# re: Pocket Outlook extension problems@ Wednesday, December 31, 2003 3:28 AM

I'm pretty sure that if you use the VS.NET Extensions for Windows Mobile 2003, you can add this functionality using the .NET Framework.

Robert McLaws

# re: Office 2003@ Thursday, January 01, 2004 6:58 AM

In Outlook (Haven't got it in front of me, working from homoe today) You can tell it to use Word as the default Editor for HTML and RTF emails , which is why it's loading.

I personally think that all HTML/RTF emails should be banned :) That would stop the worst spam.

Russ C.

# re: WINIPCFG for XP@ Sunday, January 04, 2004 11:40 PM

yepp!
but there is still "ipconfig /all" that makes exactly the same!

chris

# re: CodeGen and Partial Classes@ Monday, January 05, 2004 5:57 PM


Thanks for following up on my inquiry. I have also posted this question to a few other members on the team. Hopefully it will be addressed.

Rob Chartier

# re: CodeGen and Partial Classes@ Tuesday, January 06, 2004 4:08 AM

For showing classes in the solution explorer: you don't do that anymore. A piece of code is stored in a file, yes, but it can belong to a bigger piece of code, like 3 fragments of a class in 3 files make up 1 class. So you should work with the CLASS, not with the FILES. The file should not be the item you work with, it's silly, you work with code, classes, not with files.

The same weirdness is seen in Visio. You're modelling an ORM model and you work with PAGES. Erm... why? It's 1 model, why do I have to work with sheets of paper...

Frans Bouma

# from a computer moron@ Tuesday, January 06, 2004 12:13 PM

I have a Mac and am trying to access a site with an ashx file. It locks my computer up and shuts down the internet every time. Someone said it may be because the Mac can't read the ashx file and doesn't know what to do with it, so it kind of shrugs and dumps it. Can you tell me why and if there is anything I can do to make the Mac read this page? It's very frustrating. I get no prompt from the Mac to download a program to read the file, it just freezes on that page. I'm sorry if this isn't your area of expertise, but I'm just searching the web trying to find an answer.

Nancy

# re: Merging assemblies@ Tuesday, January 06, 2004 10:34 PM

Sounds a lot like something I did, too:

http://weblogs.asp.net/jdennany/archive/2003/09/24/29035.aspx

Jerry Dennany

# re: Copying files@ Thursday, January 08, 2004 6:01 PM

Or maybe let you roll back the copy operation? Now I know I'm asking for too much.

JosephCooney

# re: Copying files@ Thursday, January 08, 2004 6:06 PM

Good god, man, that's crazy talk.

;)

I wonder how many extra terabytes of information I've copied over the years because I had to duplicate a massive copy after one stupid file failed.

Kevin Dente

# re: Copying files@ Thursday, January 08, 2004 6:28 PM

Dear god! Who still uses Explorer for copying? Lots of very good tools out there (Total Commander being one of the most powerful file managers out there) just begging for your attention.

Roy Osherove

# re: Copying files@ Thursday, January 08, 2004 6:51 PM

Ahh Kevin - your dreams are too brave and powerful. Such a time may never in your lifetime come to pass.

Leon Bambrick

# re: Copying files@ Thursday, January 08, 2004 7:03 PM

Roy,
Something as simple as reliably copying files should hardly require a third-party tool. After all, dealing with files is one of the most basic functions of an operating system.

There was a time when I used third-party file management tools (back in DOS and Win3x days), but I would hope we've graduated beyond that - at least for most typical uses.

Kevin Dente

# re: Copying files@ Thursday, January 08, 2004 7:09 PM

Longhorn gives you the option to skip.

Rolling back the copy operation is insane. What if the rollback fails? What if you said "Yes" to overwrite an existing file. How do you roll that back? Do you attempt to resurrect the original file?

Raymond Chen

# re: Copying files@ Thursday, January 08, 2004 7:17 PM

Woo hoo! The dream lives! Thanks Raymond. I haven't dipped my toes into the Longhorn waters yet.

Kevin Dente

# re: Copying files@ Thursday, January 08, 2004 7:20 PM

So then the next question is - if you do skip, will it give you a summary of the files that failed when the copy completes? That would be sweet.

Kevin Dente

# re: Copying files@ Thursday, January 08, 2004 7:30 PM

Friendly file operations don't sell OSes, animated start menus do.

There should be several options when there is an issue :
Retry - So I can close the app that has locked the file.
No overwite - Just copy the files that are not already there.

There are lots of things like this. When I delete a file it is just going to the recycle bin, why force me to confirm? I don't feel the same about shift-delete, because it actualy deletes the file.


Rollback, just thinking about makes me want to write a tool that will enable it.

No Mr. Chen , I do not want it to attempt to resurect the original file, I want it to restore the original file. If your rollback fails, your problems are probably much more serious than a few files.

If there are files that will be overwitten, there should be an option to have them be saved/copied to some temporary location for the duration of the operation.




AndrewSeven

# re: Copying files@ Friday, January 09, 2004 2:39 AM

OK, restoring the original file is a bit crazy ... I mean, especially when you start condidering this function across a network. She skipped failed file thing would be great.

JW

# re: Copying files@ Friday, January 09, 2004 4:28 AM

"Longhorn gives you the option to skip."

Correction: Longhorn WILL give you the option to skip.

Fabrice

# re: .NET Framework 1.2?@ Friday, January 09, 2004 3:42 PM

The .Net framework version 1.2 is also referred to as 2.0.

Paritosh

# re: Copying files@ Sunday, January 11, 2004 2:43 PM

...only for local files.

AndrewSeven

# re: Copying files@ Sunday, January 11, 2004 4:39 PM

Ack, really? Locally only? Lame.

Kevin Dente

# re: Merging assemblies@ Tuesday, January 13, 2004 12:08 AM

I'll be damned. Looks like we were doing the same thing at about the same time.

Kevin Dente

# re: Encryption in .NET@ Tuesday, January 13, 2004 6:56 PM

I did notice this morning in my Whidbey bits that some encryption functionality that was previously only available by writing P/Invoke code to access the unmanaged libraries will now be available in the framework. Not sure how much is/is not NDA that I can talk about here, though.

Robert Hurlbut

# re: Encryption in .NET@ Tuesday, January 13, 2004 7:21 PM

Heh. But that's the point, really, isn't it? To make authors' lives more difficult? I mean, surely they aren't going around adding all this functionality just to make *developers'* lives *easier*? ;-)

G. Andrew Duthie

# re: The trouble with web.config@ Sunday, January 18, 2004 11:34 PM

have problem with web.config

can somebody help me pleaseeeeeeeeeeeeeee??

aljosa

www.runtothe101.com/mail/

aljosa@cox.net

# re: Indigo application concerns@ Wednesday, January 21, 2004 2:14 AM

This is in fact a developer preview. The PDC build was based on M4 of Indigo and the programing model (especially for the Service Model) currently get revamped for M5 - as the guys sais a trillion times at PDC, in articles and in interviews :-)
So I would not worry too much at this point in time. Expect it to become a lot more 'convinient' ... but it definitey will differ from the ASMX model which is good, IMHO.

Christian Weyer

# re: Indigo application concerns@ Wednesday, January 21, 2004 5:26 AM

Indigo offers two general programming models, targeting very different levels of control.

The Service Model is the one you are looking for, it works much the same way that ASMX works today.

The Indigo Connector model is the more complex and low level messaging model