Lorenzo Barbieri @ Weblogs.Asp.Net

Shake your thoughts... Confessions of a MSF and .NET addicted
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October 2003 - Posts

VS.NET Online content is a little bit... offline!!!

I'm playing a little with the VS.NET 2003 Start page, and I'm very disappointed...

Wrong URLs, HTTP 404s, very old content... "Hey Visual Studio .NET 2003 Final Beta is here!"... I know, I'm using the FINAL version :-(

I really like the idea, but the implementation and how it is mainteined is really bad!!!

Posted: Oct 07 2003, 05:27 PM by barbilor | with no comments
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MSN Messenger Update for Pocket PC

I'm currently downloading the MSN Messenger Update for Pocket PC (you have to upgrade before October, 15th) from here.

Let's hope that it adds something to the crappy user interface of the PPC version... I'll tell you more when the download at the amazing 3,6Kb/sec speed ends...

UPDATE: It's the same UGLY version!!! :-((((

How much does it cost to add some nice emoticons to the program?

GPRS sucks!!!

How can they tell you "Internet Everywhere" when you can connect at 4Kb/sec (download) and 1Kb/sec (upload) at best...

And when the connection have troubles, you lose packets without any notification...

Most of the times I've to stop and restart the connection.

Now I'm only paying 20€/month, but from the next month they pretend that I pay for 3€/Mb...

I've already exchanged more that 250Mb with the network only in one week... How much have I to pay???? :-(

The next month I'll stop using the service...Or perhaps I'll search for another flat rate GPRS provider...

Another VS.NET 2003 bug...

I have a SQL Server stored procedure, I prepare the SqlCommand, SqlConnection, etc... etc...

Sometime it happens that if I make a mistake in preparing the Parameters (especially the @RETURN_VALUE) and I'm debugging the code, when I step in the ExecuteXXX statement, Visual Studio .NET 2003 exits from the debugging session and goes back to the editor...

On the same PC it happened sometime ago that I was debugging a .NET program and VS.NET stopped the debug session and killed itself without any explanation...

Let's wait for Whidbey, or better for a real VS.NET Service Pack (not like VS.NET 2003 over VS.NET RTM... :-) )

Posted: Oct 07 2003, 04:59 PM by barbilor | with no comments
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50th Post

Thanks to all the people in this great community, for all the feedback and the help that I've received and for the opportunity to be a part of it.

Let's go for the 100th Post, perhaps with more useful posts and less chit chat...

VS.NET stupid UI bug...

If you have a sourcecode (I've tried it with VB.NET) that has a lot of short lines and sometimes a long line, the editor adjust the horizontal scroll bar accordingly.

If you go to one of the long lines and scroll horizontally to the right (with the scroll bar) and then you move the vertical scroll bar until you have only short lines on the screen, the horizontal scroll bar is resized to fill all the space. At this point the edit screen is not showing it's left part, but the scrollbar tells you that there is nothing on the left... You have to use cursor keys to move...

It's the first time I've noticed it in two years, but perhaps I'm not a great user of horizontal scroll bars... :-)

Posted: Oct 06 2003, 12:15 PM by barbilor | with 2 comment(s)
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UrlScan and ASP.NET debugging

I like Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer and all the suggestions that it gives to improve the security of the scanned PC.

One of the most important suggestion, for me, is to run the IIS Lockdown tool on every Pc with IIS installed.

 I always do it, and I don't care if it's a production, a staging or a development server.

But for staging and development servers there is an issue. The IIS Lockdown tool installs the URLScan ISAPI filter to block malformed URLs, bad file extensions and wrong HTTP commands.

The only allowed HTTP commands in the default configuration are GET, POST and HEAD.

To allow VS.NET to debug ASP.NET pages you have to find URLSCAN.INI and edit it to add the DEBUG command to the list of the allowed commands.

If you don't enable it VS.NET tells you to enable server side debugging, but doesn't give you any other hint.

But for your security, don't enable DEBUG on production servers...

But after all I had a great time...

The best part of my visit to SMAU was when I met a lot of friends...

I want to greet in no particular order Luigi Crispo, Corrado Cavalli, Andrea Saltarello, Raffaele Del Monaco, Raffaele Rialdi, Alessandro Teglia, Francesco Albano, Michele Zoppi (all from MS Italy), and all the people that I'm forgetting.

I hope to meet you all in the near future, and I'm envying most of you, because you will be in L.A. at the end of this month... :-)

SMAU 2003 is disappointing

Yesterday I went to the 40th edition of SMAU, one of the most important fair dedicated to ICT of all Europe.

I think that this edition is the worst of the last decade, there were fewer people, fewer vendors, fewer gadgets, fewer hostess :-), etc.. etc...

The Microsoft pavilion was the only one that was quite at the level of the last years, a little bit less but not so much.

Every year I enjoy the theatres (MSDN, TechNet, Office, etc...) where most of the people can have the first look at new technologies, and the fact that I can find all the Microsoft partners in the same place, without having to find them.

I hope that the crisis in the ICT field is near the end, because it's very sad when you go to fairs like this one and come back so disappointed.

Posted: Oct 06 2003, 09:54 AM by barbilor | with no comments
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