Robert McLaws: FunWithCoding.NET

Does anyone know how to walk the call stack on a calling assembly? I blogged earlier about a new limit I was writing for XHEO|Licensing. Basically I want to limit an assembly's use at runtime, but I don't know what that assembly is going to be at compile time. I have written some code that loads up all the running assemblies into an array, and walks the array to see if the assembly is loaded. That is not the optimal way however, because someone could just reference and load the required caller, then execute my assembly separately, because the licensed caller is loaded into the AppDomain.

...it kicked my butt again. Last week, we migrated to new servers. Well, MSDTC reared it's ugly head again. I spent 6 hours tonight tryint to track down why the DTC transaction keeps dropping the connection. The answer? I still had the old server VPNed into the network. Disconnected the old server from the network, and BAM, my SQL transactions are working again. The problem? Damned if I know. DTC wasted ANOTHER 6 hours of my life... <sigh> :(

"An unknown error has occurred while processing the request. The transaction has already been implicitly or explicitly committed or aborted."

It's funny to me how something can get twisted and turned around without the proper facts in place. I've seen quotes from Tom Rizzo up the yang about the Whidbey/Yukon delay, but I never really heard a decent explanation until I cracked open this week's edition of CRN magazine. Page 8 says:

While far from a comprehensive study, I just tested computers on 3 different networks, and none can currently access the Passport service. Attempting to access http://messenger.msn.com returns a "Server is too busy" page. Any corroboration?

I was working on VisualBlogger once again, and I was really getting frustrated with using app.config to store blog configurations. Using a ConfigSections wrapper was kind of overkill, and so was having the app dependent on an Access database. Andy Smith turned me onto the idea of using a Typed DataSet... something that I had never done before. I had no idea how cool these things are. I just built an XML file with the desired elements, loaded them up into a DataSet, spit out the schema XSD file using the DataSet.WriteXmlSchema method. Using the VS.NET Schema editor, I was able to change the data types, set constraints, and even create automatically incrementing primary keys. From there, I generated a DataSet using the Schema | Generate Dataset option, and voila! Now I have a simple method for accessing typed data, without having to use a database.

Like, Oh My God. I have been waiting for this document from Microsoft for AGES! There is soooooooo much good information in here about configuration, security, and coding best practices if you manage your own web servers. And best of all, it doesn't make any assumptions about your level of knowledge. It's straighforward, not heavy on jargon, has lots of cross-references, and is a real gem. Congratulations to whatever team at Microsoft put this together... it should set the standard for documentation from here on out. I'll wait patiently for this kind of quality docs from any MS team that puts this much effort into their docs. Hey, if you guys put this into some kind of reference manual, I'd buy it in a stone cold second.

I've been working non-stop on VisualBlogger 2004, my new blogging add-in for VS.NET. I got the really nasty code out of the way today, and there isn't much left to do. I wanted to tell you a bit about her, but she's very independent right now, so I'll let her do it instead. Hope you like.