QuestMaster.NET

Alan Parsons - Live In Madrid reprise

Dirk — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 15:48:27 GMT

I put in the Alan Parsons Live In Madrid DVD again the other day, and I noticed a couple of subtle Pink Floyd references. I was probably extra-sensitive to those because I had listened to Pulse and In The Flesh before.

During the "spooky" section of Psychobable, you can vaguely hear (and see) the drummer whispering into his mike. He's saying things like "There's no reason to be afraid of dying, you gotta go sometime". And I can't shake the feeling that this version of the spooky section sounds suspiciously like On The Run. Both snippets are taken from Dark Side Of The Moon, on which Alan Parsons was the sound engineer.

The second is at the start of Sirius: the guitarist plays the typical "ploing-Ploing-ploing-plooing" from Shine On You Crazy Diamond (on Wish You Where Here). As far as I know, Alan Parsons was not involved with that album, however.

ReSharper, DXCore and GhostDoc can co-exist at last

Dirk — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 10:08:24 GMT

Maybe this has been possible for some time, but I finally got the combination of ReSharper, DXCore and GhostDoc to co-exist peacefully on my Vista machine. I'm using:

Resharper 3.0.2
DXCore 2.5.10
GhostDoc 2.1.2

Why is this important: it enables me to use CR_Documentor, giving a very nice almost real-time preview of XML comments in a tool window. This is important for XML comment fetishists like me.

Cryptographic failure while signing assembly: Unknown error (8013141c)

Dirk — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 12:01:19 GMT

I started experiencing a Cryptographic failure while signing assembly: Unknown error (8013141c) after moving my Visual Studio 2005 solutions to Visual Studio 2008. The reason: I'm using strongly named assemblies, and I was running Visual Studio 2005 as Administrator. Visual Studio 2008 does not require me to run as Administrator, so I use it with my normal user account.

Now unfortunately, this normal user account doesn't have the appropriate permissions needed to access the folder that contains the cryptographic key containers. Here's how to fix this (on Windows Vista):

Open C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA in Windows Explorer (ProgramData is a hidden folder)
Right-click on MachineKeys and click Properties
Click on the Security tab
Click on the Advanced button
Click on Edit (you'll have to elevate or provide administrator credentials here)
Click on Add
Enter Debugger Users in the Enter to object name to select field
Click Check Names
Click OK
Allow Full Control
Click OK
A couple of error messages appear, click to close them
Click OK
You're good to go

You should probably investigate whether you can get away with less than Full Control, though.

Visual Studio 2008 At High (*) DPI Settings

Dirk — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 12:27:07 GMT

(*) "High" as in "more than 96"

I have a frustrating issue with VS2008 on my Vista machine, but luckily I found a solution.

Here's the issue: As long as my Windows DPI settings are set to the default of 96 DPI, everything is fine. But when I set the DPI settings higher, things start to go wrong. With “wrong” I mean:

Some fonts in the IDE are larger than others
Popup menus appear in the wrong place, sometimes partly outside the screen area
Intellisense menus appear at seemingly random positions all over the screen
Team Explorer is only useable with keyboard commands, since mouse-clicks and mouse-hovers arrive at wrong places on screen.

The frustrating thing is that for a non-WPF application, the “old” VS2005 behaved surprisingly well at higher DPI settings. Somehow MS screwed this up with Orcas.

This means: VS2008 is practically unusable on the notebook screen of my Dell Inspiron M65, which has a 150 DPI panel. My Samsung 204B external monitor has a 100 DPI panel, but using a 96 DPI setting makes everything small. In fact, I like to use a setting of 120 DPI to give letters a comfortable size.

And now for the solution: buried within a comment on an entry from Scott Guthrie's blog, a fellow calling himself Deepak gives a solution: disable display scaling:

Turning off display scaling (from right click devenv -> properties -> compatibility tab in Vista) brings back things to normal.

And sure enough, when I modified my VS2008 shortcut according to these instructions, most (if not all) of my issues seem to have disappeared.

Fishmaster

Dirk — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 09:14:44 GMT

A friend of mine told me about Wishmaster - The Misheard Lyrics on YouTube. Hilarious!

LINQPad - Yes, I'm Tired of SQL

Dirk — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 17:08:50 GMT

LINQPad is a tool for learning LINQ, and incidentally for replacing SQL Management Studio. Playing around with Linq and seeing how much more elegant it is to phrase queries in Linq rather than SQL, I really feel sooo tired of SQL. I'm missing Linq, and I wish the whole world would upgrade to .NET 3.5 right now.

Shameless plug: Actually, SQL disappeared out of my life almost a year ago, when I started working for Tech Talk. They have an O/R Mapping product, called Genome. And Genome even has LINQ Integration.

Windows Vista - Do Not Board This Train

Dirk — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 08:46:07 GMT

The ÖBB, Austria's (formerly) federal railroad agency, offers companies (and people I assume) the possibility to endorse a train. So I could go ahead, endorse a train, and have the seductive female voice in stations announce "ICE 123 Dirk Rombauts with destination Antwerp is arriving at platform 42".

Apparently, Microsoft chose to market Windows Vista in Austria through that channel too. Just too bad the the ÖBB are advising people not to use Windows Vista after all ("Bitte nicht einsteigen" is German for "Do not board this train"):

MaskedTextBox and SelectAll - or why MSDN Community Content is cool

Dirk — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 09:42:35 GMT

I was working on one of my pet projects the other day, and wanted to implement this behavior: I have a text box for entering a time, and I use a masked textbox for that purpose. The text box has a default value, but the text should be selected so that users can start typing a new time right away - without having to select the existing value first. My first thought was simple:

        private void maskedTextBox1_Enter(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            maskedTextBox1.SelectAll();
        }

That didn't work as expected, however. The text in the text box was not selected, even though maskedTextBox1.SelectedText returned the entire content of the checkbox.

After some digging around on MSDN, I found a community content entry for TextBoxBase.SelectAll(). It links to a discussion on the Microsoft Windows Forms Forum, that describes my problem and offers a solution:

        private void maskedTextBox1_Enter(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            this.BeginInvoke((MethodInvoker)delegate
            {
                maskedTextBox1.SelectAll();
            });
        }

I think this is a very good example of helpful community content in MSDN!

Useful Tidbit

Dirk — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 10:16:03 GMT

One of the things that makes me go berserk is a program that minimizes to the notification area of the Taskbar and animates itself all the time for no good reason. This is incredibly distracting: I keep looking down to it to see what's happening. Read Peripheral and Foveal Vision for an entry-level read on why this is so. Thankfully, there's a standard functionality in Windows that helps out.

How To Hide Annoying Icons In The Notification Area

Right-Click the Taskbar
Select Properties
Click on the Notification Area tab
Activate the "Hide inactive icons" checkbox if it is not already activated
Click on the Customize button.
Click on the row containing the offending program
Select Hide from the Behavior dropdown
Click OK to close the form
Click OK again to close the Taskbar Properties window

Thanks to my colleague Marcus for sharing this little secret with me!

delarou's weblog - AcceptButton and CancelButton on a UserControl

Dirk — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 13:11:10 GMT

Today I was looking for the AcceptButton and CancelButton property on System.Windows.Forms.UserControl. Guess what? They don't exist. A bit of Googling (*) pointed me to this blog entry, which works like a charm: delarou's weblog - AcceptButton and CancelButton on a UserControl

(*) as in "searching using the Google search engine" - before any Google lawyers crack down on me.

Shameless Plug: DevCamp 07

Dirk — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 08:15:37 GMT

A shameless plug for a conference where I will be speaking: DevCamp 07, and specifically Track 3 at 14:00: Ein Tag im Leben eines WPF Quiz Show Entwicklungsteams (yes, the conference is completely in German language). Together with my colleague Gregor I will show how a developer and designer can work together to develop a kewl-looking quiz show program using Windows Presentation Foundation and Visual Studio 2008.

Update: So what is this DevCamp all about? DevCamp is the first conference targeted at Developers, Architects and Program Managers that focuses exclusively on the Microsoft .NET Platform. TechTalk (the company I work for and which I, incidentally, can recommend highly if you're looking for a .NET job (even more shameless plug)) wanted to plug that hole and decided to organize such a conference, together with CSS and Cupido. Microsoft and the Fachhochschule Technikum Wien jumped on the bandwagon as well. There will be three tracks, more than 20 presentations in all. I'm looking forward to meet the best .NET people Austria has to offer!

Fun with Electronic Business Cards

Dirk — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 17:46:30 GMT

An interesting article about using Electronic Business Cards (EBCs) in E-Mail signatures. I gotta play around with that a bit on Friday :-)

Link to Microsoft Office Outlook Team Blog : The 1-2-3's on EBCs

Another Link Roundup

Dirk — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 09:05:36 GMT

Architecture, Analysis and Design

The Domain Tree: a thought-provoking comparison between domain models and the WPF visual tree.
CSLA .NET 3.0 available for download
Part III. Grabbing the ScreenShot

Development tools and tips

Windows Presentation Foundation

O/R Mapping

Sidebar Development

.NET Sidebar Gadget Creator 2.0 Release

ASP.NET Development

Office Development

ASP.NET 2.0 Databinding and Custom Paging

Dirk — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 20:05:00 GMT

A lot has happened in ASP.NET 2.0 when it comes do databinding. There are the data sources that make it really easy to grab some data from a SQL database. There is even the ObjectDataSource so Microsoft effectively introduced the middle tier in ASP.NET applications (as a speaker on a conference put it eloquently). But how do I use custom paging? If I just go ahead and read all data from the database, then discard all but a few records, well ... I'll be in for an unpleasant surprise the moment somebody grabs a profiler. There has to be a better way.

And there is ... it's all beautifully written in a tutorial called Efficiently Paging Through Large Amounts of Data on www.asp.net. There are both C# and VB versions. There are also lots of other data-related tutorials as well, which I'll be sure to read over time.

MathType 6

Dirk — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 19:13:00 GMT

Design Science have finally released version 6 of MathType, the "professional version of Equation Editor". I definitely need to give this a spin when I've got time (yeah right).

Seen on CodePlex: MSBuildShellExtension

Dirk — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 08:09:00 GMT

Looks cool: a way to build your projects by right-clicking on the project file in windows explorer: the MSBuildShellExtension project on CodePlex.

Disclaimer: I haven't tried this myself yet.

If I could ask J.K. Rowling One Thing

Dirk — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 06:47:00 GMT

Spoilers: I don't think there are any Harry Potter spoilers in this post.

If I could ask J.K. Rowling one thing, it would be this: what is the "Japanese golfer joke" that Uncle Vernon is telling at the beginning of Chamber of Secrets? I know only one Japanese golfer joke, and it's not one I had expected to find in a book for children ;-)

The Green Jersey Is Back Home!

Dirk — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 11:57:00 GMT

19 years after Eddy Planckaert, the Green Jersey of the Tour de France is back in Belgian hands. Tom Boonen ended the almost two decades long draught and brings the jersey that used to be almost exclusive Belgian property back home. It's a fair bet that the Trofee voor Sportverdienste en Sportman van het Jaar will go his way too. Next victory in Stuttgart? :-)

I'm back!

Dirk — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 16:31:00 GMT

After weeks, nay, months of procrastination and trial and error, I'm back! I switched to another provider for questmaster.net and took the opportunity to make a slight adjustment to the address: we are now hailing from http://questmaster.net/community/blogs/dirks_blog/.

What To Do If Your Boss Reads Your Blog, Part 2

Dirk — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 03:09:11 GMT

Andreas was kind enough to take the time to write a reply to my post What To Do If Your Boss Reads Your Blog. I chose to disable anonymous comments on my blog long ago because I didn't want to deal with comment spam. For that reason I'm publishing his comments here (with his permission of course).

Here you are, here I am ;-)

The freedom of speech doesn't include the right to shout "fire" in a crowded theatre, if there is no fire. But you may shout "Theatre" in a crowded fire ;-)
Writing a blog is an act of publishing. The same discussion is therefore valid for all other media formats as well, blogging is just a popular occasion. Imagine moderating a late night radio show on IT projects and making mean jokes about your projects (or bosses, of course) - same disposion.
Publishing is like talking in public - only better distributed using a transportation medium. Blame your bosses on Kärntnerstrasse [a crowded shopping street in the heart of Vienna] by shouting out loud; chances are high you'll largely get ignored. But you never know.
You have to decide, what to say or not. But it's not limited to your bosses but to all stakeholders in your current professional and private environment - sometimes maybe there are thoughts which could offend, perhaps, your mother, not your boss ;-) Write it, or not? Every publication needs its own decision I'd say.
Sometimes taking the future into consideration also makes sense. The internet never forgets. You can delete a blog-entry, but it might be saved somewhere (http://archive.org) - everybody can track your contributions, even years after you've already totally forgotten about them.
Cheers
Andreas
PS: I don't agree that you can publish everything about your customers and projects in the title of the freedom of speech: most details are confidential. Of course you *could* write about everything, but it would be against various agreements between you and your company as well as your company and the customer. You would have to live with the problems generated for everybody then (however they are shaped).

I think Andreas mentions some valid points. The internet never forgets indeed, and Pilate's words may come back to haunt you ("What I have written, I have written"). I think his PS is spot on. I could talk about confidential details, but this would have very farreaching consequenses. One of those consequences would be broken trust. By signing my contract, I promised not to go public with confidential data. If I were to break that promise, I would show myself not to be trustworthy. I think trust is a very important basis for any relation, so I keep those promises.

Exam 70-528 Web-Based Client Development

Dirk — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 16:54:54 GMT

I took test 70-528 the other day, and passed. If I also pass 70-536, I can call myself Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist: .NET Framework 2.0 Web Applications.

Formula 1 2007 Predictions

Dirk — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 07:59:50 GMT

The 2007 Formula 1 season is underway. The first pole position goes to Kimi Räikönnen, who apparently is the first Ferrari driver since Juan Manuel Fangio to snatch the pole in his first race for the Italian team. My predictions for 2007:

Kimi Räkönnen will become world champion
Ferrari will win the constructor's title.
McLaren will likely be the second strongest team
Renault will try to beat McLaren
BMW will try to beat Renault.
The team to watch out for is Aguri: if their qualifying in Melbourne is any indication, they may well be on their way to leave the last place to the likes of Spyker and Toro Rosso.

What To Do If Your Boss Reads Your Blog

Dirk — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 07:47:08 GMT

Hi Christian, Andreas! Franz, are you reading this too? :-)

I know for a fact that some of my bosses read my blog. This creates an interesting situation, because it extends the working world into the private world. At work, I try to be friendly, respectful and polite towards my bosses, colleagues and customers alike. Since my blog is now part of my relation with my boss, it follows that I what I write should be equally friendly, respectful and polite.

Or does it?

On the one hand, I have the freedom to write whatever I want in my blog. This is freedom of speech, one of the very fundaments of what is usually called "western civilization". I also have to freedom to talk to and about bosses, customers and colleagues in any way I want, when it comes to that. On the other hand, I have the duty to accept peoples' reactions to my writings and sayings. Any reactions. This is the "One Right, One Duty" principle.

So where does this leave me?

I think this means that I cannot choose the content and tone of my blog based on my blog alone. I need to base those choices on my goals with regard to my relations with my bosses, customers and colleagues. I want those relations to be friendly and productive. Part and parcel of productive relations is that you praise in public, and criticize in private. For this reason, I choose to be friendly, respectful and polite in my blog. From now on, at least ;-)

Some may call this censure. I would argue with that because this so-called "censure" comes from me, not from outside. But mostly I would argue with that because "censure" would imply that the "censured" topics disappear into a black hole. They do not. These topic will be talked about in private, should the need arise. They will simply find another channel.

My bosses and I talked about this very topic before I started at TechTalk. We agreed to be open about criticism and to talk about it, but to keep it private. Like I said, this is part and parcel of a productive relation.

Windows Vista and One Care Panic

Dirk — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 17:15:24 GMT

My company notebook doesn't boot any more. Not even in safe mode. At a predictable point in the boot cycle of Vista, there comes a Blue Screen Of Death for a very short time, and then the notebook restarts. Repeat at infinitum.

So in the worst case the notebook will need to be reinstalled. So I need to retrieve my data. No problem, I think, I have one care installed and the most recent backup is only two days old. I didn't do any significant work on the notebook for the last couple of days, so this should be done in a snap. Alas, remember the old saying "Never rely on a backup system unless you have tried a restore".

Either there's something I don't understand about One Care Backup, or it is near useless. I could restore my files, yes, but the end result was that only about half the files I expected were there. This is a big no-no.

I then tried running Vista Setup in recovery mode, but to no avail. The problem couldn't be solved automatically. What did work, however, was the command prompt in the recovery console in combination with a USB hard disk. Even in recovery mode, Windows Vista is able to recognize and mount usb hard disks without any problemns. So I copied my data to the external hard disk, and resigned myself to awaiting what our sysadmins are able to salvage from this mess.

So what did I learn? One Care Backup seems to suck, but Windows Vista Recovery Mode is good.

How To Install Visual Studio 2005 SP1

Dirk — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 17:47:06 GMT

I had two big issues while installing Visual Studio 2005 SP1: installation takes ages, and on Windows 2003 it fails. Heath Stewart describes workaround for the first and the second issue.

Those workarounds are real nerve-savers. In my experience, it isn't necessary to leave the domain in the workaround for the second issue: disconnecting the network connection worked for me.