Mikes little Blog of life and mainly .NET stuff

WINFX Feb CTP just announced

2006-02-22T16:58:00.000Z

Just reading the latest post from Tim Sneath Here

Just announced the latest Feb CTP for WINFX. Looks like there may be more changes in this one compared to the Jan.

Looks like another all night download to get the SDK down again.

Guess we wait until Jan CTP in uninstalled and Feb CTP is installed onto new laptop now before we begin our journey.

The Laptop is upgraded, we begin soon

2006-02-22T13:41:00.000Z

I have had to upgrade my laptop from 512MB to 1.5GB as the 512MB was suffering having Visual Studio 2005 open with all its WINFX plugins.

My 1Gig stick arrived yesterday and has been installed successfully. I have yet to run up Visual Studio and see how it runs, but I am hoping that performance will be better.

I have also downloaded the Hands-On-Labs from the PDC05, cant remember link now though, but email me if anyone wants it and I will find it.

Just gonna start working through them soon. I also plan to do a presentation to my work colleagues and managers soon on WINFX and what it all means.

Later...

WPF, 3 little things

2006-02-20T22:13:00.000Z

I have been reading up a bit now on Windows Presentation Foundation (Formerly Avalon). It is very difficult to know where to start, there are numerous articles sprinkled around the web, but it is not easy finding some kind of coherant learning experience.

From what I have found so far, it seems that there are 3 main selling points for WPF

1. It frees up the CPU and effectively passes graphical responsibility to the Graphics card. This advantage of course only pays off if you have a good graphics card. I have yet to find out if there are any minimum specification of card or if there is a switch at which point the graphics card is ignored and the CPU has to handle the graphics.

2. It will provide the richness of Windows Forms development within a browser windows, bringing with it all of the benefits associated with applications presented withing a browser window. However, this will mean that the host PC will require a Windows OS and browser to support it. So to reap the benefits of WPF all of your clients will require the WINFX runtime.

3. The GUI design of the application can be split out from the business code. I am unsure how much of an advantage this really is. In WPF, you can define your GUI in XAML (A specification over XML) and this is compiled somehow into the application. I remember learning about .NET Remoting and how you could contain all of the configuration information in an XML config file if you hosted the service in IIS. I am unsure if the benefits that this approach gave .NET remoting are the same as what XAML gives the WPF. Of course WPF GUI definition does not require XAML, it can be programatically defined via any .NET language (C#, VB.NET etc).

Whilst writing this, it was just reported on the news that the UK womens Curling team have been knocked out of the competition. Ho hum, 1 silver it is then.

WinFX begins

2006-02-19T09:31:00.000Z

Have decided that I need to keep up with what Microsoft is doing in the arena that I work in, therefore have been researching a bit into WINFX recently.

I have a company laptop (IBM Thinkpad T40 512MB) and my own personal computer (1.4GHz 512MB). I cannot really install too much software on the company laptop incase it has to go back to HQ for work.

Therefore I have bought myself a new laptop purely for WINFX and other research. I did not want to spend too much on this, so set myself a budget of £500. What I ended up with is an ACER Aspire 3613 from Ebuyer

I have now installed the the Jan CTP for WINFX including all of the additional components that plug into Visual Studio 2005.

You know youve made it when

2006-02-08T22:52:00.000Z

you can type some key (ish) words from your website and they appear near the top of the search engines.

Google

MSN

Altavista

My Talk-PC site got posted to the search engines about 2 weeks ago. It is a bit disheartening at first when you keep going to Google and get nothing returned.

Now my search is complete

Race for Life - Sponsorship request

2006-01-28T18:44:00.000Z

My wife (Ann-Maria) is running the Race for Life again this year in aid of Cancer Research.

I would love anyone ready this to sponsor her, her own Race for Life web-page is here
Please Sponsor Her

Thanks for listening

Evening work - Talk-PC

2006-01-28T12:42:00.000Z

I have been working on a bit of an evening project recently. Setting up a website to support Computer Problems in the Warminster, Westbury and Frome areas of Wiltshire. The site is written using Visual Studio 2005 professional (See earlier post on where I got this from, thanks Microsoft).

Site is currently in state of change, but can be found here if anyone is interested in how my Web-prowess is getting on.

I am currently investigating how to get the site crawled by Googlebot and other search engines. My intention is for a local user to be able to type something like "Computer Solutions Frome" or "Computer Repairs Warminster" and the site to appear high in search engine listings.

The DotNetKicks Blog

2006-01-17T16:30:00.000Z

The DotNetKicks Blog
A new community Kick site as detailed in this blog

History (ish)

2006-01-16T09:51:00.000Z

Highly amusing, possibly not completely factually correct article here from Billy Hollis on the history of 'C' and 'BASIC' Languages.
here

What a lot of Free software

2006-01-15T16:53:00.000Z

Just by attending one of the Visual Studio 2005, Sql Server 2005 and Biztalk 2006 Launch events, Microsoft kindly sent me the following free software.

Visual Studio 2005 Professional
SQL Server 2005 Standard
Biztalk 2006

Thats nearly £2,500 for just the first 2. (Biztalk 2006 has not yet been released).
There is also a free exam voucher for one of the new Microsoft Certifications.

Thanks Bill.

A new .NET forum

2006-01-14T22:19:00.000Z

I have been hanging around the Channel 9 forums for a while recently. Some of the posts are interesting, but I think it is time to move elsewhere. I am not really interested in the code only forums, though they may be interesting, they are very in depth and focused on one very small coding problem. I like looking at those forums that discuss bigger issue topics, such as the toolsets, best practise, what Microsoft is upto etc. I certainly enjoy looking at the Channel 9 videos in their media section. It is an excellent way to get an idea of how Microsoft works and what the people are like.

Heres to a new .NET forum I have signed up to (Only third member on site!). It is run by a regular Channel 9 poster and looks promising, though as yet there is only 1 post in the forums.

.NET Foundry Lets Hope they get a more memorable web address soon eh ?

Happy Christmas to Me!

2005-12-03T15:13:00.000Z

Took a bit of a flyer, read the Microsoft Book on the final exam "Analyzing Requirements and Defining .NET Solution Architectures" at a hundred miles an hour, got to say that I already knew a lot of the subjects. A bit weak on some of the theoretical modelling questions, but I passed 2 days ago (Thursday 1st December).

So I know have my MCSD, first exam was 26th September, last on 1st December. I only managed to study in the evenings for about 1 hour a night. I believe I have done quite well considering.

At least I now have some time to actually concentrate on some real .NET stuff instead of theory.

More articles soon on what I have found.

p.s. Get along to the Microsoft site and download the Express editions of Visual Studio 2005. I must commend Microsoft for providing free downloads of these products for 12 months. My first impressions are very favourable, now I just wanna play with some code.

80% and still going strong

2005-11-23T14:45:00.000Z

Yes!

I passed 70-340 yesterday (22nd). It was the one that I had been worrying a bit about because I thought that there would be a lot of Web based security questions and my current web knowledge is limited really to what I have learnt during my drive through MCSD.

But, a pass is a pass. Onwards we now go to the final exam "Analyzing Requirements and Defining .NET Solution Architectures". Having read up a fair bit about it on the Microsoft MCSD forums, it appears to be slightly different to the rest, in that there are 30 questions based on 3 separate case studies.

I am using the Que publishing Exam Cram 2 book for this one, only really based upon feedback that I have got from others that have taken it.

Intention is to read up on book, do its test exams and hopefully schedule an exam before we break up for christmas.

MCSD would be a nice christmas present.

Later...

We arrive at MCAD

2005-10-27T23:28:00.000+01:00

Passed "Developing XML Web Services and Server Components with Microsoft Visual C# .NET and the Microsoft .NET Framework" aka 70-320 on Wednesday 26th October.

Bit unusual, registered for the exam via Pearson Vue website as usual, but noticed that I could take the exam in Wiltshire College in Chippenham (Which is much closer to me than Bristol where I took the first 2 exams). So I book it and turn up at reception, when I eventually speak to the exam coordinator, she is a bit flummoxed as being a college, they do not take entries from the public, only their students. They let me take the exam anyway and I passed (Yeah!).

So officially MCAD now.

Off to USA for 2 weeks work on saturday 29th Oct. Intending to study for next exam whilst over there. Plan is to take "Implementing Security for Applications
with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and Microsoft Visual C# .NET." aka 70-340.

Only problem know is that I dont think that Kalani has published a book on this subject, so I will have to see what is available at the local Borders when I reach America.

MCSD Onwards...

2005-10-11T20:01:00.000+01:00

Late entry I know, but I passed the “Developing and Implementing Web Based Applications with Microsoft Visual C# .NET and Microsoft Visual Studio” aka 70-315 on 27th September.

Onwards we steam to "Developing XML Web Services and Server Components with Microsoft Visual C# .NET and the Microsoft .NET Framework" aka 70-320.

Have been a week away working in London, but hopefully now back on course. I am looking to get the exam before the end of October (When I will be in the States working for 2 weeks)

Intention is to then crack on with exam number four whilst in the States working and pass sometime during November. That just leaves exam five for December.

As you can see, I have yet to decide on what my final two will be. But either way, intention is to be MCSD by years end, then... who knows...

MCSD Stage 1

2005-09-07T11:19:00.000+01:00

Passed the first exam in my soon to be MCSD certification yesterday.

“Developing and Implementing Windows Based Applications with Microsoft Visual C# .NET and Microsoft Visual Studio” aka 70-316

I have been learning C# for about 3 years on and off in my spare time (Work technologies are still back in Win32 days). And I began using the SharpDevelop free IDE and .NET SDK.

Have since got Visual Studio .NET and really enjoying using it as a tool for development.

Began studying for exam in anger using the “MCAD/MCSD.NET Training Guide: Developing and Implementing Windows Based Applications with Microsoft Visual C# .NET and Microsoft Visual Studio” published by Que and written by Amil Kalani.

I bought this book after reading numerous posts on the Microsoft Learning Communities with most posts stating it was the best resource to use to pass. I have to therefore add my further recommendation to those others as it has been an invaluable study guide and also it covers more than is just required by the exam, giving you (if you are an inexperienced C# guy) a broader understanding of the subject than just that required by the exam.

Just about to get the 70-315 book by Amit also. Reckon as I know much less about Web Applications than Windows forms that this should take a little longer to study, but going to give myself until end of October to do the exam (I also have 2 weeks away from home in that period where I will not be able to study).

ASP.NET, here we come…

Who needs SQL Server Enterprise Manager

2005-08-31T21:37:00.000+01:00

I have downloaded the Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine to allow me to study for my MCSD (Which is going swimmingly at the present).

Anyway, when I installed it, I did as usual and selected the easiest install options available. It all worked as expected and I was accessing Northwind with ease.

However, one of the examples I was working on entailed returning a Dataset object of Customers details via a Web Service. Suddenly, I could no longer connect to northwind database.

My guess was that this was something to do with the fact that the Web Service runs under a different guise than the interactive user. So far all of my connection strings had used the "Integrated Security = SSPI", so I changed this to be the SysAdmin account and password that I had created when I installed MSDE.

My Web Service then returned the error "not associated with a trusted sql server connection". A quick pump of this error message into Google, informed me that I had to use the "SQL Server Enterprise Manager " tool and change the security model to be SQL Server and windows and not windows only.

I did not have SQL Server Enterprise Manager installed on my computer, I believe it is an optional download. I relayed this relatively (ZZzzz...) interesting story to a colleague at work, who subsequently reminded me that basically all of the settings were in the registry anyway and all we had to do was find them. After a quick (1 hour or so) trawl through regedit, we came across a key named "LoginMode" that was currently set to "1". We set this to "0" and SQL Server did not like it very much and refused to start, so we tried changing it to "2". This time the server started and it also recognised my SysAdmin user ID and password.

Full Key Spec is

HKLM/Software/Microsoft/MSSQLServer/MSSQLServer/LoginMode

Obviously I cannot promote hacking the registry when there are controlled tools available to do it for you, but every now and then, it is good fun!

Fortran, C# and a very large Stack requirement

2005-08-24T22:39:00.000+01:00

I was recently evaluating the Silverfrost Fortran 95 compiler compiler for .NET. This appears to be a capable implementation of a fortran compiler for the .NET platform. One of my main test piece of code was a smallish fortran routine (approx 360 lines) that calculated a geodetic height. The fortran functions were provided with an input latitude and longitude and calculated the geodetic height above the earths surface.

Not much of real interest there, apart from the fact that the front end was written in C# and the back end which was all fortran was compiled into a DLL which was referenced from the front end project. However, to perform the calculation, the fortran function had to open and read coefficient data into memory from a file containing 65338 records and each record contained 2 integers and 4 doubles.

Thats 2*4 + 4*8 bytes per record = 40 Bytes per record.
65338 records * 40 bytes = 2, 613, 520 bytes or 2552Kb or 2.5Mb

Both projects (client and backend) compiled ok, as expected. The Client was run and some data was entered. Once the C# code called the Fortran backend, an unhandled exception was immediately raised of type "System.StackoverflowException"

The help text for System.StackoverflowException states that it is typically thrown in the case of very deep or unbounded recursion. However I had no recursion, so it must have been due to the amount of data that the fortran backend was allocating to store these large coefficient arrays.

A bit of research on the net did not really help very much, so a bit more searching around MSDN found a tool named EDITBIN. This tool (The Microsoft COFF Binary file Editor) allows you to modify certain characteristics of COFF binary files, including executables and DLL's.

It has an associated tool named DUMPBIN to obtain information about COFF files.

After examination of my .NET generated fortran backend DLL, the size of stack reserve was shown to be 100000.This number is in hex and is therefore 1048576 bytes or 1024Kb.

I ran the editbin command on my 2 files in my assembly

editbin/stack:3000000 GEOIDBackEnd.DLL
editbin/stack:3000000 GEOIDFrontEnd.EXE

So I have now increased my default stacksize on my 2 executables and am able to run my magnificent fortran coefficient mathematical engine.

To automate this process if you are debugging, you can create a .BAT file containing the above lines and reference that from within the Visual Studio .NET project Options/Build Events/Post Build Step field.

.NET FileIO Permissions on Network Share

2005-08-18T11:03:00.000+01:00

I was writing a smallish application to parse a file on a network accessible share and display in human readable form, the contents of the file.

I previously had the program 90% complete on a previous platform configuration, but since then we have changed configuration, still XP Desktops, but different Server Infrastructure. On this new configuration, the program failed with an exception as soon as it attempted to perform directory listing of files in the network share.

string[] RevFiles = Directory.GetFiles(@"\\VMS\DREADM\","*")

Exception raised was System.Security.SecurityException
Additional information: Request for permission of type System.Security.Permissions.FileIOPermission, mscorlib ... Failed.

I have read about, only lightly Code Access Security, I guess now is as good a time as any to find out what the problem is by some further analysis.

First thing to do is isolate the problem into as small a chunk of code as possible, this ended up as just a simple console Application with 2 lines of code, the first being shown above and the second being merely to output all of the returned strings to the console window. I subsequently found that I could then no-longer evenlist files on my own C: drive, the following fragment still raised the security exception.

string[] RevFiles = Directory.GetFiles(@"C:\","b*")

After further investigation into how the .NET Code Access Security worked, the following was my situation:

Application was stored on a Network Accessable Share
Application was attempting to perform direct file IO
Being on a Network Share, my application inherited the "LocalIntranet" Permission Set
"LocalIntranet" Permission set did not allow the "FileIOPermission" by default.

There appeared to be no way to modify the default settings of the "LocalIntranet" security zone (More in a later blog if I find out how)

The next thing was how was my code evaluated to use the "LocalIntranet" Permission Set ?
That was found out by examining the Runtime Security Policy. The "User, All_Code" code group, if you look at its properties, has a permission set of "Full Access" so this was not stopping anything.The "Machine, All_Code" code group has a sub-code group of "LocalIntranet Zone". Its properties showed that its permission set was "LocalIntranet". I believe that this was the link I was looking for.

A quick step back to Permission Sets for the Machine, I am allowed to create a new Permission Set. Called "Mikes"for simplicity, I copied the contents of the "LocalIntranet" Permission set and merely added "File IO", Unrestricted Access for simplicity. Now hopping back into the Machine/LocalIntranet Zone Code group, I could assign the Permission Set "Mikes" to the"LocalIntranet" code group. Logging off as Administrator and back on as lowly user account, my small test harness started finally to display files in its console window.

Result!

So, what have I learnt ?

Do not automatically assume that apps will work when migrated from one system to the other.
.NET Code Access Security is a very large subject area.
I think that I have probably frigged a solution to my problem, given more time, I may re-visit.
Why did this work on my previous platform ? Answer, It was stored on a local drive.
It is a pain to keep logging out of Non admin account and into administrator and back. Fortunately my friendly System Administrator showed me how to access the .NET Config via command line command (MMC) and use "Run-As". Good job I am trusted with the Administrator password!
I believe that I may focus some of my .NET time and energy into this area.

Wish me luck!

Welcome

2005-08-11T21:57:00.000+01:00

Hi all,

Welcome to my very first Blog post

We (The family and I) have just returned from a 2 week holiday in France in a Caravan site called Le Bois-Tordu near St Hilliare De-Riez. Had a fab time, thoroughly recommend the site if you have young children. The weather was fabulous, we even went swimming in the sea on the 1 rainy day that we had. A bit surreal, swimming in the sea when it is raining.