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Just a quick one: if you have a textbox with a Calendar (extender) from the Ajax Control Toolkit and an associated PopupButtonID which is an image, the calendar won’t close when you click outside the popup. Use an input type=”image”or an ImageButton to solve this problem. Hope this helps.

Because we were still using an old Visual Studio 2005 solution which included a Web Site project, it was time to upgrade. We upgraded our Visual Studio 2005 solution to Visual Studio 2010 (and .NET 4.0), converted the Web Site Project to a Web Application Project and then, of course, the AjaxControlToolkit had to follow. I downloaded the latest build from their Codeplex site and updated the references in the different projects.

Because I stopped working at Avanadeand started my own company(this web site is under construction and in Dutch), I had to buy and install a new laptop. Everything went great and I was up and running in half a day. Or should I say half an evening… 😉 The next day I wanted to continue developing a web site we are working on. I needed one of the Ajax Control Toolkit controls, so I added it to my toolbar the way you should go about this (create a separate tab, right click, ‘choose items’, browse for the assembly).

When you dynamically generate a LinkButton in code that will be placed inside an UpdatePanel, you’ll experience that the Click event for the LinkButton results in a full postback in stead of the UpdatePanel being triggered. There’s a rather simpel solution to this problem… First, let’s take a look at the scenario. Consider this HTML: There’s a literal control outside of the UpdatePanel. There’s a second literal control inside the UpdatePanel.

A week ago I had a nice page that was hosted in SharePoint and, among others, contained an updatepanel with a dropdownlist in it. Everything worked, and all was well. Because our testers had found some issues we had delivered two newer versions to our development environment. In the last version they found an issue that wasn’t there before: selecting a different value in the dropdown did not only update the updatepanel, but resulted in a complete postback.

As I said earlier, we didn’t test our solution to using the ModalPopupExtender in SharePoint in all situations. Today we made a start to do so. To indicate our successrate: we now use window.showModalDialogwith some extra pages… Lets go through some of the problems we encountered. Placing an UpdatePanel around the entire UserControl (with default settings) makes that the entire UserControl is posted back, even when it is a control inside a nested UpdatePanel that posts back.

Getting the ModalPopupExtender from the Ajax Control Toolkit to work (decently) in SharePoint was not exactly a walk in the park. With a default SharePoint installation, the modal popup is partly positioned ‘outside’ of the page (you only see the bottom right part of the popup in the top left corner of the browser). Postbacks are not executed or executed poorly and the page gets garbled up. A possible solution for the positioning of the popup is to set the X and Y property of the ModalPopupExtender.

Just a quick one: if you have a textbox with a Calendar (extender) from the Ajax Control Toolkit and an associated PopupButtonID which is an image, the calendar won’t close when you click outside the popup. Use an input type=”image”or an ImageButton to solve this problem. Hope this helps.

Because we were still using an old Visual Studio 2005 solution which included a Web Site project, it was time to upgrade. We upgraded our Visual Studio 2005 solution to Visual Studio 2010 (and .NET 4.0), converted the Web Site Project to a Web Application Project and then, of course, the AjaxControlToolkit had to follow. I downloaded the latest build from their Codeplex site and updated the references in the different projects.

Because I stopped working at Avanadeand started my own company(this web site is under construction and in Dutch), I had to buy and install a new laptop. Everything went great and I was up and running in half a day. Or should I say half an evening… 😉 The next day I wanted to continue developing a web site we are working on. I needed one of the Ajax Control Toolkit controls, so I added it to my toolbar the way you should go about this (create a separate tab, right click, ‘choose items’, browse for the assembly).

After extending a textbox with a NumberUpDownExtender, which comes with the AJAX Control Toolkit, I recieved the error “the number of fractional digits is out of range”. This happened when debugging my web application and using the extender. When using the web app in non-debug mode, nothing happened. This included the value change ’not happening'. Fortunately, this one was REALY easy, but it is not to be found on the web.

As I said earlier, we didn’t test our solution to using the ModalPopupExtender in SharePoint in all situations. Today we made a start to do so. To indicate our successrate: we now use window.showModalDialogwith some extra pages… Lets go through some of the problems we encountered. Placing an UpdatePanel around the entire UserControl (with default settings) makes that the entire UserControl is posted back, even when it is a control inside a nested UpdatePanel that posts back.

Getting the ModalPopupExtender from the Ajax Control Toolkit to work (decently) in SharePoint was not exactly a walk in the park. With a default SharePoint installation, the modal popup is partly positioned ‘outside’ of the page (you only see the bottom right part of the popup in the top left corner of the browser). Postbacks are not executed or executed poorly and the page gets garbled up. A possible solution for the positioning of the popup is to set the X and Y property of the ModalPopupExtender.

After playing around with Azure Static Web Apps (ASWA) for some time I found some quirks and gotchas. Of course Static Web Apps are still in preview. Most of these are probably because of that fact. Despite that, it might still be interesting to know about them. That way if you run into any of them, you’ll at least know it’s not you … 😉 🏭 Creating an Azure Static Web App It all starts when you want to create an ASWA: searching for it in the list of resources in the Azure portal doesn’t show it.

Although the two have a lot in common, even including parts of the name, there are a few very clear differences between Static website hosting in Azure Storage and Static Web Apps. We’ll have a look at what those differences are and take a first look at the most recent of the two: Static Web Apps. Static website hosting in Azure Storage Static website hosting is a feature you can enable free of charge on a storage account.

In one of the projects I’m currently working on we’re using an ASP.NET Core Web API with an Angular front-end. We’re using ADAL.js as an Azure Active Directory Authentication Library and ng2-adal for integration with Angular. To get the type declarations for all these packages in TypeScript we use The Future of Declaration Files. Some time ago, our build server started acting up with the following message: Type 'Observable<void>' is not assignable to type 'Observable<User>' The error occured in ADAL.

Part of the system we are developing uses AngularJS. Because we had an increase in the use of our system, and more diverse configurations were using our system, we got some new bugs filed. One of these bugs was about a select list showing the binding in stead of the actual value for several options. Since this ‘worked on our machines’ it had to be connected to the client’s configuration. As soon as stuff (options in this case) started moving around, it got even prettier…

Introduction Azure API Management is a hybrid, multicloud management platform for APIs across all environments. For more information on API Management, check out Microsoft Docs: About API Management. API Management (APIM) is an Azure service that enables you to manage APIs as first-class assets throughout their lifecycle. It consists of an API Gateway, a management plane and a developer portal. All these components are hosted in Azure and are completely managed by default.

Introduction Azure API Management is a hybrid, multicloud management platform for APIs across all environments. For more information on API Management, check out Microsoft Docs: About API Management. API Management (APIM) is an Azure service that enables you to manage APIs as first-class assets throughout their lifecycle. It consists of an API Gateway, a management plane and a developer portal. All these components are hosted in Azure and are completely managed by default.

Introduction Azure API Management is a hybrid, multicloud management platform for APIs across all environments. For more information on API Management, check out Microsoft Docs: About API Management. API Management (APIM) is an Azure service that enables you to manage APIs as first-class assets throughout their lifecycle. It consists of an API Gateway, a management plane and a developer portal. All these components are hosted in Azure and are completely managed by default.

When installing the Windows Azure AppFabric Tools for Visual Studio (found here), you might get the error message shown at the top, stating that Windows Server AppFabric is installed and that it is not compatible with this release of Windows Azure AppFabric Developer Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 – June 2011 CTP. It asks to uninstall Windows Server AppFabric and rerun this setup if you want to install Windows Azure AppFabric Developer Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 – June 2011 CTP.

Intro In my current project we use Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates to help with deployments across multiple subscriptions and environments. One of the elements of the ARM template is adding a couple of Shared Access Policies to enable Read and Write on the queues we have in place. The policies have been defined on Service Bus level because they span multiple queues. Our ARM template functioned just fine, (automated) deployment was up & running and life was beautiful.

Intro In my current project we use Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates to help with deployments across multiple subscriptions and environments. One of the elements of the ARM template is adding a couple of Shared Access Policies to enable Read and Write on the queues we have in place. The policies have been defined on Service Bus level because they span multiple queues. Our ARM template functioned just fine, (automated) deployment was up & running and life was beautiful.

When building an ASP application that generates Word documents, it was working fine on the local machine: A Windows XP installation with Office 2007. When we deployed it to windows 2008 (64 bit) and Word 2007 we saw that Documents.Open returned null. Other than this, there are no exceptions. The code that returned the error (simplified): Application app = new Application(); Document doc = app.Documents.Open(ref name); As it turns out, a 64 bit system stores temporary files in C:\Windows\Sys\WOW64\config\system\profile\Desktop folder.

Introduction Azure API Management is a hybrid, multicloud management platform for APIs across all environments. For more information on API Management, check out Microsoft Docs: About API Management. API Management (APIM) is an Azure service that enables you to manage APIs as first-class assets throughout their lifecycle. It consists of an API Gateway, a management plane and a developer portal. All these components are hosted in Azure and are completely managed by default.

The Betatalks Discord A few months ago we’ve started a Betatalks Discord server to build a community and enable our friends to discuss all the Betatalks content we put out there. Think about the Betatalks videos on YouTube, Betatalks live events and the most recent addition: Betatalks the podcast. To notify the corresponding Discord channels about new Betatalks videos or Betatalks the podcast episodes, I created Azure Logic Apps to check for new additions and post them to the webhook.

Azure .NET 5 Functions A lot has been said about .NET 5 support for Azure Functions. The most important news: it is now officially supported! 🥳 To enable running Azure Functions with .NET 5, the new Isolated Model enables Functions to run as an out-of-process language worker separate from the Azure Functions runtime. This way you’ll have full control over the Function’s dependencies on one hand, and new features like a middleware pipeline on the other.

After my two previous posts Azure Static Web Apps: a first look and Azure Static Web Apps: quirks & gotchas, let’s have an updated look at ASWA in this post. Support for new languages 👩🏻‍💻 Announced at Microsoft Ignite this year, Blazor and C# APIs now supported in Azure Static Web Apps. This enables .NET developers to build and deploy full stack .NET applications with Static Web Apps. Blazor support Since ASWA is a static hosting option, which means we don’t have a server component*, the Blazor support for ASWA means support for Blazor WebAssembly.

After playing around with Azure Static Web Apps (ASWA) for some time I found some quirks and gotchas. Of course Static Web Apps are still in preview. Most of these are probably because of that fact. Despite that, it might still be interesting to know about them. That way if you run into any of them, you’ll at least know it’s not you … 😉 🏭 Creating an Azure Static Web App It all starts when you want to create an ASWA: searching for it in the list of resources in the Azure portal doesn’t show it.

Although the two have a lot in common, even including parts of the name, there are a few very clear differences between Static website hosting in Azure Storage and Static Web Apps. We’ll have a look at what those differences are and take a first look at the most recent of the two: Static Web Apps. Static website hosting in Azure Storage Static website hosting is a feature you can enable free of charge on a storage account.

This post is part of a series on hosting your Hugo website on Azure. Keep an eye on this website for future articles. Intro As you might have seen or read somewhere, I’ve migrated the previous version of my personal website, which was in WordPress, to the current one that is made in Hugo. One of the reasons for migrating away from WordPress was the fact that due to a vulnerability in one of the WordPress modules, spammers were able to use my account to send out a lot of mails.

Intro The possibilities for software development have changed tremendously over the past couple of years. Actually, it’s better to say that the number of options has increased tremendously. With the final breakthrough and continuous expansion of the cloud, the supply of different types for resources like compute and data store is larger than ever before. And while you can even find a decision tree for selecting the right type of compute to use in for instance Microsoft Azure, selecting the right type of data store to use for your application is no simple feat.

My post Using Triggers & Bindings in Azure Functions V2 drew quite some attention over the past months. But there is a lot more to say about them. Time for a small follow up 😁 Covered previously ⌚ In my previous post we covered relative simple things like writing to blob storage and putting messages on a Service Bus. But the bindings for Azure Functions are so much more powerful.

This post on using App Configuration using .NET Full Framework was based on a contribution by Steven Hack. My last post Azure App Configuration: an introduction received a lot of good feedback. And one of those pieces of feedback was a question if it’s also possible to use App Configuration if you’re using Full Framework. The short answer: yes, this is possible! For the slightly longer answer: keep reading 🤓

Azure App Configuration is a powerful way to manage and store application configuration on a central location. Integrating it into for instance ASP.NET (Core) is pretty straightforward. This post gives you an introduction to Azure App Configuration and a simple example of how to integrate it in ASP.NET Core. Creating an Azure App Configuration 🆕 Of course there are several ways to create a specific resource in the Azure Portal. One of the simplest is to go to the portal, open up App Configuration and click the Add button.

Here’s a short post I didn’t want to hold from you. As you may already know I wrote a blogpost on Using Triggers & Bindings in Azure Functions. It handles quite a few nice possibilities of using triggers and bindings in Azure Functions (if I may say so myself… 😳). Fortunately, you learn something new every day. So I learned about Property Binding recently… Property Binding Like in the HttpTriggerReturnBinding example in the functions-triggers-bindings-example GitHub repository, let’s say we have a model RequestModel that we’re receiving through a POST on an HttpTriggered Function.

Yesterday I was working with one of our customers to fix an issue with an ASP.NET application throwing an error. That application threw the error on the first request coming in through Azure Front Door. When we sent a request to the original (back end) URL, the application worked fine and never threw the exception. 🤔 Time to investigate…! Finding the cause 🧐 First step of course was to find the cause of the exception.

This post is part of a series on Managed Identity. For an introduction, see Managed Identity – Part I. For a post that shows you how to connect your application to different types of Azure resources using Managed Identity see Managed Identity – Part II. Stay tuned for future posts. Introduction Elaborating on Part I and Part II, this blog post will show you how to debug your Managed Identity enabled application locally.

Next week my colleague Daniël te Winkeland I will do a session at Techorama 2019 titled Getting sh*t done with Azure Functions (on AKS!). Or GSDwAF for short 🤓 We will talk about running Azure Functions in a Kubernetes deployment using Managed Identities and implementing Dependency Injection. And, even better, we’ll show you how! Who will we see Tuesday, October 1 • 3:00pm – 4:00pm • room 3? UPDATE That. Was.

Some time ago Oscar van Tol and I started creating video content for the community. We call them #Betatalks and create them because of two very important reasons: We believe in sharing knowledge It’s. So. Much. Fun. 🤣 We talk about a lot of developer stuff: from “Microsoft Build 2019 Highlights” in episode 1 to “C# 8, What’s new?” in episode 4. The most recent #Betatalks is episode 5: “All about configuration in Azure”.

This post is part of a series on Managed Identity. For an introduction, see Managed Identity – Part I. Stay tuned for future posts. Introduction Elaborating on Part I, this blog post will show you how to connect your application to different types of Azure resources using Managed Identity. To use the Managed Identity to actually connect to Azure Resources, you’re going to need the NuGet package Microsoft.Azure.Services.AppAuthentication. This package enables a service to authenticate to Azure services using the developer’s Azure Active Directory/ Microsoft account during development, and authenticate as itself (using OAuth 2.

This post is part of a series on Managed Identity. Stay tuned for future posts. Introduction Connecting your application to a resource like Storage or a SQL database used to involve a connection string. This isn’t very secure. These settings are available through the Azure portal. So they might get compromised. With the introduction of Azure Key Vault, we got a way of separating these secrets from our application configuration. We can store them in a safe, secure place.

Calling an API from a Logic App is pretty straightforward. You open up the Logic App Designer and add an HTTP Action. Specify the method to use and the URI you want to call and you’re good to go! When the API you want to call uses Cookie Authentication, this seems pretty straightforward too. After all, the HTTP Action has an Authentication property you can set. However, this property doesn’t include Cookie authentication.

I am humbled and very proud to be awarded a Microsoft Azure MVP award today. A big “thank you” to all who helped me get here. 🙏🏻 A special thank you to my employer Betabit who supports me putting lots of effort into the community and helps organize or sponsor events. It’s strange but very cool to see social media ’explode’ (at least according to my standards) after my announcement. But I’m still just Rick, a guy who loves to do fun things with code, in the cloud.

Last week one of my colleagues had a question: Is there a performance penalty when you add multiple Azure Blob storage bindings in an Azure Function? Or is the connection only established when you access one of those blobs? Answering this grew into a way to have Dynamic output bindings in Azure Functions. This post elaborates on [blog/using-triggers-bindings-in-azure-functions-v2](Using Triggers & Bindings in Azure Functions V2). First try The idea was simple:

To start things off: yes. There’s some pretty decent documentation on all the available Triggers & Bindings in Azure Functions. Like this overview page. And you can also find documentation on specific bindings, like the Service Bus Binding. Nevertheless, I wanted to add to that documentation with some simple, real-world examples using triggers & bindings. So here goes. Writing to Blob Storage Consider this very simple BlobTriggered Azure Function. It copies the triggering file into a different container in Azure Blob Storage:

The issue While trying to publish an NPM package to our artifacts registry in Azure DevOps, we got an error: npm failed with return code: 4294963248 The exit code for the task was -4048. Strange thing is that we have our build agents running on-prem, but running this task locally on our dev machines worked just fine. We found out pretty quickly that it was an authentication issue. Because of this we thought that the npm publish task of Azure DevOps might have issues with getting the authentication right for the registry.

This Thursday December 6th I’ll be speaking at Azure Thursday - December 2018. The last of the regular Azure Thursdays this year. This is a group for all developers, consultants, architects and IT professionals who want to dive into for them unknown topics related to Azure. Azure Thursday are happening every first Thursday of the month and the format will be different every evening. From hand-on workshops to technical talks.

A few weeks ago I ordered some teXXmo® IoT Buttons to play around with. I wanted to jump right in, but I had to look some stuff up to be able to get it up and running, connecting to the right WiFi and IoT Hub. Here’s a short recap of how to get started with the teXXmo® IoT Button. Starting the device There are several modes the button can work in: sending its payload, configuring the button and running webREPL.

Here’s a quicky: Oscar van Tol and I are joining forces again on Thursday June 21st. This time we’re telling you everything there is to know on leveraging the power of different Azure services to supercharge your web application. And the session is appropriately titled Supercharge your web application with Azure ?. Or SCYWAWA for short (hint: this might become the twitter hashtag as well…). The sessions is part of the 49th WAZUG NL event and will be hosted at Betabit’s head office in Rotterdam.

One of the time consuming tasks we’re facing at my current assignment is inviting users to our Azure Active Directory tenant. Especially since we (used to) do this in the Azure Portal. We’re using Azure Active Directory B2B to which external users are invited as guests. We investigated using Microsoft Graph to automate this process. Since there’s several things to take into account when implementing this, here’s a quick HowTo.

While cleaning up the app registrations in my Azure Active Directory, I ran into two applications I couldn’t delete since the ‘Delete’ button is not clickable. I’ve had this happen for both application types: both Web app/API and Native. It’s actually pretty simple to enable removing these app registrations: make sure the application is not Multi-tenanted. * * Designates whether users in external organizations are allowed to grant your app access to data in their organization’s directory.

I’ve done another session on Serverless, this time at the Techdays in The Netherlands. The TechDays were held October 12 & 13 in the Amsterdam RAI. My session was partially based on the “Dude, Where’s my Server?” talk I did earlier this year. The main focus for the talk this time: Azure Event Grid. Serverless, Azure Functions and Azure Event Grid My session was Going Serverless (2/2): Hands-on with Azure Event Grid.

Do you live in or near The Netherlands? Would you like to know everything there is to know about Serverless Computing? Join Oscar van Tol and myself on September 20th. We will be presenting the knowledge session “Dude, Where’s my Server?” organised by Betabit and Blaak Selectie. If you don’t need any additional information and just want to reserve a spot, send an email to evenementen@betabit.nl with your name and phone number.

Intro In my current project we use Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates to help with deployments across multiple subscriptions and environments. One of the elements of the ARM template is adding a couple of Shared Access Policies to enable Read and Write on the queues we have in place. The policies have been defined on Service Bus level because they span multiple queues. Our ARM template functioned just fine, (automated) deployment was up & running and life was beautiful.

A few minutes before my second session at the Dutch Techdays started I tried connecting to my Virtual Machine in Microsoft Azure through remote desktop. It didn’t connect… The RDP client tried to connect to the Virtual Machine, but nothing happened. So I rebooted the VM and tried connecting again, confident that this would solve the problem. It didn’t connect…. again. As I started stressing out a bit (the VM was the main character of my session) I thought of one last thing I could try.

As I wrote earlier I presented at the 2014 Dutch Techdays. The session content is now available online. Find it here (Dutch): Session information + PDF of my presentation My presentation on SlideShare My session on Channel 9

I’m proud to announce that this year I’ll be speaking at the TechDays in the World Forum in Den Haag, April 16 – 17. This session will be about High Performance Computing in Windows Azure. Camera resolutions keep increasing, your digital behavior on websites and in apps is collected, images that satellites make get more and more detailed and (research) equipment produces more data. The amount of data that’s being stored keeps increasing.

When installing the Windows Azure AppFabric Tools for Visual Studio (found here), you might get the error message shown at the top, stating that Windows Server AppFabric is installed and that it is not compatible with this release of Windows Azure AppFabric Developer Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 – June 2011 CTP. It asks to uninstall Windows Server AppFabric and rerun this setup if you want to install Windows Azure AppFabric Developer Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 – June 2011 CTP.

The Betatalks Discord A few months ago we’ve started a Betatalks Discord server to build a community and enable our friends to discuss all the Betatalks content we put out there. Think about the Betatalks videos on YouTube, Betatalks live events and the most recent addition: Betatalks the podcast. To notify the corresponding Discord channels about new Betatalks videos or Betatalks the podcast episodes, I created Azure Logic Apps to check for new additions and post them to the webhook.

After my two previous posts Azure Static Web Apps: a first look and Azure Static Web Apps: quirks & gotchas, let’s have an updated look at ASWA in this post. Support for new languages 👩🏻‍💻 Announced at Microsoft Ignite this year, Blazor and C# APIs now supported in Azure Static Web Apps. This enables .NET developers to build and deploy full stack .NET applications with Static Web Apps. Blazor support Since ASWA is a static hosting option, which means we don’t have a server component*, the Blazor support for ASWA means support for Blazor WebAssembly.

This post is part of a series on hosting your Hugo website on Azure. Keep an eye on this website for future articles. Intro As you might have seen or read somewhere, I’ve migrated the previous version of my personal website, which was in WordPress, to the current one that is made in Hugo. One of the reasons for migrating away from WordPress was the fact that due to a vulnerability in one of the WordPress modules, spammers were able to use my account to send out a lot of mails.

Bloggingabout.net has moved from Community Server to WordPress. One of the changes that comes along with this is that the URL of my blog has changed too. I went from bloggingabout.net/blogs/rick to rick.bloggingabout.net. Thanks to Dennis for putting in a lot of time and effort to migrate BloggingAbout to our new WordPress environment. I’m looking forward to adding a lot more interesting content to my blog in the new Bloggingabout.net!

Our company has been mentioned in an article at the (pretty well-known) blog www.frankwatching.com. Read it over here (Dutch)

I know it has been a while since my last post, but I’m about to resurface! I’ve played in a musical the entire month of December and (because of that) we were busy getting our company up and running again in the new year. So now I’ll be developing more and I’ll probably have more things to blog about. So keep posted to see more stuff over here … For now, here are some interesting articles about Microsoft’s Surface:

I’ve been busy the last couple of weeks. Between (the announcements at) all the Conferences to follow like PDC and Tech·Ed, all the projects to do, the rehearsal for the musical I’m in in December(Dutch) and the start of our new company(Dutch), I didn’t have a lot of time to blog… Since we expect things to settle down in the next couple of days, I’m expecting to pick up where I left in a week or so.

One of the posts that is being read quite frequently over here is HOWTO: Encode a password using MD5 in C# (or: howto calculate the MD5 hash for a string). One of the (many) reactions to that post was from one Simucal, stating: Also, to the original poster, Rick van den Bosch… shame on you for using ASCIIEncoding.Default.GetBytes(). You do realize that would seriously restrict the usefulness of your method to working only in languages that ASCII has the character sets for, right?

I only had time for a quickie: The page containing all my online profiles has been updated… When interested, have a look at them{.null}.

It’s been a while because I’ve been so busy lately, but the next (technical) step for my personal website is now online. When browsing to https://rickvandenbosch.net/blog/, the content of my blog here is displayed sort of mirrored over there. I used an OpenSource RSS component to read my private rss feed from blogging about, and display it from there. There’s still a lot of work to be done (like styling!), but I’ll get there.

It is now possible to get updates from this blog through e-mail (nice feature, feedburner{.}). Updates will be sent once a day, but only when new items are available. Curious? Subscribe here!

This weekend we got back from a skiing trip we went on with the school my girlfriend works at. We had a great time! The kids were great, and so were the teachers and the Huski people who were there to teach the kids how to ski and snowboard. If they need an extra pair of hands next year, I hope they’ll consider me: I’d be happy to join them.{.}

So that’s part 1: www.rickvandenbosch.net is now online. There’s nothing to be found over there yet, but the domain has been delivered. Oh, and there’s an easy redirect to my blog, so that goes back here ;). From now on, you can also use rickvandenbosch.net/blog as the url to find my blog. I’m currently talking to the bloggingabout.net admin to mirror my content over there, for now it’s just a redirect.

Dennis already blogged about it: we had some problems with the availability of BloggingAbout since last night. The error was fixed this afternoon, so everything should be back to normal. If you’re experiencing any difficulties, please let me know through the contact form, or mail me at rick.van.den.bosch[at]bloggingabout.net.

Today was the first of two introduction days at Avanade{.}. Maybe you missed it, but I started there today{.}. And that’s why I’m writing this blogpost from a hotel in Almere, using my new Avanade laptop. 😉 I’m sure there will be lots of stuff to blog about, so stay tuned for more…

I’m thinking of hosting a blog myself. Most important reason would be that bloggingabout.net doesn’t allow some stuff like scripts, embedding flash and links to things like the ‘connect with me’ buttonand so on. Which is completely understandable by the way. What I’m not sure about is which software to use. Do you guys have any tips on which blogging software to use? Or maybe even on if I should or shouldn’t host it for myself?

The last two weeks or so, my blog has been hit by a wave of comment spam. Every morning there are 20-something comments like ‘Nice’ or ‘Sorry :(’ to be deleted. Fairly pointless posts… The only link they contain seems to be in the URL field, and not in the message like they used to. Do they really think a blogger would see that kind of rubbish as a serious comment?

Sure, we’re still a bit in the holiday season. But the last few months it seems to get quieter in the [wikipedia:blogosphere], and specifically the technical part of it. Maybe I’m just imagining it, but it feels like blogging isn’t as popular as it used to be. How are you guys experiencing this?

So, after some relaxing at home and a very cool holiday in Spain, I’m about to go to work again next monday. And with that, I’ll be picking up all my ’normal day’ hobbies and stuff. So, I’ll try and pick up blogging (and taking pictures) again, just for you guys ;). Stay tuned … !  Hey! Ho! Let’s Go ..

As you may know, I started out at blogger. I haven’t used that blog over there for the last two years, but now it is up and running again{.}! This time, I’m using it as my photo blog. I recently got my new camera, and I didn’t want to mix picture-posts with my software development related posts over here. So if you’re interested, go take a look over there. Next to the link earlier in this post, you can find a link @ the news section of this site, in the left sidebar.

As I mentioned before, bloggingabout.net got a bit unstable recently. Our administrator saw this, and migrated us to a new host. All DNS servers should be updated by now, so the new host is fully operational. This should make us fully stable again. Together with this move, he also updated our community to Community Server 2007. And because we were into making changes, I updated the look of my blog (again… 😉 ).

You’ve probably noticed it yourself. Bloggingabout.NET seems to be a bit unstable since a week or so. But it’s not just us: my rss reader indicates https://weblogs.asp.net has had some problems lately too. Is there any relation between these two sites? Do they happen to use the same database server? Or is it all just purely coincidence… I don’t know what the problem exactly is, but I’m sure our administrator is working hard to get bloggingabout.

This is the first in what I hope will be a lot of posts here on my newly created weblog. I started blogging at Google’s blogger, but then I wasn’t aware of the possibilities bloggingabout.net brings you! So now I moved my blog here, to be able to give my opinion about all kinds of (developer related) stuff, and off course just for the fun of it. I’ll try to keep you posted!

The Betatalks Discord A few months ago we’ve started a Betatalks Discord server to build a community and enable our friends to discuss all the Betatalks content we put out there. Think about the Betatalks videos on YouTube, Betatalks live events and the most recent addition: Betatalks the podcast. To notify the corresponding Discord channels about new Betatalks videos or Betatalks the podcast episodes, I created Azure Logic Apps to check for new additions and post them to the webhook.

Next week my colleague Daniël te Winkeland I will do a session at Techorama 2019 titled Getting sh*t done with Azure Functions (on AKS!). Or GSDwAF for short 🤓 We will talk about running Azure Functions in a Kubernetes deployment using Managed Identities and implementing Dependency Injection. And, even better, we’ll show you how! Who will we see Tuesday, October 1 • 3:00pm – 4:00pm • room 3? UPDATE That. Was.

Here’s a quicky: Oscar van Tol and I are joining forces again on Thursday June 21st. This time we’re telling you everything there is to know on leveraging the power of different Azure services to supercharge your web application. And the session is appropriately titled Supercharge your web application with Azure ?. Or SCYWAWA for short (hint: this might become the twitter hashtag as well…). The sessions is part of the 49th WAZUG NL event and will be hosted at Betabit’s head office in Rotterdam.

This morning I received an e-mail with the following message: “Congratulations! Your session Working with Microsoft Graph has been accepted for Microsoft TechDays 2018!” So it looks like I will be doing a talk on Microsoft Graph at TechDays Sweden October 24th and 25th later this year 🤓. There’s a few reasons for me to be looking forward to this. First of all: this will be my first visit to Sweden!

I’ve done another session on Serverless, this time at the Techdays in The Netherlands. The TechDays were held October 12 & 13 in the Amsterdam RAI. My session was partially based on the “Dude, Where’s my Server?” talk I did earlier this year. The main focus for the talk this time: Azure Event Grid. Serverless, Azure Functions and Azure Event Grid My session was Going Serverless (2/2): Hands-on with Azure Event Grid.

Do you live in or near The Netherlands? Would you like to know everything there is to know about Serverless Computing? Join Oscar van Tol and myself on September 20th. We will be presenting the knowledge session “Dude, Where’s my Server?” organised by Betabit and Blaak Selectie. If you don’t need any additional information and just want to reserve a spot, send an email to evenementen@betabit.nl with your name and phone number.

Earlier this year two colleagues and I attended Microsoft Build for the first time. In short: it was amazing. For those looking for more info: here’s a short recap on what we saw and did while we were there. Keynotes Yes, I’ve watched Build keynotes of earlier editions online. And yes, it felt big and impressive when I did so. Imagine how much more big and impressive it is to actually be there!

A few minutes before my second session at the Dutch Techdays started I tried connecting to my Virtual Machine in Microsoft Azure through remote desktop. It didn’t connect… The RDP client tried to connect to the Virtual Machine, but nothing happened. So I rebooted the VM and tried connecting again, confident that this would solve the problem. It didn’t connect…. again. As I started stressing out a bit (the VM was the main character of my session) I thought of one last thing I could try.

As I wrote earlier I presented at the 2014 Dutch Techdays. The session content is now available online. Find it here (Dutch): Session information + PDF of my presentation My presentation on SlideShare My session on Channel 9

I’m proud to announce that this year I’ll be speaking at the TechDays in the World Forum in Den Haag, April 16 – 17. This session will be about High Performance Computing in Windows Azure. Camera resolutions keep increasing, your digital behavior on websites and in apps is collected, images that satellites make get more and more detailed and (research) equipment produces more data. The amount of data that’s being stored keeps increasing.

Thanks to our friends at Microsoft (and their great BizSpark program) I will be able to attend DevDays ‘09! We won tickets because we updated our company profile and added projects at the Discover Metro site. Normally attending this kind of event is not available to young startups like ours, but now it is! I’ll be seeing you @ The Hague next week 🙂

I’ve been busy the last couple of weeks. Between (the announcements at) all the Conferences to follow like PDC and Tech·Ed, all the projects to do, the rehearsal for the musical I’m in in December(Dutch) and the start of our new company(Dutch), I didn’t have a lot of time to blog… Since we expect things to settle down in the next couple of days, I’m expecting to pick up where I left in a week or so.

Thursday the 10th of May LogicaCMG The Netherlands organises an open house for ICT professionals. From 4 pm until 9 pm colleagues will be available to answer any and all questions you might have about (working at) LogicaCMG. People active in all of our competences will be present. The open house is hosted at some of our locations across the country. This time, the lucky locations are: Amstelveen, Arnhem, Eindhoven, Rotterdam and Rijswijk.

This morning we landed in Amsterdam at approximately 7.30 am. We had a great week in America, starting of with the great sessions at Microsoft for LEAP. Together with a colleague of mine (Ruud Campsteijn) I stayed for a few more days, so we got to see some more than just the inside of the Microsoft building, like an NBA game, the Boeing factory, Downtown Seattle and so on. You will be hearing more about the LEAP sessions in a little while.

Sadly, I will not be attending the 2006 European developer Tech·Ed. Fortunately, the reason I won’t be there is quite nice: I am currently attending Microsoft’s ‘LEAP for aspiring architects’ program, which enables me to visit Redmond next January! So although I will not be visiting Spain next week, America is whitin reach! I’m looking forward to visiting the Microsoft Campus. I’ll post all the interesting information over here …

I’ve received lot’s of positive reactions on the post about organizing a bloggingabout.net meeting. I’ll try to squeeze in organizing a meeting in the near future. But see the near future somewhere between now and a few months. As you can image lot’s of stuff should be taken care of: a place to have the meeting, food & drinks, a decent agenda and maybe even guestspeakers. And to keep everything affordable for all the visitors: maybe we should consider finding a sponsor.

I attended the DevDays 2006 and my overall impression was: cool. Allthough some of the sessions I attended weren’t good (or actually, were very bad), the overall feeling is good and I picked up on some great stuff. Meeting up with some smart people is also a good addition to attending the sessions. The most impressive session I attended was Scott Guthrie on Atlas. Microsoft is doing its best in making the life of developers easier.

Yesterday I attended the Microsoft DevDays 2005 in The Hague. The MSDN TechNet briefings in Veldhoven I attended last year (was that October or November?) were great. Because the DevDays would (or should) be even greater I could hardly wait for DevDays 2005 to begin! Here’s my short opinion on the DevDays 2005. Interested in a more elaborate version? Comment! Keynote Prashant Sridharan kicked off with a killer keynote. This guy alternated humour with fact, example with slides and gave an overall really good presentation.

My provisional program for DevDays 2005: 09:30 Keynote: Microsoft Developer Tools Strategy Prashant Sridharan (Microsoft) 10.45 Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 Lex Oskam (Microsoft) 13.15 Indigo update Gijs de Jong (Microsoft) 14.45 BizTalk in action Sijmen Koffeman (Microsoft) 16.30 ASP.NET Web Services 2.0 Alex Thissen (Twice) I’ll probably be attending these sessions during my first DevDays ever: DevDays 2005.

Azure .NET 5 Functions A lot has been said about .NET 5 support for Azure Functions. The most important news: it is now officially supported! 🥳 To enable running Azure Functions with .NET 5, the new Isolated Model enables Functions to run as an out-of-process language worker separate from the Azure Functions runtime. This way you’ll have full control over the Function’s dependencies on one hand, and new features like a middleware pipeline on the other.

After my two previous posts Azure Static Web Apps: a first look and Azure Static Web Apps: quirks & gotchas, let’s have an updated look at ASWA in this post. Support for new languages 👩🏻‍💻 Announced at Microsoft Ignite this year, Blazor and C# APIs now supported in Azure Static Web Apps. This enables .NET developers to build and deploy full stack .NET applications with Static Web Apps. Blazor support Since ASWA is a static hosting option, which means we don’t have a server component*, the Blazor support for ASWA means support for Blazor WebAssembly.

Part of the system we are developing uses AngularJS. Because we had an increase in the use of our system, and more diverse configurations were using our system, we got some new bugs filed. One of these bugs was about a select list showing the binding in stead of the actual value for several options. Since this ‘worked on our machines’ it had to be connected to the client’s configuration. As soon as stuff (options in this case) started moving around, it got even prettier…

As the title states: I was unable to attach the remote debugger (for instance to an Azure Web App) after installing Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. I got an error with something about invalid memory access or something like that. The solution is simple: install Remote Tools for Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. Go to the webite, pick your machine’s architecture (the x86 install won’t run on a x64 machine) and click download.

A rather long title for this post, but that’s exactly what happened: when I opened an ASP.NET MVC 4 project with a cshtml view open, Visual Studio would crash with the error messages seen on the right. This would only occur if the first project I opened had a cshtml file open. When I opened another (type of) project first and then opened a project with a cshtml file open, the problem did not occur.

When debugging JavaScript in an ASP.NET MVC (4) application, it is not always enough to uncheck the ‘Disable script debugging’ checkboxes under ‘Tools’ – ‘Internet Options’ – ‘Advanced’ – ‘Browsing’. JavaScript inside a Razor view (a cshtml file) cannot be debugged from Visual Studio. To debug your JavaScript, move it to a separate .js file and link to that file from your Razor view. This way, breakpoints set in the JavaScript will be hit and you can debug from Visual Studio.

We held a 2.5 hour presentation about .NET Core at the Betabit office in Rotterdam on March 29th. Where ‘we’ means my colleague Oscar van Tol and myself. We ended up having way too much content for the evening. We decided to host a hands-on workshop for those interested. At that workshop we will not only show .NET Core, but also enable you to have a go at it yourself. The location will most probably be the Betabit office in Utrecht because it’s located more central.

Earlier this week the Microsoft Research Faculty Summitwas held. On 10was on the scene, and has a nice movie about the Sphere. For the entire article @ on 10, have a look over here: https://on10.net/blogs/laura/Sphere-multi-touch-computing/. This is just another sign that the best is yet to come… Good times 🙂

This morning I found a mail in my inbox telling me I was invited to Live Mesh. That’s a nice start of the weekend, so thanks Jan! The Live Desktop user interface looks pretty cool, and it almost feels like a real desktop. But that part of Live Mesh is pretty much like Live SkyDrive: a big online disk for you to put stuff on. Lots of stuff. 5 Gigabytes worth of stuf… 😉

The TED website actually explains for me why you should watch Stephen Lawler’s talk on Virtual Earth{.}: Why you should listen to him: Microsoft’s Stephen Lawler offers a tour of Virtual Earth that not only reveals the power and potential of the software itself, but also gives a global glimpse of the new virtual frontier of digital globes, the 3D Web and the metaverse. Lawler also explores the enormous effort it takes to create the fluid blending and shifting between the multiple views and resolutions of Virtual Earth.

I already stated it at Paul Gielens’ post about the SQL Server 2008 CTP: software (development) is about to hit puberty, if it hasn’t done so already. Looking at the rate (big!) new things are coming our way, you have to agree we’re entering a new level in software (development). Take a look at things like AJAX, the upcoming entity framework combined with SQL Server 2008, Acropolis, the upcoming versions of the .

I tried using Windows Live Writer as soon as it got out, but because of proxy settings at the company I was working publishing posts wasn’t possible. I only now got time to try it at home, because I’ve been at home ill the past days. I’m still not 100% well, but I’ll keep quiet to get well soon. So maybe it’s better if I go and rest now… By the way: nice writing software, Windows Live Writer!

Google added another cool search to their labs: Google Code search. Find code written in almost any language, and under almost any license. Have a look at advanced code searchand see the possibilities. If the codebase that is searched is big enough, this might be a good step into getting developers to use Google if they’re looking for a piece of code (when they’re that not doing that already…).

Today I stumbled upon the Dutch Microsoft blogs and found an interesting post at the blog of Robert Fransen: the IE Developer Toolbar beta is available! The Toolbar offers you lots of handy features: Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a web page. Locate and select specific elements on a web page through a variety of techniques. Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings. View HTML object class names, ID’s, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.

If you’re interested in Visual Studio 2005, and especially ASP.NET 2.0, visit this site: https://beta.asp.net/ It’s an official Microsoft beta site running ASP.NET 2.0. Including forum, a control gallery, tutorials, starter kits and many more!

Microsoft has released a beta for the program codenamed ‘Acrylic’. According to some people this might be Microsofts attempt to compete with Adobe, because it is said the program is the ideal combination of vector based graphics (Illustrator) and pixel based graphics (Photoshop). Is this Microsofts answer to the domination of Adobe in the graphics department? I downloaded (free) and installed it today, but I haven’t had time to check it out.

Last friday Chris Wilton posted about IE7 Beta on the Microsoft Internet Explorer Weblog (IEBlog). The two most important features for IE 7: Support for the alpha channel in PNG images. CSS standards compliance! Furthermore, it’s nice to know not only Visual Studio 2005 will be released this summer… … when we release the first beta of IE7 this summer.

My post Using Triggers & Bindings in Azure Functions V2 drew quite some attention over the past months. But there is a lot more to say about them. Time for a small follow up 😁 Covered previously ⌚ In my previous post we covered relative simple things like writing to blob storage and putting messages on a Service Bus. But the bindings for Azure Functions are so much more powerful.

This post on using App Configuration using .NET Full Framework was based on a contribution by Steven Hack. My last post Azure App Configuration: an introduction received a lot of good feedback. And one of those pieces of feedback was a question if it’s also possible to use App Configuration if you’re using Full Framework. The short answer: yes, this is possible! For the slightly longer answer: keep reading 🤓

Azure App Configuration is a powerful way to manage and store application configuration on a central location. Integrating it into for instance ASP.NET (Core) is pretty straightforward. This post gives you an introduction to Azure App Configuration and a simple example of how to integrate it in ASP.NET Core. Creating an Azure App Configuration 🆕 Of course there are several ways to create a specific resource in the Azure Portal. One of the simplest is to go to the portal, open up App Configuration and click the Add button.

Here’s a short post I didn’t want to hold from you. As you may already know I wrote a blogpost on Using Triggers & Bindings in Azure Functions. It handles quite a few nice possibilities of using triggers and bindings in Azure Functions (if I may say so myself… 😳). Fortunately, you learn something new every day. So I learned about Property Binding recently… Property Binding Like in the HttpTriggerReturnBinding example in the functions-triggers-bindings-example GitHub repository, let’s say we have a model RequestModel that we’re receiving through a POST on an HttpTriggered Function.

Probably there’s no need for me to say why .NET Core 3.0 is a big deal. There are enough articles on that. For a great write-up see Announcing .NET Core 3.0. From the inception of the .NET Core project, we’ve added around fifty thousand .NET Framework APIs to the platform. .NET Core 3.0 closes much of the remaining capability gap with .NET Framework 4.8. Introducing .NET 5 Next to adding this massive amount of .

This post is part of a series on Managed Identity. For an introduction, see Managed Identity – Part I. For a post that shows you how to connect your application to different types of Azure resources using Managed Identity see Managed Identity – Part II. Stay tuned for future posts. Introduction Elaborating on Part I and Part II, this blog post will show you how to debug your Managed Identity enabled application locally.

This post is part of a series on Managed Identity. For an introduction, see Managed Identity – Part I. Stay tuned for future posts. Introduction Elaborating on Part I, this blog post will show you how to connect your application to different types of Azure resources using Managed Identity. To use the Managed Identity to actually connect to Azure Resources, you’re going to need the NuGet package Microsoft.Azure.Services.AppAuthentication. This package enables a service to authenticate to Azure services using the developer’s Azure Active Directory/ Microsoft account during development, and authenticate as itself (using OAuth 2.

This post is part of a series on Managed Identity. Stay tuned for future posts. Introduction Connecting your application to a resource like Storage or a SQL database used to involve a connection string. This isn’t very secure. These settings are available through the Azure portal. So they might get compromised. With the introduction of Azure Key Vault, we got a way of separating these secrets from our application configuration. We can store them in a safe, secure place.

We’re hosting a VS2019 Launch Event at the Betabit The Hague office. Join us for some Visual Studio 2019 goodness! And maybe even some swag… ? Join us on April 2 for the launch of Visual Studio 2019. Learn about how Visual Studio 2019 is more productive, modern, and innovative, participate in live Q&As, and be the first to take the latest version for a spin. https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs2019-launch/ The agenda is as follows:

To start things off: yes. There’s some pretty decent documentation on all the available Triggers & Bindings in Azure Functions. Like this overview page. And you can also find documentation on specific bindings, like the Service Bus Binding. Nevertheless, I wanted to add to that documentation with some simple, real-world examples using triggers & bindings. So here goes. Writing to Blob Storage Consider this very simple BlobTriggered Azure Function. It copies the triggering file into a different container in Azure Blob Storage:

The people over at Microsoft have been working hard and have delivered a lot of stuff. That makes for a nice start after the holidays! So there’s a lot of cool stuff available to play with. I created some simple and easy to remember links for all of these goodies. Feel free to use and distribute these 🙂 Links to the goodies! The spec for .NET Standard 2.0 is complete (https://bit.

In one of the projects I’m currently working on we’re using an ASP.NET Core Web API with an Angular front-end. We’re using ADAL.js as an Azure Active Directory Authentication Library and ng2-adal for integration with Angular. To get the type declarations for all these packages in TypeScript we use The Future of Declaration Files. Some time ago, our build server started acting up with the following message: Type 'Observable<void>' is not assignable to type 'Observable<User>' The error occured in ADAL.

My employer Betabit hosted a Hack Yourself First workshop by Troy Hunt on Monday 5th and Tuesday 6th of June. Because we are always looking to improve, this was a great opportunity to tune up our security skills. We had a great time, got terrified and most of all: we learned a lot. First contact: a Twitter DM to Troy Hunt You think you know security We’ve seen a lot of different subjects during the workshop.

As the title states: I was unable to attach the remote debugger (for instance to an Azure Web App) after installing Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. I got an error with something about invalid memory access or something like that. The solution is simple: install Remote Tools for Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. Go to the webite, pick your machine’s architecture (the x86 install won’t run on a x64 machine) and click download.

Just ran into an exception when running both update-database and add-migration in the Package Manager Console for an EF Code First project. The Exception read: The type initializer for System.Data.Entity.Migrations.DbMigrationsConfiguration\'1 threw an exception. The cause? An invalid config file for the project I was trying to run the tools for. So: if you run into this exception, check your configs 😉

Last week I received my Intel Galileo board (windowsondevices.com) and I started ~playing with~ developing for it yesterday. I created a first test project, but it didn’t run. Visual Studio couldn’t find the Arduino header file, which was probably due to a missing NuGet package (the Galileo C++ SDK). I tried to save the project, because you need to before you can manage NuGet packages, but to no avail. Visual Studio served me a ‘The operation could not be completed’ error without any additional information.

There are a couple of websites I manage that use Twitter Bootstrap*. These websites are fully responsive and work well on all devices. Or actually, almost all devices. The wrapping of columns in a container on a Windows Phone doesn’t work the way you’d want it out of the box. Windows Phone interprets device-width as the actual resolution size. Other mobile browsers use what the manufacturer (or browser vendor) has decided is the optimal viewport width.

Just a quick little post today: I got the error “The Path ‘path’ is already mapped in workspace ‘workspace’” when I connected to a new Team Foundation Server and tried to map my workspace today. I had connected to a Team Foundation Services project a while back to get some shared code, but I already removed the workspace and the server binding. Even though Visual Studio didn’t see any other bindings, mapping my workspace to the same folder the previous TFS binding was mapped to served me this error.

A rather long title for this post, but that’s exactly what happened: when I opened an ASP.NET MVC 4 project with a cshtml view open, Visual Studio would crash with the error messages seen on the right. This would only occur if the first project I opened had a cshtml file open. When I opened another (type of) project first and then opened a project with a cshtml file open, the problem did not occur.

Just a quickie today: when working with Twitter Bootstrap tabs, like I am in my ASP.NET MVC 4 project, you might want to add Next and Previous buttons on the tabs to create something of a Wizard. Here’sa step by step overview of how I did this: Add an ID to all the ListItem elements that are used for the tab navigation. For instance: <ul class="nav nav-tabs" id="myTab"> <li><a href="#example" data-toggle="tab" id="xmpl">Example</a></li> .

Problem: Developing a generic class that maps datasets, datatables and datarows from a legacy system to my domain model, I ran into an issue. I wanted to call a generic method with a runtime type. Lets say the method looked like this: public string DoSomething<T>(string param). Because I use reflection to iterate properties on a type, the type of the properties was dynamic and only known at runtime. I wanted to do something like this:

Twitter Bootstrap is a… “Sleek, intuitive, and powerful front-end framework for faster and easier web development.” One of the nice things in Bootstrap is you can use icons from Glyphicons. To use these, you can simply use this markup <i class="icon-fire"></i> to get a nice fire icon. Translating this into an ActionLink styled as a button in an MVC4 application would look something like the following: @Html.ActionLink("<i class="icon-fire"></i> Invent fire", "fire", new { @class = "btn" }) Unfortunately, this renders as follows:

In the past, when you had some XML document that you wanted to translate into classes we had to create / generate a schema based on the XML file. Next, we had to generate a class based on the schema with an external tool. Not all too user friendly and somewhat time consuming. In Visual Studio 2012 you copy the XML you want to create a class/classes for, place the cursor in a class file on the location you want the code to be added and select the following menu items: Edit – Paste Special – Paste XML as Classes.

When building an ASP application that generates Word documents, it was working fine on the local machine: A Windows XP installation with Office 2007. When we deployed it to windows 2008 (64 bit) and Word 2007 we saw that Documents.Open returned null. Other than this, there are no exceptions. The code that returned the error (simplified): Application app = new Application(); Document doc = app.Documents.Open(ref name); As it turns out, a 64 bit system stores temporary files in C:\Windows\Sys\WOW64\config\system\profile\Desktop folder.

When installing SQL Server 2008 R2 on a Windows XP (or, according to the comments, Windows 7) development machine that has been around for quite some time, I got an error stating an unhandled exception occured in the application (see image). The error showed up directly upon startup and read: An error occurred creating the configuration section handler for userSettings/Microsoft.SqlServer.Configuration.LandingPage.Properties.Settings: Could not load file or assembly ‘System, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089’ or one of its dependencies.

When writing WCF services, most of us find ourselves writing quick test applications. To give you more time to do what a developer should be doing (adding business value to the project) the Visual Studio team added a WCF test client that can help you reach goals faster. This is not a very difficult application, but it does the trick and is more than sufficient for simple testing. The WCF Test Client can be found at this location (without the ‘ (x86)’ for x86 machines): C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Visual Studio 10.

Saving a file from Silverlight using the SaveFileDialog, added in Silverlight 3, is easy. If you’re used to desktop development however, you might find yourself getting a SecurityException with the message ‘File operation not permitted. Access to path ‘xxx’ is denied.’. Here’s why: In desktop development, you’re used to getting a filename from a SaveFileDialog. Next, you start doing whatever you need to be doing to the file, based on the filename.

Here’s a quick Visual Studio tip for you… I frequently search for a specific text in my solution because I need to do something in all places where that text occurs. Today I found out how you can open all the files that are mentioned in the Find Results window. Search for the text you’re looking for. In my case this is ITest*. Open up the Search Results window and select all the records where the text was found.

Just a small post to start the new year… and let it be a good one! When opening a XAML document in Visual Studio, it opens in split view by default. This might become annoying when you have a large XAML document, because all the content needs to be rendered before you can get some work done. Here’s how you can have Visual Studio open XAML documents in code view:

Although the feature has been around since ASP.NET 2.0, I still meet people that don’t know and/or use app_offline.htm. Do you know (and use) the feature…? When working on an ASP.NET web application, you should notify your visitors in a decent way that your application is down. There’s a nice default feature available for these purposes since ASP.NET 2.0. Somehow, however, this feature is not very well known and rarely used.

Because we were still using an old Visual Studio 2005 solution which included a Web Site project, it was time to upgrade. We upgraded our Visual Studio 2005 solution to Visual Studio 2010 (and .NET 4.0), converted the Web Site Project to a Web Application Project and then, of course, the AjaxControlToolkit had to follow. I downloaded the latest build from their Codeplex site and updated the references in the different projects.

Yesterday I remembered two Visual Studio options Sara Ford told about in a presentation of her I attended a while back. Changing them made me happy… 🙂 Zero-impact projects When I have to test something real quick, I tend to create a new project in Visual Studio and scribble some code to test whatever I want to test at that point. This causes my project directory to be filled with projects named WindowsFormsApplication14 or something like that.

While working with Visual Studio 2010, a new feature caught my eye that isn’t communicated (strongly) in the “What’s new” lists you can find online. As part of the Visual Studio 2010 supports multiple web.config files! Now we can create a separate web.config file for each configuration we have for our application. If you add a configuration through the configuration manager, you have the possibility to add a web.config file for the new configuration, too.

Thanks to our friends at Microsoft (and their great BizSpark program) I will be able to attend DevDays ‘09! We won tickets because we updated our company profile and added projects at the Discover Metro site. Normally attending this kind of event is not available to young startups like ours, but now it is! I’ll be seeing you @ The Hague next week 🙂

I just read this great article by Mark Voermans: Expression Web SuperPreview: Look how your site renders in various Browsers. I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve been waiting for this for a long, LONG time. I’ll give it a go this afternoon and let you know what I think… Update: This first beta version only allows you to preview your site in different versions of Internet Explorer. We will have to wait for the full feature set until the final release of this tool…

I just read an interesting article on Bertrand Le Roy’s blog. The most important information: It so happens that the menu control is making a bad assumption on what the default value for z-index should be. We debated this at length with the IE team, but it became clear as we did so that they were right and that we were wrong. We had to fix that. So here it is, the patch for menu is out and you can apply it to build IE8-compatible ASP.

When trying to pass some command line arguments to a Console Application, I got the following message: “The current project settings specify that the project will be debugged with specific security permissions. In this mode, command line arguments will not be passed to the executable. Do you want to continue debugging anyway?” (see image) I didn’t run in to this earlier, but yesterday it suddenly popped up. But I did change my zone security, so that might be of some influence… Apparently, this is because of the Debug in Zone settings you can find at the Security tab of your project properties.

I’m reinstalling my laptop after I got it back from a repair… EMPTY (grrr). What tools shouldn’t I forget when preparing this laptop to be my development machine? Already have Visual Studio, SQL Management Studio, Office and the Windows Live tools installed… (and of course I have all kinds of tools at hand from my server like DebugView, Reflector and whatnot)

I’ve had my current installation for a few months now, and I’ve used it for development purposes. Today I suddenly encountered an error when trying to add items to the Toolbox. Visual Studio 2008 simply disappeared… No errors, no warnings, it just went away. After some searching and a lot of trying, I found that deinstalling the PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 did the trick. I’m guessing that the installation of a service pack (for either Visual Studio or .

Scott Guthrie posted about a cool new ASP.NET server control: Chart. It can be used for free with ASP.NET 3.5 to enable rich browser-based charting scenarios. Read more over here: https://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/11/24/new-asp-net-charting-control-lt-asp-chart-runat-quot-server-quot-gt.aspx

While developing a page that was to be used through an inline wrapper, I got an error: “Validation of viewstate MAC failed”. This error can usually be resolved by disabling event validation, viewstate encryptionor viewstate for the MAC. In my case these solutions did not resolve the issue. After some testing Response.Redirect appeared to be the cause. I changed the page so it doesn’t need the redirect any more, and the problem disappeared.

We developed an ASP.NET page (A) to be wrapped in an existing PHP page (B) using an inline wrapper. After a few days in which both pages displayed nicely, our page (A) suddenly got displayed twice inside the existing page (B). And even weirder was that the postbacks of the first occurrence didn’t work, and the postbacks of the second were executed outside of the wrapper. We had changed some stuff the night before, so I finally checked the file line by line against an earlier version.

StyleCop version 4.3 was released last tuesday. A short summary of what version 4.3 brings us:  Various bugfixes, including fixes for VS integration issues Rules documentation is included and integrated into VS “Show Error Help” New rules, see blogpostfor the rules Branding change from Source Analysis to StyleCop **Links ** StyleCop blog: https://blogs.msdn.com/sourceanalysis/ Release announcement on the StyleCop blog: https://blogs.msdn.com/sourceanalysis/archive/2008/08/19/stylecop-4-3-is-released.aspx StyleCop 4.3 download: https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=sourceanalysis&ReleaseId=1425

Taken from the SysInternals website: The SysInternals web site was created in 1996 by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell to host their advanced system utilities and technical information. Microsoft acquired Sysinternals in July, 2006. Whether you’re an IT Pro or a developer, you’ll find Sysinternals utilities to help you manage, troubleshoot and diagnose your Windows systems and applications. One of the must-have SysInternals tools for a developer is DebugView.

The issue While trying to publish an NPM package to our artifacts registry in Azure DevOps, we got an error: npm failed with return code: 4294963248 The exit code for the task was -4048. Strange thing is that we have our build agents running on-prem, but running this task locally on our dev machines worked just fine. We found out pretty quickly that it was an authentication issue. Because of this we thought that the npm publish task of Azure DevOps might have issues with getting the authentication right for the registry.

The Betatalks Discord A few months ago we’ve started a Betatalks Discord server to build a community and enable our friends to discuss all the Betatalks content we put out there. Think about the Betatalks videos on YouTube, Betatalks live events and the most recent addition: Betatalks the podcast. To notify the corresponding Discord channels about new Betatalks videos or Betatalks the podcast episodes, I created Azure Logic Apps to check for new additions and post them to the webhook.

My post Using Triggers & Bindings in Azure Functions V2 drew quite some attention over the past months. But there is a lot more to say about them. Time for a small follow up 😁 Covered previously ⌚ In my previous post we covered relative simple things like writing to blob storage and putting messages on a Service Bus. But the bindings for Azure Functions are so much more powerful.

This post on using App Configuration using .NET Full Framework was based on a contribution by Steven Hack. My last post Azure App Configuration: an introduction received a lot of good feedback. And one of those pieces of feedback was a question if it’s also possible to use App Configuration if you’re using Full Framework. The short answer: yes, this is possible! For the slightly longer answer: keep reading 🤓

Azure App Configuration is a powerful way to manage and store application configuration on a central location. Integrating it into for instance ASP.NET (Core) is pretty straightforward. This post gives you an introduction to Azure App Configuration and a simple example of how to integrate it in ASP.NET Core. Creating an Azure App Configuration 🆕 Of course there are several ways to create a specific resource in the Azure Portal. One of the simplest is to go to the portal, open up App Configuration and click the Add button.

Probably there’s no need for me to say why .NET Core 3.0 is a big deal. There are enough articles on that. For a great write-up see Announcing .NET Core 3.0. From the inception of the .NET Core project, we’ve added around fifty thousand .NET Framework APIs to the platform. .NET Core 3.0 closes much of the remaining capability gap with .NET Framework 4.8. Introducing .NET 5 Next to adding this massive amount of .

Yesterday I was working with one of our customers to fix an issue with an ASP.NET application throwing an error. That application threw the error on the first request coming in through Azure Front Door. When we sent a request to the original (back end) URL, the application worked fine and never threw the exception. 🤔 Time to investigate…! Finding the cause 🧐 First step of course was to find the cause of the exception.

This post is part of a series on Managed Identity. For an introduction, see Managed Identity – Part I. For a post that shows you how to connect your application to different types of Azure resources using Managed Identity see Managed Identity – Part II. Stay tuned for future posts. Introduction Elaborating on Part I and Part II, this blog post will show you how to debug your Managed Identity enabled application locally.

Some time ago Oscar van Tol and I started creating video content for the community. We call them #Betatalks and create them because of two very important reasons: We believe in sharing knowledge It’s. So. Much. Fun. 🤣 We talk about a lot of developer stuff: from “Microsoft Build 2019 Highlights” in episode 1 to “C# 8, What’s new?” in episode 4. The most recent #Betatalks is episode 5: “All about configuration in Azure”.

This post is part of a series on Managed Identity. For an introduction, see Managed Identity – Part I. Stay tuned for future posts. Introduction Elaborating on Part I, this blog post will show you how to connect your application to different types of Azure resources using Managed Identity. To use the Managed Identity to actually connect to Azure Resources, you’re going to need the NuGet package Microsoft.Azure.Services.AppAuthentication. This package enables a service to authenticate to Azure services using the developer’s Azure Active Directory/ Microsoft account during development, and authenticate as itself (using OAuth 2.

This post is part of a series on Managed Identity. Stay tuned for future posts. Introduction Connecting your application to a resource like Storage or a SQL database used to involve a connection string. This isn’t very secure. These settings are available through the Azure portal. So they might get compromised. With the introduction of Azure Key Vault, we got a way of separating these secrets from our application configuration. We can store them in a safe, secure place.

Last week one of my colleagues had a question: Is there a performance penalty when you add multiple Azure Blob storage bindings in an Azure Function? Or is the connection only established when you access one of those blobs? Answering this grew into a way to have Dynamic output bindings in Azure Functions. This post elaborates on [blog/using-triggers-bindings-in-azure-functions-v2](Using Triggers & Bindings in Azure Functions V2). First try The idea was simple:

We’re hosting a VS2019 Launch Event at the Betabit The Hague office. Join us for some Visual Studio 2019 goodness! And maybe even some swag… ? Join us on April 2 for the launch of Visual Studio 2019. Learn about how Visual Studio 2019 is more productive, modern, and innovative, participate in live Q&As, and be the first to take the latest version for a spin. https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs2019-launch/ The agenda is as follows:

To start things off: yes. There’s some pretty decent documentation on all the available Triggers & Bindings in Azure Functions. Like this overview page. And you can also find documentation on specific bindings, like the Service Bus Binding. Nevertheless, I wanted to add to that documentation with some simple, real-world examples using triggers & bindings. So here goes. Writing to Blob Storage Consider this very simple BlobTriggered Azure Function. It copies the triggering file into a different container in Azure Blob Storage:

The people over at Microsoft have been working hard and have delivered a lot of stuff. That makes for a nice start after the holidays! So there’s a lot of cool stuff available to play with. I created some simple and easy to remember links for all of these goodies. Feel free to use and distribute these 🙂 Links to the goodies! The spec for .NET Standard 2.0 is complete (https://bit.

We held a 2.5 hour presentation about .NET Core at the Betabit office in Rotterdam on March 29th. Where ‘we’ means my colleague Oscar van Tol and myself. We ended up having way too much content for the evening. We decided to host a hands-on workshop for those interested. At that workshop we will not only show .NET Core, but also enable you to have a go at it yourself. The location will most probably be the Betabit office in Utrecht because it’s located more central.

After making sure my Visual Studio always ran as an administrator by following my own post HowTo: Have Visual Studio always run as administrator on Windows 8, I got a message if I wanted to save changes to devenv.sln each and every time I double clicked a Solution. Since the problem kept occuring after installing Visual Studio 2015 CTP6, I wanted to solve it. So here we go! Double clicking a Solution file doesn’t start devenv.

Just a quick little post today: I got the error “The Path ‘path’ is already mapped in workspace ‘workspace’” when I connected to a new Team Foundation Server and tried to map my workspace today. I had connected to a Team Foundation Services project a while back to get some shared code, but I already removed the workspace and the server binding. Even though Visual Studio didn’t see any other bindings, mapping my workspace to the same folder the previous TFS binding was mapped to served me this error.

Just a quickie today: when working with Twitter Bootstrap tabs, like I am in my ASP.NET MVC 4 project, you might want to add Next and Previous buttons on the tabs to create something of a Wizard. Here’sa step by step overview of how I did this: Add an ID to all the ListItem elements that are used for the tab navigation. For instance: <ul class="nav nav-tabs" id="myTab"> <li><a href="#example" data-toggle="tab" id="xmpl">Example</a></li> .

When debugging JavaScript in an ASP.NET MVC (4) application, it is not always enough to uncheck the ‘Disable script debugging’ checkboxes under ‘Tools’ – ‘Internet Options’ – ‘Advanced’ – ‘Browsing’. JavaScript inside a Razor view (a cshtml file) cannot be debugged from Visual Studio. To debug your JavaScript, move it to a separate .js file and link to that file from your Razor view. This way, breakpoints set in the JavaScript will be hit and you can debug from Visual Studio.

Problem: Developing a generic class that maps datasets, datatables and datarows from a legacy system to my domain model, I ran into an issue. I wanted to call a generic method with a runtime type. Lets say the method looked like this: public string DoSomething<T>(string param). Because I use reflection to iterate properties on a type, the type of the properties was dynamic and only known at runtime. I wanted to do something like this:

Twitter Bootstrap is a… “Sleek, intuitive, and powerful front-end framework for faster and easier web development.” One of the nice things in Bootstrap is you can use icons from Glyphicons. To use these, you can simply use this markup <i class="icon-fire"></i> to get a nice fire icon. Translating this into an ActionLink styled as a button in an MVC4 application would look something like the following: @Html.ActionLink("<i class="icon-fire"></i> Invent fire", "fire", new { @class = "btn" }) Unfortunately, this renders as follows:

In the past, when you had some XML document that you wanted to translate into classes we had to create / generate a schema based on the XML file. Next, we had to generate a class based on the schema with an external tool. Not all too user friendly and somewhat time consuming. In Visual Studio 2012 you copy the XML you want to create a class/classes for, place the cursor in a class file on the location you want the code to be added and select the following menu items: Edit – Paste Special – Paste XML as Classes.

I opened a solution in Visual Studio 2012 on my laptop running Windows 8, when I was presented with the error “The Web Application Project SomeWebProject is configured to use IIS. Unable to access the IIS metabase. You do not have sufficient privilege to access IIS web sites on your machine.” The user I was logged in with was a local administrator and was able to open up and use IIS Manager, but still I was presented with this error.

Just a quick one: if you have a textbox with a Calendar (extender) from the Ajax Control Toolkit and an associated PopupButtonID which is an image, the calendar won’t close when you click outside the popup. Use an input type=”image”or an ImageButton to solve this problem. Hope this helps.

When building an ASP application that generates Word documents, it was working fine on the local machine: A Windows XP installation with Office 2007. When we deployed it to windows 2008 (64 bit) and Word 2007 we saw that Documents.Open returned null. Other than this, there are no exceptions. The code that returned the error (simplified): Application app = new Application(); Document doc = app.Documents.Open(ref name); As it turns out, a 64 bit system stores temporary files in C:\Windows\Sys\WOW64\config\system\profile\Desktop folder.

When installing SQL Server 2008 R2 on a Windows XP (or, according to the comments, Windows 7) development machine that has been around for quite some time, I got an error stating an unhandled exception occured in the application (see image). The error showed up directly upon startup and read: An error occurred creating the configuration section handler for userSettings/Microsoft.SqlServer.Configuration.LandingPage.Properties.Settings: Could not load file or assembly ‘System, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089’ or one of its dependencies.

When installing the Windows Azure AppFabric Tools for Visual Studio (found here), you might get the error message shown at the top, stating that Windows Server AppFabric is installed and that it is not compatible with this release of Windows Azure AppFabric Developer Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 – June 2011 CTP. It asks to uninstall Windows Server AppFabric and rerun this setup if you want to install Windows Azure AppFabric Developer Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 – June 2011 CTP.

When writing WCF services, most of us find ourselves writing quick test applications. To give you more time to do what a developer should be doing (adding business value to the project) the Visual Studio team added a WCF test client that can help you reach goals faster. This is not a very difficult application, but it does the trick and is more than sufficient for simple testing. The WCF Test Client can be found at this location (without the ‘ (x86)’ for x86 machines): C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Visual Studio 10.

Saving a file from Silverlight using the SaveFileDialog, added in Silverlight 3, is easy. If you’re used to desktop development however, you might find yourself getting a SecurityException with the message ‘File operation not permitted. Access to path ‘xxx’ is denied.’. Here’s why: In desktop development, you’re used to getting a filename from a SaveFileDialog. Next, you start doing whatever you need to be doing to the file, based on the filename.

For a project I’ll probably dedicate a post on this blog to in the future, I needed a ZIP library for Silverlight. After asking around on twitter (@rickvdbosch) I was pointed towards the SharpZipLib port on Codeplex, found on https://slsharpziplib.codeplex.com. Basically what I wanted to do was replace a file inside the ZIP file with my version of that file. The file was located in a specific folder inside the ZIP and could be found by either iterating through the ZipEntries in the ZIP, or by getting it based on its name.

The above scenario gave me the well-known could not load file or assembly error message. The assembly that couldn’t be found was log4net, Version=1.2.10.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=692fbea5521e1304. Or one of its dependencies of course… The situation in which I was getting this error message: using the CrystalReportViewer in an ASP.NET application having the ASP.NET application hosted in IIS (the error did not occur on the ASP.NET Development Server) running on a 64 bit machine Log4net was available in the GAC, with the exact version and PublicKeyToken stated in the error message.

Although the feature has been around since ASP.NET 2.0, I still meet people that don’t know and/or use app_offline.htm. Do you know (and use) the feature…? When working on an ASP.NET web application, you should notify your visitors in a decent way that your application is down. There’s a nice default feature available for these purposes since ASP.NET 2.0. Somehow, however, this feature is not very well known and rarely used.

Because we were still using an old Visual Studio 2005 solution which included a Web Site project, it was time to upgrade. We upgraded our Visual Studio 2005 solution to Visual Studio 2010 (and .NET 4.0), converted the Web Site Project to a Web Application Project and then, of course, the AjaxControlToolkit had to follow. I downloaded the latest build from their Codeplex site and updated the references in the different projects.

After installing Windows 7 and Visual Studio 2010 on my laptop, I ran into the well-known message “The project location is not trusted”. I thought all I had to do was follow the instructions in this MSDN article to get my development share to be trusted again, but this doesn’t seem to work. I already tried adding the new child group under the Internet_Zone in stead of the LocalIntranet_Zone, and using the complete server name and the server IP address in stead of the name of the server.

I just read an interesting article on Bertrand Le Roy’s blog. The most important information: It so happens that the menu control is making a bad assumption on what the default value for z-index should be. We debated this at length with the IE team, but it became clear as we did so that they were right and that we were wrong. We had to fix that. So here it is, the patch for menu is out and you can apply it to build IE8-compatible ASP.

When trying to pass some command line arguments to a Console Application, I got the following message: “The current project settings specify that the project will be debugged with specific security permissions. In this mode, command line arguments will not be passed to the executable. Do you want to continue debugging anyway?” (see image) I didn’t run in to this earlier, but yesterday it suddenly popped up. But I did change my zone security, so that might be of some influence… Apparently, this is because of the Debug in Zone settings you can find at the Security tab of your project properties.

When you use a MasterPage to define the design of your website, you might come across the problem that there is no body element in a web content form. This can be a problem when you want to add an onload script to a specific page. You could of course add the onload on the MasterPage, but you might not want the script to run on every page. There are several workarounds to fix this ‘problem’.

Scott Guthrie posted about a cool new ASP.NET server control: Chart. It can be used for free with ASP.NET 3.5 to enable rich browser-based charting scenarios. Read more over here: https://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/11/24/new-asp-net-charting-control-lt-asp-chart-runat-quot-server-quot-gt.aspx

While developing a page that was to be used through an inline wrapper, I got an error: “Validation of viewstate MAC failed”. This error can usually be resolved by disabling event validation, viewstate encryptionor viewstate for the MAC. In my case these solutions did not resolve the issue. After some testing Response.Redirect appeared to be the cause. I changed the page so it doesn’t need the redirect any more, and the problem disappeared.

We developed an ASP.NET page (A) to be wrapped in an existing PHP page (B) using an inline wrapper. After a few days in which both pages displayed nicely, our page (A) suddenly got displayed twice inside the existing page (B). And even weirder was that the postbacks of the first occurrence didn’t work, and the postbacks of the second were executed outside of the wrapper. We had changed some stuff the night before, so I finally checked the file line by line against an earlier version.

StyleCop version 4.3 was released last tuesday. A short summary of what version 4.3 brings us:  Various bugfixes, including fixes for VS integration issues Rules documentation is included and integrated into VS “Show Error Help” New rules, see blogpostfor the rules Branding change from Source Analysis to StyleCop **Links ** StyleCop blog: https://blogs.msdn.com/sourceanalysis/ Release announcement on the StyleCop blog: https://blogs.msdn.com/sourceanalysis/archive/2008/08/19/stylecop-4-3-is-released.aspx StyleCop 4.3 download: https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=sourceanalysis&ReleaseId=1425

When you want to implement a custom stsadm for SharePoint, all you realy have to do is implement the Microsoft.SharePoint.StsAdmin.ISPStsadmCommand interface. Because I develop on a machine with no SharePoint installed, I (only) copy the assemblies I need to develop locally. For the stsadm command I was working on recently (more on this in a future post) I only needed the Microsoft.SharePoint and Microsoft.Office.Server assemblies. Or at least I thought so…

While writing a custom stsadm command for SharePoint (more on that in a future post) and having to do something based on the command the user typed in, I used ToLower(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture) on the command string to be able to check without the hassle of differences in casing. When I ran code analysis on my project, I got this somewhat cryptic message: CA1308 : Microsoft.Globalization : In method ‘CommandParser.Run(string, StringDictionary, out string)’, replace the call to ‘string.

One of the posts that is being read quite frequently over here is HOWTO: Encode a password using MD5 in C# (or: howto calculate the MD5 hash for a string). One of the (many) reactions to that post was from one Simucal, stating: Also, to the original poster, Rick van den Bosch… shame on you for using ASCIIEncoding.Default.GetBytes(). You do realize that would seriously restrict the usefulness of your method to working only in languages that ASCII has the character sets for, right?

The situation I talked about in my previous posthad one very big issue: LINQ sometimes just is too dynamic… 😉 The fact that I changed the value for the Ranking property for each SpecificObject that got matched, made the primary LINQ query have a different outcome. LINQ uses lazy evaluation and because of that, the contents of finalGroups and exitGroups changed every time I changed the Ranking value for one of the SpecificObjects.

While developing an algorithm to match preferences to possibilities, I had to sort a generic list of a specific object type (SpecificObject). The first x objects would be matched, the rest would be excluded because of the number of available places. To determine the group of objects that would be matched and the group that would be excluded, I did something like this: IEnumerablesortedObjects;IEnumerablefinalObjects; IEnumerableexitObjects; sortedObjects = from SpecificObject specificObject in AllSpecificObjectsorderby specificObject.

After developing a custom Web Service to be hosted in SharePoint (based on this HowTo article on MSDN) and deploying it on a testing environment, I got some entries in the EventLog over there, stating: “Unable to connect publishing custom string handler for output caching. IIS Instance Id is ‘xxxxxxxxx’, url is ‘https://internalsharepointserver/somesubfolder/services.asmx“ The PublishingHttpModule trying to cache an unmanaged path seems to be the problem here. When enabled for a custom web application (such as my web service), it causes the eventlog entry each time certain requests like web service calls or static CSS files are made.

After extending a textbox with a NumberUpDownExtender, which comes with the AJAX Control Toolkit, I recieved the error “the number of fractional digits is out of range”. This happened when debugging my web application and using the extender. When using the web app in non-debug mode, nothing happened. This included the value change ’not happening'. Fortunately, this one was REALY easy, but it is not to be found on the web.

While developing a web application for a friend of mine, I ran into a Visual Studio error message I hadn’t seen before: Error connecting to undo manager of source file ‘D:DevelopmentSomeWeb ApplicationDefault.master.designer.cs’. The error occured whenever I tried to start the (web) application in debug mode. The application did start OK after the error message though. Starting the application without debugging didn’t cause the error. I closed the solution file I had opened, but that didn’t solve the issue.

It’s been a while because I’ve been so busy lately, but the next (technical) step for my personal website is now online. When browsing to https://rickvandenbosch.net/blog/, the content of my blog here is displayed sort of mirrored over there. I used an OpenSource RSS component to read my private rss feed from blogging about, and display it from there. There’s still a lot of work to be done (like styling!), but I’ll get there.

We probably all worked with dynamically generated controls on forms, ASP.NET pages or (user) controls. And I guess we’ve all written for-each statements to loop through the ControlCollection and filter out all the controls of a specific type, right? I wanted to do the same today, so I started by trying to use LINQ for this: This, as you can see, generated a compile time error: Could not find an implementation of the query pattern for source type ‘System.

Some of my (Dutch!) Avanade colleagues recently released ‘Entlib Extensions To WSSF’ to CodePlex. Quite a cool addition to the already rich Enterprise Library. Entlib Extensions to WSSF (Web Service Software Factory) is an extension that enables WSSF to easily integrate with Enterprise Library. This extension allows you to very easily handle cross cutting concerns in WCF services like Validation, Exception Handling and Logging without much programming. The extension accomplishes this by using the policy injection application block of enterprise library.

When you dynamically generate a LinkButton in code that will be placed inside an UpdatePanel, you’ll experience that the Click event for the LinkButton results in a full postback in stead of the UpdatePanel being triggered. There’s a rather simpel solution to this problem… First, let’s take a look at the scenario. Consider this HTML: There’s a literal control outside of the UpdatePanel. There’s a second literal control inside the UpdatePanel.

The error I’m getting when setting up an OleDB connection to an Access database* via the Server Explorer in Visual Studio 2008 is ‘Format of the initialization string does not conform to specification starting at index 0’. The screen doesn’t display the way it should be displayed, as you can see in the screenshot on the left. There is a possible fix at svenM’s blog(it’s about checking the existence of a key in the registry called ‘ProgID’ and the default value, as you can read in this article), but this doesn’t seem to work for my situation.

A week ago I had a nice page that was hosted in SharePoint and, among others, contained an updatepanel with a dropdownlist in it. Everything worked, and all was well. Because our testers had found some issues we had delivered two newer versions to our development environment. In the last version they found an issue that wasn’t there before: selecting a different value in the dropdown did not only update the updatepanel, but resulted in a complete postback.

Getting the ModalPopupExtender from the Ajax Control Toolkit to work (decently) in SharePoint was not exactly a walk in the park. With a default SharePoint installation, the modal popup is partly positioned ‘outside’ of the page (you only see the bottom right part of the popup in the top left corner of the browser). Postbacks are not executed or executed poorly and the page gets garbled up. A possible solution for the positioning of the popup is to set the X and Y property of the ModalPopupExtender.

One of my colleagues pointed out the new Fine-grained password policy feature in Windows Server 2008. As you can see in this postat The Sean Blog, some values have to be entered in the I8 format, which isn’t very user friendly. Because of that, he asked me if I could whip up a tool that converts days, hours, minutes and seconds to the I8 format. I quickly put together this small tool for him.

As a reaction to this articleat Peter Ritchie’s MVP Blog, I thought I’d give my two cents on having a single exit point for methods. Here we go… When writing code, I always create only one exit point except for the occasional throwing of an exception. Most important for me is to always know where your code (really) stops. In case of long and complex methods there’s a chance you’re going to miss a return statement when scanning through a method.

One of the most annoying things in Visual Studio (to me) was the fact that complete solutions (solution folders, projects, regulare folder) would be expanded upon opening. And with big solutions, that isn’t too much fun. There are macros available online, but the ones i found were pretty slow. This is only one of the things that the PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 solves for you. But there is more. Much more!

In a quick AJAX demo I had to create today, I ran into a (somewhat cryptic) PageRequestManagerServerErrorException. I needed a simple form of the Cascading Dropdown{.}, one that doesn’t use a (web)service for its data, but gets it from a simple method. Here’s the setup, and the cause… Lets start with the exact error message: Microsoft JScript runtime error: Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManagerServerErrorException: An unknown error occurred while processing the request on the server.

With the official release of Visual Studio 2008 coming closer and its release on MSDN last november, there are more and more people asking what the impact of migrating from VS2005 to VS2008 will be and if it will have as big an impact as switching from VS2003 to VS2005 had. The answer is pretty simple: no it won’t. Let’s see why, and what impact it will have. VS2003 > VS2005

There are several steps to creating a custom web service to be hosted in SharePoint. The MSDN library{.} has a walkthrough on creating a custom web service{.}. After having followed this walkthrough thoroughly, I though my web service was good to go. Unfortunately all I saw was an error: “Could not load type ‘ThisAndThat’ from assembly ‘SoAndSo’”. Just as I was about to search for an answer somewhere online, I remembered that the MSDN library features the Community content for little over a year now{.

As stated on ScottGu’s blog{.} in his latest post{.}, the .NET Framework Library Source Code is now available. A detailed blog post about the steps to follow to enable .NET Framework source access in Visual Studio 2008 can be found at Shawn Burke’s blog in this post{.}. Taken from Scott’s post: Once you follow the configuration steps in Shawn’s post above, you’ll be able to dynamically load the debug symbols for .

The last weeks have been filled with holidays and introductional days at my new employer{.}. Because of that, I haven’t had the time to realy dive into Visual Studio 2008, although I have played around with it since the RTM version was available. Since this week I’ve been writing some serious code in VS2008 for my new personal site (more about this later!). I can only agree with what Pieter de Bruinsaid in his post about the new line of developer tools and additions: “If you are building .

Next to the message in the subject, one of the symptoms we encountered is that although the solution contains some test projects the ‘Create private accessor’ menu has disappeared. Also, selecting ‘Create unit tests…’ produces an error. And when editing a testrun config and selecting the ‘Code coverage’ option, the settings dialog simply closes, without any message. All these (and probably more) symptoms can occur because of a corrupt solution file.

At my current project we made a project template for Visual Studio for our testers. We added all the references, folders and files a tester needs to add a new system tests project. One of the testers (!) extended our XML generator, which generated XML testcases based on data entered in Excel, to now generate a complete C# test class. Making (system) tests which are automatically run during the nightly build now really is just as simple as entering data in Excel.

I have lots of games for my Xbox 360 I still need to / want to finish, like The Orange Box and Bioshock. And despite this, I’ve been working ’non-stop’ behind my laptop for the last two evenings to prepare it for Visual Studio 2008, and to download and install it. It’s almost time… 😉 I can’t wait to get busy with the final version of Visual Studio 2008 and stuff like LINQ, extension methods, anonymous types, lambda expressions and so on.

Test Driven Development is hot, just like unit testing your software and any other kinds of (automated) testing. And as we all know: sometimes stuff that’s hot is misinterpreted, explained wrong or just simply used in a really bad way. Unfortunately, testing is no exception to this rule… Not too long ago I had a discussion with a project manager who told me the code in his project had a code coverage close to 100%.

The MasterPage doesn’t have a property for setting the Theme at design time. Despite this, I wanted to set the Theme for a MasterPage, so I decided to set it from code. I was aware of the possibility to set the Theme through the web.config, but that wasn’t the way I wanted to set it. One of the reasons being it would result in the theme being applied to the entire website.

Yesterday, I posted about a problem with MSBuild building our solution. We solved it, so I wanted to let you in on the secretsolution. We use the Enterprise Library V1.2 in some of our projects. And because some of the projects are being re-used from other internal projects, not all the references in thos projects were checked for versions. As it turned out, another project had a reference to an enterprise library assembly with a runtime version of .

Our current project uses the possibilities of MSBuild to have a daily build on a TFS server. This has been working up until yesterday somewhere around noon. Nobody knows what exactly happened, but it stopped working after our successful build of 11:42 am. _Our problem: _ Compilation of one project (of a total of 71 projects) is failing. The project builds successful on the local machines of all the developers. It references EnterpriseLibrary.

At my current project we use Team Foundation Server together with the possibility to have a daily build through MSBuild. Over the weekend, the build failed. Because our ‘build master’ called in sick this morning, I took it upon me to fix the build. But compiling the sources was no problem, because that finished without any errors. And there were no failing (unit)tests. Even better: there were no tests which had run at all!

“Unit Test Adapter threw exception: System.Reflection.ReflectionTypeLoadException: Unable to load one or more of the requested types. Retrieve the LoaderExceptions property for more information..” This error popped up at one of the testers of our project this morning. The unittests he selected worked fine on my machine, but all failed on his with the above message. After searching a bit we found that the only thing which was different between my testrunconfig and his was that he enabled code coverage for the assembly these unittests were pounding away at.

It took me a while, but in the end everything worked out and life’s good… Most important changes are I have my very own server now, containing all the general stuff like mail, music, development stuff and that kind of data. My workstation received a small update (I was able to upgrade based on the ‘old’ machine of a friend) and is now running Vista quite smoothly. To be honest, I haven’t found any major issues yet.

Last week I ran into a variable called @continue in the sourcecode of a project I’m reviewing. At first I had to think a bit before I knew what the @ was for. Of course I knew it’s an escape character when used in front of a string value. But when used in front of a variable name? In that case, it is an escape character also, but this time for the name of your variable.

As I posted earlier we had some trouble with upgrading the UIPAB to be used in a ASP.NET 2.0 Web Application Project. Eventually, we solved the problem and life was good. Almost a week ago I received a mail through my blog from someone looking for the solution. So here we go… We changed a few lines in the UIPAB WebFormViewManager. The problem was in determining the application path in the method ‘RedirectToNextView’.

I encountered his error for the first time today. A Web Application Project I’ve been working on for the last months started throwing this error today almost every time I wanted to debug the project. The assembly info changed from time to time, but the error was the same. Most of the time I could ‘repair’ it by closing the ASP.NET development server. But sometimes, even that didn’t work. After the first time it hit me today, I kept encountering this until I was fed up.

We all encountered them in the field somewhere along the way: pieces of code that are based on assumptions. There’s something fundamentally wrong in assuming when writing code. I can understand that, looking at the big picture, you sometimes have to make an assumption when developing software. Some things you just can’t know for sure. This might concern something simple like the resolution of the targeted audience. But most of the time these kinds of assumptions are based on experience or plain old common sense.

Scott Guthrie announced it January 23rd: version 1.0 of the ASP.NET AJAX extensions has been released. Good news … ! Scott also added a post containing Links to ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 resources, and answers to some common questions. A good read for people who would like to get started on AJAX. It catches some of the common problems you might encounter when you get started with the ASP.NET AJAX extensions. I liked the addition 2.

We’re working to upgrade our current ASP.NET 1.1 project to an ASP.NET 2.0 Web Application project (so that’s not the new Visual Studio 2005 website model). We had some basic minor migration issues, which have all been addressed and are currently solved. The only problem we have right now is with the UIP Application Block. There are several people online stating they’ve got UIPAB working in a .NET 2.0 project. Unfortunately, we haven’t got it working… yet 😉

Because of a new way of working here at the customer I’m located at, two virtual machines will be deployed to each developer’s machine. These VM’s will be run using VMware player. The thing is, the VM’s should be able to access the network and all the ’normal’ resources. Because of this, all the VM’s should have unique (computer)names. But they have to be traceable to the host machine. The wish the customer has at this point is to give the VM’s a computername based on the name of the machine the VM will be run on.

Together with a colleague, I’m giving basic .NET training for colleagues at this moment. Not at THIS moment exactly, because they’re doing exercises right now. But today is the second day of four days of training in total. Currently we already have two weird things popping up. Last week we encountered significant inaccuracy when calculating values using doubles. For instance, when adding 0.1 to a double (instantiated at 0) several times, the value wondered off.

MSDN 2 Library has been online for a while now. When you visit the ‘old’ MSDN library, you see the following text: “We’re upgrading the MSDN Library to a new publishing system which provides improved performance, better search relevance, XHTML compliance, URLs which don’t change after product releases, and more. During the next few months we’ll gradually move content over to the new site, although MSDN Search will work across both sites automatically.

Since not too long ago, I joined the MSDN Forums. The MSDN Forums is a big community where lots of knowledge is passed around. I recommend joining. Yesterday I ran into an interesting post. It’s about an overriding method that exactly seems to match the call, but doesn’t get called. In stead, the base method is called… Apparently this is because of override-resolution starting at the base working its way up, and a method declaration that matches more than you would think it does.

“Consolas is a monospaced font (like an old typewriter) and good for programmers setting code (its core purpose).” The above quote is taken from the Microsoft Design website, and specifically the part about ClearType fonts. It states the main reason for developing the Consolas Font Pack (download here) is to develop a better font for ‘programmers setting code’. Because of this, I primarily tested Consolas in Visual Studio, my editor of choice when writing code 😉

Having a database management class called DatabaseManager, I wanted to make a property for this DatabaseManager in a BaseForm. This way, every form inheriting from BaseForm would be able to use the same instance of the DatabaseManager. Because the DatabaseManager exposes functionality to interact with the database, I wanted it to be internal. The property for the DatabaseManager in the BaseForm would have to be internal and protected, so only derived forms would be able to use the property.

Recently I ran into the Microsoft Skills Assessment page. After singing in with your passport, you can take all kinds of skills assessments for various Microsoft products, from Visual Studio 2005 to Windows Storage Server 2003. Because I’m looking in to getting an MCPD certification, I was curious about how I would score without even preparing for a test. It’s pretty neat to be scoring 80% on the first test I took: Microsoft® Windows®-based Client Development with Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 and Microsoft Visual C#®.

BloggingAbout.NET was upgraded today! We are now CommunityServer 2.0 enabled. Because of this, I also changed the look and the description of my blog. Why not do everything at once 😉 One little extra piece of information: since the update it is no longer possible to reach a blog by typing in the url bloggingabout.net/username. This has been an extra service since blogginabout.net went to CommunityServer 1.1. Now, whit the upgrade to 2.

<p> </span><span lang="EN-GB">People tend to push difficult work back. I have to admit it can be more appealing to start out with a highly interesting or fun part of the work that needs to be done, in stead of doing the difficult stuff first. I&rsquo;ve done that myself in the past. But by doing that you enable <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy's_law">Mr. Murphy</a> to come and ruin your project. Especially when his visit occurs in the final phase of your project!

At our current project, we have an application which is deployed using No Touch Deployment. Because of some SEHException we got a few months back, we started our application in a separate thread using a launcher class which contains the Main() method for the application. Recently we added functionality to display HTML pages our application generates, so we added the ActiveX webbrowser (in AxSHDocVw.dll).<p> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; thread.ApartmentState = ApartmentState.STA;<br /> </font><font size="2"><br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; thread.

ScottGu blogged about IIS 7.0 on the MSDN .NET show. He and Bill Staples did an interview on IIS 7.0, which will ship with Windows Vista Beta 2. As Scott said: IIS 7.0 is a major, major update and improvement to the overall Microsoft web platform stack. See it. You can find it here.

Sometimes when you’re inside a method you would like to know which method called it. Or even which object. For instance when you write a TraceListener, it might be pretty cool to make the TraceListener smart enough to find out what object called him and from which method. The StackTrace object in .NET makes this pretty easy. Here’s a howto… First, we iterate through the stackframes that are available on the stack, looking for the one we need.

A few days ago we ran into the error in the subject of this post at my current project. Because it wasn’t easy finding any usefull hints pointing towards a solution, I’ll post ours here. We use reflection for flexible databinding, based on types and their attributes. One of the methods we wrote sets a value, passed in as an object, on a specific attribute of a specific class. The method knows nothing about the class and its properties.

I’ve been thinking: would there be any interest for a bloggingabout .net meeting among the bloggers? We are all into .NET and most of us seem to enjoy a good discussion. Maybe we can organize a platform for those discussions in real life in stead of through posts and comments. It could be about anything, but has to have a predefined agenda to make sure the meeting has a goal.

The exception mentioned in the title of this post was the one I encountered when using an ASP.NET control I had written. **How I encountered the exception: ** Because I develop several websites, there’s a lot of functionality I need more than once. A possible solution for this is to write a control gallery containing the functionality I needed. And putting them in a seperate assembly makes it easy to dstribute them freely in the near future ;).

Yesterday we ran into a bug in the Visual Studio 2005 IDE. To be precise: in Intellisense when writing a web.sitemap file. The Intellisense tells you the attribute which indicates whether a site map provider filters site map nodes based on a user’s role is called securityTrimmingEnabled. But when you use this attribute and run the website, you receive an error stating there is an Unrecognized attribute ‘securityTrimmingEnabled’. When you look the attribute up in the help, it is called SecurityTrimmingEnabled.

Wednesday and thursday I attended the first part of a BizTalk 2006 course at Class-A. Next week I’ll be finishing the course (tuesday and wednesday). I have to say that the trainer/coach who gives the course (Astrid Hackenberg) really knows what she’s talking about. At this point the 12 (?) people attending the course have not yet come up with a question she couldn’t answer. The first two days weren’t very difficult, I think because they were an introduction to the basics of BizTalk.

Last week a book I requested arrived: Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices by Robert C. Martin. I haven’t had the time to dive in to it, but my first impression is this book is a good one. Nice quote I ran into on the first page, as one of the principles agile development follows: Simplicity – The art of maximizing the amount of work not done.

Earlier I posted about reading a configfile when using no-touch deployment. Several people have contacted me to post the code, so here it is.

I ran in to something strange today… The ASP.NET 2.0 Menu control renders differently in a browser and in the W3 validator. Loading the page in a browser results in the usage of the correct attribute ‘vertical-align’ for the image which is used to indicate a menu has subitems. I checked this in IE and FireFox and both browsers rendered correct XHTML. When you copy the source of the rendered page and paste it in the validator-textbox at W3.

As a follow-up to my previous post.. Eventually a colleague of mine pointed me in the right direction. The System.Runtime.Remoting part of a configfile can also contain a tag. Setting it to “Off” made that I got the expected exception. Thanks Jasper!

We are using binary .NET remoting over http for a client-server application. At the server, we have implemented custom error handling which results in the Service Interface (the facade layer) to throw a decent exception, with lots of information. The problem we encounter now is that most of the time the client displays these exceptions as BinaryFormatter exceptions, in stead of the ApplicationException or the normal Exception we throw serverside.

When you use No-touch deployment, reading your config file might cause some problems. I experienced this when I received a ‘No message was deserialized prior to calling the DispatchChannelSink’ error last week. It took me quite some time before I found the problem, because of the strange error. After a while I thought about the way my app was starting: I started a separate thread which configured a remoting interface based on the config file: RemotingConfiguration.

Last week I played with VS2005 a little. My first overall impression is: sweet! Partial classes, nullable types, generics, master pages, new controls, great extra debug info… they all make our life a little easier. Still, some things are rather funny. For instance: why can’t you see webpage-events any more, but do you have to write them yourself combined with auto event wireup? On one hand, I could imagine that the use of (too many) page events is not the right thing to do, and that’s the reason they made it a bit harder.

If you would like to (for example) make sure all the jpegs on your site are displayed including a copyright text or something like that, you could use the example I posted before. But it would be easier to write a custom httpHandler. Here’s a small howto: Add a class to a WebApplication, and give it a decent name. Mine is customHandler. Have the class implement the IHttpHandler interface (found in the System.

<div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <font color="#0000ff">private string</font> theKey;</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <font color="#0000ff">private string</font> theValue;</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <font color="#0000ff">public string</font> Key</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; {</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <font color="#0000ff">get</font></font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; {</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <font color="#0000ff">return</font> theKey;</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; }</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; }</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <font color="#0000ff">public string</font> Value</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; {</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <font color="#0000ff">get</font></font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; {</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <font color="#0000ff">return</font> theValue;</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; }</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; }</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <font color="#0000ff">public</font> KeyValuePair(<font color="#0000ff">string</font> key, <font color="#0000ff">string</font> value)</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; {</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; theKey = key;</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; theValue = value;</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; }</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <font color="#0000ff">public int</font> CompareTo(<font color="#0000ff">object</font> obj)</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; {</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <font color="#0000ff">if</font> (obj == <font color="#0000ff">null</font>)</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; {</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <font color="#0000ff">return</font> 1;</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; }</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <font color="#0000ff">else</font></font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; {</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; KeyValuePair check = (KeyValuePair)obj;</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <font color="#0000ff">return</font> Value.

Normally, if you would like a singleton implementation of a class, you would go about it a little bit like this: <p> </font></font></font>The trouble here is that&nbsp;this implementation&nbsp;is not thread safe. The reason I post this is I recently ran into some code of&nbsp;an old colleague&nbsp;of mine (from my former employee)&nbsp;and some tests showed his singleton class was instantiated several times when the application was stressed with requests&nbsp;from the start, which caused unwanted lag in the application.

At my current project, I’m trying to bring some structure in our visual Studio projects. But I’m finding myself not sure about how far I should go. Maybe you should know I tend to be something of a purist. At the moment, we created a project with a single class, because it didn’t belong anywhere else. So we created a client specific ‘Common’ project and put the one file there.

I couldn’t come up with a decent title for this post, so I just spit out some keywords. We got an error today, stating the Controller of some object we wanted to put on CallContext needed to be serializable. Not thinking about the weird content of this error, we tried what would happen if we made the controller serializable. We now got a different error, which was even more weird:

I saw a presentation monday to explain the basics of .NET to some starting developers. In that presentation, I saw a piece of code design I don’t think should be showed. Ever. Especially to people who are about to enter the .NET world. In one cs-file, I saw a base class, two inheriting classes and then again two classes which inherited from on of the former mentioned classes. So there were 5 public classes in one file.

For my current project I’m trying to implement a factory pattern using remoting. This seems to be more difficult than I imagined. I’ve done the following: – Create an Interfaces project containing an IProductFactory and an IProduct. – Create a Class Library which implements Product and ProductFactory and is hosted in IIS through a web.config. – Create a project which makes a ProductFactory and uses this to create a product, all based on the interfaces.

Dennis blogged about it earlier today, and as soon as I saw that I couldn’t help myself: I had to try out ReSharper 2.0! Little did I know about the consequences… I love ReSharper 1. There are some small weird things, but overall I just love it, despite its little quirks. So 2.0 had to be even better! Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that way. Visual Studio now takes forever to start, the second project I opened made ReSharper crash hard (VS had to be restarted to get life back into it), assembly-parsing is still done in a modal dialog in stead of in the promised background process, it keeps annoying me with two windows I definitely don’t want to see and last but not least: the bar next to the scrollbar now displays an ugly 3D-attempted square.

Holding down the SHIFT key when you click a link in the Visual Studio help (using external help) opens the topic in a new tab in the help browser. So that’s a form of tabbed browsing. Sweet. And pretty helpful when you would like to keep open the previous help topic you were in…

Every now and again I see a piece of code where the author has used the conditional operator ? : . It might be my tidyness or it might take some getting used to, but I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all! My gut feeling says it’s nasty, because it’s not easy readable code. Lets look at an example. Imagine you have a property getter for the count of a collection.

If you’re interested in Visual Studio 2005, and especially ASP.NET 2.0, visit this site: https://beta.asp.net/ It’s an official Microsoft beta site running ASP.NET 2.0. Including forum, a control gallery, tutorials, starter kits and many more!

<LI class="MsoNormal"> <SPAN lang="EN-US">Which methods allocate which types of objects?</SPAN><br /> <LI class="MsoNormal"> <SPAN lang="EN-US">Which objects survive?</SPAN><br /> <LI class="MsoNormal"> <SPAN lang="EN-US">What is on the heap?</SPAN><br /> <LI class="MsoNormal"> <SPAN lang="EN-US">What keeps objects alive?</SPAN> </LI></UL> <br /> <LI class="MsoNormal"> <SPAN lang="EN-US">Additionally:</SPAN><br /> <UL type="circle"> <br /> <LI class="MsoNormal"> <SPAN lang="EN-US">The call graph feature lets you see who is calling whom how often.</SPAN><br /> <LI class="MsoNormal"> <SPAN lang="EN-US">Which methods, classes, modules get pulled in by whom</SPAN> </LI></UL> <br /> <LI class="MsoNormal"> <SPAN lang="EN-US">The tool can profile applications, services, and ASP</SPAN><SPAN lang="EN-US">.

This one is actually quite simple: Crystal Reports supports exporting to a PDF. Exporting can be done to disk, or to a stream. And a stream can be written to the Repsonse property of a page. And there you go 😉 // Variable declarationCrystalTest crystalTest;MemoryStream memoryStream;// Create a new instance of the report you want to display as a PDFcrystalTest = newCrystalTest();// TODO: Add some stuff here to fill the report with data// Export the report to a stream with the PDF formatmemoryStream = (MemoryStream)crystalTest.

My last message was about this strange error I received. Today I got it again, which led me to believe a hardware failure was not the reason. So after some more investigation I found out Index Server was to blaim. Taken from support.microsoft.com (click here for full article): If you run Index Server (Cisvc.exe), then Index Server may rescan the Temporary ASP.NET Files directory while it requests a Microsoft ASP.NET page.

I’ve been using skmmenu for quite a while now, and I think it’s great! But last Friday I was fooling around in Visual Studio, trying to make some fun stuff in ASP.NET, when I got a strange error about a reference. The information part: _ === Pre-bind state information === LOG: DisplayName = skmmenu (Partial) LOG: Appbase = file:///c:/inetpub/wwwroot/Site LOG: Initial PrivatePath = bin Calling assembly : (Unknown). ===_ LOG: Policy not being applied to reference at this time (private, custom, partial, or location-based assembly bind).

Although we’re not using SourceSafe at my current project (yet), I found out about a cool feature recently: Keyword Expansion. It enables you to get information about the revision, date, author and so on of the version of the file you are looking at inside the file itself. This way you can see version information in the comments of your code-file, without even starting SourceSafe. Taken from an MSDN entry about VS2k5:

The default ComboBox has some weird characteristics…We created our own control which derives from the ComboBox because we wanted to create a ComboBox where the user could type (parts of) the value he or she wants to select, but would not be able to type something that was not in the list. So that’s kind of a combination between the DropDownStyles DropDownand DropDownList. The basics weren’t that complicated, so we created the controls pretty fast.

You might want to be able to let your assembly show up in the Add Reference window in Visual Studio without the user having to browse for it. When you install your assembly in the GAC, it doesn’t automatically show up in the Add Reference window, because it doesn’t enumerate all assemblies in the GAC. Installing in the GAC only eliminates the need to copy assemblies localy when referencing them. Microsoft doesn’t recommend putting assemblies in the GAC by the way…

We received the above error for the resx file of a form in our project today. So we checked the existence of the resx file it concerned, and it was there. So maybe the file was corrupt? We deleted the file, removed it from the project and let Visual Studio re-create it by editing the form in the designer. Building the solution gave the same error… again the file was right where it was supposed to be.

Today we had a problem on the project I am working on. To be more precise: I had a problem, the other team members did not. Quick explanation: We have a server component which uses a web service for some of the functionality we need. Other functionality can be found in a different system which is reachable through IBM WebSphere MQ. The server component is available through remoting, the objects are hosted in IIS.

Have you ever made an install for your application with Visual Studio and sent it out into the world, only to get complaints of people that your software wouldn’t run? “Have you got the Microsoft .NET framework installed?” “The what?” “Go look in control panel, …… ……” “Ow, yeah, I got that” “Hmmm….” “So ehm….” “What version is it?” “Version? …. wait …. it’s 1.0” “Darn, download it and …”

We recently ran into the problem mentioned in the title of this post at work. Microsoft has a knowledgebase article (kbid 842706) for this bug. The hotfix is not to be distributed freely, but I already spoke to some people who have contacted Microsoft and got the fix for free. It will be e-mailed to you. As you can read in the comments of this post at dotnetjunkies, there are some people who found no more problems after installing hotfixes KB841870 and KB841767-X86… I think that’s weird (but I’m not arguing!

The following method returns the MD5 hash for any given string. For instance for a password. It might be of some assistance when you’re trying to validate user credentials but you don’t want to store the password readable in the database. For this method, you’ll need the following using statements: using System; using System.Text; using System.Security.Cryptography; [...] public string EncodePassword(string originalPassword) { //Declarations Byte[] originalBytes; Byte[] encodedBytes; MD5 md5; //Instantiate MD5CryptoServiceProvider, get bytes for original password and compute hash (encoded password) md5 = new MD5CryptoServiceProvider(); originalBytes = ASCIIEncoding.

As Ernst put it in the comments: we opened a can of worms here! In my previous post about Commenting your code, I stated you should not comment your code. Of course, this is nonsense. The reason I stated that, however, isn’t. And I didn’t only say that because I would get some attention 😉 Too many times, I see complete useless naming of variables, classes, methods and so on. Because of this incomprehensible naming the developer who wrote the code then has to place enormous amounts of comments between his code to keep it even remotely understandable, even to himself.

There are several ways to comment your code. There’s the style where you place comments on the same line as the code. This might get less readable, because there’s some horizontal scrolling involved when your statements get longer. An example: string s; //Declare string s = e.Message; //Assign exception message to string s Another way to place comments in your code is to place every comment on its own line. This is less readable when you get long methods, because your methods will get twice as long because of the comments!

The AdRotator .NET provides can be used to show a different image each time a page is visited. You could write a webpage which does this for you, but it’s probably not very useful. Although you need to change the XML file when changing the images to be showed when you use an AdRotator, but that’s not the issue here. Something .NET doesn’t deliver is a control to add your own text to an image when it is displayed on a webpage.

.NET does not give you possibilities to create animated GIFs through GDI+. At least 1.1 doesn’t, they might incorporate it in 2.0. But there are ways to make them! This solution is one I used myself, and I’m very pleased! //Variable declaration StringCollection stringCollection; MemoryStream memoryStream; BinaryWriter binaryWriter; Image image; Byte[] buf1; Byte[] buf2; Byte[] buf3; //Variable declaration stringCollection = a_StringCollection_containing_images; Response.ContentType = “Image/gif”; memoryStream = new MemoryStream(); buf2 = new Byte[19]; buf3 = new Byte[8]; buf2[0] = 33; //extension introducer buf2[1] = 255; //application extension buf2[2] = 11; //size of block buf2[3] = 78; //N buf2[4] = 69; //E buf2[5] = 84; //T buf2[6] = 83; //S buf2[7] = 67; //C buf2[8] = 65; //A buf2[9] = 80; //P buf2[10] = 69; //E buf2[11] = 50; //2 buf2[12] = 46; //.

The title isn’t descriptive enough for this post, but it will have to do. Today I was trying to get an ASP.NET application to allow me to define two different login levels. What I was trying to do was the following: There’s a main ASP.NET application, which is allowed to be accessed by anyone (<allow users="*"> at https://www.domain.com/) There’s a customer part where a login is required. (https://www.domain.com/customers/) There’s a maintenance part where a different login is required.

I stumbled upon a great workspace at GotDotNet: Visual Studio Core Community Powertoys. Here you can find some pretty neat powertoys for the Visual Studio IDE. For example: Go Back Visual Studio Add-In The Go Back Add-in provides a Navigate Backward functionality that is different than the normal Navigate Backward functionality. (Which does some neat things like close a file if you happened to have opened it while navigating forward)

At the Powertoys Weblog, Sara Ford posted about a very cool tool which is available at gotdotnet: Regex Builder. At gotdotnet it is described as follows: A tool for building and testing Regular Expressions. It allows you to manipulate the expression and your source text, and shows you a tree with all of the Matches, Groups, and Captures found in the text. I think this tool is easier to use for RegEx beginners than for instance The Regulator, because its GUI is pretty simple and there’s some standard information available at startup.

The last couple of years I’ve had small Visual Studio crashes, where Visual Studio stopped and asked me if I wanted to restart and reopen the current project. These crashes never meant a loss of work. Today I had the first BIG VS2K3 crash and this time it did cost me. A lot… I’m wondering why VS stopped responding completely. The network here at our client isn’t that fast this morning, but I can not imagine this being the problem.

Sure, I’m not the first one to blog about it. But I still didn’t want it to go unnoticed… Visual Studio .NET 2005 Beta 2 is out now. (Available for people with MSDN subscriptions) For those of you who don’t have an MSDN subscription, the Express Editions can give an idea of the power .NET 2.0 will bring to you. The first impressions of people around me are good. Better yet, those first impressions are VERY good.

Most of you probably know about the refactoring options Visual Studio 2005 will deliver to us. For those of you who would like to experience what refactoring, using optimization, partial code generation and more feels like without waiting for VS2K5, you should try JetBrains’ ReSharper. I installed it yesterday (after having downloaded it a few weeks ago) and it’s a great addition to the Visual Studio development environment. And having experienced this, I want VS2K5 to come out even sooner….

Dino Esposito wrote an excellent article on the new and improved DataGridView control in .NET 2.0 in the .NET magazine of April this year. It explains the possibilities the newly built gridcontrol gives you. Finally a decent grid control… Curious what .NET 2.0 will bring you? This is a must read!

If you’ve ever worked with Access XP or earlier in combination with SourceSafe 6 and are now using Access 2003, you might miss the SourceSafe capabilities in Access. Out of the box, Access 2003 did not support putting your Access stuff in Sourcesafe. Microsoft has now released an Access 2003 add-in for this! So, if you would like your Access 2003 program to be taken into source code control: it now can.

The hype surrounding Visual Studio 2005 almost makes you not notice all the other upcoming Microsoft developer products which will accompany VS2K5. One of these products is the new source code control system. This January at the ASP.NET 2.0 roadshow in Amsterdam, Scott Guthrie (leading engineer on the ASP.NET 2.0 team) described the new source code control system as ‘SourceSafe done right’. Microsoft will be delivering Team Foundation which not only will allow you to add source control to your solutions, but also makes it easier to track work items as their status is available at all time.

Brad Abrams posted the internal MS Coding guidelines on his blog earlier this year. Interesting reading stuff! I tested my own code against these guidelines. I think I would pass…. 😉

Questa posted a very usefull piece of code… It’s possible to convert a string representation of an enum back to an enum! private enum MyEnumeration { FooBar, Foo, Bar } ... MyEnum foo = MyEnum.Foo; foobar = foo.ToString(); MyEnum bar = (MyEnum)Enum.Parse(typeof(MyEnum), foobar); At the end of this code, the variable bar has the MyEnum value Foo, just the way it’s supposed to be…

Actually, the cause for this error is very small and simple. But because the error doesn’t clearly state what’s wrong and there’s not a lot to be found about this, I’ll post it here anyway… Otherwise, you might be looking for this for a while, while it’s so easy! When you are loading an assembly using reflection and you want to call a method from the class that’s in the loaded assembly, you might get the error Object does not match target type.

After promising you a post on using delegates to create events several times, I’m now using my break to post it. Because it will be a while if I wait until I can find the time… 😉 As I mentioned earlier a delegate can be seen as an interface for a method. Because you don’t know what the method that will handle an event on your user control will look like, delegates are a great way to provide your user control with events.

Stored Procedures rule, because they facilitate manipulating the dataset you get from a database or the way you are inserting or deleting data in a database without changing your application. Or your business layer for that matter. But you can’t always use stored procedures for the actions you would like your application to take. Or maybe your database doesn’t support stored procedures. In that case it’s back to queries for you!

All I wanted to do was check if my application was running in debug-mode or in release-mode. Searching MSDN library and Google (groups) both did not deliver the solution to me. I was about to let go when, out of the blue, a webpage showed up in my browser telling me the following: Visual Studio automatically generates a pre-processor directive called DEBUG which is linked to the mode you run your application in.

Delegates can be seen as interfaces for methods. Let’s look at an example of a delegate and what it really represents. delegate double Calculation(double one, double two); All this line of code really does, is tell the class it is in that there might be one or more methods with the given signature: a method returning a double and taking two doubles as parameters. You cannot call a method Calculation now, because it does not have a body, so it doesn’t have any functionality.

When using XmlSerializer in .NET on a self-made class, you might receive the FileNotFound exception at runtime upon instantiating the serializer. You don’t get enough info to debug this problem, and the filename of the file it didn’t find can’t explain much either, because the dll-name is different ‘garbage’ every time. XmlSerializerPreCompiler to the rescue Chris Sells has developed the XmlSerializerPreCompiler tool, which gives you more info about why instantiating an XmlSerializer for your class won’t fly.

To be honest, I’m glad I’m not on an ASP.NET project right now. I saw ASP.NET 2.0 in action last Friday, and I would go crazy if I would have to do an ASP.NET 1.1 project now. 2.0 and the new Visual Studio 2005 (Whidbey) take a lot of ‘standard work’ out of the developers’ hands, making development much faster. It begins with something as simple as leaving the cursor where it is while switching between views.

Currently I’m reading the Microsoft Press book“Developing web applications with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and C# .NET” by Jeff Webb. (This book is part of the very interesting “MCAD/MCSD Self-Paced Training Kit“.) I borrowed this book from the Microsoft Library here at my new job. They’ve got a very wide variety in books! Another plus to add to the list. Although I’d like to think I’ve mastered quite a part of the .

Azure .NET 5 Functions A lot has been said about .NET 5 support for Azure Functions. The most important news: it is now officially supported! 🥳 To enable running Azure Functions with .NET 5, the new Isolated Model enables Functions to run as an out-of-process language worker separate from the Azure Functions runtime. This way you’ll have full control over the Function’s dependencies on one hand, and new features like a middleware pipeline on the other.

Yesterday I remembered two Visual Studio options Sara Ford told about in a presentation of her I attended a while back. Changing them made me happy… 🙂 Zero-impact projects When I have to test something real quick, I tend to create a new project in Visual Studio and scribble some code to test whatever I want to test at that point. This causes my project directory to be filled with projects named WindowsFormsApplication14 or something like that.

Sometimes it’s the little things that make you love a new product just a bit more. I tend to close stuff I don’t use anymore fairly quickly. Sometimes I even close an Explorer window or an application right after I used it, only to find I need it again in a few moments… We all have our quirks, right 😉 While developing I regularly close all the documents I have open in Visual Studio, especially when I am done with a specific task.

While working with Visual Studio 2010, a new feature caught my eye that isn’t communicated (strongly) in the “What’s new” lists you can find online. As part of the Visual Studio 2010 supports multiple web.config files! Now we can create a separate web.config file for each configuration we have for our application. If you add a configuration through the configuration manager, you have the possibility to add a web.config file for the new configuration, too.

The EntLib Extensions to WSSFhave gotten more and more attention lately. There now is a (very positive) announcement about the extensions on the WSSF site, and there is a complete article on MSDNexplaining how to use the extensions. Check it out! Links: EntLib Extensions to WSSF: https://www.codeplex.com/EntLibExtensionsWSSF MSDN article: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc164250.aspx WSSF site: https://www.codeplex.com/servicefactory

Some of my (Dutch!) Avanade colleagues recently released ‘Entlib Extensions To WSSF’ to CodePlex. Quite a cool addition to the already rich Enterprise Library. Entlib Extensions to WSSF (Web Service Software Factory) is an extension that enables WSSF to easily integrate with Enterprise Library. This extension allows you to very easily handle cross cutting concerns in WCF services like Validation, Exception Handling and Logging without much programming. The extension accomplishes this by using the policy injection application block of enterprise library.

Yesterday I was working with one of our customers to fix an issue with an ASP.NET application throwing an error. That application threw the error on the first request coming in through Azure Front Door. When we sent a request to the original (back end) URL, the application worked fine and never threw the exception. 🤔 Time to investigate…! Finding the cause 🧐 First step of course was to find the cause of the exception.

The issue While trying to publish an NPM package to our artifacts registry in Azure DevOps, we got an error: npm failed with return code: 4294963248 The exit code for the task was -4048. Strange thing is that we have our build agents running on-prem, but running this task locally on our dev machines worked just fine. We found out pretty quickly that it was an authentication issue. Because of this we thought that the npm publish task of Azure DevOps might have issues with getting the authentication right for the registry.

In one of the projects I’m currently working on we’re using an ASP.NET Core Web API with an Angular front-end. We’re using ADAL.js as an Azure Active Directory Authentication Library and ng2-adal for integration with Angular. To get the type declarations for all these packages in TypeScript we use The Future of Declaration Files. Some time ago, our build server started acting up with the following message: Type 'Observable<void>' is not assignable to type 'Observable<User>' The error occured in ADAL.

Part of the system we are developing uses AngularJS. Because we had an increase in the use of our system, and more diverse configurations were using our system, we got some new bugs filed. One of these bugs was about a select list showing the binding in stead of the actual value for several options. Since this ‘worked on our machines’ it had to be connected to the client’s configuration. As soon as stuff (options in this case) started moving around, it got even prettier…

Intro In my current project we use Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates to help with deployments across multiple subscriptions and environments. One of the elements of the ARM template is adding a couple of Shared Access Policies to enable Read and Write on the queues we have in place. The policies have been defined on Service Bus level because they span multiple queues. Our ARM template functioned just fine, (automated) deployment was up & running and life was beautiful.

As the title states: I was unable to attach the remote debugger (for instance to an Azure Web App) after installing Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. I got an error with something about invalid memory access or something like that. The solution is simple: install Remote Tools for Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. Go to the webite, pick your machine’s architecture (the x86 install won’t run on a x64 machine) and click download.

Just ran into an exception when running both update-database and add-migration in the Package Manager Console for an EF Code First project. The Exception read: The type initializer for System.Data.Entity.Migrations.DbMigrationsConfiguration\'1 threw an exception. The cause? An invalid config file for the project I was trying to run the tools for. So: if you run into this exception, check your configs 😉

Last week I received my Intel Galileo board (windowsondevices.com) and I started ~playing with~ developing for it yesterday. I created a first test project, but it didn’t run. Visual Studio couldn’t find the Arduino header file, which was probably due to a missing NuGet package (the Galileo C++ SDK). I tried to save the project, because you need to before you can manage NuGet packages, but to no avail. Visual Studio served me a ‘The operation could not be completed’ error without any additional information.

A few minutes before my second session at the Dutch Techdays started I tried connecting to my Virtual Machine in Microsoft Azure through remote desktop. It didn’t connect… The RDP client tried to connect to the Virtual Machine, but nothing happened. So I rebooted the VM and tried connecting again, confident that this would solve the problem. It didn’t connect…. again. As I started stressing out a bit (the VM was the main character of my session) I thought of one last thing I could try.

When working with Visual Studio 2012 on our current project, the error ‘These files are not text files and cannot be opened in the comparison window.’ shows up every now and again. I’ve tried several things to solve this problem. Here’s the one that works: Close Visual Studio Navigate to your version of the c:\users\{username}\AppData\Local\Temp\ folder Delete the TFSTemp folder Restart Visual Studio and try again. You should be good to go!

I’ve been running into the error message on the right (“Unable to get property ‘style’ of undefined or null reference”) when opening an instance or a new tab of IE10 for the past couple of weeks. It didn’t matter what start page I used, since I tried about:blank, google.com and approximately a dozen more. I found out McAfee SiteAdvisor was the cause of this error pretty quick, but since the company I’m currently in doesn’t allow users to disable SiteAdvisor and I needed IE10 for some testing purposes, I had to find a different solution to the problem.

Just a quick little post today: I got the error “The Path ‘path’ is already mapped in workspace ‘workspace’” when I connected to a new Team Foundation Server and tried to map my workspace today. I had connected to a Team Foundation Services project a while back to get some shared code, but I already removed the workspace and the server binding. Even though Visual Studio didn’t see any other bindings, mapping my workspace to the same folder the previous TFS binding was mapped to served me this error.

A rather long title for this post, but that’s exactly what happened: when I opened an ASP.NET MVC 4 project with a cshtml view open, Visual Studio would crash with the error messages seen on the right. This would only occur if the first project I opened had a cshtml file open. When I opened another (type of) project first and then opened a project with a cshtml file open, the problem did not occur.

My Microsoft Touch Mouse stopped scrolling in Visual Studio on my Windows 8 machine some time ago. Because this kills productivity, I wanted to fix the problem. After trying some things I found that the problem only occurred when I ran Visual Studio as Administrator. Searching a bit further I found this bug to be added to Microsoft Connect. I found a workaround for the problem: Go to the location where you have Microsoft Mouse and Keyboard Center installed Open up the properties of ipoint.

I opened a solution in Visual Studio 2012 on my laptop running Windows 8, when I was presented with the error “The Web Application Project SomeWebProject is configured to use IIS. Unable to access the IIS metabase. You do not have sufficient privilege to access IIS web sites on your machine.” The user I was logged in with was a local administrator and was able to open up and use IIS Manager, but still I was presented with this error.

Just a quick one: if you have a textbox with a Calendar (extender) from the Ajax Control Toolkit and an associated PopupButtonID which is an image, the calendar won’t close when you click outside the popup. Use an input type=”image”or an ImageButton to solve this problem. Hope this helps.

When building an ASP application that generates Word documents, it was working fine on the local machine: A Windows XP installation with Office 2007. When we deployed it to windows 2008 (64 bit) and Word 2007 we saw that Documents.Open returned null. Other than this, there are no exceptions. The code that returned the error (simplified): Application app = new Application(); Document doc = app.Documents.Open(ref name); As it turns out, a 64 bit system stores temporary files in C:\Windows\Sys\WOW64\config\system\profile\Desktop folder.

When installing SQL Server 2008 R2 on a Windows XP (or, according to the comments, Windows 7) development machine that has been around for quite some time, I got an error stating an unhandled exception occured in the application (see image). The error showed up directly upon startup and read: An error occurred creating the configuration section handler for userSettings/Microsoft.SqlServer.Configuration.LandingPage.Properties.Settings: Could not load file or assembly ‘System, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089’ or one of its dependencies.

When installing the Windows Azure AppFabric Tools for Visual Studio (found here), you might get the error message shown at the top, stating that Windows Server AppFabric is installed and that it is not compatible with this release of Windows Azure AppFabric Developer Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 – June 2011 CTP. It asks to uninstall Windows Server AppFabric and rerun this setup if you want to install Windows Azure AppFabric Developer Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 – June 2011 CTP.

Saving a file from Silverlight using the SaveFileDialog, added in Silverlight 3, is easy. If you’re used to desktop development however, you might find yourself getting a SecurityException with the message ‘File operation not permitted. Access to path ‘xxx’ is denied.’. Here’s why: In desktop development, you’re used to getting a filename from a SaveFileDialog. Next, you start doing whatever you need to be doing to the file, based on the filename.

For a project I’ll probably dedicate a post on this blog to in the future, I needed a ZIP library for Silverlight. After asking around on twitter (@rickvdbosch) I was pointed towards the SharpZipLib port on Codeplex, found on https://slsharpziplib.codeplex.com. Basically what I wanted to do was replace a file inside the ZIP file with my version of that file. The file was located in a specific folder inside the ZIP and could be found by either iterating through the ZipEntries in the ZIP, or by getting it based on its name.

The above scenario gave me the well-known could not load file or assembly error message. The assembly that couldn’t be found was log4net, Version=1.2.10.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=692fbea5521e1304. Or one of its dependencies of course… The situation in which I was getting this error message: using the CrystalReportViewer in an ASP.NET application having the ASP.NET application hosted in IIS (the error did not occur on the ASP.NET Development Server) running on a 64 bit machine Log4net was available in the GAC, with the exact version and PublicKeyToken stated in the error message.

Although the feature has been around since ASP.NET 2.0, I still meet people that don’t know and/or use app_offline.htm. Do you know (and use) the feature…? When working on an ASP.NET web application, you should notify your visitors in a decent way that your application is down. There’s a nice default feature available for these purposes since ASP.NET 2.0. Somehow, however, this feature is not very well known and rarely used.

Because we were still using an old Visual Studio 2005 solution which included a Web Site project, it was time to upgrade. We upgraded our Visual Studio 2005 solution to Visual Studio 2010 (and .NET 4.0), converted the Web Site Project to a Web Application Project and then, of course, the AjaxControlToolkit had to follow. I downloaded the latest build from their Codeplex site and updated the references in the different projects.

When trying to pass some command line arguments to a Console Application, I got the following message: “The current project settings specify that the project will be debugged with specific security permissions. In this mode, command line arguments will not be passed to the executable. Do you want to continue debugging anyway?” (see image) I didn’t run in to this earlier, but yesterday it suddenly popped up. But I did change my zone security, so that might be of some influence… Apparently, this is because of the Debug in Zone settings you can find at the Security tab of your project properties.

I’ve had my current installation for a few months now, and I’ve used it for development purposes. Today I suddenly encountered an error when trying to add items to the Toolbox. Visual Studio 2008 simply disappeared… No errors, no warnings, it just went away. After some searching and a lot of trying, I found that deinstalling the PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 did the trick. I’m guessing that the installation of a service pack (for either Visual Studio or .

While developing a page that was to be used through an inline wrapper, I got an error: “Validation of viewstate MAC failed”. This error can usually be resolved by disabling event validation, viewstate encryptionor viewstate for the MAC. In my case these solutions did not resolve the issue. After some testing Response.Redirect appeared to be the cause. I changed the page so it doesn’t need the redirect any more, and the problem disappeared.

Because I stopped working at Avanadeand started my own company(this web site is under construction and in Dutch), I had to buy and install a new laptop. Everything went great and I was up and running in half a day. Or should I say half an evening… 😉 The next day I wanted to continue developing a web site we are working on. I needed one of the Ajax Control Toolkit controls, so I added it to my toolbar the way you should go about this (create a separate tab, right click, ‘choose items’, browse for the assembly).

We developed an ASP.NET page (A) to be wrapped in an existing PHP page (B) using an inline wrapper. After a few days in which both pages displayed nicely, our page (A) suddenly got displayed twice inside the existing page (B). And even weirder was that the postbacks of the first occurrence didn’t work, and the postbacks of the second were executed outside of the wrapper. We had changed some stuff the night before, so I finally checked the file line by line against an earlier version.

I installed iTunes 8 on our laptop, and connected an iPod to check if all worked accordingly. The iTunes was installed in Dutch, so the displayed information was also. Apparently, when you’re Dutch, you get some extra capacity on your iPod, free of charge!  iTunes displayed the free space on the iPod as being ‘Gratis’, the Dutch word for when you don’t have to pay for stuff. Because free in English means both ’not occupied’ and ‘for free’, the wrong one seems to have been translated into Dutch here…

When you want to implement a custom stsadm for SharePoint, all you realy have to do is implement the Microsoft.SharePoint.StsAdmin.ISPStsadmCommand interface. Because I develop on a machine with no SharePoint installed, I (only) copy the assemblies I need to develop locally. For the stsadm command I was working on recently (more on this in a future post) I only needed the Microsoft.SharePoint and Microsoft.Office.Server assemblies. Or at least I thought so…

After developing a custom Web Service to be hosted in SharePoint (based on this HowTo article on MSDN) and deploying it on a testing environment, I got some entries in the EventLog over there, stating: “Unable to connect publishing custom string handler for output caching. IIS Instance Id is ‘xxxxxxxxx’, url is ‘https://internalsharepointserver/somesubfolder/services.asmx“ The PublishingHttpModule trying to cache an unmanaged path seems to be the problem here. When enabled for a custom web application (such as my web service), it causes the eventlog entry each time certain requests like web service calls or static CSS files are made.

After extending a textbox with a NumberUpDownExtender, which comes with the AJAX Control Toolkit, I recieved the error “the number of fractional digits is out of range”. This happened when debugging my web application and using the extender. When using the web app in non-debug mode, nothing happened. This included the value change ’not happening'. Fortunately, this one was REALY easy, but it is not to be found on the web.

While developing a web application for a friend of mine, I ran into a Visual Studio error message I hadn’t seen before: Error connecting to undo manager of source file ‘D:DevelopmentSomeWeb ApplicationDefault.master.designer.cs’. The error occured whenever I tried to start the (web) application in debug mode. The application did start OK after the error message though. Starting the application without debugging didn’t cause the error. I closed the solution file I had opened, but that didn’t solve the issue.

The error I’m getting when setting up an OleDB connection to an Access database* via the Server Explorer in Visual Studio 2008 is ‘Format of the initialization string does not conform to specification starting at index 0’. The screen doesn’t display the way it should be displayed, as you can see in the screenshot on the left. There is a possible fix at svenM’s blog(it’s about checking the existence of a key in the registry called ‘ProgID’ and the default value, as you can read in this article), but this doesn’t seem to work for my situation.

Getting the ModalPopupExtender from the Ajax Control Toolkit to work (decently) in SharePoint was not exactly a walk in the park. With a default SharePoint installation, the modal popup is partly positioned ‘outside’ of the page (you only see the bottom right part of the popup in the top left corner of the browser). Postbacks are not executed or executed poorly and the page gets garbled up. A possible solution for the positioning of the popup is to set the X and Y property of the ModalPopupExtender.

In a quick AJAX demo I had to create today, I ran into a (somewhat cryptic) PageRequestManagerServerErrorException. I needed a simple form of the Cascading Dropdown{.}, one that doesn’t use a (web)service for its data, but gets it from a simple method. Here’s the setup, and the cause… Lets start with the exact error message: Microsoft JScript runtime error: Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManagerServerErrorException: An unknown error occurred while processing the request on the server.

Dennis already blogged about it: we had some problems with the availability of BloggingAbout since last night. The error was fixed this afternoon, so everything should be back to normal. If you’re experiencing any difficulties, please let me know through the contact form, or mail me at rick.van.den.bosch[at]bloggingabout.net.

A Dutch web site, made in SharePoint, uses a specific ActiveX. Only the name of that control is not really specific:   The MSDN forums haven’t been available the last couple of hours. The message isn’t so pretty:

Next to the message in the subject, one of the symptoms we encountered is that although the solution contains some test projects the ‘Create private accessor’ menu has disappeared. Also, selecting ‘Create unit tests…’ produces an error. And when editing a testrun config and selecting the ‘Code coverage’ option, the settings dialog simply closes, without any message. All these (and probably more) symptoms can occur because of a corrupt solution file.

Today I received a mail from Microsoft with an invitation for an Expert session. As you can see, sometimes even the experts at Microsoft let a glitch through…

Azure App Configuration is a powerful way to manage and store application configuration on a central location. Integrating it into for instance ASP.NET (Core) is pretty straightforward. This post gives you an introduction to Azure App Configuration and a simple example of how to integrate it in ASP.NET Core. Creating an Azure App Configuration 🆕 Of course there are several ways to create a specific resource in the Azure Portal. One of the simplest is to go to the portal, open up App Configuration and click the Add button.

I’ve done another session on Serverless, this time at the Techdays in The Netherlands. The TechDays were held October 12 & 13 in the Amsterdam RAI. My session was partially based on the “Dude, Where’s my Server?” talk I did earlier this year. The main focus for the talk this time: Azure Event Grid. Serverless, Azure Functions and Azure Event Grid My session was Going Serverless (2/2): Hands-on with Azure Event Grid.

Azure .NET 5 Functions A lot has been said about .NET 5 support for Azure Functions. The most important news: it is now officially supported! 🥳 To enable running Azure Functions with .NET 5, the new Isolated Model enables Functions to run as an out-of-process language worker separate from the Azure Functions runtime. This way you’ll have full control over the Function’s dependencies on one hand, and new features like a middleware pipeline on the other.

After my two previous posts Azure Static Web Apps: a first look and Azure Static Web Apps: quirks & gotchas, let’s have an updated look at ASWA in this post. Support for new languages 👩🏻‍💻 Announced at Microsoft Ignite this year, Blazor and C# APIs now supported in Azure Static Web Apps. This enables .NET developers to build and deploy full stack .NET applications with Static Web Apps. Blazor support Since ASWA is a static hosting option, which means we don’t have a server component*, the Blazor support for ASWA means support for Blazor WebAssembly.

After playing around with Azure Static Web Apps (ASWA) for some time I found some quirks and gotchas. Of course Static Web Apps are still in preview. Most of these are probably because of that fact. Despite that, it might still be interesting to know about them. That way if you run into any of them, you’ll at least know it’s not you … 😉 🏭 Creating an Azure Static Web App It all starts when you want to create an ASWA: searching for it in the list of resources in the Azure portal doesn’t show it.

Although the two have a lot in common, even including parts of the name, there are a few very clear differences between Static website hosting in Azure Storage and Static Web Apps. We’ll have a look at what those differences are and take a first look at the most recent of the two: Static Web Apps. Static website hosting in Azure Storage Static website hosting is a feature you can enable free of charge on a storage account.

My post Using Triggers & Bindings in Azure Functions V2 drew quite some attention over the past months. But there is a lot more to say about them. Time for a small follow up 😁 Covered previously ⌚ In my previous post we covered relative simple things like writing to blob storage and putting messages on a Service Bus. But the bindings for Azure Functions are so much more powerful.

Azure App Configuration is a powerful way to manage and store application configuration on a central location. Integrating it into for instance ASP.NET (Core) is pretty straightforward. This post gives you an introduction to Azure App Configuration and a simple example of how to integrate it in ASP.NET Core. Creating an Azure App Configuration 🆕 Of course there are several ways to create a specific resource in the Azure Portal. One of the simplest is to go to the portal, open up App Configuration and click the Add button.

Here’s a short post I didn’t want to hold from you. As you may already know I wrote a blogpost on Using Triggers & Bindings in Azure Functions. It handles quite a few nice possibilities of using triggers and bindings in Azure Functions (if I may say so myself… 😳). Fortunately, you learn something new every day. So I learned about Property Binding recently… Property Binding Like in the HttpTriggerReturnBinding example in the functions-triggers-bindings-example GitHub repository, let’s say we have a model RequestModel that we’re receiving through a POST on an HttpTriggered Function.

This post is part of a series on Managed Identity. For an introduction, see Managed Identity – Part I. For a post that shows you how to connect your application to different types of Azure resources using Managed Identity see Managed Identity – Part II. Stay tuned for future posts. Introduction Elaborating on Part I and Part II, this blog post will show you how to debug your Managed Identity enabled application locally.

Next week my colleague Daniël te Winkeland I will do a session at Techorama 2019 titled Getting sh*t done with Azure Functions (on AKS!). Or GSDwAF for short 🤓 We will talk about running Azure Functions in a Kubernetes deployment using Managed Identities and implementing Dependency Injection. And, even better, we’ll show you how! Who will we see Tuesday, October 1 • 3:00pm – 4:00pm • room 3? UPDATE That. Was.

This post is part of a series on Managed Identity. For an introduction, see Managed Identity – Part I. Stay tuned for future posts. Introduction Elaborating on Part I, this blog post will show you how to connect your application to different types of Azure resources using Managed Identity. To use the Managed Identity to actually connect to Azure Resources, you’re going to need the NuGet package Microsoft.Azure.Services.AppAuthentication. This package enables a service to authenticate to Azure services using the developer’s Azure Active Directory/ Microsoft account during development, and authenticate as itself (using OAuth 2.

This post is part of a series on Managed Identity. Stay tuned for future posts. Introduction Connecting your application to a resource like Storage or a SQL database used to involve a connection string. This isn’t very secure. These settings are available through the Azure portal. So they might get compromised. With the introduction of Azure Key Vault, we got a way of separating these secrets from our application configuration. We can store them in a safe, secure place.

Last week one of my colleagues had a question: Is there a performance penalty when you add multiple Azure Blob storage bindings in an Azure Function? Or is the connection only established when you access one of those blobs? Answering this grew into a way to have Dynamic output bindings in Azure Functions. This post elaborates on [blog/using-triggers-bindings-in-azure-functions-v2](Using Triggers & Bindings in Azure Functions V2). First try The idea was simple:

Some time ago Oscar van Tol and I started creating video content for the community. We call them #Betatalks and create them because of two very important reasons: We believe in sharing knowledge It’s. So. Much. Fun. 🤣 We talk about a lot of developer stuff: from “Microsoft Build 2019 Highlights” in episode 1 to “C# 8, What’s new?” in episode 4. The most recent #Betatalks is episode 5: “All about configuration in Azure”.

We all know the “Get a Mac” videos from Apple. And to be honest, they’re pretty funny sometimes. Most of the time… 😉 After a horrible start with the Seinfeld commercials (no offence Jerry), Microsoft might be on to something with their new campain “I’m a PC” (Seinfeld commercials to be found there, too). They got an actor that looks like the PC guy in the Get a Mac commercials and used him to introduce some new videos, telling us how many different kind of PC’s there are.

I installed iTunes 8 on our laptop, and connected an iPod to check if all worked accordingly. The iTunes was installed in Dutch, so the displayed information was also. Apparently, when you’re Dutch, you get some extra capacity on your iPod, free of charge!  iTunes displayed the free space on the iPod as being ‘Gratis’, the Dutch word for when you don’t have to pay for stuff. Because free in English means both ’not occupied’ and ‘for free’, the wrong one seems to have been translated into Dutch here…

This weekend we got back from a skiing trip we went on with the school my girlfriend works at. We had a great time! The kids were great, and so were the teachers and the Huski people who were there to teach the kids how to ski and snowboard. If they need an extra pair of hands next year, I hope they’ll consider me: I’d be happy to join them.{.}

A Dutch web site, made in SharePoint, uses a specific ActiveX. Only the name of that control is not really specific:   The MSDN forums haven’t been available the last couple of hours. The message isn’t so pretty:

Have a look at this articleat Worse Than Failure. That’s pretty funny. Or actually, pretty scary… 😐 Oh and, by the way, the Rick in the article is not me ;).

Today I received a mail from Microsoft with an invitation for an Expert session. As you can see, sometimes even the experts at Microsoft let a glitch through…

Read on my favourite forum today, in someone’s signature: In a perfect world… spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many men who have enlarged their penisses, taken Viagra and are looking for a new relationship.

A few weeks ago I ordered some teXXmo® IoT Buttons to play around with. I wanted to jump right in, but I had to look some stuff up to be able to get it up and running, connecting to the right WiFi and IoT Hub. Here’s a short recap of how to get started with the teXXmo® IoT Button. Starting the device There are several modes the button can work in: sending its payload, configuring the button and running webREPL.

Last week I received my Intel Galileo board (windowsondevices.com) and I started ~playing with~ developing for it yesterday. I created a first test project, but it didn’t run. Visual Studio couldn’t find the Arduino header file, which was probably due to a missing NuGet package (the Galileo C++ SDK). I tried to save the project, because you need to before you can manage NuGet packages, but to no avail. Visual Studio served me a ‘The operation could not be completed’ error without any additional information.

I’m not entirely sure about the article on Digitimes. One of the reasons is because it was posted on April first. Another reason is the way it is written. But if it turns out to be true, I’m going to have to get a Blu-Ray player for my Xbox 360… 😉 A quote from the article: Lite-On IT is developing built-in Blu-ray Disc-(BD) ROM drives for the Microsoft Xbox 360 game console, according to industry sources.

This weekend we got back from a skiing trip we went on with the school my girlfriend works at. We had a great time! The kids were great, and so were the teachers and the Huski people who were there to teach the kids how to ski and snowboard. If they need an extra pair of hands next year, I hope they’ll consider me: I’d be happy to join them.{.}

Until the Zune is available in Europe (when will that be, if ever…), I’m using an iPod. To be honest, I’m pretty satisfied with the product although iTunes still doesn’t feel like a solid piece of software… (understatement anyone?)After lots of hours playtime the original earphones of my iPod died, or at least the right one did. I went through the Apple store and found the ‘original’ earphones over there. Because of the annoying squeaky sound the cord makes in the inside of the lower part of the earphone, I wanted to try different ones.

Back in July, Barry Goffe (Director Windows Vista Ultimate) mentionedthat the missing Extras identified in January would be released at the end of the summer. I just got a bit curious about when these Extras would finally be released, so I visited windowsultimate.comagain. And there it was: DreamScene was releasedrecently (September 25th). And although I’m not quite sure if I’ll use this ever day, it’s kind of a cool feature. Isn’t it?

Last tuesday evening I ordered them, and just over an hour ago they came in: my new toys. I’m talking about my brandnew Canon EOS 400D!!! I started out with the kit lens (18-55), and I’ll get going with that, trying some stuff with this lens. And I just might order another in the future, but you have to start somewhere, right 😉 I immediately made some shots, and I’m glad I bought the camera already.

This post on using App Configuration using .NET Full Framework was based on a contribution by Steven Hack. My last post Azure App Configuration: an introduction received a lot of good feedback. And one of those pieces of feedback was a question if it’s also possible to use App Configuration if you’re using Full Framework. The short answer: yes, this is possible! For the slightly longer answer: keep reading 🤓

Azure App Configuration is a powerful way to manage and store application configuration on a central location. Integrating it into for instance ASP.NET (Core) is pretty straightforward. This post gives you an introduction to Azure App Configuration and a simple example of how to integrate it in ASP.NET Core. Creating an Azure App Configuration 🆕 Of course there are several ways to create a specific resource in the Azure Portal. One of the simplest is to go to the portal, open up App Configuration and click the Add button.

Probably there’s no need for me to say why .NET Core 3.0 is a big deal. There are enough articles on that. For a great write-up see Announcing .NET Core 3.0. From the inception of the .NET Core project, we’ve added around fifty thousand .NET Framework APIs to the platform. .NET Core 3.0 closes much of the remaining capability gap with .NET Framework 4.8. Introducing .NET 5 Next to adding this massive amount of .

Calling an API from a Logic App is pretty straightforward. You open up the Logic App Designer and add an HTTP Action. Specify the method to use and the URI you want to call and you’re good to go! When the API you want to call uses Cookie Authentication, this seems pretty straightforward too. After all, the HTTP Action has an Authentication property you can set. However, this property doesn’t include Cookie authentication.

One of the time consuming tasks we’re facing at my current assignment is inviting users to our Azure Active Directory tenant. Especially since we (used to) do this in the Azure Portal. We’re using Azure Active Directory B2B to which external users are invited as guests. We investigated using Microsoft Graph to automate this process. Since there’s several things to take into account when implementing this, here’s a quick HowTo.

While cleaning up the app registrations in my Azure Active Directory, I ran into two applications I couldn’t delete since the ‘Delete’ button is not clickable. I’ve had this happen for both application types: both Web app/API and Native. It’s actually pretty simple to enable removing these app registrations: make sure the application is not Multi-tenanted. * * Designates whether users in external organizations are allowed to grant your app access to data in their organization’s directory.

There are a couple of websites I manage that use Twitter Bootstrap*. These websites are fully responsive and work well on all devices. Or actually, almost all devices. The wrapping of columns in a container on a Windows Phone doesn’t work the way you’d want it out of the box. Windows Phone interprets device-width as the actual resolution size. Other mobile browsers use what the manufacturer (or browser vendor) has decided is the optimal viewport width.

When you have more than one Microsoft Account that you use regularly, you might recognize the scenario where your Visual Studio keeps you signed in to Visual Studio Online… with the wrong account. You keep getting messages that you don’t have access rights. Restarting Visual Studio, rebooting and even clearing all (Visual Studio) cookies doesn’t help. Here’s a quick fix: Open Visual Studio Open the Visual Studio web browser (under View, Other Windows, Web Browser) Go to Visual Studio Online Click sign out You should be good to go now!

Just a quickie today: when working with Twitter Bootstrap tabs, like I am in my ASP.NET MVC 4 project, you might want to add Next and Previous buttons on the tabs to create something of a Wizard. Here’sa step by step overview of how I did this: Add an ID to all the ListItem elements that are used for the tab navigation. For instance: <ul class="nav nav-tabs" id="myTab"> <li><a href="#example" data-toggle="tab" id="xmpl">Example</a></li> .

When debugging JavaScript in an ASP.NET MVC (4) application, it is not always enough to uncheck the ‘Disable script debugging’ checkboxes under ‘Tools’ – ‘Internet Options’ – ‘Advanced’ – ‘Browsing’. JavaScript inside a Razor view (a cshtml file) cannot be debugged from Visual Studio. To debug your JavaScript, move it to a separate .js file and link to that file from your Razor view. This way, breakpoints set in the JavaScript will be hit and you can debug from Visual Studio.

Problem: Developing a generic class that maps datasets, datatables and datarows from a legacy system to my domain model, I ran into an issue. I wanted to call a generic method with a runtime type. Lets say the method looked like this: public string DoSomething<T>(string param). Because I use reflection to iterate properties on a type, the type of the properties was dynamic and only known at runtime. I wanted to do something like this:

After installing Visual Studio 2012 Update 1, my Visual Studio stopped opening files in preview mode when I clicked them in the Solution Explorer. This setting seems to have changed with the installation of Update 1. To re-enable opening files clicked (once) in the Solution Explorer in Preview mode, go to ‘Tools’ – ‘Options’ – ‘Environment’ – ‘Tabs and Windows’. There, check the box under ‘Preview Tab’ – ‘Single-click opens files in the preview tab in:’ – ‘Solution Explorer (Alt + click to avoid previewing)’.

Twitter Bootstrap is a… “Sleek, intuitive, and powerful front-end framework for faster and easier web development.” One of the nice things in Bootstrap is you can use icons from Glyphicons. To use these, you can simply use this markup <i class="icon-fire"></i> to get a nice fire icon. Translating this into an ActionLink styled as a button in an MVC4 application would look something like the following: @Html.ActionLink("<i class="icon-fire"></i> Invent fire", "fire", new { @class = "btn" }) Unfortunately, this renders as follows:

My Microsoft Touch Mouse stopped scrolling in Visual Studio on my Windows 8 machine some time ago. Because this kills productivity, I wanted to fix the problem. After trying some things I found that the problem only occurred when I ran Visual Studio as Administrator. Searching a bit further I found this bug to be added to Microsoft Connect. I found a workaround for the problem: Go to the location where you have Microsoft Mouse and Keyboard Center installed Open up the properties of ipoint.

In my previous post about being unable to access the iis metabase I wanted my Visual Studio to ‘Run as Administrator’ on my Windows 8 machine. I only managed to get this working for the pinned taskbar icon and not for items in the jumplist or for items you open by double clicking them. The solution to check the box ‘Run as Administrator’ on the compatibility tab of the file properties for devenv.

When building an ASP application that generates Word documents, it was working fine on the local machine: A Windows XP installation with Office 2007. When we deployed it to windows 2008 (64 bit) and Word 2007 we saw that Documents.Open returned null. Other than this, there are no exceptions. The code that returned the error (simplified): Application app = new Application(); Document doc = app.Documents.Open(ref name); As it turns out, a 64 bit system stores temporary files in C:\Windows\Sys\WOW64\config\system\profile\Desktop folder.

Saving a file from Silverlight using the SaveFileDialog, added in Silverlight 3, is easy. If you’re used to desktop development however, you might find yourself getting a SecurityException with the message ‘File operation not permitted. Access to path ‘xxx’ is denied.’. Here’s why: In desktop development, you’re used to getting a filename from a SaveFileDialog. Next, you start doing whatever you need to be doing to the file, based on the filename.

Here’s a quick Visual Studio tip for you… I frequently search for a specific text in my solution because I need to do something in all places where that text occurs. Today I found out how you can open all the files that are mentioned in the Find Results window. Search for the text you’re looking for. In my case this is ITest*. Open up the Search Results window and select all the records where the text was found.

Just a small post to start the new year… and let it be a good one! When opening a XAML document in Visual Studio, it opens in split view by default. This might become annoying when you have a large XAML document, because all the content needs to be rendered before you can get some work done. Here’s how you can have Visual Studio open XAML documents in code view:

Yesterday I remembered two Visual Studio options Sara Ford told about in a presentation of her I attended a while back. Changing them made me happy… 🙂 Zero-impact projects When I have to test something real quick, I tend to create a new project in Visual Studio and scribble some code to test whatever I want to test at that point. This causes my project directory to be filled with projects named WindowsFormsApplication14 or something like that.

When installing Windows Vista on a MacBook Pro, the default driver for the Wireless Network Adapter doesn’t function properly. To get the Wireless Network Adapter to work, first install the Boot Camp Services by inserting your OS X DVD and running the setup. Next you need to install the Boot Camp 2.1 update. You can download that one by running Apple Software Update, which is installed as part of the Boot Camp Services.

When you use a MasterPage to define the design of your website, you might come across the problem that there is no body element in a web content form. This can be a problem when you want to add an onload script to a specific page. You could of course add the onload on the MasterPage, but you might not want the script to run on every page. There are several workarounds to fix this ‘problem’.

One of the posts that is being read quite frequently over here is HOWTO: Encode a password using MD5 in C# (or: howto calculate the MD5 hash for a string). One of the (many) reactions to that post was from one Simucal, stating: Also, to the original poster, Rick van den Bosch… shame on you for using ASCIIEncoding.Default.GetBytes(). You do realize that would seriously restrict the usefulness of your method to working only in languages that ASCII has the character sets for, right?

When roaming the MSDN forumsfor unanswered questions for me to answer, I come across a lot of questions about any of the following: Intellisense acting weird Intellisense not showing up at all Menu items that are all garbled up Missing buttons on toolbars Complete toolbars missing Keyboard shortcuts acting weird Keyboard shortcuts not working at all … In most cases, resetting the Visual Studio settings to the default settings using devenv /resetsettingssolves any problems that are in that list.

When you dynamically generate a LinkButton in code that will be placed inside an UpdatePanel, you’ll experience that the Click event for the LinkButton results in a full postback in stead of the UpdatePanel being triggered. There’s a rather simpel solution to this problem… First, let’s take a look at the scenario. Consider this HTML: There’s a literal control outside of the UpdatePanel. There’s a second literal control inside the UpdatePanel.

Getting the ModalPopupExtender from the Ajax Control Toolkit to work (decently) in SharePoint was not exactly a walk in the park. With a default SharePoint installation, the modal popup is partly positioned ‘outside’ of the page (you only see the bottom right part of the popup in the top left corner of the browser). Postbacks are not executed or executed poorly and the page gets garbled up. A possible solution for the positioning of the popup is to set the X and Y property of the ModalPopupExtender.

One of my colleagues pointed out the new Fine-grained password policy feature in Windows Server 2008. As you can see in this postat The Sean Blog, some values have to be entered in the I8 format, which isn’t very user friendly. Because of that, he asked me if I could whip up a tool that converts days, hours, minutes and seconds to the I8 format. I quickly put together this small tool for him.

In a quick AJAX demo I had to create today, I ran into a (somewhat cryptic) PageRequestManagerServerErrorException. I needed a simple form of the Cascading Dropdown{.}, one that doesn’t use a (web)service for its data, but gets it from a simple method. Here’s the setup, and the cause… Lets start with the exact error message: Microsoft JScript runtime error: Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManagerServerErrorException: An unknown error occurred while processing the request on the server.

There are several steps to creating a custom web service to be hosted in SharePoint. The MSDN library{.} has a walkthrough on creating a custom web service{.}. After having followed this walkthrough thoroughly, I though my web service was good to go. Unfortunately all I saw was an error: “Could not load type ‘ThisAndThat’ from assembly ‘SoAndSo’”. Just as I was about to search for an answer somewhere online, I remembered that the MSDN library features the Community content for little over a year now{.

The MasterPage doesn’t have a property for setting the Theme at design time. Despite this, I wanted to set the Theme for a MasterPage, so I decided to set it from code. I was aware of the possibility to set the Theme through the web.config, but that wasn’t the way I wanted to set it. One of the reasons being it would result in the theme being applied to the entire website.

Thanks to the MSDN forums{.} (and specifically one Hua Chen), I found a way{.} to disable specific code analysis rules for a team build. In this post I’ll combine the steps I followed earlier with the description given at the MSDN forum. I’ll start out with some steps earlier on in the process: how to quickly get a list of all the code analysis rules you want to disable (without having to type it all yourself 😉 ).

After searching a bit, I found a way to disable specific Code Analysis rules for a team build. Or at least I thought so… The RunCodeAnalysis tag in my build.proj file is set to ‘Always’ to override the individual project settings, and I added the ‘CodeAnalysisRules’ tag to exclude some rules as a test. (See below for a part of the build.proj file.) I ran a few builds, but the tag doesn’t seem to do what is supposed to.

“Unit Test Adapter threw exception: System.Reflection.ReflectionTypeLoadException: Unable to load one or more of the requested types. Retrieve the LoaderExceptions property for more information..” This error popped up at one of the testers of our project this morning. The unittests he selected worked fine on my machine, but all failed on his with the above message. After searching a bit we found that the only thing which was different between my testrunconfig and his was that he enabled code coverage for the assembly these unittests were pounding away at.

We all encountered them in the field somewhere along the way: pieces of code that are based on assumptions. There’s something fundamentally wrong in assuming when writing code. I can understand that, looking at the big picture, you sometimes have to make an assumption when developing software. Some things you just can’t know for sure. This might concern something simple like the resolution of the targeted audience. But most of the time these kinds of assumptions are based on experience or plain old common sense.

Sometimes when you’re inside a method you would like to know which method called it. Or even which object. For instance when you write a TraceListener, it might be pretty cool to make the TraceListener smart enough to find out what object called him and from which method. The StackTrace object in .NET makes this pretty easy. Here’s a howto… First, we iterate through the stackframes that are available on the stack, looking for the one we need.

Earlier I posted about reading a configfile when using no-touch deployment. Several people have contacted me to post the code, so here it is.

If you would like to (for example) make sure all the jpegs on your site are displayed including a copyright text or something like that, you could use the example I posted before. But it would be easier to write a custom httpHandler. Here’s a small howto: Add a class to a WebApplication, and give it a decent name. Mine is customHandler. Have the class implement the IHttpHandler interface (found in the System.

<div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <font color="#0000ff">private string</font> theKey;</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <font color="#0000ff">private string</font> theValue;</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <font color="#0000ff">public string</font> Key</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; {</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <font color="#0000ff">get</font></font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; {</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <font color="#0000ff">return</font> theKey;</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; }</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; }</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <font color="#0000ff">public string</font> Value</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; {</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <font color="#0000ff">get</font></font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; {</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <font color="#0000ff">return</font> theValue;</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; }</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; }</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <font color="#0000ff">public</font> KeyValuePair(<font color="#0000ff">string</font> key, <font color="#0000ff">string</font> value)</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; {</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; theKey = key;</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; theValue = value;</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; }</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <font color="#0000ff">public int</font> CompareTo(<font color="#0000ff">object</font> obj)</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; {</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <font color="#0000ff">if</font> (obj == <font color="#0000ff">null</font>)</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; {</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <font color="#0000ff">return</font> 1;</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; }</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <font color="#0000ff">else</font></font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; {</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; KeyValuePair check = (KeyValuePair)obj;</font> </div> <div> <font face="Courier New">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <font color="#0000ff">return</font> Value.

Normally, if you would like a singleton implementation of a class, you would go about it a little bit like this: <p> </font></font></font>The trouble here is that&nbsp;this implementation&nbsp;is not thread safe. The reason I post this is I recently ran into some code of&nbsp;an old colleague&nbsp;of mine (from my former employee)&nbsp;and some tests showed his singleton class was instantiated several times when the application was stressed with requests&nbsp;from the start, which caused unwanted lag in the application.

This one is actually quite simple: Crystal Reports supports exporting to a PDF. Exporting can be done to disk, or to a stream. And a stream can be written to the Repsonse property of a page. And there you go 😉 // Variable declarationCrystalTest crystalTest;MemoryStream memoryStream;// Create a new instance of the report you want to display as a PDFcrystalTest = newCrystalTest();// TODO: Add some stuff here to fill the report with data// Export the report to a stream with the PDF formatmemoryStream = (MemoryStream)crystalTest.

You might want to be able to let your assembly show up in the Add Reference window in Visual Studio without the user having to browse for it. When you install your assembly in the GAC, it doesn’t automatically show up in the Add Reference window, because it doesn’t enumerate all assemblies in the GAC. Installing in the GAC only eliminates the need to copy assemblies localy when referencing them. Microsoft doesn’t recommend putting assemblies in the GAC by the way…

The following method returns the MD5 hash for any given string. For instance for a password. It might be of some assistance when you’re trying to validate user credentials but you don’t want to store the password readable in the database. For this method, you’ll need the following using statements: using System; using System.Text; using System.Security.Cryptography; [...] public string EncodePassword(string originalPassword) { //Declarations Byte[] originalBytes; Byte[] encodedBytes; MD5 md5; //Instantiate MD5CryptoServiceProvider, get bytes for original password and compute hash (encoded password) md5 = new MD5CryptoServiceProvider(); originalBytes = ASCIIEncoding.

The AdRotator .NET provides can be used to show a different image each time a page is visited. You could write a webpage which does this for you, but it’s probably not very useful. Although you need to change the XML file when changing the images to be showed when you use an AdRotator, but that’s not the issue here. Something .NET doesn’t deliver is a control to add your own text to an image when it is displayed on a webpage.

.NET does not give you possibilities to create animated GIFs through GDI+. At least 1.1 doesn’t, they might incorporate it in 2.0. But there are ways to make them! This solution is one I used myself, and I’m very pleased! //Variable declaration StringCollection stringCollection; MemoryStream memoryStream; BinaryWriter binaryWriter; Image image; Byte[] buf1; Byte[] buf2; Byte[] buf3; //Variable declaration stringCollection = a_StringCollection_containing_images; Response.ContentType = “Image/gif”; memoryStream = new MemoryStream(); buf2 = new Byte[19]; buf3 = new Byte[8]; buf2[0] = 33; //extension introducer buf2[1] = 255; //application extension buf2[2] = 11; //size of block buf2[3] = 78; //N buf2[4] = 69; //E buf2[5] = 84; //T buf2[6] = 83; //S buf2[7] = 67; //C buf2[8] = 65; //A buf2[9] = 80; //P buf2[10] = 69; //E buf2[11] = 50; //2 buf2[12] = 46; //.

As I wrote earlier I presented at the 2014 Dutch Techdays. The session content is now available online. Find it here (Dutch): Session information + PDF of my presentation My presentation on SlideShare My session on Channel 9

This Thursday December 6th I’ll be speaking at Azure Thursday - December 2018. The last of the regular Azure Thursdays this year. This is a group for all developers, consultants, architects and IT professionals who want to dive into for them unknown topics related to Azure. Azure Thursday are happening every first Thursday of the month and the format will be different every evening. From hand-on workshops to technical talks.

A few weeks ago I ordered some teXXmo® IoT Buttons to play around with. I wanted to jump right in, but I had to look some stuff up to be able to get it up and running, connecting to the right WiFi and IoT Hub. Here’s a short recap of how to get started with the teXXmo® IoT Button. Starting the device There are several modes the button can work in: sending its payload, configuring the button and running webREPL.

Last week I received my Intel Galileo board (windowsondevices.com) and I started ~playing with~ developing for it yesterday. I created a first test project, but it didn’t run. Visual Studio couldn’t find the Arduino header file, which was probably due to a missing NuGet package (the Galileo C++ SDK). I tried to save the project, because you need to before you can manage NuGet packages, but to no avail. Visual Studio served me a ‘The operation could not be completed’ error without any additional information.

I’ve been running into the error message on the right (“Unable to get property ‘style’ of undefined or null reference”) when opening an instance or a new tab of IE10 for the past couple of weeks. It didn’t matter what start page I used, since I tried about:blank, google.com and approximately a dozen more. I found out McAfee SiteAdvisor was the cause of this error pretty quick, but since the company I’m currently in doesn’t allow users to disable SiteAdvisor and I needed IE10 for some testing purposes, I had to find a different solution to the problem.

When debugging JavaScript in an ASP.NET MVC (4) application, it is not always enough to uncheck the ‘Disable script debugging’ checkboxes under ‘Tools’ – ‘Internet Options’ – ‘Advanced’ – ‘Browsing’. JavaScript inside a Razor view (a cshtml file) cannot be debugged from Visual Studio. To debug your JavaScript, move it to a separate .js file and link to that file from your Razor view. This way, breakpoints set in the JavaScript will be hit and you can debug from Visual Studio.

Just a quickie today: when working with Twitter Bootstrap tabs, like I am in my ASP.NET MVC 4 project, you might want to add Next and Previous buttons on the tabs to create something of a Wizard. Here’sa step by step overview of how I did this: Add an ID to all the ListItem elements that are used for the tab navigation. For instance: <ul class="nav nav-tabs" id="myTab"> <li><a href="#example" data-toggle="tab" id="xmpl">Example</a></li> .

I am humbled and very proud to be awarded a Microsoft Azure MVP award today. A big “thank you” to all who helped me get here. 🙏🏻 A special thank you to my employer Betabit who supports me putting lots of effort into the community and helps organize or sponsor events. It’s strange but very cool to see social media ’explode’ (at least according to my standards) after my announcement. But I’m still just Rick, a guy who loves to do fun things with code, in the cloud.

We’re hosting a VS2019 Launch Event at the Betabit The Hague office. Join us for some Visual Studio 2019 goodness! And maybe even some swag… ? Join us on April 2 for the launch of Visual Studio 2019. Learn about how Visual Studio 2019 is more productive, modern, and innovative, participate in live Q&As, and be the first to take the latest version for a spin. https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs2019-launch/ The agenda is as follows:

The people over at Microsoft have been working hard and have delivered a lot of stuff. That makes for a nice start after the holidays! So there’s a lot of cool stuff available to play with. I created some simple and easy to remember links for all of these goodies. Feel free to use and distribute these 🙂 Links to the goodies! The spec for .NET Standard 2.0 is complete (https://bit.

As the title states: I was unable to attach the remote debugger (for instance to an Azure Web App) after installing Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. I got an error with something about invalid memory access or something like that. The solution is simple: install Remote Tools for Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. Go to the webite, pick your machine’s architecture (the x86 install won’t run on a x64 machine) and click download.

As I wrote earlier I presented at the 2014 Dutch Techdays. The session content is now available online. Find it here (Dutch): Session information + PDF of my presentation My presentation on SlideShare My session on Channel 9

The past couple of days I’ve been experiencing some issues with the context menu for my Solution Explorer in Visual Studio 2010. It contained scrollbars even when there was sufficient space on the screen to show the menu without scrolling. Searching for that issue I immediately found this blog post on The Visual Studio Blog. Taken from that post: We’re pleased to announce that there are patches available for Visual Studio and Windows Presentation Foundation that fix this problem.

I just read this great article by Mark Voermans: Expression Web SuperPreview: Look how your site renders in various Browsers. I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve been waiting for this for a long, LONG time. I’ll give it a go this afternoon and let you know what I think… Update: This first beta version only allows you to preview your site in different versions of Internet Explorer. We will have to wait for the full feature set until the final release of this tool…

Of course, twitter has been around for quite a while. The popularity of the service is booming, because it is becoming more and more mainstream now. I myself joined somewhere in the end of 2007, when it was still underground … 😜 Do you (actively) use twitter? And if so, what’s your account, do you use it on your desktop / laptop / mobile device … and which client(s) do you use?

The article about our company that was placed in two Dutch magazines can now be found on our website (and of course, this one is in Dutch).

I just read an interesting article on Bertrand Le Roy’s blog. The most important information: It so happens that the menu control is making a bad assumption on what the default value for z-index should be. We debated this at length with the IE team, but it became clear as we did so that they were right and that we were wrong. We had to fix that. So here it is, the patch for menu is out and you can apply it to build IE8-compatible ASP.

Our company has been mentioned in an article at the (pretty well-known) blog www.frankwatching.com. Read it over here (Dutch)

Scott Guthrie posted about a cool new ASP.NET server control: Chart. It can be used for free with ASP.NET 3.5 to enable rich browser-based charting scenarios. Read more over here: https://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/11/24/new-asp-net-charting-control-lt-asp-chart-runat-quot-server-quot-gt.aspx

Our company has (the first draft of) a new website online. We’re still working on the content, but the design is now online. Check it out @ www.mediagarde.nl (Dutch).

We all know the “Get a Mac” videos from Apple. And to be honest, they’re pretty funny sometimes. Most of the time… 😉 After a horrible start with the Seinfeld commercials (no offence Jerry), Microsoft might be on to something with their new campain “I’m a PC” (Seinfeld commercials to be found there, too). They got an actor that looks like the PC guy in the Get a Mac commercials and used him to introduce some new videos, telling us how many different kind of PC’s there are.

StyleCop version 4.3 was released last tuesday. A short summary of what version 4.3 brings us:  Various bugfixes, including fixes for VS integration issues Rules documentation is included and integrated into VS “Show Error Help” New rules, see blogpostfor the rules Branding change from Source Analysis to StyleCop **Links ** StyleCop blog: https://blogs.msdn.com/sourceanalysis/ Release announcement on the StyleCop blog: https://blogs.msdn.com/sourceanalysis/archive/2008/08/19/stylecop-4-3-is-released.aspx StyleCop 4.3 download: https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=sourceanalysis&ReleaseId=1425

Taken from the SysInternals website: The SysInternals web site was created in 1996 by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell to host their advanced system utilities and technical information. Microsoft acquired Sysinternals in July, 2006. Whether you’re an IT Pro or a developer, you’ll find Sysinternals utilities to help you manage, troubleshoot and diagnose your Windows systems and applications. One of the must-have SysInternals tools for a developer is DebugView.

Earlier this week the Microsoft Research Faculty Summitwas held. On 10was on the scene, and has a nice movie about the Sphere. For the entire article @ on 10, have a look over here: https://on10.net/blogs/laura/Sphere-multi-touch-computing/. This is just another sign that the best is yet to come… Good times 🙂

Rob Enderle, columnist at TechNewsWorld, gives a new/changed view on Microsoft, Google, Apple and Linux in his article The Fall of Google, the Rebirth of Microsoft and the Changing Face of Apple and Linux. A nice read… One of the cool quotes from the article: …but it becomes risky for anyone to depend on the other guy screwing up as they typically don’t forever.

Avanade Netherlands released a new website[1]. Unlike the previous one, this one is here to stay 😉 The website holds information about events, career possibilities, publications, videos, links to blogs of Avanade Netherlands employees and more… Have a look! It is in Dutch, by the way. [1] https://www.werkenbijavanade.nl (Dutch)

I only had time for a quickie: The page containing all my online profiles has been updated… When interested, have a look at them{.null}.

The EntLib Extensions to WSSFhave gotten more and more attention lately. There now is a (very positive) announcement about the extensions on the WSSF site, and there is a complete article on MSDNexplaining how to use the extensions. Check it out! Links: EntLib Extensions to WSSF: https://www.codeplex.com/EntLibExtensionsWSSF MSDN article: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc164250.aspx WSSF site: https://www.codeplex.com/servicefactory

It’s here: the Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit. This first release contains two tools, both supported on WSS 3.0 and SharePoint Server 2007. Batch Site Manager From the “Move, Lock, and Delete Site Collections” page on Applications Management you can schedule bulk operations against site collections in the farm—including moving site collections between content databases (!!). stsadm extension: UpdateAlert This command will refresh all alert URLs in a specific site collection, which is extremely important should you change the URL of a web application or after an upgrade.

This morning I found a mail in my inbox telling me I was invited to Live Mesh. That’s a nice start of the weekend, so thanks Jan! The Live Desktop user interface looks pretty cool, and it almost feels like a real desktop. But that part of Live Mesh is pretty much like Live SkyDrive: a big online disk for you to put stuff on. Lots of stuff. 5 Gigabytes worth of stuf… 😉

It’s been a while because I’ve been so busy lately, but the next (technical) step for my personal website is now online. When browsing to https://rickvandenbosch.net/blog/, the content of my blog here is displayed sort of mirrored over there. I used an OpenSource RSS component to read my private rss feed from blogging about, and display it from there. There’s still a lot of work to be done (like styling!), but I’ll get there.

Some of my (Dutch!) Avanade colleagues recently released ‘Entlib Extensions To WSSF’ to CodePlex. Quite a cool addition to the already rich Enterprise Library. Entlib Extensions to WSSF (Web Service Software Factory) is an extension that enables WSSF to easily integrate with Enterprise Library. This extension allows you to very easily handle cross cutting concerns in WCF services like Validation, Exception Handling and Logging without much programming. The extension accomplishes this by using the policy injection application block of enterprise library.

I’m not entirely sure about the article on Digitimes. One of the reasons is because it was posted on April first. Another reason is the way it is written. But if it turns out to be true, I’m going to have to get a Blu-Ray player for my Xbox 360… 😉 A quote from the article: Lite-On IT is developing built-in Blu-ray Disc-(BD) ROM drives for the Microsoft Xbox 360 game console, according to industry sources.

Getting the ModalPopupExtender from the Ajax Control Toolkit to work (decently) in SharePoint was not exactly a walk in the park. With a default SharePoint installation, the modal popup is partly positioned ‘outside’ of the page (you only see the bottom right part of the popup in the top left corner of the browser). Postbacks are not executed or executed poorly and the page gets garbled up. A possible solution for the positioning of the popup is to set the X and Y property of the ModalPopupExtender.

It is now possible to get updates from this blog through e-mail (nice feature, feedburner{.}). Updates will be sent once a day, but only when new items are available. Curious? Subscribe here!

One of my colleagues pointed out the new Fine-grained password policy feature in Windows Server 2008. As you can see in this postat The Sean Blog, some values have to be entered in the I8 format, which isn’t very user friendly. Because of that, he asked me if I could whip up a tool that converts days, hours, minutes and seconds to the I8 format. I quickly put together this small tool for him.

As a reaction to this articleat Peter Ritchie’s MVP Blog, I thought I’d give my two cents on having a single exit point for methods. Here we go… When writing code, I always create only one exit point except for the occasional throwing of an exception. Most important for me is to always know where your code (really) stops. In case of long and complex methods there’s a chance you’re going to miss a return statement when scanning through a method.

One of the most annoying things in Visual Studio (to me) was the fact that complete solutions (solution folders, projects, regulare folder) would be expanded upon opening. And with big solutions, that isn’t too much fun. There are macros available online, but the ones i found were pretty slow. This is only one of the things that the PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 solves for you. But there is more. Much more!

Just a quick post: Windows Live SkyDrive is now available. It left the beta stage yesterday. You can now store 5Gb of data online, choose who has access to each folder you create and more. There is a maximum filesize of 50Mb. Interested? Have a look at https://skydrive.live.com/

There are several steps to creating a custom web service to be hosted in SharePoint. The MSDN library{.} has a walkthrough on creating a custom web service{.}. After having followed this walkthrough thoroughly, I though my web service was good to go. Unfortunately all I saw was an error: “Could not load type ‘ThisAndThat’ from assembly ‘SoAndSo’”. Just as I was about to search for an answer somewhere online, I remembered that the MSDN library features the Community content for little over a year now{.

So that’s part 1: www.rickvandenbosch.net is now online. There’s nothing to be found over there yet, but the domain has been delivered. Oh, and there’s an easy redirect to my blog, so that goes back here ;). From now on, you can also use rickvandenbosch.net/blog as the url to find my blog. I’m currently talking to the bloggingabout.net admin to mirror my content over there, for now it’s just a redirect.

As stated on ScottGu’s blog{.} in his latest post{.}, the .NET Framework Library Source Code is now available. A detailed blog post about the steps to follow to enable .NET Framework source access in Visual Studio 2008 can be found at Shawn Burke’s blog in this post{.}. Taken from Scott’s post: Once you follow the configuration steps in Shawn’s post above, you’ll be able to dynamically load the debug symbols for .

Have a look at this articleat Worse Than Failure. That’s pretty funny. Or actually, pretty scary… 😐 Oh and, by the way, the Rick in the article is not me ;).

The situation I talked about in my previous posthad one very big issue: LINQ sometimes just is too dynamic… 😉 The fact that I changed the value for the Ranking property for each SpecificObject that got matched, made the primary LINQ query have a different outcome. LINQ uses lazy evaluation and because of that, the contents of finalGroups and exitGroups changed every time I changed the Ranking value for one of the SpecificObjects.

While developing an algorithm to match preferences to possibilities, I had to sort a generic list of a specific object type (SpecificObject). The first x objects would be matched, the rest would be excluded because of the number of available places. To determine the group of objects that would be matched and the group that would be excluded, I did something like this: IEnumerablesortedObjects;IEnumerablefinalObjects; IEnumerableexitObjects; sortedObjects = from SpecificObject specificObject in AllSpecificObjectsorderby specificObject.

We probably all worked with dynamically generated controls on forms, ASP.NET pages or (user) controls. And I guess we’ve all written for-each statements to loop through the ControlCollection and filter out all the controls of a specific type, right? I wanted to do the same today, so I started by trying to use LINQ for this: This, as you can see, generated a compile time error: Could not find an implementation of the query pattern for source type ‘System.

This morning I found a mail in my inbox telling me I was invited to Live Mesh. That’s a nice start of the weekend, so thanks Jan! The Live Desktop user interface looks pretty cool, and it almost feels like a real desktop. But that part of Live Mesh is pretty much like Live SkyDrive: a big online disk for you to put stuff on. Lots of stuff. 5 Gigabytes worth of stuf… 😉

The Betatalks Discord A few months ago we’ve started a Betatalks Discord server to build a community and enable our friends to discuss all the Betatalks content we put out there. Think about the Betatalks videos on YouTube, Betatalks live events and the most recent addition: Betatalks the podcast. To notify the corresponding Discord channels about new Betatalks videos or Betatalks the podcast episodes, I created Azure Logic Apps to check for new additions and post them to the webhook.

A [wikipedia:RUP] project consists of 4 different phases. The elaboration phase(the second phase in the RUP project lifecycle) is normally done with a small team. One of the important reasons for this is that you want to define the basic form of your architecture. This means you think about concepts, elaborate on them, develop proof of concepts and select the ones that work best for your specific project. If there is one thing you can not use (early) in an elaboration phase of a project, it’s having too many team members.

When asked about my point of view about a guideline concerning code coverage, my answer always is: go for 100% code coverage. 100%, unless… Here is why. When the guideline for code coverage is 80% (not an uncommon guideline) the devil is in the details. Or in the 20% which is not covered to be exact. When a developer ‘only’ needs to cover 80% of his code, you can expect him (or her) to start with the easiest scenario’s, and work his way towards the more difficult scenario’s until the coverage guideline has been met.

Test Driven Development is hot, just like unit testing your software and any other kinds of (automated) testing. And as we all know: sometimes stuff that’s hot is misinterpreted, explained wrong or just simply used in a really bad way. Unfortunately, testing is no exception to this rule… Not too long ago I had a discussion with a project manager who told me the code in his project had a code coverage close to 100%.

I ordered some stuffthrough the internet a week ago. The packet was sent through the Dutch postal service. They have a track and trace website, that shows where your parcel is at that moment, and where it has been. And that website made me realise the postal service is much like a service bus. I’ll compare it to a single service, to emphasise the differences. Let’s have a look, shall we … ?

Last week we had a meeting with our contact at the department that will be maintaining the software we’re going to be developing in our upcoming project. Normally, these kinds of meetings take place in the end of a project, sometimes even under some (release) stress. At least, that was the case for all the previous projects I was involved in at the customer I’m currently at. Most of the time this is because people want to start developing the software instead of thinking about things that are not necessarily their area of expertise.

As I said earlier, we didn’t test our solution to using the ModalPopupExtender in SharePoint in all situations. Today we made a start to do so. To indicate our successrate: we now use window.showModalDialogwith some extra pages… Lets go through some of the problems we encountered. Placing an UpdatePanel around the entire UserControl (with default settings) makes that the entire UserControl is posted back, even when it is a control inside a nested UpdatePanel that posts back.

Getting the ModalPopupExtender from the Ajax Control Toolkit to work (decently) in SharePoint was not exactly a walk in the park. With a default SharePoint installation, the modal popup is partly positioned ‘outside’ of the page (you only see the bottom right part of the popup in the top left corner of the browser). Postbacks are not executed or executed poorly and the page gets garbled up. A possible solution for the positioning of the popup is to set the X and Y property of the ModalPopupExtender.

Thanks to the MSDN forums{.} (and specifically one Hua Chen), I found a way{.} to disable specific code analysis rules for a team build. In this post I’ll combine the steps I followed earlier with the description given at the MSDN forum. I’ll start out with some steps earlier on in the process: how to quickly get a list of all the code analysis rules you want to disable (without having to type it all yourself 😉 ).

After searching a bit, I found a way to disable specific Code Analysis rules for a team build. Or at least I thought so… The RunCodeAnalysis tag in my build.proj file is set to ‘Always’ to override the individual project settings, and I added the ‘CodeAnalysisRules’ tag to exclude some rules as a test. (See below for a part of the build.proj file.) I ran a few builds, but the tag doesn’t seem to do what is supposed to.

A rather long title for this post, but that’s exactly what happened: when I opened an ASP.NET MVC 4 project with a cshtml view open, Visual Studio would crash with the error messages seen on the right. This would only occur if the first project I opened had a cshtml file open. When I opened another (type of) project first and then opened a project with a cshtml file open, the problem did not occur.

When debugging JavaScript in an ASP.NET MVC (4) application, it is not always enough to uncheck the ‘Disable script debugging’ checkboxes under ‘Tools’ – ‘Internet Options’ – ‘Advanced’ – ‘Browsing’. JavaScript inside a Razor view (a cshtml file) cannot be debugged from Visual Studio. To debug your JavaScript, move it to a separate .js file and link to that file from your Razor view. This way, breakpoints set in the JavaScript will be hit and you can debug from Visual Studio.

Twitter Bootstrap is a… “Sleek, intuitive, and powerful front-end framework for faster and easier web development.” One of the nice things in Bootstrap is you can use icons from Glyphicons. To use these, you can simply use this markup <i class="icon-fire"></i> to get a nice fire icon. Translating this into an ActionLink styled as a button in an MVC4 application would look something like the following: @Html.ActionLink("<i class="icon-fire"></i> Invent fire", "fire", new { @class = "btn" }) Unfortunately, this renders as follows:

The past couple of days I’ve been experiencing some issues with the context menu for my Solution Explorer in Visual Studio 2010. It contained scrollbars even when there was sufficient space on the screen to show the menu without scrolling. Searching for that issue I immediately found this blog post on The Visual Studio Blog. Taken from that post: We’re pleased to announce that there are patches available for Visual Studio and Windows Presentation Foundation that fix this problem.

This post is part of a series on hosting your Hugo website on Azure. Keep an eye on this website for future articles. Intro As you might have seen or read somewhere, I’ve migrated the previous version of my personal website, which was in WordPress, to the current one that is made in Hugo. One of the reasons for migrating away from WordPress was the fact that due to a vulnerability in one of the WordPress modules, spammers were able to use my account to send out a lot of mails.

I am humbled and very proud to be awarded a Microsoft Azure MVP award today. A big “thank you” to all who helped me get here. 🙏🏻 A special thank you to my employer Betabit who supports me putting lots of effort into the community and helps organize or sponsor events. It’s strange but very cool to see social media ’explode’ (at least according to my standards) after my announcement. But I’m still just Rick, a guy who loves to do fun things with code, in the cloud.

As I wrote earlier I presented at the 2014 Dutch Techdays. The session content is now available online. Find it here (Dutch): Session information + PDF of my presentation My presentation on SlideShare My session on Channel 9

I’m proud to announce that this year I’ll be speaking at the TechDays in the World Forum in Den Haag, April 16 – 17. This session will be about High Performance Computing in Windows Azure. Camera resolutions keep increasing, your digital behavior on websites and in apps is collected, images that satellites make get more and more detailed and (research) equipment produces more data. The amount of data that’s being stored keeps increasing.

Just a small post today: as of September first I joined Betabit (site is in Dutch). After having had several employers in the last few years, this feels like coming home. On our way to do nice things…!

As of December first I’ll be joining the ranks of Valid (www.valid.nl – Dutch website). I’m very excited to start over there and I am convinced we will be able to do great stuff together 🙂 I would also like to take this opportunity to thank BDO (www.bdo.nl) for the past period and wish them all the best with the plans for the future of ‘our’ system. Update 14 Jan 2011

As you probably know I’ve worked for my own company for quite a while (see my post ‘A new challenge’ of October first 2008). Because business was good, I had way too little time to keep this blog up to date. Sorry for that… Since the beginning of this month, that all has changed: I joined BDO) and can now work ’normal’ hours in stead of ‘I-own-my-own-company-and-have-to-make-every-minute-of-every-day-count’ hours. I’ll probably still be pretty busy, but there’s a difference between busy and busy… 😉

Of course, twitter has been around for quite a while. The popularity of the service is booming, because it is becoming more and more mainstream now. I myself joined somewhere in the end of 2007, when it was still underground … 😜 Do you (actively) use twitter? And if so, what’s your account, do you use it on your desktop / laptop / mobile device … and which client(s) do you use?

I’m reinstalling my laptop after I got it back from a repair… EMPTY (grrr). What tools shouldn’t I forget when preparing this laptop to be my development machine? Already have Visual Studio, SQL Management Studio, Office and the Windows Live tools installed… (and of course I have all kinds of tools at hand from my server like DebugView, Reflector and whatnot)

I know it has been a while since my last post, but I’m about to resurface! I’ve played in a musical the entire month of December and (because of that) we were busy getting our company up and running again in the new year. So now I’ll be developing more and I’ll probably have more things to blog about. So keep posted to see more stuff over here … For now, here are some interesting articles about Microsoft’s Surface:

I’ve been busy the last couple of weeks. Between (the announcements at) all the Conferences to follow like PDC and Tech·Ed, all the projects to do, the rehearsal for the musical I’m in in December(Dutch) and the start of our new company(Dutch), I didn’t have a lot of time to blog… Since we expect things to settle down in the next couple of days, I’m expecting to pick up where I left in a week or so.

As of today, I am no longer working for Avanade. I had a good time over there, but my personal goals changed. I found a new challenge: I started a company with a good friend of mine. We’re still building the website, so the information is not there yet. But it will be soon. So check the websiteevery now and again. We’re very excited and can’t wait to get started!

I only had time for a quickie: The page containing all my online profiles has been updated… When interested, have a look at them{.null}.

It’s been a while because I’ve been so busy lately, but the next (technical) step for my personal website is now online. When browsing to https://rickvandenbosch.net/blog/, the content of my blog here is displayed sort of mirrored over there. I used an OpenSource RSS component to read my private rss feed from blogging about, and display it from there. There’s still a lot of work to be done (like styling!), but I’ll get there.

This weekend we got back from a skiing trip we went on with the school my girlfriend works at. We had a great time! The kids were great, and so were the teachers and the Huski people who were there to teach the kids how to ski and snowboard. If they need an extra pair of hands next year, I hope they’ll consider me: I’d be happy to join them.{.}

I won’t be blogging for the next week. Tomorrow evening, we are going on a ski vacation! I was invited to join the skicamp my girlfriend is going on with her work. A nice opportunity to brush up my skiing skills. Let’s hope we’ll come back in one piece, but I’m counting on it 😉 I’ll catch you guys later.

Until the Zune is available in Europe (when will that be, if ever…), I’m using an iPod. To be honest, I’m pretty satisfied with the product although iTunes still doesn’t feel like a solid piece of software… (understatement anyone?)After lots of hours playtime the original earphones of my iPod died, or at least the right one did. I went through the Apple store and found the ‘original’ earphones over there. Because of the annoying squeaky sound the cord makes in the inside of the lower part of the earphone, I wanted to try different ones.

So that’s part 1: www.rickvandenbosch.net is now online. There’s nothing to be found over there yet, but the domain has been delivered. Oh, and there’s an easy redirect to my blog, so that goes back here ;). From now on, you can also use rickvandenbosch.net/blog as the url to find my blog. I’m currently talking to the bloggingabout.net admin to mirror my content over there, for now it’s just a redirect.

Dennis already blogged about it: we had some problems with the availability of BloggingAbout since last night. The error was fixed this afternoon, so everything should be back to normal. If you’re experiencing any difficulties, please let me know through the contact form, or mail me at rick.van.den.bosch[at]bloggingabout.net.

Today was the first of two introduction days at Avanade{.}. Maybe you missed it, but I started there today{.}. And that’s why I’m writing this blogpost from a hotel in Almere, using my new Avanade laptop. 😉 I’m sure there will be lots of stuff to blog about, so stay tuned for more…

All the best for the year 2008! I hope we will be hearing/reading a lot of each other this year 😉

I’m thinking of hosting a blog myself. Most important reason would be that bloggingabout.net doesn’t allow some stuff like scripts, embedding flash and links to things like the ‘connect with me’ buttonand so on. Which is completely understandable by the way. What I’m not sure about is which software to use. Do you guys have any tips on which blogging software to use? Or maybe even on if I should or shouldn’t host it for myself?

Recently I put up a list of my Xbox 360 games. I’ll try to keep it up to date. I must say it’s difficult to choose which game to get next. There are so many good titles out! Assassins Creed, Need for Speed ProStreet, Call of Duty 4 Modern warfare, and more… Want to join me when gaming online? My gamertag is OZGump (see my gamercard).

As of 01-01-2008, I’m joining Avanade. You might have heard Avanade opened an office in the south of The Netherlandsthe first of November. I’ll be joining the ranks over there (Eindhoven!) and I am exited to get started. I spent the past years at LogicaCMG. I had a lot of fun and, even more important, I learned a lot. I’ll miss the guys (and girls!) I worked with, but I’m sure I will keep in touch with some of them.

Back in July, Barry Goffe (Director Windows Vista Ultimate) mentionedthat the missing Extras identified in January would be released at the end of the summer. I just got a bit curious about when these Extras would finally be released, so I visited windowsultimate.comagain. And there it was: DreamScene was releasedrecently (September 25th). And although I’m not quite sure if I’ll use this ever day, it’s kind of a cool feature. Isn’t it?

WOW The single player mode feels like a multiplayer game, with excellent gameplay. Certain parts of the game are pretty creepy, and I like it that there are some surprising elements in there. Sometimes you expect something to happen, which doesn’t. And when you least expect it…. So the (story in the) game is original. That makes a game interesting to play. One of the things I like a lot is that you can use almost everything your opponents use, like vehicles and weapons

So, after some relaxing at home and a very cool holiday in Spain, I’m about to go to work again next monday. And with that, I’ll be picking up all my ’normal day’ hobbies and stuff. So, I’ll try and pick up blogging (and taking pictures) again, just for you guys ;). Stay tuned … !  Hey! Ho! Let’s Go ..

As you may know, I started out at blogger. I haven’t used that blog over there for the last two years, but now it is up and running again{.}! This time, I’m using it as my photo blog. I recently got my new camera, and I didn’t want to mix picture-posts with my software development related posts over here. So if you’re interested, go take a look over there. Next to the link earlier in this post, you can find a link @ the news section of this site, in the left sidebar.

Last tuesday evening I ordered them, and just over an hour ago they came in: my new toys. I’m talking about my brandnew Canon EOS 400D!!! I started out with the kit lens (18-55), and I’ll get going with that, trying some stuff with this lens. And I just might order another in the future, but you have to start somewhere, right 😉 I immediately made some shots, and I’m glad I bought the camera already.

A while ago I wrote about my laptop not wanting{.} to connect to the internet or an Exchange Server. Two days later, I thought I found{.} the updates which were the cause of all this. It wasn’t exactly true, but in the end everything worked… Because of that, I let it go for a few days. But after a while, I couldn’t help myself: I had to know the real reason for the problem.

I found the two updates which crippled{.} my laptop’s Windows installation. After uninstalling and re-installing lots of updates, it seems that these two updates caused the problem: – Update for Windows Vista (KB936825)This wasn’t the one. The problem was back this morning. 🙁 I’ll be checking this out later today. – Update for Outlook 2007 (KB933493) Re-installing them causes the same problems to occur: Outlook can’t connect to Exchange and IE7 can’t display any webpages.

I took the test Adel blogged about. And guess what? I’m binary! Does this mean I’m 1337? 😉 Which Programming Language are You?

I ran into a nice little riddle on thinkgeek.com{.} today (in the shirts section). If you enjoy silly humor: take a look over there. How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex? For the answer, select the box below… 57006. (dead is 57005 in hex. Add 1 for you and there you are: 57006)

It took me a while, but in the end everything worked out and life’s good… Most important changes are I have my very own server now, containing all the general stuff like mail, music, development stuff and that kind of data. My workstation received a small update (I was able to upgrade based on the ‘old’ machine of a friend) and is now running Vista quite smoothly. To be honest, I haven’t found any major issues yet.

It’s been a while since I blogged, because… – I started a new (exciting but busy) project building a technical framework (and ‘proving’ a reference architecture along the way). – it looks like I might become a published writer when I hand in my article for the Dutch .NET magazine anywhere in the next couple of weeks. – we had lot’s of meetings @ LogicaCMGlately, like the yearmeeting, an architect meeting, a funmeeting (bowling can be cool!

Today I changed the appearance of my blog. The header has changed, and the content part is much wider. Because of the self-made banner I think this is a little more personal. Or a little less ordinary, whichever you prefer. If you have any feedback, please let me know. I think it’s pretty sweet, although this won’t show up pretty in a resolution below 1280 x 1024… Ah well, I think most people in our line of work will meet this requirement.

It seems there’s something to be celebrated today, so my girlfriend went and bought this little gem for me called the Gear4 HouseParty II. Its design is pretty cool, and I must say the quality of the sound comming out of that little box (approx. 25 cm wide) is pretty stunning! It comes with docks for all iPods (except for the shuffle) and even has its own remote, which lets you skip songs, change the volume and even use the iPod menu.

After managing to dodge tags for quite some time, I’ve been tagged twice this week. Both PJ van de Sandeand Marcel Boersmatagged me, so here we go… **We named our cat after a dog ** Our cat’s name is ‘Dribbel’, which is the Dutch name for the dog ‘Spot’. The most important reason for naming the cat like that, is because of a big white spot on its back and a smaller black spot on its nose.

It’s almost here… Next monday me and about 30 LogicaCMG colleagues will be heading to Redmond. I’m pretty excited: we’ll be attending some pretty cool sessions, and some of us will get the opportunity to take a look at Microsofts vision of the future home in their Microsoft Home. Besides that I’ll stay a few days longer, so I can see something of America. My first trip over there ever … !

Maybe I mentioned it earlier: I play in a musical in the month December (Veldhovense Revue). We started rehearsing twice a week in March. Now, we’ve played 4 shows already, and we’ve got 10 more to go. We’ve been really busy the last couple of weeks to make it a great show, and I think we succeeded. Anyway, I just wanted to mention the reason for me not blogging so much lately.

I tried using Windows Live Writer as soon as it got out, but because of proxy settings at the company I was working publishing posts wasn’t possible. I only now got time to try it at home, because I’ve been at home ill the past days. I’m still not 100% well, but I’ll keep quiet to get well soon. So maybe it’s better if I go and rest now… By the way: nice writing software, Windows Live Writer!

I’m back again. The past four weeks I’ve been entertaining kids on a summer camp (one week) and we’ve moved into our new house! After lots of painting, demolition and other stuff, our new house is ready (enough) to live in. In the near future, our new furniture will arrive and our bathroom will be renewed. So: lots of upcoming milestones! A note on the serious side: bloggingabout.net is being spammed heavily.

The next couple of weeks there will be low activity on my blog. First, I’ll be guiding a total of almost 100 kids through a summercamp for a week (we’re leaving today), next we will start working on our new house! We get the key a week from monday, so that’s two days after we come back from camp. Two days of resting…… I hope 😉 I might get back once in a while, maybe even publishing some pics about the ‘renovation’, but since this is a .

Lots of stuff happened the past few months, so it’s time for a personal update. Here we go… I’ll be attending an MSF4 Agile Masterclass @ Microsoft in July In August my girlfriend and I will be the proud owners of a house in Grasrijk (a part of Eindhoven). We can’t wait … ! Because of this, our apartment in Eindhoven is for sale right now (for pictures and info: www.

I’m not blogging about the wellknown song by the Dutch band Lucifer from the year 1975, but to let you know we (my girlfriend and me) have bought a new house! Somewhere in August of this year, we will be the proud owners of a house in ‘Grasrijk’, a new part of Eindhoven right next to Veldhoven. After three-somewhat years in our current home we are ready for the next step.

I’ve received lot’s of positive reactions on the post about organizing a bloggingabout.net meeting. I’ll try to squeeze in organizing a meeting in the near future. But see the near future somewhere between now and a few months. As you can image lot’s of stuff should be taken care of: a place to have the meeting, food & drinks, a decent agenda and maybe even guestspeakers. And to keep everything affordable for all the visitors: maybe we should consider finding a sponsor.

I’ve been thinking: would there be any interest for a bloggingabout .net meeting among the bloggers? We are all into .NET and most of us seem to enjoy a good discussion. Maybe we can organize a platform for those discussions in real life in stead of through posts and comments. It could be about anything, but has to have a predefined agenda to make sure the meeting has a goal.

After years of loyal service, I’m going to sell my current digital camera. I’m interested in buying an even better one (7.1 MP), although the Sony DSC-S85 I have now (4.1 MP) has brought me lots of great pictures. It accompanied me on several holidays and events. I’ve got a few Gb of images to show for it…. 😉 If anyone’s interested in buying it: drop me a line or visit the advert on markplaats.

Sometimes things aren’t as difficult as they seem… After some extra reading, and searching on gathering.tweakers.net, I found that everything I had done was correct. The only uncertainty was my graphics card. I went out and bought me a faster one (a Radeon 9550) and everything works well! As I am typing this, the same machine is playing a sweet K’s Choice song and recording a TV show, while displaying media center on my TV without any problems.

Ramon’s tips helped me a bit further, because they enabled me to test some of the settings and try where the problem is. I now encounter a very nice but weird phenomenon: when I use DualView on my NVidia card, I can drag Media Center to my TV. This works and shows up properly. When I maximize Media Center the image is all garbled up. But: when I open another window (this can be anything: notepad, display properties or the DirectX Control Panel (By the way: thanks for that one Ramon!

It’s been a while since I’ve been blogging, because my project has been extremely hectic. Now I’m enjoying a week off, so I’ve got time for toys now… 😉 One of these toys was going to be Windows XP Media Center Edition. I installed it, bought a compatible TV card together with a MCE remote and yep: everything is working fine. At least, as long as I am watching it on my monitor.

I’m having a good weekendstart today: I took an exam for Rational Unified Process this afternoon, and passed with a score of 91%! I am now an IBM certified Rational Unified Process professional. Sweet.

We landed in Eindhoven this morning after a great holiday in Turkey. I’ve done some resting, got a tan and I’m ready to go for the rest of this year… And not only at my job: I’ll also pick up on blogging about .NET again. While on holiday I had a strange encounter: we were looking at the window of a jewelery when one of the people who worked there came out and started a conversation.

I’m leaving for a 2-week holiday next sunday. Or actually, I’m going to a childrens camp as group leader for a week first, and after that I’m in need of a holiday ;). So then I’ll be leaving for 8 days of sun in Turkey. I’ll be back august twentysecond, but the two days after that are filled up with some in-house training, so my blog might be kinda quiet the next few weeks.

We finally made the change to Community Server here at bloggingabout.net. Because of this, some stuff will change. One of them is the appearance of all the blogs. And I’m not entirely happy with the way my blog is looking right now. I guess it takes some getting used to. Maybe I’ll switch a little the next days. If you think I should keep a certain skin (or loose it!): drop me a comment…

Last weekend I went to see the musical Hair at the Stadsschouwburg in Eindhoven. It was played by an allmost all American cast: only the male lead was a Dutch guy, if I understood correctly. (Normally the female lead was Dutch too, but that role was played by someone else last saturday.) And I have to say: it was really great! Unbelievable vocals, great play and a pretty cool way to bring all those long forgotten beautiful songs back to life (Aquariuuuuus).

Soon bloggingabout.net will switch to new (and better) blogging software. Because of this, the URL to my blog (and any other blog at bloggingabout.net) will change. In stead of bloggingabout.net/username, all blogs will become available through URLs like bloggingabout.net/blogs/username. Don’t worry if you can’t remember: the old URL will keep working for a while: it will redirect to the new one. I’ll keep you posted when the change is going to be done.

Sorry I’ve been away for a while, but there was hardly enough time between work, friends, birthdays and deadlines for me to blog… I’ll try and make up for lost time. Last sunday my girlfriend turned 25: we had a killer party! Almost 40 people visited our apartment in Eindhoven, so it was pretty crowded in out otherwise quiet home. Thanks to all of you. And then there’s been the project I’ve been working on: the first delivery is next thursday, so I’ve spent quite some time there.

They don’t want your money, they want your voice… Take ONE minute today to sign the ONE declaration and lend us your voice in the fight against global AIDS and extreme poverty. Click here to visit one.org

Questa star-listed me on his blog (together with Frans Bouma!). He wrote: De blog van Gump is nog jong, maar tot nu toe voor mij in iedergeval al de meest gelezen weblog Which roughly translates to Gump’s blog is still young, but is the blog I recently read most. I’m flattered Questa: thanks! I’ll try to keep up the good work and live up to my star status. 😉

They stole my leather jacket this weekend, containing my wallet and my keys. Assholes. First thing I learned as a kid: leave other people’s stuff alone! Why is it some people simply don’t have the decency to work for the things they want? I do… Just like all of my friends. And although you might not be able to buy everything you like, it feels pretty good when you are, for instance, finally able to order the phone you’ve wanted for months.

My new phone is on the way! I ordered it yesterday, and faxed all of the necessary info today. So if all goes well, I’ll be calling you using this baby next week! This is the MDA III, provided by T-Mobile. It’s actually the QTek 9090, but T-Mobile placed their own logo on it. It has integrated wireless networking, bluetooth, and many more! I could even develop my own software for it.

Just a quick personal update: my carchoice has been approved and the car is currently on it’s way. Just a few more weeks… I sold my bike, but will be looking for another one! we had a wedding last friday, very good party! the company party was great! the bottom shelve of the cupboard in our kitchen broke: most of our muds and scales have crashed… 🙁 tonight we’re having a company yearmeeting!

It’s almost like playing Need for Speed: “Please select your car.” But this time it was real! Last saturday I had two testdrives and I selected my future car. It is going to be the Citroën C4. I ordered it today and, when all goes well, I’ll be receiving it within just a few weeks! That is if my director accepts the order. I can hardly wait ….

Introduction Azure API Management is a hybrid, multicloud management platform for APIs across all environments. For more information on API Management, check out Microsoft Docs: About API Management. API Management (APIM) is an Azure service that enables you to manage APIs as first-class assets throughout their lifecycle. It consists of an API Gateway, a management plane and a developer portal. All these components are hosted in Azure and are completely managed by default.

Azure App Configuration is a powerful way to manage and store application configuration on a central location. Integrating it into for instance ASP.NET (Core) is pretty straightforward. This post gives you an introduction to Azure App Configuration and a simple example of how to integrate it in ASP.NET Core. Creating an Azure App Configuration 🆕 Of course there are several ways to create a specific resource in the Azure Portal. One of the simplest is to go to the portal, open up App Configuration and click the Add button.

This post is part of a series on Managed Identity. For an introduction, see Managed Identity – Part I. For a post that shows you how to connect your application to different types of Azure resources using Managed Identity see Managed Identity – Part II. Stay tuned for future posts. Introduction Elaborating on Part I and Part II, this blog post will show you how to debug your Managed Identity enabled application locally.

This post is part of a series on Managed Identity. For an introduction, see Managed Identity – Part I. Stay tuned for future posts. Introduction Elaborating on Part I, this blog post will show you how to connect your application to different types of Azure resources using Managed Identity. To use the Managed Identity to actually connect to Azure Resources, you’re going to need the NuGet package Microsoft.Azure.Services.AppAuthentication. This package enables a service to authenticate to Azure services using the developer’s Azure Active Directory/ Microsoft account during development, and authenticate as itself (using OAuth 2.

This post is part of a series on Managed Identity. Stay tuned for future posts. Introduction Connecting your application to a resource like Storage or a SQL database used to involve a connection string. This isn’t very secure. These settings are available through the Azure portal. So they might get compromised. With the introduction of Azure Key Vault, we got a way of separating these secrets from our application configuration. We can store them in a safe, secure place.

Calling an API from a Logic App is pretty straightforward. You open up the Logic App Designer and add an HTTP Action. Specify the method to use and the URI you want to call and you’re good to go! When the API you want to call uses Cookie Authentication, this seems pretty straightforward too. After all, the HTTP Action has an Authentication property you can set. However, this property doesn’t include Cookie authentication.

My employer Betabit hosted a Hack Yourself First workshop by Troy Hunt on Monday 5th and Tuesday 6th of June. Because we are always looking to improve, this was a great opportunity to tune up our security skills. We had a great time, got terrified and most of all: we learned a lot. First contact: a Twitter DM to Troy Hunt You think you know security We’ve seen a lot of different subjects during the workshop.

The title isn’t descriptive enough for this post, but it will have to do. Today I was trying to get an ASP.NET application to allow me to define two different login levels. What I was trying to do was the following: There’s a main ASP.NET application, which is allowed to be accessed by anyone (<allow users="*"> at https://www.domain.com/) There’s a customer part where a login is required. (https://www.domain.com/customers/) There’s a maintenance part where a different login is required.

The Betatalks Discord A few months ago we’ve started a Betatalks Discord server to build a community and enable our friends to discuss all the Betatalks content we put out there. Think about the Betatalks videos on YouTube, Betatalks live events and the most recent addition: Betatalks the podcast. To notify the corresponding Discord channels about new Betatalks videos or Betatalks the podcast episodes, I created Azure Logic Apps to check for new additions and post them to the webhook.

Azure .NET 5 Functions A lot has been said about .NET 5 support for Azure Functions. The most important news: it is now officially supported! 🥳 To enable running Azure Functions with .NET 5, the new Isolated Model enables Functions to run as an out-of-process language worker separate from the Azure Functions runtime. This way you’ll have full control over the Function’s dependencies on one hand, and new features like a middleware pipeline on the other.

After my two previous posts Azure Static Web Apps: a first look and Azure Static Web Apps: quirks & gotchas, let’s have an updated look at ASWA in this post. Support for new languages 👩🏻‍💻 Announced at Microsoft Ignite this year, Blazor and C# APIs now supported in Azure Static Web Apps. This enables .NET developers to build and deploy full stack .NET applications with Static Web Apps. Blazor support Since ASWA is a static hosting option, which means we don’t have a server component*, the Blazor support for ASWA means support for Blazor WebAssembly.

It’s Serverless September! The one month a year in which we can keep talking about Serverless to our friends without feeling bad about it. So here goes … 🤓 In this post we’ll have a look at Power Automate. Because of the low code / no code nature of the service, it’s a great fit for citizen developers to automate (business) processes. And although I love to code, it’s good to also look at these other types of services that expand the Serverless universe.

After playing around with Azure Static Web Apps (ASWA) for some time I found some quirks and gotchas. Of course Static Web Apps are still in preview. Most of these are probably because of that fact. Despite that, it might still be interesting to know about them. That way if you run into any of them, you’ll at least know it’s not you … 😉 🏭 Creating an Azure Static Web App It all starts when you want to create an ASWA: searching for it in the list of resources in the Azure portal doesn’t show it.

Although the two have a lot in common, even including parts of the name, there are a few very clear differences between Static website hosting in Azure Storage and Static Web Apps. We’ll have a look at what those differences are and take a first look at the most recent of the two: Static Web Apps. Static website hosting in Azure Storage Static website hosting is a feature you can enable free of charge on a storage account.

My post Using Triggers & Bindings in Azure Functions V2 drew quite some attention over the past months. But there is a lot more to say about them. Time for a small follow up 😁 Covered previously ⌚ In my previous post we covered relative simple things like writing to blob storage and putting messages on a Service Bus. But the bindings for Azure Functions are so much more powerful.

Here’s a short post I didn’t want to hold from you. As you may already know I wrote a blogpost on Using Triggers & Bindings in Azure Functions. It handles quite a few nice possibilities of using triggers and bindings in Azure Functions (if I may say so myself… 😳). Fortunately, you learn something new every day. So I learned about Property Binding recently… Property Binding Like in the HttpTriggerReturnBinding example in the functions-triggers-bindings-example GitHub repository, let’s say we have a model RequestModel that we’re receiving through a POST on an HttpTriggered Function.

This post is part of a series on Managed Identity. For an introduction, see Managed Identity – Part I. For a post that shows you how to connect your application to different types of Azure resources using Managed Identity see Managed Identity – Part II. Stay tuned for future posts. Introduction Elaborating on Part I and Part II, this blog post will show you how to debug your Managed Identity enabled application locally.

Next week my colleague Daniël te Winkeland I will do a session at Techorama 2019 titled Getting sh*t done with Azure Functions (on AKS!). Or GSDwAF for short 🤓 We will talk about running Azure Functions in a Kubernetes deployment using Managed Identities and implementing Dependency Injection. And, even better, we’ll show you how! Who will we see Tuesday, October 1 • 3:00pm – 4:00pm • room 3? UPDATE That. Was.

This post is part of a series on Managed Identity. For an introduction, see Managed Identity – Part I. Stay tuned for future posts. Introduction Elaborating on Part I, this blog post will show you how to connect your application to different types of Azure resources using Managed Identity. To use the Managed Identity to actually connect to Azure Resources, you’re going to need the NuGet package Microsoft.Azure.Services.AppAuthentication. This package enables a service to authenticate to Azure services using the developer’s Azure Active Directory/ Microsoft account during development, and authenticate as itself (using OAuth 2.

This post is part of a series on Managed Identity. Stay tuned for future posts. Introduction Connecting your application to a resource like Storage or a SQL database used to involve a connection string. This isn’t very secure. These settings are available through the Azure portal. So they might get compromised. With the introduction of Azure Key Vault, we got a way of separating these secrets from our application configuration. We can store them in a safe, secure place.

Calling an API from a Logic App is pretty straightforward. You open up the Logic App Designer and add an HTTP Action. Specify the method to use and the URI you want to call and you’re good to go! When the API you want to call uses Cookie Authentication, this seems pretty straightforward too. After all, the HTTP Action has an Authentication property you can set. However, this property doesn’t include Cookie authentication.

Last week one of my colleagues had a question: Is there a performance penalty when you add multiple Azure Blob storage bindings in an Azure Function? Or is the connection only established when you access one of those blobs? Answering this grew into a way to have Dynamic output bindings in Azure Functions. This post elaborates on [blog/using-triggers-bindings-in-azure-functions-v2](Using Triggers & Bindings in Azure Functions V2). First try The idea was simple:

To start things off: yes. There’s some pretty decent documentation on all the available Triggers & Bindings in Azure Functions. Like this overview page. And you can also find documentation on specific bindings, like the Service Bus Binding. Nevertheless, I wanted to add to that documentation with some simple, real-world examples using triggers & bindings. So here goes. Writing to Blob Storage Consider this very simple BlobTriggered Azure Function. It copies the triggering file into a different container in Azure Blob Storage:

This Thursday December 6th I’ll be speaking at Azure Thursday - December 2018. The last of the regular Azure Thursdays this year. This is a group for all developers, consultants, architects and IT professionals who want to dive into for them unknown topics related to Azure. Azure Thursday are happening every first Thursday of the month and the format will be different every evening. From hand-on workshops to technical talks.

I’ve done another session on Serverless, this time at the Techdays in The Netherlands. The TechDays were held October 12 & 13 in the Amsterdam RAI. My session was partially based on the “Dude, Where’s my Server?” talk I did earlier this year. The main focus for the talk this time: Azure Event Grid. Serverless, Azure Functions and Azure Event Grid My session was Going Serverless (2/2): Hands-on with Azure Event Grid.

Do you live in or near The Netherlands? Would you like to know everything there is to know about Serverless Computing? Join Oscar van Tol and myself on September 20th. We will be presenting the knowledge session “Dude, Where’s my Server?” organised by Betabit and Blaak Selectie. If you don’t need any additional information and just want to reserve a spot, send an email to evenementen@betabit.nl with your name and phone number.

When you want to implement a custom stsadm for SharePoint, all you realy have to do is implement the Microsoft.SharePoint.StsAdmin.ISPStsadmCommand interface. Because I develop on a machine with no SharePoint installed, I (only) copy the assemblies I need to develop locally. For the stsadm command I was working on recently (more on this in a future post) I only needed the Microsoft.SharePoint and Microsoft.Office.Server assemblies. Or at least I thought so…

While writing a custom stsadm command for SharePoint (more on that in a future post) and having to do something based on the command the user typed in, I used ToLower(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture) on the command string to be able to check without the hassle of differences in casing. When I ran code analysis on my project, I got this somewhat cryptic message: CA1308 : Microsoft.Globalization : In method ‘CommandParser.Run(string, StringDictionary, out string)’, replace the call to ‘string.

After developing a custom Web Service to be hosted in SharePoint (based on this HowTo article on MSDN) and deploying it on a testing environment, I got some entries in the EventLog over there, stating: “Unable to connect publishing custom string handler for output caching. IIS Instance Id is ‘xxxxxxxxx’, url is ‘https://internalsharepointserver/somesubfolder/services.asmx“ The PublishingHttpModule trying to cache an unmanaged path seems to be the problem here. When enabled for a custom web application (such as my web service), it causes the eventlog entry each time certain requests like web service calls or static CSS files are made.

It’s here: the Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit. This first release contains two tools, both supported on WSS 3.0 and SharePoint Server 2007. Batch Site Manager From the “Move, Lock, and Delete Site Collections” page on Applications Management you can schedule bulk operations against site collections in the farm—including moving site collections between content databases (!!). stsadm extension: UpdateAlert This command will refresh all alert URLs in a specific site collection, which is extremely important should you change the URL of a web application or after an upgrade.

A week ago I had a nice page that was hosted in SharePoint and, among others, contained an updatepanel with a dropdownlist in it. Everything worked, and all was well. Because our testers had found some issues we had delivered two newer versions to our development environment. In the last version they found an issue that wasn’t there before: selecting a different value in the dropdown did not only update the updatepanel, but resulted in a complete postback.

As I said earlier, we didn’t test our solution to using the ModalPopupExtender in SharePoint in all situations. Today we made a start to do so. To indicate our successrate: we now use window.showModalDialogwith some extra pages… Lets go through some of the problems we encountered. Placing an UpdatePanel around the entire UserControl (with default settings) makes that the entire UserControl is posted back, even when it is a control inside a nested UpdatePanel that posts back.

Getting the ModalPopupExtender from the Ajax Control Toolkit to work (decently) in SharePoint was not exactly a walk in the park. With a default SharePoint installation, the modal popup is partly positioned ‘outside’ of the page (you only see the bottom right part of the popup in the top left corner of the browser). Postbacks are not executed or executed poorly and the page gets garbled up. A possible solution for the positioning of the popup is to set the X and Y property of the ModalPopupExtender.

Saving a file from Silverlight using the SaveFileDialog, added in Silverlight 3, is easy. If you’re used to desktop development however, you might find yourself getting a SecurityException with the message ‘File operation not permitted. Access to path ‘xxx’ is denied.’. Here’s why: In desktop development, you’re used to getting a filename from a SaveFileDialog. Next, you start doing whatever you need to be doing to the file, based on the filename.

For a project I’ll probably dedicate a post on this blog to in the future, I needed a ZIP library for Silverlight. After asking around on twitter (@rickvdbosch) I was pointed towards the SharpZipLib port on Codeplex, found on https://slsharpziplib.codeplex.com. Basically what I wanted to do was replace a file inside the ZIP file with my version of that file. The file was located in a specific folder inside the ZIP and could be found by either iterating through the ZipEntries in the ZIP, or by getting it based on its name.

When installing SQL Server 2008 R2 on a Windows XP (or, according to the comments, Windows 7) development machine that has been around for quite some time, I got an error stating an unhandled exception occured in the application (see image). The error showed up directly upon startup and read: An error occurred creating the configuration section handler for userSettings/Microsoft.SqlServer.Configuration.LandingPage.Properties.Settings: Could not load file or assembly ‘System, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089’ or one of its dependencies.

After my two previous posts Azure Static Web Apps: a first look and Azure Static Web Apps: quirks & gotchas, let’s have an updated look at ASWA in this post. Support for new languages 👩🏻‍💻 Announced at Microsoft Ignite this year, Blazor and C# APIs now supported in Azure Static Web Apps. This enables .NET developers to build and deploy full stack .NET applications with Static Web Apps. Blazor support Since ASWA is a static hosting option, which means we don’t have a server component*, the Blazor support for ASWA means support for Blazor WebAssembly.

After playing around with Azure Static Web Apps (ASWA) for some time I found some quirks and gotchas. Of course Static Web Apps are still in preview. Most of these are probably because of that fact. Despite that, it might still be interesting to know about them. That way if you run into any of them, you’ll at least know it’s not you … 😉 🏭 Creating an Azure Static Web App It all starts when you want to create an ASWA: searching for it in the list of resources in the Azure portal doesn’t show it.

Although the two have a lot in common, even including parts of the name, there are a few very clear differences between Static website hosting in Azure Storage and Static Web Apps. We’ll have a look at what those differences are and take a first look at the most recent of the two: Static Web Apps. Static website hosting in Azure Storage Static website hosting is a feature you can enable free of charge on a storage account.

I know it has been a while since my last post, but I’m about to resurface! I’ve played in a musical the entire month of December and (because of that) we were busy getting our company up and running again in the new year. So now I’ll be developing more and I’ll probably have more things to blog about. So keep posted to see more stuff over here … For now, here are some interesting articles about Microsoft’s Surface:

I just read this great article by Mark Voermans: Expression Web SuperPreview: Look how your site renders in various Browsers. I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve been waiting for this for a long, LONG time. I’ll give it a go this afternoon and let you know what I think… Update: This first beta version only allows you to preview your site in different versions of Internet Explorer. We will have to wait for the full feature set until the final release of this tool…

When asked about my point of view about a guideline concerning code coverage, my answer always is: go for 100% code coverage. 100%, unless… Here is why. When the guideline for code coverage is 80% (not an uncommon guideline) the devil is in the details. Or in the 20% which is not covered to be exact. When a developer ‘only’ needs to cover 80% of his code, you can expect him (or her) to start with the easiest scenario’s, and work his way towards the more difficult scenario’s until the coverage guideline has been met.

Test Driven Development is hot, just like unit testing your software and any other kinds of (automated) testing. And as we all know: sometimes stuff that’s hot is misinterpreted, explained wrong or just simply used in a really bad way. Unfortunately, testing is no exception to this rule… Not too long ago I had a discussion with a project manager who told me the code in his project had a code coverage close to 100%.

‼ There’s new information in this issue. Please read the updates at the bottom of the article.‼ We use our own TFS server and were using TFS 2013 Update 2 up until last Tuesday. We have several build definitions for my current project, and most of them are scheduled at a specific time, because we have specific times for automatic deployment. Up until Tuesday, everything seemed to work well and the Builds ran at the specified time (both before and after Daylight Saving Time applied).

When working with Visual Studio 2012 on our current project, the error ‘These files are not text files and cannot be opened in the comparison window.’ shows up every now and again. I’ve tried several things to solve this problem. Here’s the one that works: Close Visual Studio Navigate to your version of the c:\users\{username}\AppData\Local\Temp\ folder Delete the TFSTemp folder Restart Visual Studio and try again. You should be good to go!

When you have more than one Microsoft Account that you use regularly, you might recognize the scenario where your Visual Studio keeps you signed in to Visual Studio Online… with the wrong account. You keep getting messages that you don’t have access rights. Restarting Visual Studio, rebooting and even clearing all (Visual Studio) cookies doesn’t help. Here’s a quick fix: Open Visual Studio Open the Visual Studio web browser (under View, Other Windows, Web Browser) Go to Visual Studio Online Click sign out You should be good to go now!

Just a quick little post today: I got the error “The Path ‘path’ is already mapped in workspace ‘workspace’” when I connected to a new Team Foundation Server and tried to map my workspace today. I had connected to a Team Foundation Services project a while back to get some shared code, but I already removed the workspace and the server binding. Even though Visual Studio didn’t see any other bindings, mapping my workspace to the same folder the previous TFS binding was mapped to served me this error.

Thanks to the MSDN forums{.} (and specifically one Hua Chen), I found a way{.} to disable specific code analysis rules for a team build. In this post I’ll combine the steps I followed earlier with the description given at the MSDN forum. I’ll start out with some steps earlier on in the process: how to quickly get a list of all the code analysis rules you want to disable (without having to type it all yourself 😉 ).

After searching a bit, I found a way to disable specific Code Analysis rules for a team build. Or at least I thought so… The RunCodeAnalysis tag in my build.proj file is set to ‘Always’ to override the individual project settings, and I added the ‘CodeAnalysisRules’ tag to exclude some rules as a test. (See below for a part of the build.proj file.) I ran a few builds, but the tag doesn’t seem to do what is supposed to.

Here’s a short post I didn’t want to hold from you. As you may already know I wrote a blogpost on Using Triggers & Bindings in Azure Functions. It handles quite a few nice possibilities of using triggers and bindings in Azure Functions (if I may say so myself… 😳). Fortunately, you learn something new every day. So I learned about Property Binding recently… Property Binding Like in the HttpTriggerReturnBinding example in the functions-triggers-bindings-example GitHub repository, let’s say we have a model RequestModel that we’re receiving through a POST on an HttpTriggered Function.

Probably there’s no need for me to say why .NET Core 3.0 is a big deal. There are enough articles on that. For a great write-up see Announcing .NET Core 3.0. From the inception of the .NET Core project, we’ve added around fifty thousand .NET Framework APIs to the platform. .NET Core 3.0 closes much of the remaining capability gap with .NET Framework 4.8. Introducing .NET 5 Next to adding this massive amount of .

While cleaning up the app registrations in my Azure Active Directory, I ran into two applications I couldn’t delete since the ‘Delete’ button is not clickable. I’ve had this happen for both application types: both Web app/API and Native. It’s actually pretty simple to enable removing these app registrations: make sure the application is not Multi-tenanted. * * Designates whether users in external organizations are allowed to grant your app access to data in their organization’s directory.

After making sure my Visual Studio always ran as an administrator by following my own post HowTo: Have Visual Studio always run as administrator on Windows 8, I got a message if I wanted to save changes to devenv.sln each and every time I double clicked a Solution. Since the problem kept occuring after installing Visual Studio 2015 CTP6, I wanted to solve it. So here we go! Double clicking a Solution file doesn’t start devenv.

A few minutes before my second session at the Dutch Techdays started I tried connecting to my Virtual Machine in Microsoft Azure through remote desktop. It didn’t connect… The RDP client tried to connect to the Virtual Machine, but nothing happened. So I rebooted the VM and tried connecting again, confident that this would solve the problem. It didn’t connect…. again. As I started stressing out a bit (the VM was the main character of my session) I thought of one last thing I could try.

There are a couple of websites I manage that use Twitter Bootstrap*. These websites are fully responsive and work well on all devices. Or actually, almost all devices. The wrapping of columns in a container on a Windows Phone doesn’t work the way you’d want it out of the box. Windows Phone interprets device-width as the actual resolution size. Other mobile browsers use what the manufacturer (or browser vendor) has decided is the optimal viewport width.

I’m proud to announce that this year I’ll be speaking at the TechDays in the World Forum in Den Haag, April 16 – 17. This session will be about High Performance Computing in Windows Azure. Camera resolutions keep increasing, your digital behavior on websites and in apps is collected, images that satellites make get more and more detailed and (research) equipment produces more data. The amount of data that’s being stored keeps increasing.

When you have more than one Microsoft Account that you use regularly, you might recognize the scenario where your Visual Studio keeps you signed in to Visual Studio Online… with the wrong account. You keep getting messages that you don’t have access rights. Restarting Visual Studio, rebooting and even clearing all (Visual Studio) cookies doesn’t help. Here’s a quick fix: Open Visual Studio Open the Visual Studio web browser (under View, Other Windows, Web Browser) Go to Visual Studio Online Click sign out You should be good to go now!

After installing Visual Studio 2012 Update 1, my Visual Studio stopped opening files in preview mode when I clicked them in the Solution Explorer. This setting seems to have changed with the installation of Update 1. To re-enable opening files clicked (once) in the Solution Explorer in Preview mode, go to ‘Tools’ – ‘Options’ – ‘Environment’ – ‘Tabs and Windows’. There, check the box under ‘Preview Tab’ – ‘Single-click opens files in the preview tab in:’ – ‘Solution Explorer (Alt + click to avoid previewing)’.

In the past, when you had some XML document that you wanted to translate into classes we had to create / generate a schema based on the XML file. Next, we had to generate a class based on the schema with an external tool. Not all too user friendly and somewhat time consuming. In Visual Studio 2012 you copy the XML you want to create a class/classes for, place the cursor in a class file on the location you want the code to be added and select the following menu items: Edit – Paste Special – Paste XML as Classes.

When writing WCF services, most of us find ourselves writing quick test applications. To give you more time to do what a developer should be doing (adding business value to the project) the Visual Studio team added a WCF test client that can help you reach goals faster. This is not a very difficult application, but it does the trick and is more than sufficient for simple testing. The WCF Test Client can be found at this location (without the ‘ (x86)’ for x86 machines): C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Visual Studio 10.

Here’s a quick Visual Studio tip for you… I frequently search for a specific text in my solution because I need to do something in all places where that text occurs. Today I found out how you can open all the files that are mentioned in the Find Results window. Search for the text you’re looking for. In my case this is ITest*. Open up the Search Results window and select all the records where the text was found.

Although I don’t like Internet Explorer toolbars at all, I’m thinking about installing one. MSN toolbar V1.2 now gives your IE5.1+ browser the cool feature of tabbed browsing. This IE7 preview kind of thing is available for download together with Windows Desktop Search functionality and some more stuff. Read about the functionality here, or just get it.

At the Powertoys Weblog, Sara Ford posted about a very cool tool which is available at gotdotnet: Regex Builder. At gotdotnet it is described as follows: A tool for building and testing Regular Expressions. It allows you to manipulate the expression and your source text, and shows you a tree with all of the Matches, Groups, and Captures found in the text. I think this tool is easier to use for RegEx beginners than for instance The Regulator, because its GUI is pretty simple and there’s some standard information available at startup.

There are a couple of websites I manage that use Twitter Bootstrap*. These websites are fully responsive and work well on all devices. Or actually, almost all devices. The wrapping of columns in a container on a Windows Phone doesn’t work the way you’d want it out of the box. Windows Phone interprets device-width as the actual resolution size. Other mobile browsers use what the manufacturer (or browser vendor) has decided is the optimal viewport width.

Just a quickie today: when working with Twitter Bootstrap tabs, like I am in my ASP.NET MVC 4 project, you might want to add Next and Previous buttons on the tabs to create something of a Wizard. Here’sa step by step overview of how I did this: Add an ID to all the ListItem elements that are used for the tab navigation. For instance: <ul class="nav nav-tabs" id="myTab"> <li><a href="#example" data-toggle="tab" id="xmpl">Example</a></li> .

After playing around with Azure Static Web Apps (ASWA) for some time I found some quirks and gotchas. Of course Static Web Apps are still in preview. Most of these are probably because of that fact. Despite that, it might still be interesting to know about them. That way if you run into any of them, you’ll at least know it’s not you … 😉 🏭 Creating an Azure Static Web App It all starts when you want to create an ASWA: searching for it in the list of resources in the Azure portal doesn’t show it.

Although the two have a lot in common, even including parts of the name, there are a few very clear differences between Static website hosting in Azure Storage and Static Web Apps. We’ll have a look at what those differences are and take a first look at the most recent of the two: Static Web Apps. Static website hosting in Azure Storage Static website hosting is a feature you can enable free of charge on a storage account.

In one of the projects I’m currently working on we’re using an ASP.NET Core Web API with an Angular front-end. We’re using ADAL.js as an Azure Active Directory Authentication Library and ng2-adal for integration with Angular. To get the type declarations for all these packages in TypeScript we use The Future of Declaration Files. Some time ago, our build server started acting up with the following message: Type 'Observable<void>' is not assignable to type 'Observable<User>' The error occured in ADAL.

Because of (a movie on) Microsofts cool new projects SeaDragon{.} and PhotoSynth{.} (which doesn’t seem to run from behind the firewall over here), I found the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference website{.}. There are some pretty impressive talks to be found there. And some are plain hilarious. There’s one I enjoyed a lot: Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos’ talk “After the gold rush, there’s innovation ahead{.}“. In this talk he compares the internet hype to the 1849 Gold Rush, but goes even further by using more analogies to explain the current state of the internet.

This is my first post using Windows Live Writer Beta 2. I must say, it looks nicer than the first beta (having a Windows Vista-proof UI), but that’s not all… Some of the features that were added are pretty darn cool (auto-ping on post, table editing) or just plain good (use the same window for multiple posts, finally!). I am missing the spelling checker though… My first feeling: this is a pretty big step ahead for Windows Live Writer.

I signed up at technorati recently. Technorati uses ping to get the info from blogs. And BloggingAbout.NET (Community Server) supports that. Or it should… Some posts just don’t show up over there! I’ve searched a little, and saw other people were having trouble with this too. I’ll see if I can find anything and if I do, I’ll forward it to our community administrator.

The past weeks have been busy for me, but especially in the evenings, with the musical I played in and all that… During the day, I had some spare time every now and again, and I wasted most of that on my Xbox 360. … loving it 😉 … XBox Live is getting more and more functionality. On top of that, more and more people are connecting… I’m curious which bloggers/blog-readers game online with their Xbox 360 and which games are played.

I used to think we (people working in software development) were far behind when it came to testing. Due to a few experiences over hte last few weeks this has changed… In waterfall projects, testing is at the end of the process, causing it to be the first thing to go when time gets short. In agile methods, test is evenly divided throughout the process. This combined with the popularity of agile methods make that test is getting more and more mature in software development.

The Visual Studio servicing page is updated: VS 2005 SP1 will ship Q3 of this year. This date seems to have has slipped before, but at least it gives us an estimated time of shipping. Taken from that page: “The types of fixes you can expect to find in this service pack are: The Hotfixes and General Distribution Release Updates (GDRs) released between RTM and the end of the Service Pack customer beta period.

Jan Schreuder blogged about it earlier, and the buzz around Sandcastle is growing… Brenton House posted about Sandcastle last friday, stating that it might have been the day Sandcastle would be released. Unfortunately it wasn’t, so the waiting does not stop yet. It even looks like we might be waiting a little longer: “In addition we plan to include Sandcastle in our August CTP release of Visual Studio SDK.” (taken from a thread on the MSDN Forums)

Since we upgraded to Community Server, visitors are now able to rate posts. This way you can let the bloggers here at bloggingabout.net know what you think about the things they post. Give it a go! Find a post you would like to rate, open the comments of that post and then click ‘Rate’.

View the interview Channel 9 had with Microsoft’s CEO: Steve Ballmer. The interview in short: _Why does Microsoft care about developers? 01:11 Why does Microsoft have an evangelism team? 01:48 What is your call to action for developers right now? 02:44 Microsoft is a leader in transparency and blogging. Why did you allow blogging? 03:38 Time for some tough questions. On the blogs there are those that say that Microsoft doesn’t innovate, can you give us some examples of where Microsoft is innovating?

This Microsoft sites makes it possible to enable ClearType fonts in Windwos XP from a web interface (using Internet Explorer). Neat! There’s a powertoy available also… ClearType is a special way of displaying fonts that makes fonts stand out more on LCD screens. It’s almost as if you’re looking at a piece of paper with the words printed on it. Click here for more information on ClearType.

Introduction Azure API Management is a hybrid, multicloud management platform for APIs across all environments. For more information on API Management, check out Microsoft Docs: About API Management. API Management (APIM) is an Azure service that enables you to manage APIs as first-class assets throughout their lifecycle. It consists of an API Gateway, a management plane and a developer portal. All these components are hosted in Azure and are completely managed by default.

Introduction Azure API Management is a hybrid, multicloud management platform for APIs across all environments. For more information on API Management, check out Microsoft Docs: About API Management. API Management (APIM) is an Azure service that enables you to manage APIs as first-class assets throughout their lifecycle. It consists of an API Gateway, a management plane and a developer portal. All these components are hosted in Azure and are completely managed by default.

We’re hosting a VS2019 Launch Event at the Betabit The Hague office. Join us for some Visual Studio 2019 goodness! And maybe even some swag… ? Join us on April 2 for the launch of Visual Studio 2019. Learn about how Visual Studio 2019 is more productive, modern, and innovative, participate in live Q&As, and be the first to take the latest version for a spin. https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs2019-launch/ The agenda is as follows:

The people over at Microsoft have been working hard and have delivered a lot of stuff. That makes for a nice start after the holidays! So there’s a lot of cool stuff available to play with. I created some simple and easy to remember links for all of these goodies. Feel free to use and distribute these 🙂 Links to the goodies! The spec for .NET Standard 2.0 is complete (https://bit.

As the title states: I was unable to attach the remote debugger (for instance to an Azure Web App) after installing Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. I got an error with something about invalid memory access or something like that. The solution is simple: install Remote Tools for Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. Go to the webite, pick your machine’s architecture (the x86 install won’t run on a x64 machine) and click download.

After updating Visual Studio 2015 (there was an update for GitHub Extensions, one for the NuGet Package Manager and, of course, there was Visual Studio 2015 Update 2) I tried to add the WindowsAzure.Storage NuGet package to a project I started about a month ago. I opened NuGet Package Manager, went to the Browse tab and typed WindowsAzure.Storage. The result: No Packages Found. OK, so then I’ll just…. Wait… WHAT?

After making sure my Visual Studio always ran as an administrator by following my own post HowTo: Have Visual Studio always run as administrator on Windows 8, I got a message if I wanted to save changes to devenv.sln each and every time I double clicked a Solution. Since the problem kept occuring after installing Visual Studio 2015 CTP6, I wanted to solve it. So here we go! Double clicking a Solution file doesn’t start devenv.

Last week I received my Intel Galileo board (windowsondevices.com) and I started ~playing with~ developing for it yesterday. I created a first test project, but it didn’t run. Visual Studio couldn’t find the Arduino header file, which was probably due to a missing NuGet package (the Galileo C++ SDK). I tried to save the project, because you need to before you can manage NuGet packages, but to no avail. Visual Studio served me a ‘The operation could not be completed’ error without any additional information.

When you have more than one Microsoft Account that you use regularly, you might recognize the scenario where your Visual Studio keeps you signed in to Visual Studio Online… with the wrong account. You keep getting messages that you don’t have access rights. Restarting Visual Studio, rebooting and even clearing all (Visual Studio) cookies doesn’t help. Here’s a quick fix: Open Visual Studio Open the Visual Studio web browser (under View, Other Windows, Web Browser) Go to Visual Studio Online Click sign out You should be good to go now!

Just a quick little post today: I got the error “The Path ‘path’ is already mapped in workspace ‘workspace’” when I connected to a new Team Foundation Server and tried to map my workspace today. I had connected to a Team Foundation Services project a while back to get some shared code, but I already removed the workspace and the server binding. Even though Visual Studio didn’t see any other bindings, mapping my workspace to the same folder the previous TFS binding was mapped to served me this error.

A rather long title for this post, but that’s exactly what happened: when I opened an ASP.NET MVC 4 project with a cshtml view open, Visual Studio would crash with the error messages seen on the right. This would only occur if the first project I opened had a cshtml file open. When I opened another (type of) project first and then opened a project with a cshtml file open, the problem did not occur.

When debugging JavaScript in an ASP.NET MVC (4) application, it is not always enough to uncheck the ‘Disable script debugging’ checkboxes under ‘Tools’ – ‘Internet Options’ – ‘Advanced’ – ‘Browsing’. JavaScript inside a Razor view (a cshtml file) cannot be debugged from Visual Studio. To debug your JavaScript, move it to a separate .js file and link to that file from your Razor view. This way, breakpoints set in the JavaScript will be hit and you can debug from Visual Studio.

In the past, when you had some XML document that you wanted to translate into classes we had to create / generate a schema based on the XML file. Next, we had to generate a class based on the schema with an external tool. Not all too user friendly and somewhat time consuming. In Visual Studio 2012 you copy the XML you want to create a class/classes for, place the cursor in a class file on the location you want the code to be added and select the following menu items: Edit – Paste Special – Paste XML as Classes.

My Microsoft Touch Mouse stopped scrolling in Visual Studio on my Windows 8 machine some time ago. Because this kills productivity, I wanted to fix the problem. After trying some things I found that the problem only occurred when I ran Visual Studio as Administrator. Searching a bit further I found this bug to be added to Microsoft Connect. I found a workaround for the problem: Go to the location where you have Microsoft Mouse and Keyboard Center installed Open up the properties of ipoint.

In my previous post about being unable to access the iis metabase I wanted my Visual Studio to ‘Run as Administrator’ on my Windows 8 machine. I only managed to get this working for the pinned taskbar icon and not for items in the jumplist or for items you open by double clicking them. The solution to check the box ‘Run as Administrator’ on the compatibility tab of the file properties for devenv.

I opened a solution in Visual Studio 2012 on my laptop running Windows 8, when I was presented with the error “The Web Application Project SomeWebProject is configured to use IIS. Unable to access the IIS metabase. You do not have sufficient privilege to access IIS web sites on your machine.” The user I was logged in with was a local administrator and was able to open up and use IIS Manager, but still I was presented with this error.

When installing the Windows Azure AppFabric Tools for Visual Studio (found here), you might get the error message shown at the top, stating that Windows Server AppFabric is installed and that it is not compatible with this release of Windows Azure AppFabric Developer Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 – June 2011 CTP. It asks to uninstall Windows Server AppFabric and rerun this setup if you want to install Windows Azure AppFabric Developer Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 – June 2011 CTP.

When writing WCF services, most of us find ourselves writing quick test applications. To give you more time to do what a developer should be doing (adding business value to the project) the Visual Studio team added a WCF test client that can help you reach goals faster. This is not a very difficult application, but it does the trick and is more than sufficient for simple testing. The WCF Test Client can be found at this location (without the ‘ (x86)’ for x86 machines): C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Visual Studio 10.

Here’s a quick Visual Studio tip for you… I frequently search for a specific text in my solution because I need to do something in all places where that text occurs. Today I found out how you can open all the files that are mentioned in the Find Results window. Search for the text you’re looking for. In my case this is ITest*. Open up the Search Results window and select all the records where the text was found.

The past couple of days I’ve been experiencing some issues with the context menu for my Solution Explorer in Visual Studio 2010. It contained scrollbars even when there was sufficient space on the screen to show the menu without scrolling. Searching for that issue I immediately found this blog post on The Visual Studio Blog. Taken from that post: We’re pleased to announce that there are patches available for Visual Studio and Windows Presentation Foundation that fix this problem.

Just a small post to start the new year… and let it be a good one! When opening a XAML document in Visual Studio, it opens in split view by default. This might become annoying when you have a large XAML document, because all the content needs to be rendered before you can get some work done. Here’s how you can have Visual Studio open XAML documents in code view:

Yesterday I remembered two Visual Studio options Sara Ford told about in a presentation of her I attended a while back. Changing them made me happy… 🙂 Zero-impact projects When I have to test something real quick, I tend to create a new project in Visual Studio and scribble some code to test whatever I want to test at that point. This causes my project directory to be filled with projects named WindowsFormsApplication14 or something like that.

Sometimes it’s the little things that make you love a new product just a bit more. I tend to close stuff I don’t use anymore fairly quickly. Sometimes I even close an Explorer window or an application right after I used it, only to find I need it again in a few moments… We all have our quirks, right 😉 While developing I regularly close all the documents I have open in Visual Studio, especially when I am done with a specific task.

While working with Visual Studio 2010, a new feature caught my eye that isn’t communicated (strongly) in the “What’s new” lists you can find online. As part of the Visual Studio 2010 supports multiple web.config files! Now we can create a separate web.config file for each configuration we have for our application. If you add a configuration through the configuration manager, you have the possibility to add a web.config file for the new configuration, too.

After installing Windows 7 and Visual Studio 2010 on my laptop, I ran into the well-known message “The project location is not trusted”. I thought all I had to do was follow the instructions in this MSDN article to get my development share to be trusted again, but this doesn’t seem to work. I already tried adding the new child group under the Internet_Zone in stead of the LocalIntranet_Zone, and using the complete server name and the server IP address in stead of the name of the server.

When trying to pass some command line arguments to a Console Application, I got the following message: “The current project settings specify that the project will be debugged with specific security permissions. In this mode, command line arguments will not be passed to the executable. Do you want to continue debugging anyway?” (see image) I didn’t run in to this earlier, but yesterday it suddenly popped up. But I did change my zone security, so that might be of some influence… Apparently, this is because of the Debug in Zone settings you can find at the Security tab of your project properties.

I’m reinstalling my laptop after I got it back from a repair… EMPTY (grrr). What tools shouldn’t I forget when preparing this laptop to be my development machine? Already have Visual Studio, SQL Management Studio, Office and the Windows Live tools installed… (and of course I have all kinds of tools at hand from my server like DebugView, Reflector and whatnot)

I’ve had my current installation for a few months now, and I’ve used it for development purposes. Today I suddenly encountered an error when trying to add items to the Toolbox. Visual Studio 2008 simply disappeared… No errors, no warnings, it just went away. After some searching and a lot of trying, I found that deinstalling the PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 did the trick. I’m guessing that the installation of a service pack (for either Visual Studio or .

Scott Guthrie posted about a cool new ASP.NET server control: Chart. It can be used for free with ASP.NET 3.5 to enable rich browser-based charting scenarios. Read more over here: https://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/11/24/new-asp-net-charting-control-lt-asp-chart-runat-quot-server-quot-gt.aspx

Because I stopped working at Avanadeand started my own company(this web site is under construction and in Dutch), I had to buy and install a new laptop. Everything went great and I was up and running in half a day. Or should I say half an evening… 😉 The next day I wanted to continue developing a web site we are working on. I needed one of the Ajax Control Toolkit controls, so I added it to my toolbar the way you should go about this (create a separate tab, right click, ‘choose items’, browse for the assembly).

StyleCop version 4.3 was released last tuesday. A short summary of what version 4.3 brings us:  Various bugfixes, including fixes for VS integration issues Rules documentation is included and integrated into VS “Show Error Help” New rules, see blogpostfor the rules Branding change from Source Analysis to StyleCop **Links ** StyleCop blog: https://blogs.msdn.com/sourceanalysis/ Release announcement on the StyleCop blog: https://blogs.msdn.com/sourceanalysis/archive/2008/08/19/stylecop-4-3-is-released.aspx StyleCop 4.3 download: https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=sourceanalysis&ReleaseId=1425

Taken from the SysInternals website: The SysInternals web site was created in 1996 by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell to host their advanced system utilities and technical information. Microsoft acquired Sysinternals in July, 2006. Whether you’re an IT Pro or a developer, you’ll find Sysinternals utilities to help you manage, troubleshoot and diagnose your Windows systems and applications. One of the must-have SysInternals tools for a developer is DebugView.

When you want to implement a custom stsadm for SharePoint, all you realy have to do is implement the Microsoft.SharePoint.StsAdmin.ISPStsadmCommand interface. Because I develop on a machine with no SharePoint installed, I (only) copy the assemblies I need to develop locally. For the stsadm command I was working on recently (more on this in a future post) I only needed the Microsoft.SharePoint and Microsoft.Office.Server assemblies. Or at least I thought so…

While writing a custom stsadm command for SharePoint (more on that in a future post) and having to do something based on the command the user typed in, I used ToLower(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture) on the command string to be able to check without the hassle of differences in casing. When I ran code analysis on my project, I got this somewhat cryptic message: CA1308 : Microsoft.Globalization : In method ‘CommandParser.Run(string, StringDictionary, out string)’, replace the call to ‘string.

While developing a web application for a friend of mine, I ran into a Visual Studio error message I hadn’t seen before: Error connecting to undo manager of source file ‘D:DevelopmentSomeWeb ApplicationDefault.master.designer.cs’. The error occured whenever I tried to start the (web) application in debug mode. The application did start OK after the error message though. Starting the application without debugging didn’t cause the error. I closed the solution file I had opened, but that didn’t solve the issue.

When roaming the MSDN forumsfor unanswered questions for me to answer, I come across a lot of questions about any of the following: Intellisense acting weird Intellisense not showing up at all Menu items that are all garbled up Missing buttons on toolbars Complete toolbars missing Keyboard shortcuts acting weird Keyboard shortcuts not working at all … In most cases, resetting the Visual Studio settings to the default settings using devenv /resetsettingssolves any problems that are in that list.

We probably all worked with dynamically generated controls on forms, ASP.NET pages or (user) controls. And I guess we’ve all written for-each statements to loop through the ControlCollection and filter out all the controls of a specific type, right? I wanted to do the same today, so I started by trying to use LINQ for this: This, as you can see, generated a compile time error: Could not find an implementation of the query pattern for source type ‘System.

The error I’m getting when setting up an OleDB connection to an Access database* via the Server Explorer in Visual Studio 2008 is ‘Format of the initialization string does not conform to specification starting at index 0’. The screen doesn’t display the way it should be displayed, as you can see in the screenshot on the left. There is a possible fix at svenM’s blog(it’s about checking the existence of a key in the registry called ‘ProgID’ and the default value, as you can read in this article), but this doesn’t seem to work for my situation.

As a reaction to this articleat Peter Ritchie’s MVP Blog, I thought I’d give my two cents on having a single exit point for methods. Here we go… When writing code, I always create only one exit point except for the occasional throwing of an exception. Most important for me is to always know where your code (really) stops. In case of long and complex methods there’s a chance you’re going to miss a return statement when scanning through a method.

One of the most annoying things in Visual Studio (to me) was the fact that complete solutions (solution folders, projects, regulare folder) would be expanded upon opening. And with big solutions, that isn’t too much fun. There are macros available online, but the ones i found were pretty slow. This is only one of the things that the PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 solves for you. But there is more. Much more!

With the official release of Visual Studio 2008 coming closer and its release on MSDN last november, there are more and more people asking what the impact of migrating from VS2005 to VS2008 will be and if it will have as big an impact as switching from VS2003 to VS2005 had. The answer is pretty simple: no it won’t. Let’s see why, and what impact it will have. VS2003 > VS2005

As stated on ScottGu’s blog{.} in his latest post{.}, the .NET Framework Library Source Code is now available. A detailed blog post about the steps to follow to enable .NET Framework source access in Visual Studio 2008 can be found at Shawn Burke’s blog in this post{.}. Taken from Scott’s post: Once you follow the configuration steps in Shawn’s post above, you’ll be able to dynamically load the debug symbols for .

The last weeks have been filled with holidays and introductional days at my new employer{.}. Because of that, I haven’t had the time to realy dive into Visual Studio 2008, although I have played around with it since the RTM version was available. Since this week I’ve been writing some serious code in VS2008 for my new personal site (more about this later!). I can only agree with what Pieter de Bruinsaid in his post about the new line of developer tools and additions: “If you are building .

Next to the message in the subject, one of the symptoms we encountered is that although the solution contains some test projects the ‘Create private accessor’ menu has disappeared. Also, selecting ‘Create unit tests…’ produces an error. And when editing a testrun config and selecting the ‘Code coverage’ option, the settings dialog simply closes, without any message. All these (and probably more) symptoms can occur because of a corrupt solution file.

At my current project we made a project template for Visual Studio for our testers. We added all the references, folders and files a tester needs to add a new system tests project. One of the testers (!) extended our XML generator, which generated XML testcases based on data entered in Excel, to now generate a complete C# test class. Making (system) tests which are automatically run during the nightly build now really is just as simple as entering data in Excel.

I have lots of games for my Xbox 360 I still need to / want to finish, like The Orange Box and Bioshock. And despite this, I’ve been working ’non-stop’ behind my laptop for the last two evenings to prepare it for Visual Studio 2008, and to download and install it. It’s almost time… 😉 I can’t wait to get busy with the final version of Visual Studio 2008 and stuff like LINQ, extension methods, anonymous types, lambda expressions and so on.

Have you ever made an install for your application with Visual Studio and sent it out into the world, only to get complaints of people that your software wouldn’t run? “Have you got the Microsoft .NET framework installed?” “The what?” “Go look in control panel, …… ……” “Ow, yeah, I got that” “Hmmm….” “So ehm….” “What version is it?” “Version? …. wait …. it’s 1.0” “Darn, download it and …”

We recently ran into the problem mentioned in the title of this post at work. Microsoft has a knowledgebase article (kbid 842706) for this bug. The hotfix is not to be distributed freely, but I already spoke to some people who have contacted Microsoft and got the fix for free. It will be e-mailed to you. As you can read in the comments of this post at dotnetjunkies, there are some people who found no more problems after installing hotfixes KB841870 and KB841767-X86… I think that’s weird (but I’m not arguing!

The last couple of years I’ve had small Visual Studio crashes, where Visual Studio stopped and asked me if I wanted to restart and reopen the current project. These crashes never meant a loss of work. Today I had the first BIG VS2K3 crash and this time it did cost me. A lot… I’m wondering why VS stopped responding completely. The network here at our client isn’t that fast this morning, but I can not imagine this being the problem.

I’ve had my current installation for a few months now, and I’ve used it for development purposes. Today I suddenly encountered an error when trying to add items to the Toolbox. Visual Studio 2008 simply disappeared… No errors, no warnings, it just went away. After some searching and a lot of trying, I found that deinstalling the PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 did the trick. I’m guessing that the installation of a service pack (for either Visual Studio or .

One of the most annoying things in Visual Studio (to me) was the fact that complete solutions (solution folders, projects, regulare folder) would be expanded upon opening. And with big solutions, that isn’t too much fun. There are macros available online, but the ones i found were pretty slow. This is only one of the things that the PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 solves for you. But there is more. Much more!

When you have more than one Microsoft Account that you use regularly, you might recognize the scenario where your Visual Studio keeps you signed in to Visual Studio Online… with the wrong account. You keep getting messages that you don’t have access rights. Restarting Visual Studio, rebooting and even clearing all (Visual Studio) cookies doesn’t help. Here’s a quick fix: Open Visual Studio Open the Visual Studio web browser (under View, Other Windows, Web Browser) Go to Visual Studio Online Click sign out You should be good to go now!

When installing the Windows Azure AppFabric Tools for Visual Studio (found here), you might get the error message shown at the top, stating that Windows Server AppFabric is installed and that it is not compatible with this release of Windows Azure AppFabric Developer Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 – June 2011 CTP. It asks to uninstall Windows Server AppFabric and rerun this setup if you want to install Windows Azure AppFabric Developer Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 – June 2011 CTP.

When writing WCF services, most of us find ourselves writing quick test applications. To give you more time to do what a developer should be doing (adding business value to the project) the Visual Studio team added a WCF test client that can help you reach goals faster. This is not a very difficult application, but it does the trick and is more than sufficient for simple testing. The WCF Test Client can be found at this location (without the ‘ (x86)’ for x86 machines): C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Visual Studio 10.

Here’s a quick Visual Studio tip for you… I frequently search for a specific text in my solution because I need to do something in all places where that text occurs. Today I found out how you can open all the files that are mentioned in the Find Results window. Search for the text you’re looking for. In my case this is ITest*. Open up the Search Results window and select all the records where the text was found.

The past couple of days I’ve been experiencing some issues with the context menu for my Solution Explorer in Visual Studio 2010. It contained scrollbars even when there was sufficient space on the screen to show the menu without scrolling. Searching for that issue I immediately found this blog post on The Visual Studio Blog. Taken from that post: We’re pleased to announce that there are patches available for Visual Studio and Windows Presentation Foundation that fix this problem.

Just a small post to start the new year… and let it be a good one! When opening a XAML document in Visual Studio, it opens in split view by default. This might become annoying when you have a large XAML document, because all the content needs to be rendered before you can get some work done. Here’s how you can have Visual Studio open XAML documents in code view:

Because we were still using an old Visual Studio 2005 solution which included a Web Site project, it was time to upgrade. We upgraded our Visual Studio 2005 solution to Visual Studio 2010 (and .NET 4.0), converted the Web Site Project to a Web Application Project and then, of course, the AjaxControlToolkit had to follow. I downloaded the latest build from their Codeplex site and updated the references in the different projects.

Sometimes it’s the little things that make you love a new product just a bit more. I tend to close stuff I don’t use anymore fairly quickly. Sometimes I even close an Explorer window or an application right after I used it, only to find I need it again in a few moments… We all have our quirks, right 😉 While developing I regularly close all the documents I have open in Visual Studio, especially when I am done with a specific task.

While working with Visual Studio 2010, a new feature caught my eye that isn’t communicated (strongly) in the “What’s new” lists you can find online. As part of the Visual Studio 2010 supports multiple web.config files! Now we can create a separate web.config file for each configuration we have for our application. If you add a configuration through the configuration manager, you have the possibility to add a web.config file for the new configuration, too.

When working with Visual Studio 2012 on our current project, the error ‘These files are not text files and cannot be opened in the comparison window.’ shows up every now and again. I’ve tried several things to solve this problem. Here’s the one that works: Close Visual Studio Navigate to your version of the c:\users\{username}\AppData\Local\Temp\ folder Delete the TFSTemp folder Restart Visual Studio and try again. You should be good to go!

A rather long title for this post, but that’s exactly what happened: when I opened an ASP.NET MVC 4 project with a cshtml view open, Visual Studio would crash with the error messages seen on the right. This would only occur if the first project I opened had a cshtml file open. When I opened another (type of) project first and then opened a project with a cshtml file open, the problem did not occur.

When debugging JavaScript in an ASP.NET MVC (4) application, it is not always enough to uncheck the ‘Disable script debugging’ checkboxes under ‘Tools’ – ‘Internet Options’ – ‘Advanced’ – ‘Browsing’. JavaScript inside a Razor view (a cshtml file) cannot be debugged from Visual Studio. To debug your JavaScript, move it to a separate .js file and link to that file from your Razor view. This way, breakpoints set in the JavaScript will be hit and you can debug from Visual Studio.

After installing Visual Studio 2012 Update 1, my Visual Studio stopped opening files in preview mode when I clicked them in the Solution Explorer. This setting seems to have changed with the installation of Update 1. To re-enable opening files clicked (once) in the Solution Explorer in Preview mode, go to ‘Tools’ – ‘Options’ – ‘Environment’ – ‘Tabs and Windows’. There, check the box under ‘Preview Tab’ – ‘Single-click opens files in the preview tab in:’ – ‘Solution Explorer (Alt + click to avoid previewing)’.

In the past, when you had some XML document that you wanted to translate into classes we had to create / generate a schema based on the XML file. Next, we had to generate a class based on the schema with an external tool. Not all too user friendly and somewhat time consuming. In Visual Studio 2012 you copy the XML you want to create a class/classes for, place the cursor in a class file on the location you want the code to be added and select the following menu items: Edit – Paste Special – Paste XML as Classes.

After making sure my Visual Studio always ran as an administrator by following my own post HowTo: Have Visual Studio always run as administrator on Windows 8, I got a message if I wanted to save changes to devenv.sln each and every time I double clicked a Solution. Since the problem kept occuring after installing Visual Studio 2015 CTP6, I wanted to solve it. So here we go! Double clicking a Solution file doesn’t start devenv.

As the title states: I was unable to attach the remote debugger (for instance to an Azure Web App) after installing Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. I got an error with something about invalid memory access or something like that. The solution is simple: install Remote Tools for Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. Go to the webite, pick your machine’s architecture (the x86 install won’t run on a x64 machine) and click download.

After updating Visual Studio 2015 (there was an update for GitHub Extensions, one for the NuGet Package Manager and, of course, there was Visual Studio 2015 Update 2) I tried to add the WindowsAzure.Storage NuGet package to a project I started about a month ago. I opened NuGet Package Manager, went to the Browse tab and typed WindowsAzure.Storage. The result: No Packages Found. OK, so then I’ll just…. Wait… WHAT?

After making sure my Visual Studio always ran as an administrator by following my own post HowTo: Have Visual Studio always run as administrator on Windows 8, I got a message if I wanted to save changes to devenv.sln each and every time I double clicked a Solution. Since the problem kept occuring after installing Visual Studio 2015 CTP6, I wanted to solve it. So here we go! Double clicking a Solution file doesn’t start devenv.

The people over at Microsoft have been working hard and have delivered a lot of stuff. That makes for a nice start after the holidays! So there’s a lot of cool stuff available to play with. I created some simple and easy to remember links for all of these goodies. Feel free to use and distribute these 🙂 Links to the goodies! The spec for .NET Standard 2.0 is complete (https://bit.

We’re hosting a VS2019 Launch Event at the Betabit The Hague office. Join us for some Visual Studio 2019 goodness! And maybe even some swag… ? Join us on April 2 for the launch of Visual Studio 2019. Learn about how Visual Studio 2019 is more productive, modern, and innovative, participate in live Q&As, and be the first to take the latest version for a spin. https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs2019-launch/ The agenda is as follows:

One of the most annoying things in Visual Studio (to me) was the fact that complete solutions (solution folders, projects, regulare folder) would be expanded upon opening. And with big solutions, that isn’t too much fun. There are macros available online, but the ones i found were pretty slow. This is only one of the things that the PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 solves for you. But there is more. Much more!

When writing WCF services, most of us find ourselves writing quick test applications. To give you more time to do what a developer should be doing (adding business value to the project) the Visual Studio team added a WCF test client that can help you reach goals faster. This is not a very difficult application, but it does the trick and is more than sufficient for simple testing. The WCF Test Client can be found at this location (without the ‘ (x86)’ for x86 machines): C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Visual Studio 10.

My Microsoft Touch Mouse stopped scrolling in Visual Studio on my Windows 8 machine some time ago. Because this kills productivity, I wanted to fix the problem. After trying some things I found that the problem only occurred when I ran Visual Studio as Administrator. Searching a bit further I found this bug to be added to Microsoft Connect. I found a workaround for the problem: Go to the location where you have Microsoft Mouse and Keyboard Center installed Open up the properties of ipoint.

In my previous post about being unable to access the iis metabase I wanted my Visual Studio to ‘Run as Administrator’ on my Windows 8 machine. I only managed to get this working for the pinned taskbar icon and not for items in the jumplist or for items you open by double clicking them. The solution to check the box ‘Run as Administrator’ on the compatibility tab of the file properties for devenv.

When installing SQL Server 2008 R2 on a Windows XP (or, according to the comments, Windows 7) development machine that has been around for quite some time, I got an error stating an unhandled exception occured in the application (see image). The error showed up directly upon startup and read: An error occurred creating the configuration section handler for userSettings/Microsoft.SqlServer.Configuration.LandingPage.Properties.Settings: Could not load file or assembly ‘System, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089’ or one of its dependencies.

As of December first I’ll be joining the ranks of Valid (www.valid.nl – Dutch website). I’m very excited to start over there and I am convinced we will be able to do great stuff together 🙂 I would also like to take this opportunity to thank BDO (www.bdo.nl) for the past period and wish them all the best with the plans for the future of ‘our’ system. Update 14 Jan 2011

As you probably know I’ve worked for my own company for quite a while (see my post ‘A new challenge’ of October first 2008). Because business was good, I had way too little time to keep this blog up to date. Sorry for that… Since the beginning of this month, that all has changed: I joined BDO) and can now work ’normal’ hours in stead of ‘I-own-my-own-company-and-have-to-make-every-minute-of-every-day-count’ hours. I’ll probably still be pretty busy, but there’s a difference between busy and busy… 😉

Our company has been mentioned in an article at the (pretty well-known) blog www.frankwatching.com. Read it over here (Dutch)

I’m reinstalling my laptop after I got it back from a repair… EMPTY (grrr). What tools shouldn’t I forget when preparing this laptop to be my development machine? Already have Visual Studio, SQL Management Studio, Office and the Windows Live tools installed… (and of course I have all kinds of tools at hand from my server like DebugView, Reflector and whatnot)

Our company has (the first draft of) a new website online. We’re still working on the content, but the design is now online. Check it out @ www.mediagarde.nl (Dutch).

Because I stopped working at Avanadeand started my own company(this web site is under construction and in Dutch), I had to buy and install a new laptop. Everything went great and I was up and running in half a day. Or should I say half an evening… 😉 The next day I wanted to continue developing a web site we are working on. I needed one of the Ajax Control Toolkit controls, so I added it to my toolbar the way you should go about this (create a separate tab, right click, ‘choose items’, browse for the assembly).

As of today, I am no longer working for Avanade. I had a good time over there, but my personal goals changed. I found a new challenge: I started a company with a good friend of mine. We’re still building the website, so the information is not there yet. But it will be soon. So check the websiteevery now and again. We’re very excited and can’t wait to get started!

One of my colleagues pointed out the new Fine-grained password policy feature in Windows Server 2008. As you can see in this postat The Sean Blog, some values have to be entered in the I8 format, which isn’t very user friendly. Because of that, he asked me if I could whip up a tool that converts days, hours, minutes and seconds to the I8 format. I quickly put together this small tool for him.

The last weeks have been filled with holidays and introductional days at my new employer{.}. Because of that, I haven’t had the time to realy dive into Visual Studio 2008, although I have played around with it since the RTM version was available. Since this week I’ve been writing some serious code in VS2008 for my new personal site (more about this later!). I can only agree with what Pieter de Bruinsaid in his post about the new line of developer tools and additions: “If you are building .

Today was the first of two introduction days at Avanade{.}. Maybe you missed it, but I started there today{.}. And that’s why I’m writing this blogpost from a hotel in Almere, using my new Avanade laptop. 😉 I’m sure there will be lots of stuff to blog about, so stay tuned for more…

A [wikipedia:RUP] project consists of 4 different phases. The elaboration phase(the second phase in the RUP project lifecycle) is normally done with a small team. One of the important reasons for this is that you want to define the basic form of your architecture. This means you think about concepts, elaborate on them, develop proof of concepts and select the ones that work best for your specific project. If there is one thing you can not use (early) in an elaboration phase of a project, it’s having too many team members.

As of 01-01-2008, I’m joining Avanade. You might have heard Avanade opened an office in the south of The Netherlandsthe first of November. I’ll be joining the ranks over there (Eindhoven!) and I am exited to get started. I spent the past years at LogicaCMG. I had a lot of fun and, even more important, I learned a lot. I’ll miss the guys (and girls!) I worked with, but I’m sure I will keep in touch with some of them.

My employer Betabit hosted a Hack Yourself First workshop by Troy Hunt on Monday 5th and Tuesday 6th of June. Because we are always looking to improve, this was a great opportunity to tune up our security skills. We had a great time, got terrified and most of all: we learned a lot. First contact: a Twitter DM to Troy Hunt You think you know security We’ve seen a lot of different subjects during the workshop.

After developing a custom Web Service to be hosted in SharePoint (based on this HowTo article on MSDN) and deploying it on a testing environment, I got some entries in the EventLog over there, stating: “Unable to connect publishing custom string handler for output caching. IIS Instance Id is ‘xxxxxxxxx’, url is ‘https://internalsharepointserver/somesubfolder/services.asmx“ The PublishingHttpModule trying to cache an unmanaged path seems to be the problem here. When enabled for a custom web application (such as my web service), it causes the eventlog entry each time certain requests like web service calls or static CSS files are made.

It’s here: the Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit. This first release contains two tools, both supported on WSS 3.0 and SharePoint Server 2007. Batch Site Manager From the “Move, Lock, and Delete Site Collections” page on Applications Management you can schedule bulk operations against site collections in the farm—including moving site collections between content databases (!!). stsadm extension: UpdateAlert This command will refresh all alert URLs in a specific site collection, which is extremely important should you change the URL of a web application or after an upgrade.

As I said earlier, we didn’t test our solution to using the ModalPopupExtender in SharePoint in all situations. Today we made a start to do so. To indicate our successrate: we now use window.showModalDialogwith some extra pages… Lets go through some of the problems we encountered. Placing an UpdatePanel around the entire UserControl (with default settings) makes that the entire UserControl is posted back, even when it is a control inside a nested UpdatePanel that posts back.

Getting the ModalPopupExtender from the Ajax Control Toolkit to work (decently) in SharePoint was not exactly a walk in the park. With a default SharePoint installation, the modal popup is partly positioned ‘outside’ of the page (you only see the bottom right part of the popup in the top left corner of the browser). Postbacks are not executed or executed poorly and the page gets garbled up. A possible solution for the positioning of the popup is to set the X and Y property of the ModalPopupExtender.

The EntLib Extensions to WSSFhave gotten more and more attention lately. There now is a (very positive) announcement about the extensions on the WSSF site, and there is a complete article on MSDNexplaining how to use the extensions. Check it out! Links: EntLib Extensions to WSSF: https://www.codeplex.com/EntLibExtensionsWSSF MSDN article: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc164250.aspx WSSF site: https://www.codeplex.com/servicefactory

Some of my (Dutch!) Avanade colleagues recently released ‘Entlib Extensions To WSSF’ to CodePlex. Quite a cool addition to the already rich Enterprise Library. Entlib Extensions to WSSF (Web Service Software Factory) is an extension that enables WSSF to easily integrate with Enterprise Library. This extension allows you to very easily handle cross cutting concerns in WCF services like Validation, Exception Handling and Logging without much programming. The extension accomplishes this by using the policy injection application block of enterprise library.

The above scenario gave me the well-known could not load file or assembly error message. The assembly that couldn’t be found was log4net, Version=1.2.10.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=692fbea5521e1304. Or one of its dependencies of course… The situation in which I was getting this error message: using the CrystalReportViewer in an ASP.NET application having the ASP.NET application hosted in IIS (the error did not occur on the ASP.NET Development Server) running on a 64 bit machine Log4net was available in the GAC, with the exact version and PublicKeyToken stated in the error message.

I’m not entirely sure about the article on Digitimes. One of the reasons is because it was posted on April first. Another reason is the way it is written. But if it turns out to be true, I’m going to have to get a Blu-Ray player for my Xbox 360… 😉 A quote from the article: Lite-On IT is developing built-in Blu-ray Disc-(BD) ROM drives for the Microsoft Xbox 360 game console, according to industry sources.

Recently I put up a list of my Xbox 360 games. I’ll try to keep it up to date. I must say it’s difficult to choose which game to get next. There are so many good titles out! Assassins Creed, Need for Speed ProStreet, Call of Duty 4 Modern warfare, and more… Want to join me when gaming online? My gamertag is OZGump (see my gamercard).

I have lots of games for my Xbox 360 I still need to / want to finish, like The Orange Box and Bioshock. And despite this, I’ve been working ’non-stop’ behind my laptop for the last two evenings to prepare it for Visual Studio 2008, and to download and install it. It’s almost time… 😉 I can’t wait to get busy with the final version of Visual Studio 2008 and stuff like LINQ, extension methods, anonymous types, lambda expressions and so on.

WOW The single player mode feels like a multiplayer game, with excellent gameplay. Certain parts of the game are pretty creepy, and I like it that there are some surprising elements in there. Sometimes you expect something to happen, which doesn’t. And when you least expect it…. So the (story in the) game is original. That makes a game interesting to play. One of the things I like a lot is that you can use almost everything your opponents use, like vehicles and weapons

A Halo 3 video has been posted at the Microsoft website, which can be found through the Bungie website. The article containing the link starts out with this next sentence: Maybe you’ve heard of him, maybe you haven’t… but around Microsoft, Mr. Jukes has established a name for himself as a tireless, hardcore and fanatical player of Halo who isn’t too shabby in the video production department either. You can find the complete article here.