Yeah, It's THAT Boring!

LINQPad + SQLite => An Hour Saved

2011-04-13T21:41:00.003-05:00

Recently, I lost all the images for my website due to some technical issues. All the images were also being saved in a SQLite database with the description as the file name. Instead of writing a brand new console app, I fired up LINQPad, added the SQLite driver and saved myself an hour's time

var images = (from img in ImageTables where img.Description.StartsWith("images") select img);
foreach (var img in images) {
var fi = new FileInfo(img.Description);
fi.Directory.Create();
File.WriteAllBytes(fi.FullName, img.Image);
img.Description.Dump();
}

iPhone App Compiles For Simulator And Not For Device

2010-02-13T12:47:00.003-06:00

I was writing a quick app using the MKMapView and CoreLocation. The application compiled fine for the simulator and pulled up the correct view when running on the simulator. Once I changed the config to compile to the device, all hell broke lose. The compiler started generating link errors. After a couple of hours of hitting my head against the wall I was able to find the solution here. But essentially, the project.pbxproj file contained items that shouldn't have been in the file. After I updated the framework search path, the application compiled correctly. Below is the fix

FRAMEWORK_SEARCH_PATHS = "$(inherited)";

Wondering About Getting My Own Blog Site

2008-12-13T23:43:00.001-06:00

I am really tired of formatting code for the blogspot. It is a major PITA. Wondering whether hosting my own blogs would make things easier? Then again, I don’t blog enough to justify the cost…

C#, Generics, and Reflection

2008-12-13T23:24:00.010-06:00

On my current project, we are using a homegrown ORM framework that works against stored procedures. The framework is fairly slick, uses generics, and does save time by producing basic plumbing as well as the stored procedures. As to why we are not using NHibernate and Spring.NET, the client does not have much faith in Open Source projects and only allows stored procedures to access their database. Though I have opinions about that, we will not share those here.

Since the application we are writing must coexist side by side with the legacy application and it’s other modules, we must also use the legacy tables. The application uses lots of lookup tables, which could really all be rolled up into a single table with types but I digress. We decided that instead of having several classes to do the CRUD for the lookup types, we will be writing a single class to manage all of lookup tables.

So my team member, Jes, created the stored procedure to let us return any of the lookup values based on the parameters that we pass in. The problem reared its ugly head when she tried to use the framework in association with a single common stored procedure. The framework expects the generic type parameter and we don’t have this value till runtime and there is not much that could be done here without the use of reflection.

Reflection allows an application to use introspection to to work with some piece of code and can be a very powerful tool in the bag o’ tricks. I have used reflection extensively in my days of java development but not much in the .NET world. While thinking about the problem, I started thinking about reflection once again and started playing with it. As it turns out, reflection is even easier in .NET than it was in java (which was really cool and easy).

After playing with it a little, I realized that you can check to see if a method is a generic method and whether it has a generic type parameter. Once I realized that, I knew our problem had been solved. Below is an example of a class that has a method with a type parameter. The code uses reflection to dynamically pass the parameter type. No, the code is not production quality and makes assumptions that should always be validated but that’s not the point here

using System;
using System;
namespace Test {
  public class Hello {
    public void PrintTypeName() {
      Console.WriteLine("Parameter Type Name: {0}", typeof(T).FullName);
    }
  }
  class Program {
    static void Main(string[] args) {
      // instantiate the object and store the type information...will need it again
      var instance = Activator.CreateInstance(Type.GetType("Test.Hello"));
      var type = instance.GetType();

      // lookup the method you want to work on.  This is just for demonstration purposes
      // only...there are better ways to lookup information
      var m = type.GetMethod("PrintTypeName");

      // this call makes the method into a generic method passing in the type parameter
      // information.  DO note that you must assign back the value returned from the
      // method call.  If you fail to do the assignment, you will get the following exception
      // which I did but didn't find much help on google and is the whole point of this blog
      // Exception: "Late bound operations cannot be performed on types or methods for which ContainsGenericParameters is true"
      m = m.MakeGenericMethod(type);

      // now that you have a generic method, all that is needed is the invocation.
      // Since there are no argument values for the method, we are passing in the null
      // Also note that we must have an instance to execute the method on since the method is not
      // static.  If the method was static, instance would be passed in as null as well
      m.Invoke(instance, null);

      // Sam Bradford of OU won the Heisman today [12.13.2008]
      // Boomer Sooner!
      Console.Write("Press any key...");
      Console.ReadKey();
    }
  }
}

Going Home

2008-08-23T09:07:00.002-05:00

My Employer and I have agreed that I can work from home starting September. This is a big change for them as I live 600 miles away from the office but something they have agreed to try with me.

I am a little nervous, but also excited about. I already have an office at home and the family is excited about the prospects as well

Text Inverter Application

2008-07-12T00:02:00.002-05:00

Once upon a long time, I worked for a mega company (now, I work for a different mega company) and we had disparate systems. We had applications written in COBOL, Delphi, and of course, java.

Applications started out on the MainFrame eons ago and a decision was made to invert the order numbers. I, for the life of me, cannot remember what the reason was but anyhow, our java apps used the correct order number and there was a disparity. Sometimes we had to take the copy the order number from the MainFrame into our java apps/sql executor to see why things were not running correctly. It was a pain in the butt to invert the numbers so I wrote this utility in 2003 with Sharp Develop to invert the values. Double clicking the textbox copies the value to the clipboard (wonder what it will do under Vista).

This might come in handy some day or to anyone else. The file can be downloaded here: http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?nmq3xthldgm

Stuff You Need

2008-06-29T10:57:00.004-05:00

Eclipse/NetBeans
Visual Studio (latest version)
Resharper
NHibernate
Spring.NET
Firebug
Fiddler
Process Explorer
TCPView
SQL Server Profiler
Microsoft Virtual PC (only because it's free)
ISO Recorder

Tweeting Out

2008-06-23T19:28:00.002-05:00

Seems like I may be close to my tweeting days, which is a shame!

2008-06-22T23:38:00.000-05:00

Twitter is crapping out again!

2008-05-18T18:17:00.002-05:00

I just saw Ironman and it is an awesome movie! I wonder, though, why was one of the bad dudes switching languages between Urdu and Arabic? Then he goes on and talks to someone from a "small village" in Afghanistan and talks to him in Urdu...Wrong! They speak Pushtu, from what I know.

Twitter

2008-05-06T21:21:00.000-05:00

Has anyone else noticed that Twitter is down almost every day?

PERMISSION_SET = EXTERNAL_ACCESS or UNSAFE

2008-05-06T20:07:00.004-05:00

The other day one of our developers decided to create some code that he wanted to be accessible from SQL Server 2005 Stored Proc. While he was on vacation, we deployed the application on the client's server for UAT and got the following message:

"Executed as user: xxx\SVCSQLAGENT. An error occurred in the Microsoft .NET Framework while trying to load assembly id 65545. The server may be running out of resources, or the assembly may not be trusted with PERMISSION_SET = EXTERNAL_ACCESS or UNSAFE. Run the query again, or check documentation to see how to solve the assembly trust issues. For more information about this error: System.IO.FileLoadException: Could not load file or assembly…"

After digging around a little bit, I delegated the problem to one of my colleagues (Jos) who solved the problem promptly. Below is the solution:

ALTER DATABASE MY_DATABASE
SET TRUSTWORTHY ON;
go

USE MY_DATABASE
go
sp_configure 'show advanced options', 1;
GO
RECONFIGURE;
GO
sp_configure 'Ole Automation Procedures', 1;
GO
RECONFIGURE;
GO

Accessing Controls on the Master Page

2008-04-26T20:03:00.006-05:00

The other day, a colleague of mine had a problem where he needed to disable a control on the master page. The page that he was working on was fairly big, as far as the amount of data is concerned. There were buttons on the master page that let the user manipulate the content page. The problem was that master page got rendering way before the content page and if the user clicked on the button to control the content page, ASP.NET got ticked off and threw some kind of ViewState exception.

The solution that I proposed was to disable the button until the content page gets rendered and have the content page enable the button on the master page using javascript. Since the button was on the master page, we had to do the following

1. Added a method that will find any control recursively. We “borrowed” this code from the Coding Horror site here
2. Add a public variable that was the actual id of the control we were trying to access. ASP.NET assigns a unique id to each control and needed to make sure we get the exact id
3. Used javascript after the data was done rendering to get the element by id and enabled it

Content page looked like this

public string btnName;
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) {
Control o = FindControlRecursive(this.Master, "Button1");
btnName = o.UniqueID;
}

And the javascript looks like this


var lnk = document.getElementById("<%= btnName %>");
alert("enabling the button");
lnk.disabled = false;

You can download the solution here

I think I need to blog about…

2008-04-24T00:16:00.001-05:00

There have been a couple of topics that I want to blog about but due to several factors, laziness mainly, I haven't been able to do so. The topics that I am going to write about are

Controlling controls on the master page in an ASP.NET site
Playing more with the barcodes with iTextSharp

Amazon Toll Free Number

2008-04-14T22:21:00.002-05:00

If anyone is looking for amazon.com's toll free number, here it is:
(800) 201-7575

Office 2007 and Spell Check

2008-04-12T19:31:00.004-05:00

At office, we are in the process of upgrading from Office 2003 to Office 2007. Couple of weeks ago, I decided to bite the bullet and upgraded to Office 2007. At first, the I wasn't comfortable with the new "Ribbon" interface, but the more I used it the more I liked it. I started noticing that Word was not doing a good job of catching my spelling mistakes; to prove myself correct, I typed bunch of garbage and there were no red underlines. I hit F7 and again it failed to register anything.

After a couple weeks of living without the spell check, I was annoyed enough to where I decided to google it. Seems like I wasn't the only dude having problems after upgrading. After trying several things that I read on blogs, my spelling didn't get any better. After looking more I stumbled upon Microsoft KB document that helped me out.

Basically, you have to delete a few registry keys. These are listed below. Please DO NOT take these steps lightly as your computer can become unusable. Always export your setting as a backup scenario. Once you delete these keys and start Word, it will regenerate these keys and you should be in business.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Proofing Tools

You can find the the original document from Microsoft here.

Turn on IIS6 Compression

2008-04-08T01:55:00.001-05:00

When I was working for my previous employer, one of the applications that we had developed was based on the "Software as a Service" (SaaS) premise. I was at the client site (a school district), at a VERY remote location with no AT&T cell phone service, and loading their data over the internet into our system. This was our first attempt at SaaS so we were learning as we went along. At one point, we had about 5 different people loading data into our system by scanning the serial numbers on the items. During our testing, within our network, the application was scaling just fine and we were thinking that we will gain insight into what else we need to do to make it scale even more.

Since the application was written in ASP.NET using the 2.0 Framework, every scan required a postback. As it turned out, the internet connection was slow at the client site but not that slow. They were using a dedicated T1 amongst the school district and it was summer time, 1 week before the start of fall session. There should have been enough bandwidth to enter the data without any noticeable latency but we were waiting about 20 seconds per scan. My first thought was that the internet connection back in the office was having troubles (yeah, we were sharing our T1 in the office with this application!). After confirming back at the office that we were not having any issues, I had to turn my attention to the amount of data being chunked back and forth. I used the excellent Fiddler tool to figure out the data transfer and the roundtrip time. SQL Server Profiler also came in handy as I was watching the tables being hit. Each scan was posting back about 100K of data in about 10 seconds. That means that the application was taking 10 seconds to process the information which, to me, was unacceptable. Since this was our beta test customer, nobody was panicking except for me and my boss.

After the first week at the client and nowhere being done, something had to be done as I didn't plan on not being ready when the school opened. So, over the weekend my first stab was at "fixing" the indexes. That helped…just a little. Now, each scan was taking about 7 seconds to process. Still not good! After looking at the code, (I was not the original developer and was only helping out since "the dude" had gone on vacation) I realized that NHibernate was not setup correctly and it was issuing N+1 queries. I fixed that as well and the application started humming. The data was getting loaded in less than half a second now.

This was only half the battle. We had to load thousands of items and at this rate it would have taken us forever. There was still the issue of sending 100K of data across the country. OK, I have done enough development to know that pages can be g-zipped. On the java side, I had written custom filters to compress the jsp pages and expected to find something on the ASP.NET side as well. First reads of the symptom were discouraging as it was hard to turn it on IIS5 (Windows XP) and it has issues, but luckily at home I use Win2K3 for my main machine and was able to find several documents that showed how to turn it on IIS6. After messing with the settings, I was able to get things going. 100K of data transfer was history; IIS6 was doing an excellent job of compression the data and we were only transferring about 30K of data. This made my week bearable and we were able to load all of the data that was required before the week was over.

Of course, I turned on AJAX in the coming weeks and the application ran just as fast on a dialup as on broadband (except for the initial load) but that wasn't bad either on the dialup due to compression.

I am writing this blog 9 months after the fact and I the site that came in really handy was Scott Forsyth's blog especially this post

http://weblogs.asp.net/owscott/archive/2004/01/12/57916.aspx

To Turn On IIS6 Compression

From the IIS snap-in, right-click on the Web Sites node and click on Properties
Select the Service tab - Enable Compress application files
Enable Compress static files
Select a new Temporary directory or leave the default in there
Make sure The IUSR_{machinename} has write permissions to this directory. This is the id that IIS runs as
Save and close the Web Site Properties dialog

Create a Web Service Extension

In the IIS snap-in right-click Web Service Extensions
Add a new web service extension
Call it HTTP Compression
Point it to c:\windows\system32\inetsrv\gzip.dll
Select Set extension status to Allowed

Changing Metabase.xml

Shutdown IIS
Backup %windir%/system32/inetsrv/Metabase.xml to your desktop or another directory away from inetsrv directory
Open Metabase.xml for editing
Find "<IisCompressionScheme" section in the xml file. There should be 2 entries for this. One for deflate and one for gzip. Both these sections will need to be edited
Update HcDynamicCompressionLevel to 9. Valid values are from 0 to 10. 10 is not recommended by Microsoft.
Make sure to follow the already entered format for the below sections
1. Update HcScriptFileExtensions and add aspx and axd
2. Update HCFileExtensions and add css and js
Save the file and restart IIS.
Once IIS is up and running, make sure to browse the deployed websites to make sure everything is running as expected

There should be some files in the temporary directory. If there are no files in that directory, browse some pages with css files. If there still aren't any files in the temporary directory, you may have to restart this process again.

Afterwards, I found out that you can use the Metabase Explorer from Microsoft to edit the Metabase file as well.

Installing Windows Media Player 11 on Windows Server 2003

2008-03-23T20:33:00.000-05:00

I use Windows Server 2003 as my primary development machine for various reasons. The other day, I decided that I will start listening to my music library on my development machine. I tried installing the Yahoo Jukebox and Rhapsody both of which failed miserably. iTunes installed successfully, but I don't like it...besides it installs QuickTime and I plain just hate that! Also, I tried watching movies on NetFlix and it told me that it needed WM Player 11 for DRM purposes.

After doing some research, I found out that WM player 11 is not available for Win 2K3. So, off I went looking for how to install WMP 11 on my machine. The process turned out to be very simple on my machine running SP2. You can get the details from Zack Whittaker's blog.

Even though, the music players still didn't work, I can now watch media files from NetFlix. After some digging around, I gave up and ran Rhapsody in compatibility mode. Out with iTunes!

It also goes to show the dependency everyone, except for Apple, has on Microsoft. And, why is the Xbox360 not able to connect to my machine? May be, Yahoo should let Microsoft buy them after all.

uncaught exception: Permission denied to get property

2008-02-25T20:57:00.000-06:00

The other day, we implemented SSL on our production site and all of a sudden some of the popup screens, that were calling javascript functions on the opening window, stopped working. After digging around this is what I discovered:

You cannot switch protocols between https and http or the other way around. As far as the browsers are concerned, this is a cross-domain permissions issue. Yes, even though the application may be calling a function on the same domain, the browsers treat it as cross domain call. Unless of course, you are truly make a cross domain call.

Microsoft OneNote Trick

2008-02-19T22:27:00.000-06:00

Today, I was looking for Google Desktop plugin for OneNote and found a little trick. Apparently, you can do some interesting math in your notes. For example, you can type

Sqrt(33) + 12 + 254 =

and hit the enter key to show your results. You can find the original post and more cool tricks here

XBox 360 -- The Return

2008-02-13T20:00:00.000-06:00

I finally got my 360 back last Thursday. It seems like these things are sent to Mexico for repair. After 2 weeks of doing nothing with my console, Microsoft decided that it would be better to exchange my console for a different one.

Since I was checking the status on my console several times a day, I noticed that one day the status changed to something like "No repair info". At first I started to freak out; then I thought they must have shipped it back...but where is the return info? Hmmm...3 LONG days later, the status changed to "Device shipped to customer" and the serial number looked different since mine, from what I could remember, had lots of 6s and 0s. Sure enough, I got a nice little letter from Microsoft declaring that my console had been swapped out so that I could get back to gaming.

When I got the console back, I fired it up only to notice the freaking CD drive was louder than a turbo diesel truck! I wasn't too happy about this "new" development. OK, let's test Halo...what the f@#k?! Why does it keep locking and restarting the game...I wasn't getting a good feeling in my gut. I decided to start the level again and viola, it worked! I was kinda excited as well as upset...I am playing at the legendary level and had to lose a lot of progress.

I guess, you win some and you lose some. As long as you are in the winning column more than the losing column, it should be alright

XBox 360 -- The Coffin

2008-01-23T20:53:00.000-06:00

The coffin for my 360 arrived today. I promptly packed it up and it will be shipping out tomorrow morning. Let's just hope that it has a quicker turn around time than 2 months

Aaaahhh...Joys of Being an Xbox 360 Owner

2008-01-18T23:31:00.000-06:00

I was big into computer/console games when I was in college. Once I entered my professional life, I kind of gave up on upgrading my computer every year just so that I can play the latest games. So, after years of inactivity, my little brother convinced me to buy an Xbox 360 console this past April. I did my research and read horror stories about the dreaded "Red Ring of Death". I thought to myself, what are my chances of getting a bummed console?

I bit the bullet and bought my first Xbox from the beloved Wal-Mart for instant gratification. 5 days into my gaming, just when I was getting used to the controller, the red lights lit up...I packed up my dead console and went back to the wally world and explained what had just happened. It felt like I had been cavity searched before they took the stupid thing back!

OK...not gonna get another one...not gonna do it...no way Jose...should I do it?...let me think about it...lightning doesn't hit the same spot twice...yeah, that makes sense...I should get another one...remember, it was fun!..OK...I got another one...from amazon.com this time.

Sure, I have been hooked on Halo ever since I first played it. I own the whole trilogy...and I love playing it. So, last night after the kids were in bed, it was Halo time baby!

NO IT WASN'T! My console locked up right when the Xbox logo came on the screen. None of the light came on...hmm...not a big deal...let's try again...this is ridiculous...I am seeing red...no, I am seeing the "Ring 'o Death!" OH CRAP!!!!

This is total bullcrap! Microsoft should have done a better job of getting its suppliers and materials right. If they were in such a competition to come out earlier than Sony, the least they could have done was to make sure that the console were made to last at least a year or two before Sony got its mojo going! Who dumps $400 (I know it's cheaper now) on a piece of hardware just so that it can go poof twice in less than a year?! I can't!

I am just glad that they covered the console, which I still happen to love, for 3 years! I am going to call Microsoft in the morning and hopefully get this resolved soon, by which I mean 2 months or more of course!

Barcode Generation Using iText

2008-01-17T20:09:00.013-06:00

In my previous life as a java developer, I had used iText to generate barcodes and attach them to pdf files for faxing. Recently, we had a need where our warehouse users were mistyping the RMA code thus slowing down the process. We decided that barcodes would be a perfect idea as the warehouse is littered with scanners.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that iText (iTextSharp) has been ported to the .Net world without any dependencies on the J# runtime. Below is a sample piece of code to generate a barcode as a png file

private void GenerateBarCode(string strBarCodeValue) {
 //Barcode
Response.ContentType = "image/png";
MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream();
Document doc = new Document(PageSize.A4, 50, 50, 50, 50);
PdfWriter writer = PdfWriter.GetInstance(doc, stream);
doc.Open();

PdfContentByte cb = writer.DirectContent;
Barcode39 code39 = new Barcode39();
code39.Code = strBarCodeValue;
code39.StartStopText = true;
code39.GenerateChecksum = false;
code39.Extended = true;

MemoryStream mem = new MemoryStream();
code39.CreateDrawingImage(System.Drawing.Color.Black, System.Drawing.Color.White)
.Save("E:\\abcd.png");

}

Date Validation Using Javascript in ASP.Net

2008-01-14T21:03:00.000-06:00

I ran across an issue today where I had to use javascript to validate the user date. The pattern I matched against is "mm/dd/yyyy". Below is the code that does the trick

  var pattern = /^(?=\d)(?:(?:(?:(?:(?:0?[13578]|1[02])(\/|-|\.)31)\1|(?:(?:0?[1,3-9]|1[0-2])(\/|-|\.)(?:29|30)\2))(?:(?:1[6-9]|[2-9]\d)?\d{2})|(?:0?2(\/|-|\.)29\3(?:(?:(?:1[6-9]|[2-9]\d)?(?:0[48]|[2468][048]|[13579][26])|(?:(?:16|[2468][048]|[3579][26])00))))|(?:(?:0?[1-9])|(?:1[0-2]))(\/|-|\.)(?:0?[1-9]|1\d|2[0-8])\4(?:(?:1[6-9]|[2-9]\d)?\d{2}))($|\ (?=\d)))?(((0?[1-9]|1[012])(:[0-5]\d){0,2}(\ [AP]M))|([01]\d|2[0-3])(:[0-5]\d){1,2})?$/;
       function validateDate(userDate) {
         var fld = document.getElementById(userDate);
         if(fld.value != "") {
            if(!fld.value.match(pattern)) {
              alert("Date must be in mm/dd/yyyy format");
            }
          }
       }

In the Beginning

2008-01-14T20:27:00.000-06:00

This is my first blog.

I am a software developer by trade and have been writing software for a while. I have been thinking about blogging about coding issues that I run into at work and how I solve these issues. The problem is that I forget how I "fixed" a certain problem and have to find the solution again.

I will be writing short blurbs about:

1. java
2. c#, asp.net, and .net in general
3. hibernate and nhibernate
4. spring and spring.net
5. misc.

This blog is mostly for my consumption, but I will be happy if it comes in handy for others as well.