I've been working lately on adding "self-healing" capabilities to a certain application. The idea is to create a set of utility functions which will validate (and fix if needed) various environmental settings such as NTFS permissions, registry permissions, IIS metabase settings, etc. None if this is...

After "Collapsing to Definitions" (Cntl-M,Cntl-O), Visual Studio decided to color the collapsed code section in black, white and red: Can anyone clue me in on what/why that is? It happened consistently while VS.NET was open, but only for that specific method. After rebooting VS.NET I can't recreate...

The Tip: If your mouse has thumb buttons, they are usually mapped (by default) to "back" and "forward" in IE. Change those to PgUp and PgDown, and give it a test drive in Visual Studio. I never noticed how much of my development time was being spent on paging... much better now! The Tool: Resharper is...

About 2 months ago I asked if anyone was interested in an alternative to the WSS webservices . A few people responded and tried my WssDal library. The general consensus seems to be that while it isn't perfect, it is useful enough to continue developing. So if anyone else wants to give it a test drive...

Random musings... I have had too much sugar today and too little sleep last night, so my brain is a little fried. Consider yourself warned :) My current gig is for a hospital. Every evening when I leave the parking lot, the automated toll machine remarks " thank you and please come again ". Is that really...

I'm looking for a few people to help beta-test an alternative to Sharepoint's web services. The solution allows a simple "object modelish" approach to working with WSS, as shown by the following sample code snippets: // display all fields of all items of all lists ListsClient ListClient = new ListsClient...

Utility and source code here ( http://www.addysanto.com/blog/fixsitelinks.zip ) Introduction WSS 2.0 includes a utility called SMigrate which can be used to backup the content and structure of a site and to later recreate a site’s content and structure from the backup file. SMigrate also enables migration...

... is on Stefan Goßner 's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/stefan_gossner/articles/271524.aspx .

In my Biztalk projects, I had several scenarios which sounded like a great fit for HWS. I spent a fair amount of time and effort but could never get HWS to cooperate. After a while I just gave up on it and advised customers to use standard Biztalk orchestrations when possible, or leapfrog HWS and go...

Yesterday's ".Net Deep Dive" day at Microsoft Israel was a huge success. Over 1600 developers came to the event to hear about advanced development topics such as Agile/TDD and Production Time Debugging . Both of Royo 's lectures were packed , with people sitting on the floor after the 700 or so chairs...

Gregory MacBeth recently posted an exhaustive 28-step roadmap for wannabe Sharepoint developers. IMHO some of the topics there aren't really required for Sharepoint development per-se (UML? UIP Application Block?) but the list is detailed and definitely worth checking out: http://weblogs.asp.net/gregmcb...

Proving once again that Resistance Is Futile *, TristanK updates his Outlook Calender Adapter to support beta1 of BlogWave mere hours after it is released. And he even added a slick(er) new interface and an icon!

This release is full of cool new features. Drag-and-drop enables creating complex aggregate feeds in literally seconds. Context Menus. NNTP (newsgroup) support. A pluggable architecture and a C# code sample showing how to connect BlogWave to additional data sources . Whats not to like ?!? Get it HERE...

I finally solved the problems with enabling XP Visual Styles (Themes) which I described here . My initial attempt worked on some computers but not others; apparently there is some mystic connection between the themed activation context, the color of my underwear and the current conversion rate from yen...

<8/18/2004 update: see part II of this post, with a better solution: http://weblogs.asp.net/asanto/archive/2004/08/18/216825.aspx > .Net version 1.1 has a bug with XP Visual Styles which causes the following cryptic exception: "'System.Runtime.InteropServices.SEHException: External component has...

Alpha 2 of BlogWave is now available. ( What is BlogWave?? ) New & Improved in this version: Many internal changes and bug fixes. Supports for syndicating multiple feeds at once through the UI. Redesigned the "Running" screen to be more informative. Added support for syndicating event logs . (Thanks...

Everyone knows about securing apps from SQL injection attacks, but how many of you have given consideration to XPath injection protection? This (PDF:"Blind Xpath Injection") is a good introduction. A short excerpt shows why XPath injection can be more dangerous than it's SQL cousin: This approach...

One common task when programmatically manipulating an InfoPath form is setting up the namespace manager. The following code will fail: MyInfopathDOM.SelectSingleNode("//my:name"); because of the unrecognized "my" prefix. But create a namespacemanager with the namespaces used in the form and you are good...

Infopath has a simple and elegent system for caching form templates - when you open a form with an unknown template, it extracts the template version and location information from an XML processing instruction (PI) in the form, and then loads the template from the specified location and caches it on...

Note to self: Next time you need to add a Processing Instruction (PI) to an XmlDocument, ignore the MSDN documentation sample which uses XmlDocument.AppendChild . That sample isn't exactly incorrect, however it does result in the PI being appended to the end of the document , which probably matches...

While this has been blogged about ( ScottWoo , OAllen ) it really deserves a little more buzz: 1. Microsoft FINALLY released the Friggin help and documentation for BizTalk 2004. As a newbie BTS developer on a tight schedule I have been praying for this for weeks! Download Here 2. Also released...

I was deploying a webservice onto a SharePoint box when I got the “Debugging is not supported under current trust settings” error. So, I Google the error message and guess what is Google's number #1 search result ? :)

I must have dozed off at the wheel because this was new to me: Finally, Indigo is different from the other new Longhorn technologies in an important way: It will run on some older versions of Windows. The plan of record is to offer Indigo on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, as well as on the Longhorn...

Last week there was a bit of a controversy surrounding somebody’s bad experiences with .NET Serialization. Getting intimate with Serialization is a bit like any other relationship – Sometimes good, sometimes bad, every now and then just incomprehensible. And you better not forget to buy flowers...

There is an impressive number of developer webcasts available on-demand here , 23 just from last week! I usually don't have patience for presentations (especially webcasts) but I checked out a few of the level 400s and they were exactly what I was looking for. Recommended....