Code/Tea/Etc...

This blog has moved... notice #2...

Duncanma — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 05:17:00 GMT

For various reasons, the biggest being my desire to play around with .Text, I've moved my blog to my own server at http://blogs.duncanmackenzie.net/duncanma

following the 3 leaf model when they moved, I thought I should post this notice a couple of times...

This blog has moved...

Duncanma — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 17:11:00 GMT

For various reasons, the biggest being my desire to play around with .Text, I've moved my blog to my own server at http://blogs.duncanmackenzie.net

The first post over there shows the app that I wrote last night and then used to copy all of my posts and categories over from this blog to the new location... I'll post the code for that app at some point, as boring as it is...

Has anyone tried migrating posts from weblogs.asp.net to another .Text installation?

Duncanma — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 00:29:00 GMT

I've set up my own little .Text installation and I'm considering copying (not removing the existing versions) posts to my installation so that I still have a visible archive... has anyone done this before?

Happen to have created a tool or script to help the process?

Wes Haggard discusses the new iterators in C# 2.0

Duncanma — Tue, 24 Aug 2004 06:13:00 GMT

Recusive GetFiles for DirectoryInfo via a C# Iterator
I have been working on a project using C# Express and so I have been playing around with some of the new C# 2.0 features. In my project I had a need to get all the files of a particular type in a given directory including all sub-directories. The DirectoryInfo class has a method GetFiles that takes a search pattern (ie "*.exe") but it only searches that directory it doesn't search sub-directories. So I figured this would be a good chance for me to play with these new things called iterators. At any rate I wrote a recursive version of GetFiles using an iterator so that I could do a simple foreach loop to get all the files recursively.

Click on the title of the post to read the entire article...

The email I get...

Duncanma — Mon, 23 Aug 2004 08:53:00 GMT

Every day I get from 1 to 10 emails asking me various VB questions... some I answer by pointing to a link, some by providing code, and sometimes I just point people to the newsgroups or forums that exist for this type of question... but this time I thought I'd just post the question and answer into my blog ...

The Question (edited slightly):

I just want to ask how to make the string in to proper format..
ex...
input.
gerald

this must be the output:
Gerald

and i want it to interactively change when i'm inputing a string in a textbox..

And the answer is to put this code into the TextChanged event of your textbox;

Dim ci As Globalization.CultureInfo = _
    System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture



Private Sub TextBox1_TextChanged(ByVal sender As System.Object, _

        ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles TextBox1.TextChanged

    Dim pos As Integer = TextBox1.SelectionStart

    TextBox1.Text = ci.TextInfo.ToTitleCase(TextBox1.Text)

    If pos > 0 AndAlso pos <= TextBox1.Text.Length Then

        TextBox1.SelectionStart = pos

    End If

End Sub

The key is that the CultureInfo class provides a TextInfo instance, which in turn has a method of "ToTitleCase" on it... This KB article provides more info and also shows an alternate method to achieve the same results (StrConv()).

C# 2005 and C# Express Content Up...

Duncanma — Thu, 12 Aug 2004 21:28:00 GMT

Just up...

Investigating Code Snippet Technology
Andrew W. Troelsen
Intertech Training
Summary: This article explorers the use of Visual Studio 2005 and Visual C# 2005 Express Edition code snippet technologies. Once the reader understands the XML syntax used to represent code snippets, this article examines the process of building and registering custom code expansions with your Microsoft .NET IDE of choice. (21 printed pages)

and up a few days ago...

An Introduction to Programming Using Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express Edition
Andrew W. Troelsen
Intertech Training
Summary: This article introduces programming with the C# language using the Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express Edition Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Using various example projects, readers will be exposed to several aspects of the C# programming language and key concepts of the .NET platform. (23 printed pages)

Another article preview up... this one is a content rotator for ASP.NET

Duncanma — Thu, 12 Aug 2004 09:43:00 GMT

As I discussed in an earlier post, I wanted to know if people found preview articles useful... and at least a few people said they did, so here is another one....

Rotating Is Fun
Summary: Duncan Mackenzie describes the creation of a simple ‘content rotator’ in ASP.NET

Feedback, via the blog or the feedback link at the bottom of the article page, is always welcome!

vbCity has blogs!?!? Excellent...

Duncanma — Thu, 12 Aug 2004 09:18:00 GMT

Serge Baranovsky, the man behind vbCity, just mentioned to me that they have started hosting blogs... just their staff at the moment, but they have plans to grow... Since vbCity is already one of the best sites for VB developers, this is good news!

http://blogs.vbcity.com/

Removing Word's Formatting from text before pasting into .Text or other apps...

Duncanma — Thu, 12 Aug 2004 07:59:00 GMT

The age-old question of 'how do I avoid putting funky Office HTML into my blog postings' came up on an internal email list today, and one of the answers was a pointer to http://stevemiller.net/PureText/, which I had never heard of... but it looks cool!

"Have you ever copied some text from a web page, a word document, help, etc., and wanted to paste it as simple text into another application without getting all the formatting from the original source? PureText makes this simple. Just copy/cut whatever you want to the clipboard, click on the PureText tray icon, and then paste to any application. Better yet, you can configure a Hot-Key to convert and paste the text for you. The pasted text will be pure and free from all formatting."

(Listening To: Simple Lies [Endo / Daredevil])

I'm thinking about installing .Text into my own web-site...

Duncanma — Thu, 12 Aug 2004 04:22:00 GMT

And maybe the Forums code too... Nothing against www.asp.net, but I'm just thinking it might be interesting to host my own blog... moving seems disruptive though, leaving a large number of my posts here, new ones there.... what do you folks think? Have you thought about hosting your own blog... are you already doing it .... would you never leave the collective?

The Updater Application Block... various additions...

Duncanma — Tue, 10 Aug 2004 08:16:00 GMT

One of the nice things about the Updater Application Block is that it was written to be quite extensible... I saw a post today where SamSantiago mentioned he had created a custom class to delete all those old versions on your machine whenever you do an update.... very cool, I'll be trying that out right away...

Personally, I've updated the updater in a few different ways, but the most recent changes have been the most reusable, in my opinon;

I fixed the code so that it no longer requires users to have admin rights...
I added a 'mandatory' flag to the updates (and updated the manifestutility in a few different ways), so that for some updates the client app would know not to ask the user if they want to upgrade... great for occasionally forcing everyone up to the same build...
and I modified the manifest retrieval code so that it can call an ASP or ASP.NET page, which in turn allowed me to create a manifest.aspx page that returns different manifests based on the user's credentials (so I can have a 'beta' group who are given one version, and everyone else gets the last major release...)

I've got to work out a way to get these bits of code online.... it isn't hard, but it takes time that I haven't planned in yet :)

Soma discusses the future of VB

Duncanma — Mon, 09 Aug 2004 06:27:00 GMT

Soma (whose name you may or may not recognize) is in a position to know a lot about the future of Visual Basic (in his own words, from his intro post... "My name is Somasegar and I run the Developer Division at Microsoft."), so when he decides to post about it, it is probably worth a quick read...

....A couple of the people in that session had some questions for me around our commitment to VB in the .NET world. I was a little surprised by these questions. That made me think more and I wanted to share with you my thoughts on this....

Read the full post here...

Ok... I can finally read my comments again...

Duncanma — Sun, 08 Aug 2004 09:54:00 GMT

I'm sure I'll be one of many commenting on this, but the recent updates to .Text on this site are a wonderful improvement. For the past while I had been unable to really sift out the good comments from the bad, so real (non-spam) comments to the VB or C# FAQ sites, and to this blog... were all being drowned out by all of the spam. Keeping up with it (to delete the spam) was almost impossible and I gave up some time ago ...

We'll see how it goes, but I'm hoping these changes make these blogs sites a less attractive target for spam.

Previews of articles...

Duncanma — Fri, 06 Aug 2004 06:23:00 GMT

A couple of weeks ago I posted my "Quick Poll" Coding 4 Fun column in its unedited form... was that useful?

If it was, I can continue to do that with my articles ... basically posting my version of them up in advance onto www.duncanmackenzie.net and then redirecting that to the real article once it ends up on MSDN.

Jesse Liberty, author of one of my favorite books (Clouds to Code) gives an overview of "My" in Visual Basic 2005

Duncanma — Thu, 05 Aug 2004 07:30:00 GMT

Blurb copied using the cool "Blog This" link on the ondotnet pages :)

Rapid Application Development with VB.NET 2.0 by Jesse Liberty -- For a couple of years now, Jesse Liberty been touting the Microsoft endorsed-sentiment that it really doesn't matter if you program in C# or in VB.NET, since both are just syntactic sugar layered on top of MSIL (Microsoft Intermediate Language, the true language of .NET). That appears to be changing a bit with Whidbey. Jesse Liberty investigates the new My object in VB.NET 2.0.

Updated the headlines on the VB Community page today...

Duncanma — Mon, 02 Aug 2004 21:58:00 GMT

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/community

I added a little blurb at the top asking folks to send in any ideas they have for this page, please use it... I try to scan the community sites regularly but I'm certainly missing a lot of stuff.

If you see something worth noting on the VB site, let me know.

Anders on MSDNTV

Duncanma — Thu, 29 Jul 2004 22:11:00 GMT

Whiteboard with Anders Hejlsberg
At Tech Ed 2004, Anders Hejlsberg gave an informal talk, answered attendee questions, and wrote some code examples on the whiteboard. (July 29)

New Coding 4 Fun Article up...

Duncanma — Wed, 28 Jul 2004 22:20:00 GMT

Add a Quick Poll to Your Web Site
Summary: Duncan Mackenzie describes his process to build a "Quick Poll" using Visual Basic and ASP.NET.

Recent discussions have motivated me to add some 'anti-repeat-voting' code to this sample... I've finished up most of the changes, so grab the sample from the article if you are interested and then watch this space for more information on the additions!

With things like AOL and other proxies... how useful is IP Address in figuring out duplicate votes/comments/etc... ?

Duncanma — Wed, 28 Jul 2004 00:38:00 GMT

I'm playing around with my voting control and I was thinking of (in addition to a cookie based check) querying to see how recently this IP address had tried voting and if it was within 'x' seconds, rejecting the vote...

Something more extreme, like rejecting any second vote from the same IP seems wrong, since multiple people could be coming in through the same IP.. in fact, you have to assume that is likely over time...

What do you folks think? Is a time-limit per IP address reasonable, or will that produce 'odd' behaviour for corporate and large ISP users?

Trying out something 'bad'...

Duncanma — Tue, 27 Jul 2004 23:54:00 GMT

So, if you missed it... I was just playing with displaying a poll in the blog... don't worry, I won't make a habit of this :)... I did it using ~~the spawn of evil~~ an iframe... I've removed it now, the experiment is done... but it exposed an interesting problem. When viewed through the IFRAME IE's default settings (well, my settings... I'm not sure if they are the default) blocked any cookies from that page, which meant that you could vote as often as you liked... hmm... not a good thing. Obviously a second-line of defense is necessary.

I'm thinking of adding login/registration to my personal site...

Duncanma — Mon, 26 Jul 2004 23:54:00 GMT

Not sure what scenarios this will be used to enable in the long run, but I might play around with some web services (with authentication) and a few 'prototypes' for articles and MSDN features that I've been musing about...

Do you run a personal site?
Do you have any form of authentication?
What do you use to handle it (I'm planning Forms Authentication against SQL Server)?
What do you use it for?

this is for http://www.duncanmackenzie.net ... which is quickly becoming my little sandbox for asp.net code :)

Solutions at a Glance... great for all .NET developers interested in security...

Duncanma — Mon, 26 Jul 2004 23:22:00 GMT

I was just talking with J.D. Meier (from PAG) about the Improving Application Security book and he pointed out a great page to me... the "Solutions At A Glance" list... this page lists a ton of very frequently asked questions around .NET security and provides links deep into all that great PAG security info.

Some examples;

How to write secure managed code
Use strong names to digitally sign your assemblies and to make them tamperproof. At the same time you need to be aware of strong name issues when you use strong name assemblies with ASP.NET. Reduce your assembly attack profile by adhering to solid object oriented design principles, and then use code access security to further restrict which code can call your code. Use structured exception handling to prevent sensitive information from propagating beyond your current trust boundary and to develop more robust code. Avoid canonicalization issues, particularly with input file names and URLs.
For information about how to improve the security of your managed code, see Chapter 7, "Building Secure Assemblies." For more information about how to use code access security effectively to further improve security, see Chapter 8, "Code Access Security in Practice." For information about performing managed code reviews, see Chapter 21, "Code Review."

and

How to prevent SQL injection
Use parameterized stored procedures for data access. The use of parameters ensures that input values are checked for type and length. Parameters are also treated as safe literal values and not executable code within the database. If you cannot use stored procedures, use SQL statements with parameters. Do not build SQL statements by concatenating input values with SQL commands. Also, ensure that your application uses a least privileged database login to constrain its capabilities in the database.
For more information about SQL injection and for further countermeasures, see "SQL Injection" in Chapter 14, "Building Secure Data Access."

For a ton more questions and answers, you can check out the entire page here

ReSharper 1.0 Released...

Duncanma — Fri, 23 Jul 2004 20:16:00 GMT

From their site...

"ReSharper is an add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 that brings intelligent C# coding assistance, real-time error highlighting, and refactoring features to this popular development platform."

More info here...

Thanks Bill... Vaughn that is, not that other guy...

Duncanma — Thu, 22 Jul 2004 06:27:00 GMT

I noticed yesterday that my poll wasn't showing the question on the top of the list of choices, or the list of results. Viewing the source made it pretty obvious the <asp:label> was rendering, but that it was empty. Checking my code everything seemed fine, but when I retrieved the poll details through a Stored Proc I was using an Output param for the question text and it was always blank. Well, I knew there was an entire article on MSDN on this exact topic... and a quick search on “Vaughn” on MSDN took me right to the article I knew would show me exactly what I needed to do.

Retrieving the Gazoutas: Understanding SQL Server Return Codes and Output Parameters

William Vaughn

Summary: Discusses how to capture, interrupt, and handle resultsets and rowsets, as well as the extra information that they return when executing a Microsoft SQL Server query. (7 printed pages)

Yep... turns out I had goofed up, I was calling the stored proc with ExecuteReader, but I was trying to read those params before I had closed the data reader. So I made one change to my code;

Dim dr As SqlDataReader = _
    cmdGetPollDetails.ExecuteReader( _
    CommandBehavior.CloseConnection)
If dr.HasRows Then
    Dim po As PollOption
    Do While dr.Read
        po = New PollOption
        po.OptionID = dr.GetInt32(0)
        po.OptionText = dr.GetString(1)
        result.Options.Add(po)
    Loop
    result.ID = pollID
    result.Name = CStr( _
        cmdGetPollDetails.Parameters("@PollName").Value)
    result.Question = CStr( _
        cmdGetPollDetails.Parameters("@PollQuestion").Value)
    dr.Close()
    Return result
Else
    dr.Close()
    Return Nothing
End If

I just moved the dr.Close( ) up to right after the end of the Do loop...

    Loop
    dr.Close()
    result.ID = pollID
    result.Name = CStr( _
        cmdGetPollDetails.Parameters("@PollName").Value)
    result.Question = CStr( _
        cmdGetPollDetails.Parameters("@PollQuestion").Value)
    Return result

Don't ask me why, but I've become the official forum for Spiderman 2

Duncanma — Wed, 21 Jul 2004 18:43:00 GMT

I blame google.

(250 + comments so far, not counting the ones I've had to remove)