Matt Manela's Blog : Windows

Modifying IL of an existing assembly

MattManela — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 07:46:04 GMT

Any one who programs in .NET is well aware of Lutz Roeder's .NET Reflector. It is a tool which allows you to disassemble .NET assemblies in to IL, C#, Visual Basic and several other languages. This tool also supports many add-ins which add cool features to it. Today I came across one that I had been wanting for a while. It is called Reflexil and it allows you to modify the code of an existing assembly. You can modify any of the IL and it even is beginning to support rewriting in C# or VB parts of the existing assembly.

Really cool!

Best Internet Explorer Plug-in

MattManela — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 10:06:14 GMT

There are many features which Opera and Firefox (through extensions) have that I can't live without. Features like advertisement blocking, mouse gestures and custom site JavaScript. Internet Explorer doesn't have these features but I found a plugin which adds all this functionality and more. It is called IE7Pro and I feel it truly enhances the experience of using IE. If you are interested check out their website at http://www.ie7pro.com/

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 WOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!

MattManela — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 07:45:34 GMT

I am sure they will be many blogs and articles that will mention the awesome fact that Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 have been released. I am also sure most of these posts will go talk about some of the many cool new features in both. While that is very tempting for me to do I restrain myself. Instead I will doing something which you may find even more useful....

I will give you links to go download and play with it!

The new .NET framework can be downloaded for free from here:

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5

And Visual Studio Express editions can be downloaded for free from here:

Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions

The express editions are free version of the IDE which focus on one technology like C#, ASP .NET or VB.

If you are interested in trying the full edition you can download a trial of it here:

Visual Studio 2008 Trial

I guarantee if you start to play with these you will fall in love and find eternal happiness.

Well, maybe that is a bit of a hyperbole but it is really cool.

Master Boot Record Fiasco

MattManela — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 07:37:56 GMT

The Error

I restarted my computer for the first time in a couple weeks and it would not boot. I was faced with a screen which said:

Grub Loading Stage 1.5

Error 22

A nice helpful error.

Now I was faced with a problem and I needed to figure out how to solve this. My first step was to restart again, since that ALWAYS fixes problems. Sadly, after several more restarts I still was stuck at that screen. Then it hits me as to what is going on.

One Week Earlier

I had Ubuntu 7.04 dual-booting with Windows XP on my computer. I was running low on hard drive space so I decided

to get rid of the Ubuntu partition. That worked fine and then I go on using my computer not realizing that by removing that partition, the Grub application that was in the master boot record would now fail to run.

The Solution

I looked the error up online and found out that Error 22 means that Grub failed to find a partition. Which makes sense since I deleted the partition it was looking for. The simplest solution to this problem would be to put a Windows XP disc in and go to the recovery console. From there you can easily overwrite the master boot record with the default windows one. One problem though, I couldn't find my XP disc. Now I know, I work for Microsoft I could just get one the next day. I thought about that but I didn't want to wait, I was determined to fix the problem. The only solution I could think of to re-install Ubuntu from a Live CD which would let me repartition, and fix the Grub boot record.

In The End

After all of that I am able to boot into my computer once more. I also learned my lesson, Ubuntu does not like when I delete it :)

For now I will stick with having my computer dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu.

Windows Media Player Problem AND Solution

MattManela — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 19:33:07 GMT

I am the proud owner of a iriver clix portable media player. I have had it for about a year now and I have had no complaints. It works beautifully. When I first got it I had some concerns about using Windows Media Player. The clix is made to work best with it but I had some bad experiences in the past versions of WMP. However, I decided to give it a go and I was pleasantly surprised. The killer feature I found with WMP11 is the synching. You can synch your device with media based on any criteria you want. One example is that I set it up that whenever I plugged my device in WMP would synch all songs which are in the genre of rock and I have listened to 5 or more times but I haven't heard in 2 months.

That is pretty cool.

I was happy with this until about a week ago when IT STOPPED SYNCHING. I didn't know if it was a iriver problem or a WMP11 problem. I reset the firmware on my clix and it didn't help. I reinstalled WMP11 and it didn't help. Then after searching online a bit I found a solution.

Somehow my WMP library got corrupt. The music was fine but the index the media player keeps of the music got corrupt. WMP would still play music and videos but it wouldn't let me manage my library, add files to the library or synch.

I thought that reinstalling WMP would fix the library but it doesn't. I really do think repair library probably should be an option in the installer or in the program but since it is not I had to look to the intertubes for the answer. The solution was simple though, just delete the contents of the WMP library folder.

Instructions to do so can be found

here

and

here

Depending on whether you are running XP or Vista the instructions are slightly different so read carefully.