MikePelton's WebLog : .NET

Announcing: A Unique UK .NET Developer Event

MikePelton — Tue, 22 Mar 2005 16:09:00 GMT

using DeveloperCommunity.BestSpeakers;

using Microsoft.Premises;

namespace DeveloperDeveloperDEVELOPER

{

class ByDeveloperForDeveloperEvent

{

string date = "Saturday May 14th 2005";

string location = "Microsoft UK's HQ, Reading, England";

bool isRelaxedAndInformal = true;

bool isTechnologyFocusDotNet = true;

bool isLunchProvided = true;

bool arePresentersFromMicrosoft = false;

bool isOnASaturday = true;

bool isFree = true;

public void EnjoySessions()

{

for(int iTrack = 0 ; iTrack < 2 ; iTrack++)

{

for(int iSession = 0 ; iSession < 6 ; iSession++)

{

AttendSession(iTrack, iSession);

}

public void AttendSession(int iTrack, int iSession)

{

//TODO

// if (I want to share my experiences and knowledge of

// .NET with other developers)

// {

// Suggest a title for a presentation I'd like to give

// to Mike Pelton (mpelton@microsoft.com )

// }

// if (I want to hear about my peers' experiences and learnings)

// {

// Come along,listen, chat, ask questions...

// REGISTER HERE!

// }

}

Superb Office Dev Book

MikePelton — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 23:43:00 GMT

I promised another book recommendation and then failed to deliver, so I owe the remarkable Andrew Whitechapel an apology.

My latest passion is for rabbiting about developing for Office in managed code. If your perception of Office dev is solely confined to the world of VBA macros be prepared to be very surprised - the story changes ever so slightly.. okay... hugely with Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO to its pals) and even hugelier (?) for the version that'll arrive very soon with Whidbey. Even the story for managed code with the less-than-current versions of Office is much richer than you might expect.

The Office products are of course COM servers, and there's a plethora of techniques that Andrew's book describes for integrating managed code, crossing the managed/unmanaged boundary safely and easily. By sharp contrast with many developer books, it's extremely well written and has a fantastically even pace - never trivialising and never bewildering. The examples (available online) are plentiful, rich, and well documented, so all in all the best £23 I've spent in a while. No, I'm not on commission, and no, we're not related - I just felt that everyone should know about a very sound dev text book!

The book's called .NET Development for Microsoft Office by Andrew Whitechapel, published by MS Press, ISBN 0735621322.

Enjoy!

Whidbey VSTO Issue

MikePelton — Tue, 15 Feb 2005 17:28:00 GMT

My weekend was somewhat overshadowed by a rather sneaky Visual Studio Tools for Office issue in Whidbey Beta One; I've seen a few other people post on having encountered it but no-one thus far having fixed it. I found a brute force way of resolving it so thought I'd share - if anyone finds a better way do please spread the word.

The manifestation is pretty nasty - you do File -> New -> Project and then pick either Excel or Word templates, and then try to build and run. So it's pretty fundamental! It's a case of software rot - it all used to work and suddenly it breaks. VB or C#, Excel or Word. An exception is thrown:

"Type 'System.Security.Cryptography.SHA1CryptoServiceProvider' in Assembly 'mscorlib, Version=2.0.3600.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089' is not marked as serializable."

Naturally you read this as being an issue with the privilege level of the associated assembly, but when you try to elevate its permission set via the .NET Framework Wizard, you're told the assembly "can't be opened". ILDASM can read it, so it can be opened! Interestingly, the Wizard now says this to every assembly, VSTO or otherwise.

I had been playing with the security settings beforehand, trying to give an Action Pane user control (what a fabulous feature that is!) privilege to hit a local database, running the Yukon beta, so it's a lot of pre-release code conspiring to wreak havoc and probably very hard to trace as a bug for that reason.

I de- and re-installed Whidbey; no change. De-installing Yukon requires a reboot at every stage and Coronation Street was looming closer so time was against me. I decided that re-installing the .NET Framework 2.0 Beta might do the trick, but Framework 2 Beta doesn't appear in "Add/Remove Programs" nor in Windows Components.

Hence I am indebted to Sam Gentile's blog entry which outlines a very blunt way of de-installing Fx 2.0 and indeed the other beta bits:

"To remove Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Beta

msiexec.exe /x {71F8EFBF-09AF-418D-91F1-52707CDFA274}

If that fails, try:

msizap.exe TWA {71F8EFBF-09AF-418D-91F1-52707CDFA274}"

The first option did it for me - I reinstalled from the MSDN distribution and all is now fine. Sam, I owe you a beer.