Word Entropy

The Best Culture Invariant Format for DateTime

2009-11-09T01:35:41Z

If you are looking to display how to display DateTime as text without causing confusion to users in different countries then good choices is either "o" or "r". The "o" format is in general more preferable as it also puts timezone offset.

long t = DateTime.Now.Ticks;
Console.WriteLine((new DateTime(t)).ToString("o"));
Console.WriteLine((new DateTime(t, DateTimeKind.Local)).ToString("o"));
Console.WriteLine((new DateTime(t, DateTimeKind.Unspecified)).ToString("o"));
Console.WriteLine((new DateTime(t, DateTimeKind.Utc)).ToString("o"));

Prints followings when actual date time is 2009-11-08T17:16:13.7791953 PST:
2009-11-08T17:16:13.7791953
2009-11-08T17:16:13.7791953-08:00
2009-11-08T17:16:13.7791953
2009-11-08T17:16:13.7791953Z

If you use "r" instead it would print followings:
Sun, 08 Nov 2009 17:26:02 GMT
Sun, 08 Nov 2009 17:26:02 GMT
Sun, 08 Nov 2009 17:26:02 GMT
Sun, 08 Nov 2009 17:26:02 GMT

Find Path of a Command Line Tool

2009-10-29T23:06:45Z

Many times you work on different machines, execute a command line tool but often wonder where that tool is actually installed. One way to figure this out is to look at all environment PATH variables and search them manually in same order as Windows does. But you don’t have to because luckily there is a little known built-in command called WHERE that does that for you:

This is similar to Unix commands like WHICH and WHEREIS.

How to Right Align Address in Word Document

2009-10-09T08:33:23Z

May be the silliest thing but how do you align address on the right side of a letter in Microsoft Word 2010? Select the text you need and then click on that little square in Ribbon bar:

Type amount of indentation you need. It’s typically 5” for letter size:

And you have right aligned address!

Selecting Random Row From SQL Server Table

2009-10-06T03:08:25Z

It is important to make sure your automated tests covers various real-world data combinations (for instance, some columns could be null or some rows could be duplicate). For perf testing you want to reduce effects of caching by not firing same SQL over and over. In these cases, ability to select a random row for your test could come in handy and here’s neat little trick to do it:

select top 1 *
from table
order by newid()

What’s in a name?

2009-08-08T03:32:48Z

When you want to store the name of a person a typical design starts out by creating two fields (in database or class):

Person
First Name
Last Name

Soon you realize lot of people have middle name, especially, when name change occurs after marriages. So you go and add one more field:

Person
First Name
Middle Name
Last Name

This is all good… until you encounter people in countries such as Spain and Cuba who have custom to have two last names. Both are equally important and both are required in any official document (including ones your website or app may print out). So you go in and add one more field while thinking this ought to do it once and for all:

Person
First Name
Middle Name
Last Name
2nd Last Name

Not so fast… Lot of people from Hong Kong and few other places in Asia actually carry two first names. One of these first names is traditional while other is typically a Western/Roman name. Both first names are important and often many people will know only Western/Roman first name of a person although official documents would only refer to traditional names.

For example, consider name of Hong Kong’s Chief Secretary Anson Chan Fang On Sang. Here Anson is English given name, On Sang is Chinese given name, Chan is husband’s surname and Fang is her own surname.

So time to add few more field so we can store everybody’s names on planet without loss of semantics:

Person
Traditional Given Name
English Given Name
Middle Name
Last Name
2nd Last Name

Ok… so are we done now? Well, almost! We are still missing at least two critical pieces of information: Salutation and Suffix.

Example of common salutations are Dr, Mr, Mrs, Mr. While salutations are quickly falling out of fashion it might be still required, for example, if you are printing out an official letter to your customer and don’t want to make it look very casual.

Example of common suffixes are Jr, Sr, III, IV etc. These are required in official/legal communication to avoid confusion with other family members of a person.

Person
Salutation
Traditional Given Name
English Given Name
Middle Name
Last Name
2nd Last Name
Suffix

Now we have covered most of the globe. There are still two more nice-to-have fields if you want to make your customers happy: Phonetic Given Name and Phonetic Last Name. Remember the times when you call customer support and each time you have a guy struggling to say your name? These two fields would avoid those moments:

Person
Salutation
Traditional Given Name
English Given Name
Middle Name
Last Name
2nd Last Name
Phonetic Given Name
Phonetic Last Name
Suffix

So there you have it. A structure that can store almost anybody’s name on planet while maintaining semantics of each component of a name.

Most applications won’t need to go to this extreme because it’s OK to just have one first name and one last name that correctly identifies a person for its purpose even if it’s culturally incorrectly and technically incomplete. However if you are in a business where legal implications are high or if any information loss about your customer is not tolerable then it’s good to think about these possibilities.

There are probably better solutions than giant structure like above just to store name of a person. Instead of having all these different fields you can simply have one free form field, say, Full Name and another field called Full Name Style which takes values indicating how different components of names are arranged:

Person
Full Name
Full Name Style

This structure will make searches for specific components of a name little difficult but it would extend well as your application grows around the planet.

Solving Shared Notebook Sync Issue With OneNote 2010

2009-08-07T10:55:14Z

Since about 3 years we used Groove to share calendar, notes and files within family – until I discovered a feature in OneNote called “Shared Notebooks”. The Shared Notebooks are just like any other OneNote notebooks with a difference that they get synced with other people! If someone added new note or modified a note you get it next time and vice a versa. On conflicts it created new pages and also you can take automated backups. This feature requires either file share or SharePoint. So I’ve now got my personal SharePoint website on Internet (which costs $10 per year) to host our shared OneNotes as well as our shared calendar that gets synced in Outlook.

Unfortunately in OneNote 2010 Technical Preview, the sync stopped working because OneNote for some reason does not popup a dialog to ask for a password to connect to SharePoint website on Internet anymore. Very troublesome. But here’s the work around I’ve found:

Right click on the Notebook, select Properties.
Click on Change Location button.
Type URL of your SharePoint website. This will popup password dialog.
Cancel all dialogs and sync! It should work now.

Twitter Dishing Out 417 - Expectation Failed to .Net Clients

2008-12-27T12:20:00Z

My little Twitter app was broke since past few days with error 417 - Expectation Failed. Infect most .Net apps calling Twitter APIs would be broken right now so I thought to write this up.

This error is seemingly because Twitter servers have started rejecting Expect HTTP header with value "!00-Continue". I'm not sure if this was planned event or enough warnings were issued to developers but it would be guaranteed to drive you nuts.

The error is because of default behavior in HttpWebRequest object that adds an HTTP header called Expect with value "100-Continue" to almost every outgoing POST request. This header basically tells the server that it's going to send all the data in form in the next request instead of current request so that if server has redirects or auth then it doesn't have to resend it all over again. This is a good thing if your web form has lots of data or if you are on low latency network or most servers in the word have either redirects or auth when submitting forms but a bad thing for server performance because now it gets hit twice for each request. I think performance might be the reason Twitter has turned off support for such two partter POST requests which unfortunately happens to be the default for HttpWebRequest.

In any case, it turns out that HttpWebRequest does all these thing under the hood so to get rid of this error you will need to set a static flag in ServicePointManager class like this:

System.Net.ServicePointManager.Expect100Continue = false;

Above statement will cause elimination of HTTP Expect header from your calls to Twitter and it will be happy again.

I'm using Yedda's C# wrapper for Twitter APIs for QckTwit so above line goes in to start of ExecutePostCommand method.

PS: If you are new to Twitter try out free simple lightweight app QckTwit. It just sits in your system tray, asks you about what you are doing at reminder interval you set, updates the Twitter and gets out of your way!

Space Elevator Conference

2008-06-28T07:10:03Z

They do have Space Elevator Conference, complete with a blog! Looks like MSR is participating too (Microsoft employees gets discount - just $225 for a ride of, uhm..., armchair presentations, for now).

Why would you still get "Strong name validation failed"?

2008-05-01T10:34:00Z

There are not many web pages mentioning this so I would just post this so it comes up in search. Having personally spent 4 hours tracking this little thing down, I would want anyone else to go through same :).

So... if you are using delay signing, you will need to run the following command so you can still debug from Visual Studio.Net:

sn -Vr *,[public key token]

Apparently if you are using Vista 64-bit it just won't work! You will still keep getting error something like,

Could not load file or assembly '[Your file], Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=[public ket token]' or one of its dependencies. Strong name validation failed. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8013141A)

You can try viewing Fusion log, cleaning solution, rebooting machine, watch FileMon, run Process Explorer, rebuild everything 10 times... but it just won't work. Infect if you try removing signing and if your app is WPF 3.5 then you might even get even more weird errors like

Could not create an instance of type 'StaticExtension'

The solution is hidden in a one liner in Dan Wahlin's blog:

If you're running a 64-bit installation of Vista you'll need to use the sn.exe located at C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bin\x64\sn.exe

I'm pretty sure tons of developers adopting shiny 64-bit OS are/would run in to this. The root cause here is sn.exe designed for 32-bit doesn't error out instead it happily lets you know that "Verification entry added for assembly '*,*'" successfully! It's not! So I also filed a bug in out Connect web site. Please vote to make 64-bit world a better place!

A quicker way to Twitter

2008-04-22T11:25:03Z

Past weekend, I finally thought about giving Twitter a try and started looking for a client app that just allows me to very quickly update the status with a global keyboard shot cut. I'm not in to following anyone or replying anyone but wanted this very simple app with one text box. Apparently no such apps existed in Twitter Fan Wiki which actually turned out to be a good thing because I immediately started looking at Twitter's API and any C# wrappers. About 90 minutes later I'd my app ready. On the way I also added functionality to break the big updates in to multiple twits. This little (literally) app is now open sourced on CodePlex and ready for you to try it out!

Run As... is back in Vista!

2008-04-22T11:09:24Z

Yes, this dearly missed shell context menu item is now available again in Windows Vista, thanks to Mark Russinovich. This little new utility is a new addition to Sysinternals toolset and can be downloaded here. Just run ShellRunAs /reg to register context menu for Shell "Run as different user". This menu will then be available in Start menu items as well as Windows Explorer right clicks :).

Phun With Physics Simulations

2008-03-09T06:30:03Z

This addictive program can easily keep you busy for rest of the weekend so be careful :). Phun is a physics simulator that even kids can use and its absolutely a delight. I watched the video and had to immediately download to give it a try. At first the interface might seem not as easy but after reading tutorial in main page and forums, you might be able to accomplish everything shown in video in less than 15 min of learning curve! Simply the easiest, powerful and most fun physics program I’ve...(read more)

Hello Word

2008-03-08T01:15:00Z

Hello, I'm Shital Shah . I currently work with NGIM team at Microsoft as SDE. I intend to use my MSDN blog for mostly technology/programming related stuff with occasional detours :). Let me put out standard big disclaimer: All views expressed in this blog are mine and not my employer or any teams at Microsoft. The information, data and opinions being presented here are neither validated nor endorsed by Microsoft and should not be considered as an official statement of the company. So let's get started....(read more)