Microsoft .NET and all related stuff

Accessing an XML-RPC service

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 16:55:54 GMT

I'm trying to access an XML-RPC service from C# that I'm building. I've had absolutely no response from my message on the XML-RPC.net YahooGroup, so I started looking at the only other .Net XML-RPC class library out there: XmlRpcCS, which is only confusing me further.

The cause of my problems appears to be that XML-RPC.Net seems to require all its proxy objects to be structs. I, however, would like to use class objects, so I can add other functionality into the classes (constructors, the ability to have properties that are masked from the XML-RPC output and so on).

Now if this were XML serialisation, I would use the attributes that control XML serialisation, such as [XmlIgnore]. Without rewriting half of the class library, though (which would seem to defeat the purpose of using it!), I can't do something like that.

Does anyone here have any experience of using an XML-RPC library for .Net?

(Cross-posted to csharp.)

Possible .Net regex bug?

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 16:30:23 GMT

For reasons too dull to explain, I’m trying to use regular expressions to postprocess an HTML-stream. I want to find all anchor (<a/>) tags that link within our site, in this case using the domain name.

My regular expression looks right to me, but .Net is convinced I don’t have enough close-parentheses. I’ve added line breaks for clarity:

   (?<=<a[^>]* href=['"]?)
   (?<before>https?://[a-z0-9.-]*uswitch\.[a-z]+/[-\w_,.%/~]+)
   (?<querystring>\??[-\w&=~]*)
   (?<fragment>#?[-\w&=~]*)
   (?=['"]?[^>]*>)

I’ve tested both the above code with the line breaks removed and the original code (which is compiled with RegexOptions.IgnorePatternWhitespace and has embedded comments for ease of maintenance. Each time, I get a System.ArgumentException: parsing "..." - Not enough )'s.

Despite that I’m quite certain they’re perfectly matched.

Anyone?

Cross-posted to regexp.

http://xmlia.com

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 10:42:32 GMT

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Quick rant before my meeting

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 15:01:53 GMT

Why is it that Microsoft appear to be completely incapable of writing decent code and documenting it?

I'm trying to work with SharePoint 2007 for a project at work. The developer textbooks haven't yet been published (and the release dates have recently been pushed back), so all I have to rely on is the MSDN Library's documentation of the API.

So when I see method descriptions like this (BaseFieldControl.RegisterFieldControl, fuck only knows what it does), I get pretty pissed off.

So I gave some feedback:

This is a public API, that developers need to access to work with SharePoint. Why on earth is there absolutely no documentation on some of these properties and methods?

Ridiculously poor; if one of my developers passed it to me for QA, I would have failed it and sent them to go do it all again, whilst hanging their head in shame.

I wonder if anyone will actually ever read it.

Cross-posted to owenblacker

Technical Analysis API

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 12:08:11 GMT

Hello! Can anyone point me in the direction of a free .NET API for technical analysis? Thanks.

FastFourier Transforms

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 16:56:46 GMT

Hello again :-)

Can anyone recommend a .Net FFT library that doesn't do anything with imaginary numbers, into which I can throw an Array of Int16 being a WaveForm and get out an Array of Int16 of the same size being the FFT analysis? Inverse FFT would be a nice feature, too.

More VB.Net aimed, but someone might be able to help...

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 10:29:33 GMT

This is cross-posted elsewhere.

Can anyone point me in the right direction for enumerating the Classes within my Assembly, and then enumerating the Members of those Classes?

The plan is this:
I'm using a very lightweight database engine (SQLite - specifically, the System.Data.SQLite wrapper which is fantastic - you can also link it with your binary, Google for ILMerge)
What I want to do is to write a number of Classes which inherit from a generic Database Table Base Class. The Base Class has a Method called SelfCheck. This Method (called on all Classes which inherit from the Base Class at startup) checks the table in the database against the Members of the Class, and takes action if there is a mismatch. The action may be to CREATE TABLE, or to rebuild the table with any extra columns which were missing. This allows for a quick, simple & transparent upgrade path for the end user, and means I (or others in the future) won't have to keep messing about with table generation scripts.

Sun, 07 Jan 2007 19:13:03 GMT

For those who are interested in DotNetNuke ASP.NET content management system have a look at new site www.olegzhukov.com (www.olegzhukov.com/content) The author is going to write articles on DotNetNuke and other .NET - related topics. Welcome to all :)

Sat, 07 Oct 2006 09:44:39 GMT

Hi, i'm just a student, so don't be too strict ;)
I have a problem using a DataGrid in my VB.NET application.
So, what's the problem?
I have a DataGrid, it's DataSource is set to a DataView which gets data from a DataSet, connected to MS SQL DB through SQLDataAdapter.
So, I need to add and edit entries in my DataGrid, applying this changes to my database...
So, how can I do it (I mean applying my changes)?

x-posted

Mon, 21 Aug 2006 12:17:22 GMT

The issue I have encountered with is that while writing the web service on c# one of the parameters of the method that should be used is a array of structure. The issue is actually that the client written on ColdFusion doesn’t see my method and while launching it crashes it and displays the error. "Web service operation "test" with parameters {t2={{A={[{PRICE={12},NAME={Myname}}]}}}} could not be found. "

My question is what is the right way to declare the variables in the web service? (It is not advisable to change the client as I’m writing the web service for the client and not vice verse.)

Client:
< cfscript>
  a = ArrayNew(1);
  t=structNew();
  t.price = 12;
  t.name  = "Myname";
  a[1] = t;
  t2=structNew();
  t2.a = a;
< /cfscript>
< cfinvoke webservice="http://localhost:2851/test/Service21.asmx?WSDL" method="test" returnvariable="wsResult">
< cfinvokeargument name="t2" value=#t2#/>
< /cfinvoke>
< cfoutput>#wsResult#< /cfoutput>

WebService:

[SoapTypeAttribute(Namespace = "http://dts")]
public class postback_response
{
    public double crl_id;
    public double resp_code;
    public string resp_message;
}
[SoapTypeAttribute(Namespace = "http://dts")]
public struct test_c2
{
    public test_c[] a;
}
[SoapTypeAttribute(Namespace = "http://dts")]
public class test_c
{
    public double price;
    public string name;
}

    [WebMethod(), SoapRpcMethod(Use = System.Web.Services.Description.SoapBindingUse.Literal)]
    public postback_response test(test_c2 t2)
    {

        postback_response response = new postback_response();
        response.crl_id = 1;
        response.resp_code = 0;
        response.resp_message = "test";
        return response;
    }

Databinding methods such as Eval(), XPath(), and Bind() …

Wed, 19 Jul 2006 14:32:56 GMT

I've spent loads of time Googling to try to work this one out and I'm sure it's something obvious.

I get an InvalidOperationException reading "Databinding methods such as Eval(), XPath(), and Bind() can only be used in the context of a databound control" when I start my page. Unless I'm missing something obvious, this is not the same issue as the "2-way databinding cascading lists" issue (which is linked from everywhere; I kinda wish that were my problem ;o)

I have a templated databound custom server control, that I've built with a great deal of help from the two articles by 4GuysFromRolla's Scott Mitchell (1, 2).

I don't seem to be able to use databinding syntax, however:

   <ItemTemplate>
      <asp:TableCell runat="server"><%# Eval("First") %></asp:TableCell>
      ...
   </ItemTemplate>

bound to a List<Pair> gives me an exception:

[InvalidOperationException: Databinding methods such as Eval(), XPath(),
and Bind() can only be used in the context of a databound control.]
   System.Web.UI.Page.GetDataItem() +90
   System.Web.UI.TemplateControl.Eval(String expression) +110
   ASP.owentest_aspx.__DataBind__control8(Object sender, EventArgs e) in
      c:\Projects\Customisation\RedesignProtoTypeWeb\Owentest.aspx:13
   System.Web.UI.Control.OnDataBinding(EventArgs e) +80
   System.Web.UI.Control.DataBind(Boolean raiseOnDataBinding) +198
   System.Web.UI.Control.DataBind() +12
   System.Web.UI.Control.DataBindChildren() +214
   System.Web.UI.Control.DataBind(Boolean raiseOnDataBinding) +208
   System.Web.UI.Control.DataBind() +12
   System.Web.UI.Control.DataBindChildren() +214
   System.Web.UI.Control.DataBind(Boolean raiseOnDataBinding) +208
   System.Web.UI.Control.DataBind() +12
   uSwitch.Web.UI.Lego.RepeatingInputRow.CreateItem(Int32 rowIndex,
      Table container, Boolean useDataBinding, Object rowData) in
      C:\Projects\uSwitch.Web\UI.Lego\InputModule\RepeatingInputRow.cs:361
   uSwitch.Web.UI.Lego.RepeatingInputRow.CreateControlHierarchy(Boolean
      useDataBinding) in
      C:\Projects\uSwitch.Web\UI.Lego\InputModule\RepeatingInputRow.cs:452
   uSwitch.Web.UI.Lego.RepeatingInputRow.DataBind() in
      C:\Projects\uSwitch.Web\UI.Lego\InputModule\RepeatingInputRow.cs:643
   Owentest.Page_Load(Object sender, EventArgs e) in
      c:\Projects\Customisation\RedesignProtoTypeWeb\Owentest.aspx.cs:20
   System.Web.Util.CalliHelper.EventArgFunctionCaller(IntPtr fp, Object
      o, Object t, EventArgs e) +13
   System.Web.Util.CalliEventHandlerDelegateProxy.Callback(Object
      sender, EventArgs e) +45
   System.Web.UI.Control.OnLoad(EventArgs e) +80
   System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() +49
   System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean
      includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean
      includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) +3716

I don't get the exception if my databinding control is outside the table cell but, for a handful of other reasons, including that my ItemTemplate is being instantiated inside a TableRow, that won't work for me.

Any ideas gratefully received, as I'm completely lost. If you don't want to leave thoughts as a comment on here, feel free to email me (owenblacker at uswitch dot com). Cross-posted to owenblacker and ms_dot_net.

FYI - new resource:

Wed, 24 May 2006 13:29:41 GMT

www.iis.net

Website forms

Mon, 08 May 2006 01:29:40 GMT

I'm making a client-side application that monitors the status of a website and reports what it finds. I have that part working, but now I need to add the ability to have my application automatically submit information through a form on the site (textboxes and submit button style.) I have no clue how to do this, any suggestions?

Thanks

myspace.com is hiring .NET developers!

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 18:31:12 GMT

They are hiring developers like crazy! Email your resume to myspacejobs@yahoo.com.

Job description: .Net Developer-ASP.Net and C# (1.1 and 2.0)

Social Networking is one of the hottest sectors on the web in recent years. MySpace.com has emerged as the definitive leader in this space and is the 2nd highest trafficked site on the Internet. MySpace has 210 employees and is in rapid growth mode.

The .NET Team at MySpace.com focuses on performance and scalability to a degree that most developers have never had a chance to experience.

Required Skills/Experience:
- 2+ years of solid C# experience
- 2+ years of ASP.NET (and the .NET 1.1 Framework) experience
- 2+ years of experience developing with SQL Server 2000 (including stored procedures)
- Strong knowledge of .NET Remoting (including HTTP and TCP/IP) and UDP
- a solid foundation in n-tier, Business Objects, Design Patterns, and general OOP
- Strong knowledge (and wisdom) of IIS6 and it's internals
- Experience on sites under heavy loads that require meticulous attention to coding practices as they relate to performance and scalability

Preferred but not required Experience:
- Microsoft Pattern and Practice Team's Enterprise Application Blocks
- Agile Software Development (including Extreme Programming)
- Microsoft Application Center Test
- LLBLGen
- NUnit
- nANT
- Visual Studio 2005 (including Team System)
- ASP.NET 2.0, ADO.NET 2.0, AJAX (Atlas), and the .NET 2.0 Framework
- SQL Server 2005 feature set, enhancements, and changes that effect developers
- ReSharper & dotTrace (from JetBrains)

Reading a book on ADO.NET - highly recommended.

Sun, 09 Apr 2006 06:22:49 GMT

When developers design systems, much of their time is focused on making sure that a particular piece of functionality can be accomplished. If we finish our design at the point where we can get the functionality to work, however, we are doomed to fail. Let me tell you a story from my past where I was more worried about the functionality than the performance.

Some years back I was charged with writing some code to enable doctors using a pen computer to pick a medication for a prescription. I wanted the doctors to be able to pick from any drug so I thought, simple: create a list box with all the drugs. I wrote the database queries, the screens, and the reports that would shoot out prescriptions on a printer for the doctor. Everything worked end to end on my machine.

The day I released it to the testers I was excited to watch it work for them, so I camped myself in the QA lab for the day. I was expecting to be available to field questions about the application, but they got to my screen and it seemed like it froze up. The hourglass cursor just sat there, mocking me. We gave up after a few minutes. I was perplexed.

That night, QA forgot to reboot one of the pen systems and left it running overnight. Surprisingly, the next day they brought me one of the units and showed me that the screen was up. As I played with the screen, I noticed that all the drugs had names starting with the letter 'A'. When I tried to move the scrollbar, it froze up again. I asked the QA people how many drugs were in the database. They answered, "About twelve thousand, why?" "Oh," I replied. I had tested with 40.

I ended up changing the list box to a grid that could page and load only the drugs that could be shown on the screen at one time. What did I learn that day? I learned that understanding the capacity of a system is crucial to finding the right solution. So, should you worry? Of course you should.

hopefully, the author won't sue me for this :-)

The book is "Pragmatic ADO.NET: Data Access for the Internet World"
by Shawn Wildermuth

anyone dabble in dotnetnuke?

Tue, 14 Feb 2006 01:55:37 GMT

Just trying to surround myself with people that are doing the same stuff as me..

Cursor position

Mon, 06 Feb 2006 04:21:48 GMT

I'm trying to basically make a simple notepad app in C# .NET and I want to display the cursor position, but I can't figure out a property or event to get it to work. Any suggestions? Thanks

HttpCachePolicy in an IHttpModule

Mon, 30 Jan 2006 17:54:26 GMT

I'm having some trouble sorting out image caching for JPEGs that are served through an IHttpModule.

A quirk of the site I'm working on at the moment is that product images are served via a third-party image hosting provider (Scene7, who have been very helpful and so deserve a credit). In order to save having to reference the URI stem all over our code, I wrote an IHttpModule that parses all requests on the basis of:

   HttpContext context = ((HttpApplication) sender).Context;
   HttpRequest request = context.Request;

   Regex r = new Regex(
      @"/images/products/(?<sku>[A-Z0-9-]+)_(?<size>\d)\.jpg",
      RegexOptions.Compiled | RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
   Match m = r.Match(request.RawUrl);

   if (m.Success && request.HttpMethod == "GET")
   {
      // Handle the Scene7-specific stuff
   }
   else
   {
      // Set cacheability
   }

Before I was doing anything in this else clause, Fiddler was showing me that the following headers were being sent with all non-Scene7 JPEGs:

   Pragma: no-cache
   Cache-Control: no-cache
   Pragma: no-cache
   Expires: -1

Now, if I add the following two lines to my else clause:

   HttpCachePolicy cache = context.Response.Cache;
   cache.SetAllowResponseInBrowserHistory(true);

it gets rid of the Expires: -1 header. Adding any / all of the following, though, won't shift the Pragma: and Cache-Control: headers — they all seem to have no effect on my actual HTTP transaction, so it's still not being cached properly:

   cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.Public);
   cache.SetMaxAge(new TimeSpan(30, 0, 0, 0));
   cache.SetExpires(DateTime.Now.AddDays(30));
   cache.SetLastModifiedFromFileDependencies();
   cache.SetValidUntilExpires(true);

Does anyone have any real experience with setting HttpCachePolicy properties from within an IHttpModule? Am I missing something really obvious?

If you don't want to leave thoughts as a comment on here, feel free to email me (owen dot blacker at wheel dot co dot uk). Cross-posted to owenblacker and ms_dot_net.

Thanks everyone!

In Search of Free .NET based CMS

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 04:19:14 GMT

I'm looking for a free CMS based on .NET.
What are my options?

Thanks.

p.s. important - it should be written in C#, not in VB.NET.

Design change

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 03:52:50 GMT

Hi everybody,
I changed the design for our community.
Hope you all like it.

Enjoy!

:-)

Sun, 08 Jan 2006 23:35:00 GMT

My school officially teaches Java, but one of my required courses was a "logic" class which used Visual Basic.NET. After taking a semester of both I have decided I much prefer the .NET platform than Java.

The logic/VB.net class only covered the first eight chapters of this book, http://www.course.com/catalog/product.cfm?category=Programming&subcategory=Microsoft%20Visual%20Basic.NET&isbn=0-619-16010-1, but I decided I would finish reading it on my own. I have, and now I'm interested in continuing to learn more .NET programming (and I'll have to do it on my own since that class was the only non-Java class my school teaches.)

I’ll be switching to Visual Studio.NET 2005 and .NET 2.0, and I would like to get into some C# programming as well. I also know PHP, Java, and some C++, so I’m not a programming newbie.

What books would you suggest to continue from here?

Also, my school suggests that Java is the big language to learn. However, many people outside the school suggest that Java is starting to take a back seat to the .NET platform. What's the truth of the industry? What should I try to learn if I want to get work? (Keeping in mind that I'm not very fond of website development.)

Thanks

Mon, 02 Jan 2006 16:50:29 GMT

I have been browsing the Microsoft ASP.NET Development Center and trying to introduce myself to .NET and Visual Studio. Unfortunately I have a laptop with ME on it. Is it absolutely unavoidable that I will have to get XP instead in order to run these software programs? Where do I really start? The Microsoft Web site is confusing me.

DLL Management Code?

Sat, 03 Dec 2005 06:31:53 GMT

I've been asked to find some sort of program, or better yet some code (and even better in Visual Basic of some variety) that will (I think) check the DLLs and their versions that are being loaded against what the program is expecting, or something similar (sorry, it wasn't made very clear.)

Any suggestions? Thanks

woo-hoo....

Fri, 09 Sep 2005 21:28:53 GMT

(sorry for a slightly outdated info).
Passed my 70-315 (ASP.NET with C#) exam with a score of 924... 4 more to go.

p.s. found an interesting link: http://philip.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=000tcP

Re: UserControl output into an XmlNode

Tue, 16 Aug 2005 12:07:47 GMT

A continuation of my awkward question for any C# geeks reading.

Ok, I don'think I'm gonna find a convenient way to do it the way I'd hoped, so I've started thinking about rendering the control into a Stream and XmlDocument.Load-ing that Stream into my XmlNode hierarchy.

Except I'm not getting anything out using Control.RenderControl(HtmlTextWriter):

   public XmlDocument RenderXmlDocument()
   {
      MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream();
   
      this.RenderControl(new HtmlTextWriter(new StreamWriter(stream)));
   
      byte[] streamContents = stream.ToArray();
      System.Text.StringBuilder sb = new System.Text.StringBuilder();
   
      foreach (byte tmp in streamContents)
         sb.Append(Convert.ToChar(tmp));
   
      HttpContext.Current.Trace.Write("EditSectionOrAsset",
         "Rendered control as \n\n[" + sb.ToString() + "]");
   
      XmlDocument control = new XmlDocument();
      control.Load(new XmlTextReader(new StreamReader(stream)));
   
      return control;
   }

and nothing is getting written to the Trace.

Am I gonna have to work out how to do this without using the control?

Any and all suggestions gratefully received. Cross-posted to owenblacker, csharp and ms_dot_net.