Accessing Microsoft Access from .NET fairly straight forward through the OleDb adapters and connections. I haven't found a problem connecting to it through a Windows Application. When you try and connect to it from a website or web service, you might find some unhelpful E_NOINTERFACE errors. The reason is that Access was never designed to be accessed from a multi-threaded environment. Although Windows Applications can potentially be multi-threaded, the initial running process has the [STAThread] attribute, indicating that the process, as far as COM is concerned, is single threaded. Th... [More]

If you try to run a .NET Compact Framework 2.0 application on Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone (ie no touch screen), you may get an error like this: NotSupportedException at Microsoft.AGL.Common.MISC.HandleAr() This is because Windows Mobile 5 actually comes in two 'editions' - Smartphone and PocketPC. Whether they're actually the same codebase I don't know, but depending on your device different functionality is supported. For example - the PocketPC menus you can build in the Mobile 5 SDK don't work on Smartphones. So if you have an app with that error, either bug the software publisher to get ... [More]

Updating multiple databases (maybe on different servers), but in a "all-or-nothing" fashion. Its something that you will come across at least once in your professional career. But how do you do it in .NET? Transactions work great if there's just one connection to one database at a time. But what happens if you want to update several databases? Microsoft thought of that too, using something called DTC (Distributed Transaction Co-ordinator). But that's in the COM/COM+ world and we don't want to touch that do we?? No! is the answer. Digging through the documentation (or Google :-P) you can... [More]

Overview Before .NET 2.0, if you wanted to choose a value that represented null, you had to fall back on the xxx.MinValue or xxx.MaxValue and then convert this value to NULL once the information was hitting the database. In order to make it easier, Microsoft thought that it was helpful to allow value types to be assigned null and therefore just plonk the value straight into database - correct!? Well ..... sort of. Conversion I've found nullable types aren't all "that". Lets take a quick example to see how they can be a handful to use: int? input = null; string strInput = Console.... [More]

If you see an error about 'existing version alrady installed' then grab the .NET Compact v2 sp2 install - it seems as if the original install is a bit flaky on working out what version is already on the smarthphone.

So for some bizarre reason I decided to slap Tomcat on my Windows XP machine so that I could brush up my rather rusty Java skills with some web programming. Having recently had a remarkably pleasant install experience with MySQL I had high hopes for Tomcat. So first I needed to work out what binaries I need. Please PLEASE Java world... realise that not everyone who wants to install your software is comfortable compiling stuff first and just maybe they'd like an easy link to the binaries! Yes I know they are there but it's not exactly obvious. Anyway - I got my ZIP package and ran my setup. It... [More]

So you've seen EPiTrace and very nice it is too. Especially as it's free. You've probably played with the live demo, downloaded it, followed the install instructions, created an EPiTrace page and voila! You got the following message: Flash 8 required This confused you as you're already running Flash 9. Well - the solution isn't anything to do with Flash itself. That error is just the contents of a div that gets replaced with the flash object once it's loaded. If the object doesn't load, then the message stays on-screen. Thing is, there could be umpteen reasons why the movie doesn't load. An... [More]

Well I've been doing loads of pre-sales recently which has kept me off the development track - a necessary evil really. Thought I'd share a quick learning with you about a problem that sometimes happens with the Admin CSS in EPiServer. On a project I'm doing alongside my colleagues, they set up EPiServer on a virtual directory on their default website, e.g. localhost/clientname/default.aspx. I was set up on the root a different site (but lets just say it was the default website, it doesnt matter), e.g. localhost/default.aspx. I decided to change my project structure to match theirs, especial... [More]

Hooray! On Wednesday, I passed my MCTS Web Based Client Applications Exam (70-528). Just wondering what path to go down next? The MCPD track looks good with all the design, requirements analysis, testing, debugging and overall consultancy, but I would also like to brush up my SQl 2005 skills (even though SQL 2008 is round the corner). Apart from that, I'm glad I ordered my business cards with MCTS on them a month ago :-P