I've found a bug with IE8 Beta 2 (in both IE7 and IE8 browser modes) where list boxes that, although disabled but containing selected items, do not show the selected items. Here is an example of what should be displayed I am selected Not selected I am selecting this as well! Not selected either I am selecting this too! I am selecting this again! For those of you who are not using IE8 Beta 2, here is what it appears like: I am selected Not selected I am selecting this as well! Not selected either I am selecting this too! I am selecting this again! I have logge... [More]

One of IE8's new features is a that when closing a window or tab, it can remember the session ID and therefore maintain the session with a website. This is an advantage if you accidentally close a window or tab, but there is a problem. For example, if you have several logins for a site, each login giving totally separate functionality of the site (e.g customer and administrator), then you may close your browser and login as someone else. What you may find is that when you open a new window, you are already logged in as the other person. Why does this happen? IE8 seems to use the first window... [More]

I put my VPC's on my external hard disk and run them off there, as the hard drive can run independently of Windows. I've noticed over the past few months, that randomly, my external USB 2.0 hard drive (Freecom 400GB) disconnects for no reason and I get a balloon in the system tray with the title "Delayed Write Problem" , then something to do with G:\$MFT or G:\$Bitmap. Yesterday, I was defragmenting my external hard disk and noticed it kept happening. I turned it off and on again, started defragmenting and the same problem happened. I thought it might be the writing caching, which helps im... [More]

Our network guys recently added a proxy server to our network which has caused my Windows Mobile device to no longer sync with Exchange via ActiveSync. I thought that's annoying but its ok I will just set the proxy settings in ActiveSync... To my disapointment ActiveSync doenst have that option! After some investigation I discovered that if you change the "This computer is connected to:" value to "The Internet" (rather than "Automatic") it works fine! So in summary, with your device connected, in ActiveSync go to: File > Connection Settings > This computer is connected to: > Th... [More]

I was recently trying to check if IIS's SMTP sever was working correctly. To help I turned on the logging, leaving the default "W3C Extended Log Format" selected. I sent the test email and checked the log - to say it was unhelpful is an understatement! I was wrongly assuming that "extended" format meant it would have more information than the other logging formats which didn't have "extended" in their name! Enter Steve who suggested I change the format to Microsoft IIS Log File Format (shown in the image below). I did, and the log file was suddenly completely what I was expecting and I could ... [More]

I recently stumbled across these Remote Desktop keyboard shortcuts so thought I'd share them... RDP Session Local Equivalent Description CTRL + ALT + END CTRL + ALT + DEL Windows Security Dialog CTRL + ALT + BREAK (none) Toggle RDP from window to Full Screen ALT + INSERT CTRL + ALT + TAB Cycle through running programs ALT + HOME WINDOWS Open Start Menu ALT + DELETE ALT + SPACEBAR Open Control Menu ... [More]

This article is part 1 of 2 articles. Wouldn't it be great if you could call a web service hundreds, if not thousands of times, and then just wait until the results come back, rather than doing it one at a time? The System.Threading namespace created WaitHandle.WaitAll(), but this is only useful for threads - how do you call lots of web services asynchronously, and then continue once they have all returned? Well, one could argue why don't you just call them synchronously? Good idea, but it just means that those extra seconds of time taken waiting, could be put to use by another web se... [More]

Short but sweet .... If you've ever created a toolip using the "title" attribute of an anchor stage, you might expect that if you span multiple lines, the tooltip would also span multiple lines? On IE 6+, this IS the case, but on Firefox 1.0+, they do not. The way around it? Don't depend on mulitple lines! After researching this, I found a referenced article to a bug at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=358452 , which says they are working on it, but isn't working on Version 2.0.0.11of Firefox. Tooltips really are snippets of information relating to the link. If you are dep... [More]

My setup is a widescreen laptop on my left (primary monitor) and a 19" flatscreen on my right. My laptop is plugged into a Dell docking station. I use Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 to host my development environment on my 19", but sometimes find that when going to fullscreen (CTRL-ALT-ENTER), the VPC window disappears from both my desktops and is only usable from a reduced version. I have found that the only way around this was to go into the Display Settings, disable the second monitor, click Apply and OK and then return to the Display Settings and re-enable the second monitor. The fulls... [More]

If you've ever got the following annoying message when trying to RDP to a remote server: "The terminal server has exceeded the maximum number of allowed connections. The system cannot log you on. Please try again or consult your system administrator" Then normally you've got to either ask another user to log off (not easy if its a remote server) or wait for them to. A little known trick is to use the following command line parameter when launching remote desktop: /console From the command prompt type: mstsc /console This will launch it in console mode, which in layman's terms me... [More]

The Windows Service I built needed to access a web service on another domain (and in production on another server over the internet). The admin made the service run as NetworkService to reduce the security permissions. I received an error stating: "System.Net.WebException: Unable to connect to the remote server ---> System.Net.Sockets.SocketException: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it" The error, in my case, was not to do with a firewall, or a connection problem with regards to TCP/IP, its purely that the NetworkService account cannot  a)  ... [More]

I was trying to debug an issue, where my application was using Distributed Transactions to do database access. The data was to be inserted across 4 databases in a transaction, where it was an all or nothing. The environment was configured as 2 clusters: 4 VPCs that were all cloned (app layer). This cluster talked to another cluster of DB VPC's (data layer), each being a clone of the original image. Anyway, here is the error I was getting: An error occurred while enlisting in a distributed transaction MS DTC was running on both layers, so this error wasn't very helpful. The next... [More]

I had an error message when using Transactions in .NET 1.1.  The error is: Error: System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Import of Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (MS DTC) transaction failed: 0x8004d00e(error not found). It may be rhetorical - but is that actually an error?

When using the build scripts to automatically GAC a component, I came across the error where it failed, returning code 9009. I found a useful post that is short and sweet to explain why: In summary, don't rely on VS to navigate the PATH environment variables. Instead, point to it yourself!

I've been using my lunch breaks to help contribute to the Wikibook for C#, available at: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/C_Sharp_Programming So far I've added entries to: "implicit" definition "base" defintion Factory Design Pattern Console programming Events and delegates .NET framework definitions There's still loads needed to help bring the book up to scratch, so any help is appreciated!

In order to encrypt data, you need a key and the data itself. The problem comes when you need to securely store the key! Rather than go through a process of showing you how to retrieve secret keys from .exe files (which is no secret in itself!), I'm going to show you a quick way of using a key which you don't have to know in advance, you just use! .NET introduced the System.Security.Cryptography in 1.0, but the 2.0 edition added the DPAPI extension. Rather than waffling on, lets just jump into an example. The class we're focusing on is the ProtectedData class: using System; ... [More]

Microsoft have released Fiddler Version 2(.0.8.8) of their application. One issue I found is that I installed version 2 over version 1.x, and since it installed it in a different directory from version 1.x, it removed a shared ActiveX control upon uninstallation. If, when loading Fiddler on Version 2, you see the following error appear: Remove version 2.x, and then re-install it. You should have no problems. Thanks to Eric Lawrence for his quick reply on the subject.

Websites are a bit too complicated to set up automatically. Aren't they? I've written an article to show you just how easy the process is! http://blogs.bdnet.co.uk/dominicz/archive/2007/04/19/Creating-installations-for-websitesAgain.aspx