EdSharp

Beware of Xceeds bearing datagrids?

2009-01-29T10:31:00.000-08:00

I'm currently working on a pretty simple WPF project here that needed a pretty straightforward datagrid setup. I looked around at the available datagrid's and Xceed's had a pretty nice card view so I downloaded the 2.0 Express version and put it in my app. Everything worked fine and I moved on to working on other parts of the app. I got an email yesterday that Xceed had made the 3.1 version of their datagrid available so I installed it on my machine and rebuilt my project.

I ran the app and got this error message:"'Xceed.Wpf.DataGrid.Views.CompactCardView' value cannot be assigned to property 'View' of object 'Xceed.Wpf.DataGrid.DataGridControl'. You are using the CardView feature, which is available only in the Professional Edition. To use this feature, you must purchase a Professional Edition license. Error at object 'Xceed.Wpf.DataGrid.Views.CompactCardView' in markup file 'A01;component/window1.xaml' Line 47 Position 9."

Isn't that beautiful?

Guess whose products I'll be avoiding from now on?

Why yes, I DO want to use that source code.

2008-09-10T06:56:00.000-07:00

As you probably already know, when you download a file using IE or Firefox it stores the zone the file came from in an alternate NTFS datastream in the file. (For more details on alternate datastreams go here.)

That zone information in combination with your security settings is what determines whether or not you get this "The publisher could not be verified" popup when you try to run an executable you've downloaded off the net.

This zone information also creates an issue when downloading source code off the net. If you happen to forget about this and don't go the the properties window for the zip file and click unblock you will get a rather cryptic "The project location is not trusted" error when you try to open the solution in Visual Studio 2008. I thought that I also got this error from Visual Studio 2005 but I haven't been able to reproduce it.

After forgetting to go click unblock on yet another zip file full of source code, once again, I went in search for information on how to deal with this issue. If you want to prevent the zone information from being attached to your files by default you can go to the Run menu and run gpedit.msc. Then navigate through the tree to "User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Attachment Manager" and Enable the "Do not preserve zone information in file attachments." option. Doing this will prevent the zone information from being stored in any new files you download. However, since this functionality was enabled in XP Service Pack 2, you may have a lot of files that have already been flagged as coming from an untrusted zone. To cleanup those files you can got to sysinternals and download the streams utility to retroactively strip off those unwanted streams using the command Streams –d –s c:\
Of course this will strip all the streams off all the files on your drive so you want want to be a bit more specific about which directory you want to work with.

Or you could avoid all of this entirely, by using 7-Zip to unzip your files as it apparently doesn't try to preserve alternate datastreams while Winzip does. Oh yeah, it's also free and works a lot faster than Winzip. I knew there was a reason why I'd stopped using Winzip. (grin)

The wonders of dealing with responsive companies.

2008-09-02T09:22:00.001-07:00

Well, Jetbrains released the 4.1 version of Resharper today and it included the licensing fix so my license now works correctly! Hooray!
Throughout this I've been really impressed by the people from Jetbrains that I've interacted with. They provided me with a temporary key to tide me over till 4.1 came out and overall were extremely helpful. I'm going to try to refrain from gushing too much in an attempt to hide the fact that I think I've been converted into a Jetbrains evangelist.

The wonder of confusing licensing terms.

2008-08-21T17:35:00.000-07:00

I've heard from a helpful person at JetBrains that this is actually a bug in 4.0 not some sort of Kafkaesque licensing nightmare. Sadly, the fix for this bug doesn't appear to be in the dailies so I'm still stuck without Resharper for my 2005 installation. Annoying, since my primary usage will be in 2005 or 2008.

Yesterday I decided that I really needed to get Resharper up and running on my installation of Visual Studio 2003 and 2005. I went to the JetBrains website to try to figure out how to do this. According to this page all I needed to do was order a new license for Resharper 2.0 for my VS 2003 and I would be able to use 4.0 with my VS 2005.

Guess what happened? You got it, when my shiny new license key arrived it worked great with Resharper 2.0 and said it wasn't compatible with Resharper 4.0. This worried me a bit, so I started poking around the JetBrains website trying to figure out what was going on and why my key wouldn't work.

This all seems pretty straightforward since I bought my Resharper license after December 31, 2007 so it should work with Resharper 4.0. Here's hoping I hear from them soon.

Installing Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04) in Microsoft Virtual PC 2007

2008-08-15T07:41:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note for those of you trying to run a VM of Hardy Heron/Ubuntu 8.04 Linux.
I, like a lot of others, tried to use the instructions out there and kept getting the processor error of doom.

I finally got it to work by hitting F6 and adding noreplace-paravirt and vga=791.

Then, once the install was completed I hit alt-f2 and ran this command gksu gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

Finally, I scrolled down to the bottom of that file and found the menu choice that corresponded to what I was trying to boot and added those two commands to that line to make things permanent.

Good luck!

Windows Mobile 6 PHPBB posting?

2008-08-05T09:28:00.000-07:00

Partially for the exercise and partially because I really don't like trying to post via Mobile IE I've been working on a Windows Mobile 6 Standard (smartphone) app to post to PHPBB forums.
I've been trying to find some info on how to post to a forum from a program but so far the only suggestion I've had was to set up the forum with a particular mobile interface. Since I'm not the one running the forum that suggestion wasn't what I needed.

On another note, whose idea was it to rename Windows Mobile Smartphone to Windows Mobile Standard? All it does is cause everybody to say, Windows Mobile Standard, you know, the version for Smartphones? Yeah, that's the one. Sigh...

Nice work. Version checking FTW.

2008-07-24T11:28:00.000-07:00

So, I installed the Compact Framework .NET 2.0 sp2 and it wanted to install itself on my Smartphone. That's odd, I thought, my phone is pretty new and already has Windows Mobile 6.0 Standard on it so I'd assume it already HAS that version of the Compact Framework. Well, it does. The installer, in it's infinite wisdom, tried to copy itself onto my phone without (apparently) checking to see if it actually was installing something that wasn't already in the phone's ROM. So the install process on the phone started and then aborted with a snarky little comment about the software already being installed in ROM and maybe I should have checked first before wasting its time.

Bah.

The Joy of Installs

2008-07-24T10:26:00.000-07:00

How is it that I've been installing various Microsoft development packages for the last 12 years and the basic user experience still has the same set of... quirks?

I'm installing Visual Studio 2005 Standard and SQL Server 2005 Standard from the launch event CD's I got a few years ago on my laptop.

For the last two years I've only had my personal copy of VS 2003 Enterprise installed as I was writing code for .NET 1.x due to my client's requirements. Their North American Standard Image had .NET 1.x and I thought it a bit unlikely that they would change their standard image just so I could develop towards a target with nicer bits and pieces.

Anyway, here I am doing the Microsoft install shuffle. It's worlds better than when I first installed early Visual Studio .NET and had it kill my previous installations in new and exciting ways. However, it still has it's own share of strangeness.

Example 1:
If you try to install the Standard edition of SQL Server 2005 it will give you a warning if you already have SQL Server 2005 Express installed. It warns you that you will need to restart the install with a command-line flag of -SKUUPGRADE in order to do an upgrade of an existing installation. It will do this whether or not you actually told it to upgrade an existing installation or not. Even if you tell it to create a completely new instance on the previous screen it will still warn you.
Why does the install process seem to completely forget what you just told it one screen ago?
Of course, that completely ignores the really ridiculous part of this. You are in the pre-install checklist part of the install and it tells you to go back and restart the setup app with a command-line flag? Rank silliness is what this is.

Example 2:
Why hasn't Microsoft taken some sort of control of their own web presence? Their update programs still can't check the update website during an install to look for appropriate updates?
I'm sitting here waiting for SP1 for VS 2005 to download because the Compact framework install happened to tell me that such a creature exists. Not because it was on the Update site, but because someone hardcoded the check into the install process.

I know these are minor things that can be worked around but hey, venting is good for the spleen right?

(Insert standard first post here)

2008-07-23T12:48:00.000-07:00

Me Too!