Here is another of my favorite problems with VS2005.

If I have a Web Application Project.  If I build it (with no errors) then when I try to view it I get the error below.  However,

Parser Error

Description: An error occurred during the parsing of a resource required to service this request. Please review the following specific parse error details and modify your source file appropriately.

Parser Error Message: The type 'Company.Web.Equipment.Global' is ambiguous: it could come from assembly 'C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\equipment\3f386648\c5a85b94\App_Code.gv_z5p7w.DLL' or from assembly 'C:\Data\Company\Company.Web.Equipment\bin\Company.Web.Equipment.DLL'. Please specify the assembly explicitly in the type name.

Source Error:

Line 1:  <%@ Application Inherits="Company.Web.Equipment.Global" Language="VB" %>

Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.42; ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.42

I don't know why it is only happening with this one web app.

Very frustrating.

Update: This has been resolved.  The problem is obvious now.  This was a web application that had been converted to a Web Site Project.  When I tried to reimport the files manually into a new Web Application Project there was one minor, yet major, difference that was causing it to fail.  The "CodeBehind" attribute had been changed to "CodeFile".  I didn't think much of it at the time, but of course this indicates that it is going to actually USE the codefile when the page is accessed.  By having a CodeFile attribute AND compiling the code into a DLL, I was ending up with copies of every class.

Some of my web applications that I have recently upgraded to 2005 at some point had their references changed to point to the DLLs that were already in the bin directory.

Of course this was causing all kinds of problems with missing DLLs and compile problems.

Make sure you check your references to see that they are not just pointed back into the bin.

I was just reading this site:

http://www.bearcanyon.com/dotnet/#AssemblySettings

I downloaded the sample code (link below).  It is supposed to allow you to have a config file per assembley e.g. MyAssembly.dll.config. 

I haven't looked at the code, but I guess you would just write something that uses reflection to find the assembly name, and then look for an xml file to read.

AssemblySettings.zip (10.5 KB)

I have tried to councel against sending datasets across web service calls, but we have a lot of instances where this is being done.

One of the problems with this is that datasets get bloated when converted to XML.

So I set out to compare the sizes of:

1. Serialized List(Of MyType)
2. Serialized DataTable
3. Serialized DataSet
4. XML Serialized Dataset

I wish I had done some research on this, because I would have quickly been reminded that DataSets always serialize as XML, even if you are using the BinaryFormatter. 

There are lots of people out there coming up with their own ideas for how to improve the serialization of datasets:

• Dino Esposito's Ghost method
• MSDN Surrogate Dataset Serialization
• Andres Aguiar's Customization of Generated DataSets
• Another Ariticle Summing Up Other Options

Anyway, this isn't really THAT big of a deal, because my real goal wasn't to improve the dataset serialization, but to simply see what it would be, and compare it to some other ways to serialize data, like in a list of business objects or a datatable.

The results are interesting:

Given a list of 1013 Business Objects (Records) the serialization results are as follows:

Encoding.ASCII.GetString(bytes)

And here is a function for that uses it to convert a byte array to a string

    
    Private Function streamToString(ByVal stream As System.IO.MemoryStream) As String
        Dim o As New IO.StreamWriter(stream, System.Text.Encoding.Default)
        Dim bytes(stream.Length - 1) As Byte
        stream.Read(bytes, 0, stream.Length - 1)
        Return Encoding.ASCII.GetString(bytes)
    End Function

        
        Public Function Clone() As ClassName
            Dim bFormatter As New System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.BinaryFormatter
            Dim stream As New System.IO.MemoryStream()
            bFormatter.Serialize(stream, Me)
            stream.Seek(0, System.IO.SeekOrigin.Begin)
            Dim newClone As ClassName
            newClone = CType(bFormatter.Deserialize(stream), ClassName)
            Return newClone
        End Function
        Private Function ICloneableImplementation() As Object Implements System.ICloneable.Clone
            Return Me.Clone
        End Function

In VS.Net 2003 projects had a little sub folder looking icon called References that you could quickly expance to see what assemblies are being referenced. 

In 2005, you have to open a projects page and navigate to the references tab, but only for VB.Net projects.  C# projects still get the nice shortcut.  Weird.

I just came across another bug in VS.Net 2005.

When I went to upgrade some of my projects from 2003 to 2005 I copied them to a new folder.  So for the sake of simplicity lets say that my projects were in C:\Projects\ and the 2005 versions are in C:\Projects2005\.

Some of the projects had a reference to a DLL located in C:\Projects\MyDLL, so when you run the upgrade wizard, it adds C:\Projects\MyDLL as a reference path for your new project located in C:\Projects2005.

Now here is what ticked me off.

I had already taken the code from MyDLL and upgraded it to 2005, built the DLL, and put the DLL in C:\Projects2005\MyDLL.

So if you convert a project, it doesn't know about that new 2005 version of MyDLL, so I was nice enough to go in, remove the 2003 reference, and repoint it to the 2005 version.

However, at this point it says "Oh I see you want me to use this DLL, but it looks like there is one with the same (whatever criteria it uses, maybe just the name?) in my reference path (C:\Projects\MyDLL), so I'll just throw out whatever you were asking me to do and reference that one" which is EXACTLY what I didn't want it to do.

I had been really bugged by the way VS.Net 2005 seemed to treate project references.

As I mentioned in a previous post, if you remove a project from a solution, all references to that project are also removed from their respective project.

The result is that lots of project suddenly lose reference to a needed dll or project, and you have to go back and manually add the reference back in.  Big pain.

Thankfully, Mikhail Arkhipov from Microsoft has reassured me that 1) I am not going crazy, 2) this is not by design as in fact a bug, and 3) it will be fixed in a (hopefully soon to be released) service pack. 

Strike 1 issue with VS.Net 2005.  Only like 10 more to go.

Search engine optmization is the efforts to increase a website's ranking in the various search engines.

One site that I have been using, mostly for fun, is http://www.googlerankings.com which, unlike other sites that just tell you the page rank of your site, will allow you to provide a search term, and it will try to find your site on the google, msn, and yahoo. 

Of course, finding that your site is number 836 for some search doesn't really help you in any meaningful way, other than to know that no one is ever going to find your site through that search engine.

I was trying to see who my site is listed number 2 at MSN for "Chris May" but not even in the top 1000 at google or yahoo.  

Which is worse?

The fact that I spend so much time working at Borders, that when they hire a new barista I notice, or the fact that I spend so much time working at Borders that the new barista notices that I used to have a beard.

OMG TicketMaster Sucks!!!

I just went to buy some tickets for The Secret Machines, and the tickets were 15 bucks each. 

I picked the FREE delivery option, and my order came to $72.30.  WHAT???  3 tickts @ $15 << $72.30.

So for a 15 dollar ticket, they add on a "facility charge" of another buck, then there is the "Convenience Charge" WTF is that BS?  Tax is only 1.50 but then they throw on a "Order Processing Fee" charge of 4.80?? What the hell is the difference between their Order processing fee, and their Convenience charge?  This is totally gay.

In the end my "tickets" cost 60% more than the cost of the "tickets"!!

Ticketmaster really sucks ass.  I hate them with a passion.

And how come I keep signing up to be notified when some bands go on tour and they never email me, those ass hats.

I decided to go with Scott Gu's suggestion to use Web Application Projects to help ease the conversion for 2003.

I will agree that this is a much better way to convert your project than to turn it into a Web Site Project, but there are still lingering problems.

In one of my projects the web page and code behind have somehow become lost.  The code behind pages can't see their controls, which are placed in some mystery file thanks to the new Partial Class feature.

I tried ranaming the files, I tried cutting and then replacing the HTML that defines the controls, the only thing I found that works is to totally delete the file and recreate it exactly the same way.  What a pain.

The "What a pain" concept is the only constant in this process.

I am still not sure what is going on with project references. 

As far as I see, if there is a DLL in the bin directory, you don't need a reference to that DLL.  But as soon as you clean out your bin, your project will break with error messages that are nothing like "Are you missing a reference?" because, of course you are, VS.Net just removes them all the time w/o asking you! 

There must be some new paradigm with how you are supposed to work with references, projects, and solutions, because trying to do it like you would in vs.net 2003 is causing a ton of problems.

Update: Almost as if VS was getting back at me, as soon as I posted this it took a crap and crashed. 

I just got my first set of grades from University of Chicago.  I got an A in OO Architecture and Design Patterns, and a B in Software Construction.

I think I couldn't have done any better than a B in Software Construction.  The work was very challenging, in a good way, but the time requirement was so great that week after week I wasn't able to complete the weeks assignment, or if I was able to complete it, my code wasn't as strong as it could have been.

I am taking this quater off to focus on work, and I am not sure if I will be taking anything in the summer as they usually do the really basic classes then.  We will see. 

I probably still need to take some kind of discrete math class, but I don't want to pay the $3600 bucks to take it at UofC if I can take it elsewhere for less.

Bret Martin and Katie Kniss

Bret Martin and Katie Kniss are getting married

I am going to see if I can get a googlewhack on Bret Martin and Katie Kniss, linking to this page.  Technically a googlewhack is 2 words that are in the dictionary, but I am expanding on this to include names.

Putting their names in some H1 and H2 tags at the top here should help with the Googlebot.




Actually, Katie is probably getting the raw end of this deal, she is going to have to put up with Bret for years to come. 

Same goes for Kathleen.  Sometimes I wonder if knew what she was getting herself into.  . 

The wedding is this summer in St. Louis, and I hear they are spending their honeymoon in Peoria.  Well not just Peoria... East Peoria. 

Update: Well I got my home page number 1 on the major 3 search engines:
Google
Yahoo
MSN

But they are only indexing my homepage right now, not the actual article link (Bret Martin and Katie Kniss).

Slashdot is running an Ask /. article on alternatives to Citrix.

At Walsh, we run a lot of applications over Citrix, mostly apps that really aren't meant to be run remotely, to allow remote users to run them against databases that are stored in our main offices.

MSi is interested in a solution such as this as well but for more daily operations than specific application access.

Here is a little example of how vb.net deals with passing of objects ByRef and ByVal.  The short answer is that when you pass a reference type object (not a value type) byval, the object is copied back when the method if finished.  You never really have handle on the original object, which is evident by the fact that you can't set it = nothing.  However, if you pass ByRef then you can indeed set the object = nothing and it will remain null when you return to the calling function.

If you try the same thing, except using a value type structure, you will see almost the same behavior, except for the major differenct that if you pass a structure byval and then make a change to it, those changes will not be copied back to the calling function.

Here is a link to a tool that will go through a collection of blog entries and rename them.  Just what I was looking for.

http://www.vasanth.in/Software.aspx?=renamer

I just finished watching Over the Years and Through The Woods which I first blogged about here.

It was pretty cool!  If you like Queens of the Stone Age, then you should really get it.

The performances reminded me of the one thing that they do live that I don't like, and that is take an adlib section too far.  It's like, oh cool, normally this part only goes on 4 times but they are doing it more, ok, thats 12, 16, ...  ok 24 times ... ok... this is getting stupid, I lost track of the count, are they ever going to jump back into the song?

But the DVD is pretty cool.  There are some cool bonus footage of a bunch of the songs I really like with their old bass player that they don't play live anymore, which sucks.  I think they were a lot better w/ him in 2003 than w/o.  But whatever.

I found this other CD by them that I might end up getting called The Desert Sessions. 

Cool stuff.

As we were upgrading to run ASP.Net 2.0, we ran into this wonderful problem.  Your code seems to run fine until you push it to a server and you get this error:

 Parser Error

Description: An error occurred during the parsing of a resource required to service this request. Please review the following specific parse error details and modify your source file appropriately.

Parser Error Message: Could not load type 'xyz.Global'.
Source Error:

Line 1:  <%@ Application Inherits="xyz.Global" Language="VB" %>

Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.42; ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.42

There are 2 things I had to remember to do to get this to work.

1) We use a domain user for the aps.net worker process, so our site can access UNC files across the network.  In order for this user to have the ability to compile the app, you have to give them full rights to: c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322 and if you start running your apps in .net 2.0, you need to do the same for c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727.

2) If you have any web apps running in 1.1, there is a good chance that even thought you changed the iis setting to asp.net 2.X, you are still running against an app pool that is shared with another site using asp.net 1.1.  So, just create a new app pool, and have your newly 2.0 site setup to use that app pool.

Problem solved!