Monthly Archives: April 2006

Moving a Network

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This weekend I helped a client of mine move their computer system to a new factility.  In the new location I racked up and configured an HP Procurve switch, and 2 Cisco APs.

All in all the move went well.  I had some problems getting into the Procurve at first.  I think the problem was a bad serial cable, but in the end I got it working right.

We didn’t quite have enough ports on Procurve, so I uplinked a couple of their old switches until I could procure some more modules for the HP.

The Cisco 1100 APs had great range.  I was able to blanket the entire facility with WIFI access.  Pretty nice!

Fixing Left Column Problem With dasBlog Essence Theme

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I got a response back from Jelle Druyts regarding the problem where the left column falls off the page if you narrow the window enough.

He was kind enough to respond with his CSS changes:

/*—– Content Styles —–*/

#content {
        margin-top: 10px;
        position: relative;
        top: 0px;
}

#bodyContainer {
        margin-left: 220px;
}

/* Exceptions for Print */
@media print {
        #bodyContainer {
                width: 100%;
                margin-left: 0px;
        }
}

(…A little later…)

pre {
        overflow-x: scroll;
}

(…A little later…)

#metaContainer {
        border: 1px dashed #d0d0d0;
        background-color: #f0f0f0;
        color: #505050;
        font-size: smaller;
        width: 210px;
        position: absolute;
        top: 0px;
}

Once you apply these to the dasBlog.css file in the Essence theme package, the left column will remain in place!  Excellent!

Delete the Web Apps DLLs and Everything Works

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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:WINDOWSMicrosoft.NETFrameworkv2.0.50727Temporary ASP.NET Filesequipment3f386648c5a85b94App_Code.gv_z5p7w.DLL’ or from assembly ‘C:DataCompanyCompany.Web.EquipmentbinCompany.Web.Equipment.DLL’. Please specify the assembly explicitly in the type name.

Source Error: 

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

Source File: /Equipment/global.asax    Line: 1

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.

App.Config functionality for Class Library Assembiles

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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)

 

Sending Datasets and Objects Over the Wire: Serialization and XML

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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:

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:

Method Size (bytes)
List(Of MyType) 290,321
DataTable 819,575
DataSet 693,088
XML Serialzied Dataset 851,614

I have read that you can really decrease the size of the dataset by writing your own logic to do the serialization, but as everyone points out that is kind of a pain.

Byte Array To String

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Here is a very simple code snippet for converting a Byte Array to a String in VB.Net 

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

Implementing System.ICloneable and a Snippet

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This will provide the necessary functions to implement ICloneable as well as a type specific Clone method. 

        
        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

I wrapped this into a snippet that you can import into Visual Studio 2005.

Implement ICloneable.snippet (1.84 KB)