Vladimir Bychkov

Last week I installed IE7. Didn't have any problems with it up until today. I had to make some changes to one of my web applications through Web Application Administration Tool (VS 2005 menu: Website -> ASP.NET Configuration) so, I launched Administration website but none of the links worked. After being confused for a couple of minutes I went on googling and it apperars that I'm not the only one who have this problem. To fix it you have to add localhost to the list of trusted sites. Here is how you do it:

Open up IE7 window
Go Tools -> Internet Options -> Security tab
Click on "Trusted sites" icon in the list, then click Sites button
In "Trusted sites" dialog UnCheck "Require server verification (https:) for all sites in this zone
Type http://localhost in the textbox and click Add button
Click Close and then Ok in the "Internet Options" dialogs

Now try Web Application Administration Tool. All links should work like they did in IE6.

.NET 3.0 released

2006-11-15T11:00:02.766-05:00

Another big release - .NET Framework 3.0! Looks like November became a prime month for big releases from Microsoft. As I remember, .NET Framework 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 were announce in November, last year.

PowerShell V1.0 released

2006-11-15T10:01:46.659-05:00

Jeffrey Snover, the architect of Windows PowerShell, announced today release of V1.0. I've been using PowerShell RC1 for about a month and I'm very amaized. What a great tool it is! All the power of .NET at your fingertips without bogging (re)compilation. Object pipeline is a great idea! I see a lot of application areas in my day-to-day programming tasks (in no particular order):

Managed code research and investigation
Get-Member cmdlet is a great way to take a quick pick at class members. You can use -static switch to get a list of static members.
ETL scripts
I often found myself in a need of a quick script to extract some data from different sources (text files, web pages, logs, utils output etc.) make some transformation and load this data into SQL Server database. Support of RegExp and object pipeline make this process smooth and easy.
Ad-hock code testing
Now if you need to do a quick test to take a look if something is working how you expected it to be, just instantiate an object, fill it's properties and call a method. All this can be done from command line using PowerShell scripting language. It is quite possible to anticipate a new testing framework to apper in the nearest future.
Database picking
I use generated NetTiers framework in my .Net web applications. Now I can take my generated DAL and BL assemblies, load them in PowerShell and use BL classes to pick into my DB data or even modify it using command line. Isn't it cool?!
Application administration
Nowadays, more and more applications support managed APIs. So it's a prime use for PowerShell to manage those applications!
Windows monitoring
Unified access to different Windows datasources (File system, Registry, Event-log, Processes, Varables etc.) makes all those routine tasks to pick into those datasources a snap.

Plus many more uses for other geek stuff. I you haven't tried it, do it now! :-)

PS I use PowerShell Analyzer to write test and run my scripts. A very good tool indeed! It will probably take some time to recompile it for release build of PowerShell.

Microsoft Buys Winternals and Sysinternals

2006-07-19T10:36:29.0690288-04:00

WOW! What a News! In my previous post I just mentioned Mark Russinovich's free webcast and now this news, what a coincidence... Well, I don't know if it's for better or for worse, but it should definitely bring some fresheness to Microsoft. Mark posted on his blog about this aquisition and he sounds pretty enthusiastic. I hope that as part of MS he will continue to post his great insights on software security and Windows internals as well as provide great free tools and source code samples.

TechNet Webcast: Windows Hang and Crash Dump Analysis

2006-06-07T08:44:32.500632-04:00

Another freebie! Sysinternals anounces free webcast from MS TechEd 2006 in Boston: Windows Hang and Crash Dump Analysis. Here is a description of the webcast:

Learn to analyze Microsoft Windows crash dumps, diagnose the cause, pinpoint a solution, and resolve the problem. Intended for system administrators, this webcast explains how system crashes occur and what happens when you reboot a crashed system. We lead you through the crash dump analysis process step by step, introducing the latest tools from Microsoft and handy tricks for isolating the cause of a crash.

It's always nice to hear and learn from smart people like Mark Russinovich, especially when it's for free :-).

SQL Prompt is FREE!

2006-05-30T12:40:13.725-04:00

Great news! Red-Gate Software acquired SQL Prompt utility and they have a promo offer until September 2006. Download your copy of SQL Prompt for FREE. Very-very nice!

My presentation on Debugging and Error handling in ASP.NET 2.0 for DCMCSD group

2006-05-01T18:03:22.0111665-04:00

Here is a link to my presentation

Debugging.zip (15.31 KB)

.NET exceptions 101

2006-04-20T09:39:02.847139-04:00

Very nice and clear explanation of .NET exceptions and ways to deal with them in this article. Too many times I've seen people get confused with exception handling. Speaking truth it's haven't been clear for me as well up until I visited Wintellect's Devscovery conference a couple of years ago where Jeff Richter had the whole 2-hour session devoted to exception only...

How to "enable" IntelliSense in SQL Server Management Studio (SQL Server Enterprise Manager, SQL Query Analyzer etc.)

2006-04-13T12:11:25.626-04:00

As I can see from statistics on my blog, the most popular topics are those devoted to IntelliSense support. I am indeed a huge fan of IntelliSense. After release of VS 2005 (and even before while working with it's beta version - Whidbey) I enjoy it's enhanced support at large. Event though there are couple of glitches in the current implementation, workarounds do exist. Beside working with C# in VS 2005 I spend a lot of time working with database scripts in SQL Server Management Studio (and with it's ancestors SQL Server Enterprise Manager and SQL Query Analyzer). The lack of IntelliSense in those tools are obvious. The current project I'm working on involve 6 pretty big databases with over a hundred table names and thousands columns I'm not really familiar. So, I spend a little time researching and looking for a tool to solve this problem and finally googled to a great tool - PromptSQL. Seems like it was around for a while, but for me personally it's huge discovery! Here is a breif description from their website:

It adds SQL Intellisense^®-like word-completion for you when you are editing SQL using these [MS SQL Server Management Studio 2005, SQL Server 200 Enterprise Manager and SQL Query Analyzer and some other] products. You can enable/disable PromptSQL for specific editors. PromptSQL simply sits behind the scenes and provides unobtrusive help when you press Ctrl-Space or when you type "." after a table/view/alias name.

Here is full ist of features. If you work with SQL a lot, give it a try, I'm pretty sure it will make your SQL live a helluva lot easier :-)!

Update (04/20/2006): Found another tool with similar functionality. SqlAssist "supplies high quality intellisense for SQL to your Visual Studio .NET IDE"

A very good article on exception handling

2006-04-10T10:44:25.0265666-04:00

More as a note to myself. Today I stumbled to a nice article on exception handling in .NET applications. Here is the link.