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Referencing assemblies in GAC

I found out that you can't actually refer to assemblies from the GAC directly. So in development, you need to add reference to the physical assemblies (wherever that assemblies are located), set "Copy Local" to false and at run time, the CLS will load the assembly reference from the GAC.

More information here:

http://www.eggheadcafe.com/PrintSearchContent.asp?LINKID=1175
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/dotnet/demystifygac.aspx

Running DOS batch file from UNC path

My DOS batch install file broke when I tried running them from a UNC path. It says: "CMD does not support UNC paths as current directories". Old error message but new to me. Make sense since DOS was around before the UNC path era.

Turn out that there is a solution, not the cleanest but it works. Basically you have to do this:


pushd "%~dp0"

REM ... do your stuff

popd


What pushd does is automatically map the given parameter as a drive and popd removes the mapping. Not the best solution, but a working one. And the "%~dp0" parameter gets you the current directory of the batch file.

SkyDrive bumped to 25Gb

Microsoft SkyDrive ramps its storage space to 25Gb. This will undoubtedly heating up the competition for online backup services.

I think 25Gb is plenty for a lot of people. I for one will be in those category. What it's missing is sync ability ala Carbonite. There's a Gladinet, a new software to mount web-drive to your Windows Explorer but it's still in Beta and that too is missing sync ability.

For me though, this is great news. I will start uploading my archived files one-by-one while giving me a bit more time to do my research for online backup or when Gladinet finally comes out with the sync function or when GDrive is finally released ... whenever that may be.

Is that Padding or Margin?

I've always got confused about the difference between Padding and Margin. Yeah sure for a seasoned web developers or UI developers this is easy, but I hardly touch any UI code these days (that may change).

Dan Rigsby has this really good post about the difference between Padding and Margin (in WPF), bookmarked and linked.

Hashtable Serialization

I've experienced the pain of Hashtable serialization/deserialization. It's just doesn't work as you expect it to.

The following two posts are very useful explaining what the issues with Hashtable's serialization mechanism:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/279524/hashtable-ondeserialization

http://clevercoder.wordpress.com/2006/11/30/hashtable-serialization-and-the-ideserializationcallback-interface/

Good Bye Hostway, Hello GoDaddy

I can't find any fault with my previous hosting provider, Hostway, but 'tis is the time to reduce spending and be prudent.

So since I hardly ever use any of the features provided by Hostway, I've decided to go cheap and use GoDaddy's ads supported free hosting.

I've been slowly moving away from the "do it yourself" mantra and moving to the "let others do it" mantra. How things have changed :)

No longer have the time or passion to tinker with MovableType, I now use Blogger to manage the (pretty much abandoned) blogs.

Coppermine is gone a while back, I just could not be arsed to maintain it anymore. Now all my pics are hosted in Picasa.

Just a few years ago I loved to tinker with MT, WordPress or Coppermine. Thus being able to ssh to my web host is very important, but now that I've pretty much outsourced all the functionalities, a free web host with GoDaddy is more than enough. And of course it's free.