Destination IUnknown

Referencing assemblies in GAC

2009-03-31T21:05:00.000+01:00

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

2009-03-03T20:12:00.002Z

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

2009-02-28T17:51:00.004Z

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?

2009-02-27T20:11:00.002Z

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

2009-02-05T11:00:00.001Z

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

2009-01-21T17:18:00.003Z

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.

Manually creating Interop dll using tlbimp.exe

2008-06-27T13:09:00.005+01:00

Visual Studio .Net automatically creates Interop dll when you reference the COM dll in your project. This is all nice and behaves as expected, but at times you may want to create the Interop dll manually.

Tlbimp.exe is the tool to use. However, strange as it may seems, by default it doesn't do what Visual Studio does. How interesting ...

Visual Studio .Net by default add "Interop." at the beginning of the generated Interop dll and set the namespace as the name of the dll sans the ".dll".

For example, if the dll is called MyCOM.dll. Visual Studio generates: Interop.MyCOM.dll and creates the Interop dll under MyCOM namespace.

To achieve the same effect using tlbimp, you need to use both the /out and /namespace flag. For example:

tlbimp /out:Interop.MyCOM.dll /namespace:MyCOM MyCOM.dll

Sorted.

Resharper Love & Hate

2008-06-25T16:01:00.002+01:00

ReSharper is the tool that I can't live without it and I can't live with it. It's easy to say why. First of all I just can't work without the following R# shortcuts:

- Ctrl + N (this probably worth 95% of R# price)
- Ctrl + B
- Ctrl + Shift + B
- Alt + F7
- Ctrl + Shift + F7
- Ctrl + F12

And the code analysis is too darn useful:

- Auto import
- Auto initialise variable through constructor
- Generate getter
- Plus all the refactoring tools (extract method etc. etc. etc.)

But it's really s ..... l .... o .... w. It's worse during debugging session. Every F10 can take up to a second. Evaluating a variable can produce a time-out and it also crashes my debugging session when it's running within NUnit. God knows why.

It's such a shame for such a great tool to be super slow. I often had to turn R# off for debugging and turn it back on during coding. The problem with this is that it often screw up the R# keyboard short cuts and I had to reset it again. This takes about 25 minutes in my PC.

A lot of people complained about R# regarding its memory foot print and more frequently ... performance. This seems to be a common whinge about it. If only R# is a tad faster, we all will be in coding nirvana. I kid you not.

In the mean time I'm investigating CodeRush + Refactor combo as R# replacement.

LoaderLock was detected

2008-03-05T15:24:00.001Z

Blimey … what was that? This kind of exception, that only happens during debugging, confuses developers. Googling about the problem shows that Microsoft at times gives pointless answer. Some blame iTunes about this problem ;)

Rather than following the advice to turn this rather useful check in VS 2005, the most probable causes of this problem are:

1) An unmanaged dll calls a managed dll on its DLLMain or
2) Not marshalling your call back to the main UI thread.

Vivek wrote a bit more about this problem here.

New Home

2008-02-20T22:03:00.000Z

Well here it is. After years of mucking around with Movable Type, I've made up my mind that it ain't worth it anymore. Started as curiosity about running my own blogging engine, it's becoming more and more obvious that I just don't have the energy nor time to maintain it.

I had this grand idea of having a cool CMS, blogging and online photo library system all on my website. However, just like the guys at Top Gear always say: it was ambitious but rubbish! The Movable Type is now several version old, I never get around to install the CMS and the Coppermine is neglected. Running all these things give me more hassle than I can tolerate. So off with all of them!

Nathan has the right idea of having Blogger as your main blog engine and publish them via FTP to your webserver. This way you still have all the HTML files on your site while relieving all the boring engine maintenance to Blogger. Owned by Google, I'm sure they won't disappear anytime soon.

I'm taking his advice and ditching Movable Type. In fact I'm going to ditch Coppermine install too. That is my failed online photo library attempt and will move my online photos to a managed solution.

Don't get me wrong, Movable Type and Coppermine are an excellent software. I just don't have the interest of playing with them anymore.

So here it is the new location for Destination IUnknown.