I can't remember where I read it...

SQL Server test databases

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

As mentioned in my previous post, I often need to run the tooling I’m working on against databases to test it. Part of this testing is to ensure that the tooling can handle schemas with odd naming. Over the years working on database tooling, I’ve collated a script full of odd cases that can easily trip up tooling. It’s now become a standard script that I run on my local SQL Server testing instance when I first set it up.

CREATE DATABASE [💩]
GO

USE [💩]
GO

CREATE SCHEMA [💰]
GO

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[🍺]
(
    [🐈] INT NULL
)
GO

CREATE TABLE [💰].[💾]
(
    [📌] INT NULL
)
GO

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CREATE DATABASE [.]
GO

USE [.]
GO

CREATE SCHEMA [.]
GO

CREATE SCHEMA [..]
GO

CREATE TABLE [.].[.]
(
    [.] [int] NULL,
    [..] [int] NULL,
    [...] [int] NULL
)
GO

CREATE TABLE [.].[..]
(
    [.] [int] NULL,
    [..] [int] NULL,
    [...] [int] NULL
)
GO

CREATE TABLE [..].[.]
(
    [.] [int] NULL,
    [..] [int] NULL,
    [...] [int] NULL
)
GO

CREATE TABLE [..].[..]
(
    [.] [int] NULL,
    [..] [int] NULL,
    [...] [int] NULL
)
GO

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CREATE DATABASE [')) group by groupcir; select 1;GO--%']
GO

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CREATE DATABASE [_Burma ဗမာ (မြန်မာ) my-mm]
GO

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CREATE DATABASE [_Georgia _ქართული (საქართველო) ka-ge]
GO

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CREATE DATABASE [_Saudi Arabia العربية (المملكة العربية السعودية) ar-sa]
GO

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CREATE DATABASE [_Tamil தமிழ் (இலங்கை) ta-lk]
GO

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CREATE DATABASE [<script>alert("hi there");</script>]
GO

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CREATE DATABASE [a-database-with-a-very-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-name]
GO

USE [a-database-with-a-very-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-name]
GO

CREATE SCHEMA [a-schema-with-a-very-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-name]
GO

CREATE TABLE [a-schema-with-a-very-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-name].[a-table-with-a-very-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-name]
(
    [a-column-with-a-very-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-name] INT NULL
)
GO

CREATE TABLE [another-table-with-a-very-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-name]
(
    [another-column-with-a-very-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-name] INT NULL
)
GO

CREATE VIEW [a-view-with-a-very-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-name]
AS
    SELECT 1 AS V
GO

CREATE PROCEDURE [a-procedure-with-a-very-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-name] @a_parameter_with_a_very_long_long_long_long_long_long_long_long_long_long_long_long_long_long_long_long_long_long_long_name INT 
AS
    SELECT 1
GO

CREATE FUNCTION [a-function-with-a-very-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-long-name](@another_parameter_with_a_very_long_long_long_long_long_long_long_long_long_long_long_long_long_long_long_long_long_long_name INT)
RETURNS INT AS
BEGIN
    RETURN 1
END
GO

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CREATE DATABASE [Empty]
GO

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CREATE DATABASE [name with spaces]
GO

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CREATE DATABASE [name'with'single'quotes]
GO

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CREATE DATABASE [name.with.dots]
GO

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CREATE DATABASE [name/with/forward/slashes]
GO

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CREATE DATABASE [name[with[opening[brackets]
GO

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CREATE DATABASE [name\with\backslashes]
GO

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CREATE DATABASE [name]]with]]closing]]brackets]
GO

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CREATE DATABASE [name-with-dashes]
GO

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CREATE DATABASE [name]
GO

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CREATE DATABASE [Offline]
GO

ALTER DATABASE [Offline] SET OFFLINE
GO

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CREATE DATABASE [ReadOnly]
GO

ALTER DATABASE [ReadOnly] SET READ_ONLY WITH NO_WAIT
GO

Reference databases

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

As part of my day-to-day work, I often need to run the tooling I’m working on against databases to test it. The databases need to have a variaty of different schemas and data in them to do a representative test. A big problem with this is getting hold of an array of different databases in the first place. This problem is compounded further by the fact that the tooling I work on supports five different database platforms, so there is a need for different databases for each platform.

A useful source of ready-made databases is the reference databases that are provided by the vendor or community around each database. The ones I’ve found so far are listed below, with a bit of detail about what each one represents.

SQL Server

Name	Description	Install
AdventureWorks	A fictional bicycle manufacturer “Adventure Works Cycles”, containing data including manufacturing, sales, purchasing, product management, contact management, and human resources. Available in Online transactional (OLTP), Data warehousing (DW), and Lightweight (LT) formats.	backups scripts
Chinook	A fictional digital media store, containing data including artists, albums, tracks, invoices, and customers.	script
Contoso	“Contoso Corporation”, a fictional multinational business (more info here), containing data including manufacturing, sales, and products.	scripts
Northwind	“Northwind Traders”, a fictional importer/exporter of speciality foods from around the world, containing sales data including customers, orders, inventory, purchasing, suppliers, shipping, employees, and accounting.	scripts
WideWorldImporters	“Wide World Importers”, a fictional wholesale novelty goods importer and distributor operating from the San Francisco bay area (more info here), containing data including purchasing, sales and stock. Available in Online transactional (OLTP) and Data warehousing (DW) formats.	backups

Stack Exchange / StackOverflow

The databases behind the many sites in the Stack Exchange network can be downloaded here. The database for each Stack Exchange site can be downloaded, including that for StackOverflow. However, the StackOverflow database is quite big (~65GB), so it has been split up into several files. That makes it non-trivial to get it into a SQL Server database.

Brent Ozar has simplified this process by providing downloads of the database files in SQL Server 2016 format.

PostgreSQL

Name	Description	Install
AdventureWorks	A port of the SQL Server version of AdventureWorks, a fictional bicycle manufacturer “Adventure Works Cycles”, containing data including manufacturing, sales, purchasing, product management, contact management, and human resources.	script
Chinook	A port of the SQL Server version of Chinook, a fictional digital media store, containing data including artists, albums, tracks, invoices, and customers.	script
Pagila	A database of a fictional DVD rental store, containing data including films, actors, customers, staff, and payments.	scripts

Bluebox

Ryan Booz has created Bluebox, a database based on Pagila that aims to make it more full-featured.

NYC Census

If using PostGIS (an extension for managing spatial data), the introduction to PostGIS tutorial contains a sample database of census data for New York City.

Other Databases

The PostgreSQL website has a long list of other sample databases, including IMDB, the UK land registry of sales, and OpenStreetMap.

MySQL / MariaDB

Name	Description	Install
Bureau of Transportation Statistics	A database of US commercial airline flight data including airlines, airports, and flights.	scripts
Employees	A database containing generated data including employees, departments, employees, and salaries.	scripts
Sakila	A fictional DVD rental store, containing data including films, actors, customers, staff, and payments.	scripts
World	A database containing information about the countries and cities of the world, containing data including countries, cities, and languages spoken.	script

Other Databases

The MySQL website has a list of other sample databases, including some with large data sets.

Oracle

Oracle themselves provide some interlinked sample schemas:

Customer Orders (CO)
Human Resources (HR)
Online Catalog (OC)
Order Entry (OE)
Product Media (PM)
Sales History (SH)

These are documented on the Oracle site, and can be obtained from the Oracle samples GitHub repository.

Name	Description	Install
OT	A global fictitious company that sells computer hardware including storage, motherboard, RAM, video card, and CPU.	scripts
O7	A schema for a fictitious bank, containing customers, accounts, products, branches, departments, and employees.	scripts (see section 2)

Gerenal data sources

There are many sites that provide data suitable for using as a reference database. While many of these sites provide the data, few of them provide it in a format that can be loaded straight into the relevant database platform. They can however be imported fairly trivially.

Name	Description
Google Dataset Search	A search engine for datasets from across the internet.
Kaggle	Datasets for data science and machine learning. Interesting datasets include NBA Basketball and Spotify.
UC Irvine Machine Learning Repository	Well-documented and clean data sources, mainly geared towards machine learning.
Awesome Public Data Sets	A list of high quality, topic-centric public data sources.
Data Is Plural	A weekly newsletter and archive of real-world datasets.
Hugging Face	A huge set of data, mainly targeted at machine learning.

DDD South West 14

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just got back from another DDD South West. It’s the last time at the Engine Shed, the venue it’s been at for several years. It’s a shame, as the venue is perfect for an event like this, and the food is excellent.

This year I was a speaker, doing a session on sketchnoting. It’s the first time I’ve given this talk, and I got the whole audience sketching along with me during the session. Several people also took my challenge to sketchnote a session during the rest of the day. Hopefully they will continue to do so at other events.

2026: The Year Of The Software Factory

by Rich Woollcott

Using Claude To Access Data And Make Smarter Decisions

by Elizabeth Hanson

Playing With AI Locally

by Paul Michaels

From Developer To Architect, The Career Path Nobody Explained

by John Kilmister

Do We Really Need A New Playbook For AI?

by Stuart Caborn

Why Don’t People Seem To Be Able To Diagnose Problems These Days?

by Richard Fennell

Extracting a DACPAC

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

SQL Server has the concept of data-tier applications. This is a way of defining the structure and data of an entire database within a single file, enabling it to be moved between machines. There are two types of files that can be used:

BACPAC - This contains the database schema and the data from a database.
DACPAC - This contains the just the database schema by default, but data from some tables can be included.

Data-tier applications have benefits over backup files in that they are more portable. Backups are tied to the version of SQL Server that they are created with, meaning that only that version or later can restore them.

I use DACPACs a lot to get database schemas between different servers. Deploying a DACPAC will sometimes fail due to it containing logins, users, etc… from the database it was created from that don’t exist on the server it is being deployed to. When this happens, SQL Server Management Studio simply fails with an error with no way around the issue.

It is possible to deploy however, but it takes a bit of command line trickery. To do this, first install the SqlPackage dotnet tool:

 dotnet tool install -g microsoft.sqlpackage

Once installed, you can run it from the command line, passing the option to exclude certain object types. Something like:

sqlpackage
  /Action:Publish
  /TargetServerName:.\SQL2025
  /TargetDatabaseName:Northwind
  /Properties:ExcludeObjectTypes="Users;RoleMembership;Logins;ServerRoles;ServerRoleMembership;Permissions"
  /SourceFile:northwind.dacpac

It’s the /Properties:ExcludeObjectTypes=... parameter that does the magic. In this case, the security-related objects causing the deploy to fail will be excluded from the deployed database schema.

More details can be found in the docs for the SqlPackage publish action.

nor(DEV):con 2026

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just returned from nor(DEV):con, an event I previously went to a few years ago.

Designing Services That Stand The Test Of Time

by Paul Grenyer

Stop Testing! (My Patience)

by Ryan Healey

Modular Monoliths And Other Facepalms

by Kevlin Henney

Debugging Your Imposter Syndrome

by Vickie Allen-Collier

Learn How To Learn

by Frances Buontempo

Translating Business Metrics Into Meaningful User Outcomes

by Elisabeth Dubus

How We Support Deploying Multi-Cloud Apps At Stack Overflow

by Chris O’Dell

NDC London 2026

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

After a three year hiatus, last week I returned to the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in Westminster to attend NDC London.

As I’ve done before, I was part of the crew helping out at the event. In exchange for a free ticket, you help out with the setup and registration of attendees, and spend 50% of each day room monitoring. While I did not know most of the crew when I turned up, we formed our own little community within the conference and got to know each other in just a few days.

.Net Meets MCP - Build Your Own AI-Powered Service With C#

by Gerald Versluis

Advanced Pattern Matching In C#

by Oliver Sturm

10 Tips To Level Up Your AI Assisted Coding

by Aleksander Stensby

Modern .Net Configuration Practices

by Chris Ayers

Notebooks And .Net

by Alexander Hall

Immutable Patterns Of System Design

by James Eastham

Progressive Collapse

by Sam Newman

Application Performance Optimisation In Practice

by Steve Gordon

Modular Code

by Ian Cooper

Optimising HttpClient Usage

by Nico Vermeir

Code That Writes Code - .Net Source Generators

by Glenn F. Henriksen

AI-Powered App Development

by Steve Sanderson

Supercharging Local Development With Aspire

by Jimmy Bogard

DDD South West 13

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As is becoming customary each April, I did my annual trip to DDD South West last weekend. Another really good event.

Surviving Complexity Through Software Design

by Jacqui Read

Modern Software Architecture Review Best Practices

by Steven Read

Why Am I Being Such A Git About Best Practices?

by Joe Glombek

A Developers Guide To Getting The Most Out Of Containers

by John Kilmister

Mutation Testing

by Stuart Lang

Let’s Ship This Thing!

by Gary Ewan Park

StaffPlus London 2024

Sun, 07 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

After previously attending last year’s inaugural event, I recently went back to StaffPlus London. This year was compèred by Suhail Patel, one of the speakers from 2023.

Influencing Through Getting Your Carrots In A Row

by Joy Ebertz

Architecting For Scale And Simplicity

by Segun Viktor Orekoya

Deming’s Wisdom For Staff+ Engineers: A Modern Take On Timeless Principles

by Annie Vella

Filling The Void: Operating As A Staff Engineer In A Leaderless Scope

by Sami Farhat and Guillaume Mazollier

Doing “The Most Important Thing” Is A Trap

by James Ford

Letting The Best Ideas Win

by Tristan Heal

Sunsetting Legacy: Navigating The Shop Merchant Eligibilty Data Pipeline Migration

by Dianing Yudono

Navigating Complex Projects: Finding The Right Mode Of Operation

by Mahmut Canga

Understanding Complex Systems Without Simplifying Them

by Rita Sodt

Have AI Got News For You

by Katie Koschland

Is Staff Engineering Valuable At A Small Company?

by Glen Mailer

Fitness Functions: Creating Consistency Across 100s Of Services

by Bijan Chokoufe Nejad

DDD South West 12

Sat, 04 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I attended the latest DDD South West last weekend. It’s become one of my favourite of the DDD events, partly because of the venue and the relaxed feeling of the conference, but also because of Bristol - one of my favourite cities in the UK.

#FAIL

by Kevlin Henney

Confident Communication For Developers

by Aaron Green

An Above Average Tech Ecosystem

by Jennifer D Daniel

Celibrate You’re Misteaks

by Joe Glombek

Debugging: More Than Breakpoints And Log Analysis

by Rachel Breeze

Rest, gRPC, GraphQL Or Asynchronous Messaging

by Poornima Nayar

nor(DEV):con 2024

Sat, 24 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I was at nor(DEV):con a few weeks ago. It’s the first time I’ve been to this event, event though it’s fairly local to me and has been running for many years.

The Heat Death Of Enterprise IT

by Garth Gilmour & Eamonn Boyle

How To Protect Yourself From the Biggest Internet Threats

by Ignat Korchagin

Introduction To Property Based Testing In (Mostly) C#

by Steve Love

Predict The Future (With Old-School Maths)

by Dani Papamaximou

Authentic Storytelling

by Elle Overvoorde

Rethinking Content Modelling For Unfogettable User Experiences

by Esther Agbaje

GenAI For Automating Business Processes

by Maryleen Amaizu

The Erosion Of Consumer Ownership: From Posession To Subscriptions

by Alexio Rodrigues

Cedar: Next Generation Authz For Your Apps

by Ricardo Sueiras

Escaping The Hype Train

by Anna Aitchison

Agile Cambridge 2023

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Last week, I spent a few days at Agile Cambridge. I’ve been to this conference once before back in 2014, where I gave a talk on whether agile can work for off-the-shelf software. I was also speaking this year, but about “Tracking the Unmeasurable with OKRs”. Overall, it was an enjoyable conference as it gave me time away from code, and enough headspace to think about the processes involved in writing software without the details of the tech used to do it.

Five reflections for modern leaders

by Marcin Floryan

A culture of observing: how to get better understanding across the org through observability

by Apostolis Apostolidis

Improving engineering performance, the DORA way

by Carlo Beschi

To mob, pair, or fly solo?

by Chris Oldwood

A game of patterns

by Tiani Jones

Empower your master builders with strategic context

by Cei Sanderson

How to deal with uncertainties & risk in complex environments

by Maik Wojcieszak

Agile song-writing workshop

by Farah Egby

Something about the title of this workshop drew my attention, and always willing to try something new and to step out of my comfort zone, I went along. In the 90 minute session, a group of about 12 wrote and performed an original song, inspired by our love/hate of agile. We did this by first decomposing the song into its constituent parts (a chorus and three verses). We collectively worked on the chorus, which would have an uplifting feel to highlight the positives of agile. We then split into three groups, where each group worked on a different verse. After several minutes, we rotated to iterate on the verse created by a different group. We did this again until each group had worked on all three verses.

It was now time to put the lyrics to a melody. Farah had come pre-prepared with a chord progression and some suggeted styles, so we didn’t have to start completely from scratch. After a few false starts, a melody started to emerge. It wasn’t long before we had our completed masterpiece.

It was an interesting idea for a session, and one which I enjoyed taking part in. The following day, some of our group performed the song on stage in the welcome session at the start of the day - I chose to offer moral support from the audience.

How to be agile with critical national priorities

by Anna Sherrington & Nick Smith

Responsible research and innovation

by Cat Swetel

Fixing Feedback

by Ceri Newton-Sargunar

Lean inceptions: how to set your teams up for success

by Marcel Britsch

Unleashing the transformational power of play. With Lego. Seriously

by Robb Lockwood

For my last session of the conference I chose to attend Robb’s session. I mainly chose this because it involved Lego, something which I have had a strong interest in since I was a child. Robb showed how using a small set of just 50 Lego pieces, insights can be discovered to aid with the coaching process. It was also fun to build some simple models as the workshop progressed, including one challenge of “build a tower with you in it”. We also got to keep the Lego at the end of the session :)

StaffPlus London 2023

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I spent a few days this week at the first ever StaffPlus London, a conference for senior individual contributors being run alongside the LeadDev London event. The conference was compèred by Tanya Reilly, author of The Staff Engineer’s Path.

Unlinke other conferences I’ve been to, there was only one track which made choosing what sessions to see quite easy. The talks were of varying lengths, and there were a lot of them, which made sketchnoting them quite a task.

Filling The Jar Of Impact And Trust As A Principal Engineer

by Nayana Shetty

The Journey Of A Byline

by Alice Bartlett

Running Large Scale Migrations Continuously

by Suhail Patel

How To Not Lose Friends And Alienate Yourself

by Waheed El Miladi

Scaling Your Influence Through Documentation

by James Ford

Solving The Puzzle Of Staff+ Time Management

by Blanca Garcia Gil

Maximising Your Impact When Context Switching

by Maude Lemaire

Homebrew’s Greatest Migration: Moving To Github Packages With Zero Downtime

by Mike McQuaid

The Dark Side Of Lessons Learned

by Dianing Yudono

Working On Software That Is Older Than You

by Sally Wahba

Practical Systems Thinking For Software Engineers

by Laura Nolan

Unmasking Imposters By Debugging Doubts

by J Bobby Dorlus

Delivering A Digital-First BBC - An Architect’s Perspective

by Hannes Ricklefs

Defining A Technical Visiion

by Eamon Scullion

Putting Down Line Management - Returning To The Individual Contributor Role

by Caroline Handley

Cloud Infrastructure Architecuture For Nubank’s Global Expansion

by Lais Oliviera

Building A Shared Vision: Creating Alignment Across Autonomous Teams

by Maria Neumayer

Working Sideways

by Aish Raj Dahal

Scaling Your Influence When You Can Only Be In One Place

by Michael Tweed

The Dark Side Of Standardisation

by Samantha Schaevitz

Librarian’s Guide To Documentation

by Kaitlyn Tierney

Building A Diverse And Inclusive Guild From The Ground Up

by Liem Pham

Setting Goals As A Staff+ Engineer

by Sabrina Leandro

DDD South West 11

Fri, 12 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I attended DDD South West. It was run very similar to last year’s event, but was much better attended. Here are my sketchnotes of the talks.

Being Staff Plus

by Ian Cooper

User Testing In Production

by Eli Holderness

High Performance .Net JSON Serialization With Code Generation

by Ian Griffiths

Event Sourcing Using .Net, CosmosDB And Elastic

by James World & Gareth James

There’s No Such Thing As Plain Text

by Dylan Beattie

DDD South West 10

Mon, 04 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

DDD South West returned for its 10th event a few weeks ago. With it came a few new organisers, plus a brand new venue which was great. I took the opportunity to have a long weekend in Bristol, a city that I always enjoy visiting.

The Source Code Generation Game

by Steve Collins

Exploring Minimal .Net

by Kevin Smith

Data Scientists: Making Shit Up Since 1974

by Gary Short

Why Premature Optimisation Is The Root Of All Evil

by Craig Jones

Let’s Stop Blaming Our Users For Getting Hacked When It Is Our Problem To Solve

by Scott Brady

NDC London 2022

Thu, 12 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

After a hiatus of over two years due to the pandemic, NDC London returned this week to an in-person conference. After attending many virtual user groups, conferences, and training courses, it was great to meet up again with friends I’ve got to know through attending conferences over the years (and also a few former work colleagues as an unexpected bonus). The conference itself didn’t feel any different from the previous NDC London events I’ve attended, with a great venue, lots of interesting talks, and some excellent hospitality laid on by the organisers.

Here are the sketchnotes that I made for the talks that I attended.

The Last Twenty Years Of Software Development

by Richard Campbell

Richard went over the history of the past twenty years of software development, demonstrating how both technology and the big companies have changed in that time period. What was notable was the acceleratation in the pace of change in technology over the latter half of the timeframe.

The Curious Incident In Your Software In The Daytime

by Liam Westley

Liam discussed how to deal with incidents that happen with your software. He covered the kind of things that you should consider having in place to deal win an incident, and showed some example incidents and how they were dealt with. One thing that stood out from the examples was that having extensive detailed logging helps to inform about what has happened, and what data is affected. He also discussed points of failure that many people wouldn’t even consider, such as Slack being down or maxing out a credit card that is needed to pay for more resources.

The Untruthful Art - Five Ways Of Misrepresenting Data

by Alexander Arvidsson

Alexander used many humourous examples to demonstrate how data can be displayed, or even manipulated, to give an incorrect representation. He also stressed the importance of considering any agenda that the author may have when creating the visualisations.

Wearable Live Captions

by Jo Franchetti

Jo demonstrated her live captioning face mask - a wearable face mask that she built to enable her deaf mother to read what she was saying while looking at her. Traditional captioning technology relies on reading what the speaker is saying from the phone screen, making it diffuclt to look at someone when they are speaking. This is different in that the phone uses Azure Cognitive Services to convert the speech to text, and then sends the text to and LED panel in the face mask via bluetooth.

The Visible Developer

by Heather Downing

This talk was all about having a “developer brand”. Life isn’t fair, and it isn’t sufficient to work hard and be a good developer. If you do only that, you will not get recognition for your achievements. Heather encouraged people to make sure that other people know what you have done, and talked about several ways of doing this.

Roslyn Source Generators

by Stefan Pölz

Stefan went through several uses for Roslyn source generators, and how to use them.

How The Fastest Growing Companies Develop Their Public API

by Josh Twist

This talk was about making a public API on the web. Josh covered several of the key things that need to be considered when making a public API, and presented some possible solutions. One common solution for all of the considerations was an API gateway. He then demoed the Zuplo API gateway, something that Josh created after working at companies like Microsoft, Facebook, and Stripe.

Design For Developers

by Lex Lofthouse

Lex covered several of the core design principles and theories for presenting content, with lots of resources to draw from for example content.

Tracking Database Changes With Apache Kafka

by Francesco Tisiot

This talk covered how Apache Kafka can be used to track changes to a relational database. Francesco used a worked exampled to decouple a production transactional database from other potential uses such as data analysis and reporting, using Kafka log streaming to synchronise the data into a separate data store. He then introduced Debezium to track changes to a database without the need for polling.

Failure Is Always An Option

by Dylan Beattie

Dylan using the famous “failure is not an option” quote from Apollo 13 as inspiratino to highlight how we should always consider failure as an option in software systems, with examples from history of how failure modes were anticipated and came to be needed later.

Nevermind The Containers

by Rob Conery

This talk was centred around the Remote Containers Visual Studio Code extension from Microsoft. This extension allows the configuration of a development environment using a devcontainer.json file, which when run with the extension spins up a Docker container with VS Code running inside it, with the UI running on the host machine. Rob did a very slick demo of how to set it up and use it using his Ruby-based blog as an example.

Fractal Architecture

by Mark Seemann

Mark talked through his latest thinking on developing easy to maintain code, which he has captured in his latest book. Using theroies about the human memory and its limitations, he introduced the concept of a “hex flower” to represent the 7 elements that fit in your head when reading code. By breaking code down into small enough parts to fit into these shapes, it allows a software system to be seen as being composed of hierarchies of these systems that fit together to abstract behaviour.

Software Lessons From Aviation Disasters

by Adele Carpenter

Adele talked through two examples of flights that went wrong, and linked them to their underlying causes. She compared these to the world of software as things to look out for.

Team Topologies, Software Architecture And Complexity Science

by James Lewis

James talked about how most software companies get slower as they grow due to an ever-increasing number of processes and levels of hierarchy, and compared them to Amazon who are quoted as saying “the bigger we get, the easier it becomes to get bigger”. He then went through some of the reasons as to why Amazon can achieve this, with analogies drawn from city planning and biology.

Marvels Of Teenage Engineering

by Anders Norås

Anders took a nostalgic look back through development over the past forty years to highlight how the early developers honed their skills, and how seeming impossible things were achieved through perserverance and experimentation. He then lamented about how that is no longer the case as modern developers typically start coding much later in life, and don’t hone the curiosity that they would have if they were to start younger.

I’m Gonna Make You Stop Hating CSS

by Lemon

Lemon showed some things that CSS does poorly, such as the CSS is awesome meme, how people tend to fix them, and how to fix them in very simple ways, some of which required only a single line of CSS.

How To Close The Diversity Gap

by Heather Wilde

Heather talked about the diversity gap in the majority of tech companies, and some of the things that can be done to reduce it. She used many examples from the WeCrashed and Super Pumped Tv series to demonstrate the issues.

ASP.NET Core Beyond The Basics

by Chris Klug

Chris did a talk consisting of 100% code (hence the lack of a sketchnote), showing how to do some of the more advanced things with ASP.NET Core. These included:

Writing custom middleware
Using distributed caching
The IActionConstraint interface
Using custom output formatters
Custom model binding
Background tasks
Configuring an app from an external assembly using IStartupFilter and IHostingStartup

He also used the Insomnia API client during his demos, which looked like a more lightweight version of Postman.

Finding wifi passwords for saved networks

Mon, 20 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Occasionally I need to find the password for a wifi connection that I have previously connected to. Navigating the maze of dialogs to find it is never easy, especially when the path to those dialogs changes frequently in Windows 10.

One way to do it is to find the network via the Windows Control Panel (Control Panel -> Network and Internet -> Network and Sharing Centre). Once found, clicking on the connection properties will open the Wi-Fi Status panel:

Clicking on the Wireless Properties button and then selecting the Security tab will show the wifi password:

This method works, but involves a lot of clicking through screens. Also, it requires starting at the legacy Control Panel, which is gradually being replaced with the new Settings app. Instead, all of this information and more can be accessed via the command line using the netsh command.

To get the password for a wifi network, run the command:

netsh wlan show profile WifiName key=clear

You can also use this command to see the list of every saved network that your device has connected to:

netsh wlan show profile

DDD North 9

Mon, 02 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just got back from DDD North 9, held for second time in Hull. As is always the case with DDD events, there was a great community feel at the conference. Here are the sketchnotes I made in the talks I attended.

.Net Core 3 With A Raspberry Pi

by Pete Gallagher

Blazor - The Future Of Frontend Is Here

by Chris Sainty

.Net Configuration Is Easy…Right?

by Steve Collins

50 Ways To Show Your Data

by Thomas Hütter

Kubernetes On Raspberry Pi

by Chris Wraith

NDC London 2020

Mon, 10 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I attended NDC London. As I’ve done in the past, I attended as part of the NDC crew. I didn’t manage to sketchnote every talk I attended, mainly because I was in the larger rooms as part of the crew schedule and was working the camera a lot of the time. Here are the sketchnotes that I did make:

Capability Mapping

by Ian Cooper

Controlling Wildfires While Only Getting Singed

by Jessica White

An Introduction To Machine Learning Using Lego

by Jeppe Tornfeldt Sørensen

Modernising The Enterprise Desktop Application

by Oren Novotny

Rip It Up And Start Again

by Sam Newman

A Developer’s Introduction To Electronics

by Guy Royse

3D Printed Bionic Hand, A Little IoT, And A Xamarin Mobile App

by Clifford Agius

Keep It Clean - Why Bad Data Ruins Projects And How To Fix It

by Philip Winder

Shrink The Web

by Lemon

Common API Security Pitfalls

by Philippe De Ryck

Drinking A River Of Data With Akka.Net

by Hannes Lowette

DDD East Midlands 2019

Mon, 28 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

All The Mistakes I’ve Made Trying To Implement Microservices

by Zac Braddy

This talk was cut short by a fire alarm at the venue, hence the incomplete sketchnote.

Deep Learning In The World Of Little Ponies

by Galiya Warrier

Whose Design Is It Anyway?

by Helen Joy

Think Like A Hacker

by Matt Brunt

ProgNet 2019

Tue, 17 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Last week I attended ProgNet 2019 held at SkillsMatter in London.

This is my sixth year of attendance (last year’s notes are here), and as usual I sketchnoted the talks that I attended. Videos for all of the talks are available on the ProgNet 2019 website.

We Are The Guardians Of Our Future

by Tess Ferrandez

Beyond HTTP In ASP.Net Core 3.0 With gRPC

by Steve Gordon

Globalization And Localization In ASP.Net Core

by Rachel Appel

Communication In A Microservice World

by Irina Scurtu

Surviving Microservices

by Michele Leroux Bustamante

TDD And The Terminator - A Guide To Better TDD

by Layla Porter

The Pipeline Driven Organisation

by Roy Osherove

Bayesian Decision Making In The Face Of Uncertainty

by Gary Short

DDD South West 9

Mon, 29 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

DDD South West took place this last weekend in Bristol. It was a really good event as usual.

Here are the sketchnotes I did during the day.

Nailing Down Distributed Workflows With Microservices

by Ben Arroyo

Writing High Performance C# And .Net Code

by Steve Gordon

GraphQL And Dapper

by John Stovin

Better The DevTool You Know

by Viv Richards

Kubernetes, Raspberry Pis, And More

by Dan Clarke

DDD North 8

Sun, 03 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just got back from DDD North, held for the first time in Hull.

Here are the sketchnotes I did during the day.

IoT With Nothing But A Laptop

by Pete Gallagher

Selling Unicorns With Shopify And Azure

by Michael Stephenson

Making Noise With F#

by John Stovin

Air Quality, LoRa And Azure Functions

by Rob Miles

Solving Microservices Challenges On The Kubernetes Platform

by Shahid Iqbal

NDC London 2019

Wed, 13 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I attended NDC London. This time I attended as part of the NDC crew. In exchange for a free ticket to the event, you agree to help out for 50% of the time you are there.

The evening before the conference, I joined the other volunteer crew members at the venue to help get set up for registration. This involved unpacking the NDC hoodies (each attendee receives one) from their boxes and getting the registration desk set up with the conference lanyards and badges. The following morning, we had to be there bright and early to welcome the attendees, check them in, and issue their conference badges.

For the rest of the conference, half of each day is spent working, and half is yours to do as you please. I was assigned to one of the conference rooms for each afternoon. This involved ensuring that the speaker turned up to the room before their talk, dealing with any problems that may happen during the talk, and giving the speaker their NDC speaker gift after their talk. A downside of being assigned to a specific room is that you don’t get to choose the talks you see, but having volunteered before back in 2014, I knew I would still see some good talks.

Dynamic Runtime Code With Roslyn

by Jeremy Miller

Pragmatic Performance

by David Wengier

CSS Grid - What Is This Magic?

by Amy Kapernick

A Lap Around Azure DevOps

by Jakob Ehn

ASP.Net Core One Hour Makeover

by Jon Galloway

Leadership Guide For The Reluctant Leader

by David Neal

Keeping It DRYer With Templates

by Layla Porter

ML.Net For Developers Without Any AI Experience

by Lee Mallon

Reverse Engineering A Bluetooth Lightbulb

by Jesse Phelps

Let’s Talk HTTP In .Net Core

by Steve Gordon

Ctrl-Alt-Del: Learning To Love Legacy Code

by Dylan Beattie

The Functional Programming Toolkit

by Scott Wlaschin

These are the other talks I attended but didn’t sketchnote:

Microsoft’s Open Source Journey

by Scott Hanselman

Solving Diabetes With An Open Source Artificial Pancreas

by Scott Hanselman

ProgNet 2018

Wed, 12 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I’m currently attending ProgNet 2018 held at SkillsMatter in London. This is an annual conference that focuses on the latest trends and technologies in the .Net space. The conference runs over three days, and consists of a day of talks followed by two days of instructor-led workshops.

I’ve been several times before and it’s always a good event, with a variety of topics covered over the three days. I especially enjoy the conversations outside of the sessions during the breaks and in the evenings, and the chance to mix with some very knowledgeable people.

During the first day of the conference, I sketchnoted the talks that I attended. Videos for all of the talks are available on the ProgNet 2018 website.

Own The Future

by Udi Dahan

In this talk, Udi talked about the problems that companies tend to have when trying to maintain a piece of software over time. He highlighted the traps that are easy to fall into, including attempting to rewrite the software only to be left maintaining both the original big ball of mud and the rewrite side-by-side. He then suggested some techniques that can help, such as better initial requirements (including “why” something is wanted), giving better estimates, and working in a more iterative way. Ultimately his suggestion is to compose applications using the bounded context idea from Domain Driven Design to give better decoupling, keeping unrelated behaviours separate from each other, and preventing the big ball of mud from happening in the first place.

Let’s Talk HTTP In .Net Core

by Steve Gordon

Many modern applications make use of HTTP for communication for calls between microservices, to 3rd party REST APIs, or even to cloud services. HttpClient is widely used to make these calls, but can cause serious issues if not done properly.

Steve showed some example code for making a remote call using HttpClient, and highlighted the issues that can happen in the underlying TCP layer as a result of its use. He then adapted the code in several steps to show how to use the IHttpClientFactory (introduced in ASP.NET core 2.1) to do it properly, including integrating with DI containers and middleware.

He also introduced Polly, a library for introducing resilience and fault handling into an application. With Polly, it is easy to configure the behaviours that should happen when errors occur, including retries, trimeouts and fallback.

Steve finished off the talk by giving some general tips for working with HTTP calls.

Building Real Time Software With ASP.Net Core SignalR

by Rachel Appel

This talk was a beginner’s introduction to SignalR, a technology that allows real-time asynchronous communication from a server to clients. SignalR has recently been rewritten to remove some of the problems of the previous versions, as well as adding some new features.

Rachel started by explaining how to add SignalR to a web application, including its core concept of hubs that allow the communication between clients and the server. She showed how to configure a hub and how to send messages via it, using both the C# and Javascript clients.

She concluded the talk by highlighting a couple of settings that need to be changed when deploying to Azure to allow SignalR to work properly.

Learning To Code By Making Games

by Willow Rendle

Starting with Scratch, then Hopscotch, and ending up at Unity, Willow (who is only 12 years old) described her journey in making games. Most of the talk revolved around Unity, its ecosystem, and the things that can be achieved with it.

Willow demonstrated some of the games she has made and the tools and techniques used to make them, including the many freely available models, textures, sounds and environments that can be downloaded from the Unit assert store. She then went on to demonstrate what is possible with Unity by showing off some of the freely available game kits (available for both 2D and 3D games) that are useful for learning from. These are full games that include the code and graphics that can be inspected to see how to achieve certain game effects and behaviours.

Security In Cloud Native

by Robin Minto

Robin talked about the importance of security in modern software, especially in cloud based systems.

He started by giving an overview of cloud native applications and described the three major threats to them: vulnerable software, leaked credentials, and time. These threats can be mitigated using a security model developed by Pivotal called the 3Rs: Repair (fixing software, patching infrastructure, updating dependencies), Repave (destroy and recreate environments to destroy anything nasty that may have got inside), Rotate (change credentials, certificate, keys regularly).

Robin went on to talk about the different cloud providers (e.g. Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud), and how they will always be better than you at security - they employ more knowledgeable security people and have more visibility and exposure to the latest threats.

After introducing some of the security issues that are easy to do with cloud applications and how to mitigate them, Robin concluded by showing some tools to help to secure your cloud applications.

Turning Passion Into Experience

by Shawn Wildermuth

Shawn spoke about the importance of having passion and excitement about what you do as a developer. It is not enough however to have just these attributes - you have to be willing to take risks alongside them. He talked about his own experiences of following technologies that even though short-lived, gave him the opportunity to learn new things.

He gave examples from his own career of having imposter syndrome, and weighed it up against the arrogance that some developers use as camouflage to hide their insecurities. He also stressed the importance of saying “I don’t know” and that it is ok to do so, even as an experienced developer.

Shawn talked again about some of his failures, and highlighted how failures are useful because they are a learning opportunity and a moment of growth that you will be better for after experiencing. This has to be balanced against risk however, and you should understand what level of risk you are willing to take.

Career Advice For Programmers

by Tirsha Gee

Trisha talked about how she now has the job she really wants (she is a developer advocate at Jetbrains and works remotely from Spain) after steering her career in that direction over a number of years.

She talked about the recruitment of developers and how the software industry is not very good at measuring programming ability, meaning that figuring out who to hire and reward is hard. As a result, being good at a job is not the same as looking good at a job. She then gave some tips on how to “hack the system” so that you can look like you are good at your job.

She concluded the talk by giving some advice on how to iterate on your career to move it forward.

Making Useless Stuff: A Tale Of Magic, Code And The Unknown

by Amie Dansby

DDD Reading 13

Tue, 26 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

At the weekend, I went down to Reading to attend DDD 13. Hosted at Microsoft’s offices the DDD Reading event is the mother of all of the DDD events, with the first one held back in 2005.

Here are the sketchnotes I took of the talks I attended.

Quantum Computing: Don’t Panic

by Anita Ramanan and Frances Tibble

Web Assembly, Blazor, And The Future Of Web Development

by Joseph Woodward

From Monolithic Monster To Majestic Microservice App

by Callum Whyte

Automate Your Test Infrastructure With Kubernetes

by Joe Stead

DDD South West 8

Mon, 23 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I attended DDD South West at the weekend in Bristol. As usual, it was a great event.

Here are the sketchnotes I took of the talks I attended.

Outside-In TDD

by Ian Russell

Give It A REST - Tips For Designing And Consuming Public APIs

by Liam Westley

Kubernetes For .Net Developers

by Shahid Iqbal

Teaching An Old Dog New Tricks

by Ismail Mayat

Patterns And Practices For Building A Better Web API Architecture

by Joseph Woodward

Cambridge Alexa Devs Meetup

Tue, 17 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I recently attended the inaugural meetup of the Cambridge Alexa Developers Group held at Amazon’s Cambridge office. The group was set up by Bob Harris and Rich Merrett, who both gave talks on building Alexa skills and SSML.

David Low, Amazon’s Head of Solutions Architects, also gave a talk about how to best create a skill by working out its user value:

One particlarly interesting thing covered was a formula for working out whether a skill will be a “killer skill”:

Cusomter value	×	Contexts	×	Frequency	×	Multipliers
Complexity	×	Friction

The higher the output of this formula, the higher the likelihood that a skill will be succesful.

While this talk wasn’t recorded, he has given a similar talk before that was.

NDC London 2018

Tue, 23 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Last week I attended NDC London. It’s not the first time that I’ve been, but it is the first time I’ve done the workshops that run alongside the main conference.

I attended the “Identity & Access Control for modern Applications and APIs using ASP.NET Core 2” workshop hosted by Dominick Baier and Brock Allen. This was a two day workshop consisting of a mixture of presentation, discussion, and hands-on labs. It dived deep into the security aspects of modern ASP.Net applications, specifically the application itself and its APIs. The first day focused on how external authentication (via OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect) could be used to save having to implement authentication yourself in your application. The second day took this further and focused on how to secure an API that you may have in an application so that you can call it server-to-server, from mobile applications, or from JavaScript applications.

The remaining three days of the conference was in the form of talks. Like I’ve done before, I sketchnoted many of the sessions that I attended.

What Is Programming Anyway?

by Felienne Hermans

The Power Of Technical Decisions

by Jake Ginnivan

You Build It, You Run It

by Chris O’Dell

An Introduction To Kotlin

by Dmitry Kandalov

Composite UIs: The Microservices Last Mile

by Jimmy Bogard

Designing For Speech

by Jessice Engström

Jewelbots: How To Get More Girls Coding

by Jennifer Wadella

Who Needs Dashboards?

by Jessica White

Pilot Decision Management

by Clifford Agius

A Developer’s Guide To Machine Learning

by Tess Ferrandez-Norlander

CSP XXP STS PKP CAA ETC…

by Scott Helme

Web Apps Can’t Do That, Can They?

by Steve Sanderson

These are the other talks I attended but didn’t sketchnote:

C# 7.0

by Jon Skeet

C# 7.1 and 7.2: The Releases You Didn’t Know You Had

by Bill Wagner

by Niall Merrigan

The Modern Cloud

by Scott Guthrie

The Hello World Show Live

hosted by Heather Downing and Spencer Schneidenbach

Tips And Tricks With Azure

by Scott Guthrie

Why I’m Not Leaving .Net

by Mark Rendle

DDD North 7

Mon, 16 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I recently attended DDD North 7 in Bradford. I’ve been wanting to take up sketchnoting for a while now, but have never gotten round to doing it, so when Ian Johnson (go check out his sketchnotes - they are great) prompted me to take my sketchbook and pens with me, I reluctantly obliged. I’m so glad I did though as I really enjoyed doing them, and I feel it had the effect of me being able to recall much more of the content of each talk. I tweeted the sketchnotes after each session and got a great response from both the speakers and attendees.

Here are the sketchnotes I did during the day.

Microservices: What I’ve Learned After A Year Of Building A System

by Nathan Gloyn

Spot The Difference: Automating Visual Regression Testing

by Viv Richards

Married To The Mob (Programming)

by Derek Graham

How To Parse A File

by Matt Ellis

Alexa, Open Sneezaroo…

by Zinat Wali

Setting a culture for all threads in an application

Tue, 29 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

If you do any kind of globalisation in your applications, you will probably already be familiar with the Thread.CurrentCulture and Thread.CurrentUICulture properties that can be used to set a culture on the thread so that .Net knows to load the correct resources and to format numbers and dates properly.

A big downside to using approach this is that the culture is only set on the current thread, meaning that any new threads created will be using the default culture for the application (which is tied to the regional settings of the operation system). This wasn’t too much of a problem years ago when multi-threading was not used widely, but in modern application development it is virtually impossible to avoid using multiple threads (e.g. Task Parallel Library), especially when trying to make use of modern multi-core hardware. You would have to manually set the culture when spawning new threads to ensure that the correct culture was being used - a real pain and a common cause of bugs.

.Net 4.5 comes to the rescue with the introduction of two new properties:

CultureInfo.DefaultThreadCurrentCulture
CultureInfo.DefaultThreadCurrentUICulture

A culture can be set using properties that will then be used for all threads in the whole application domain, meaning that you can set the correct culture at application start up and all threads will use that culture. By default, these properties are set to null meaning that the pre-4.5 behaviour will still hold and that the system culture will be used by default.

The MSDN docs for CultureInfo.DefaultThreadCurrentCulture and CultureInfo.DefaultThreadCurrentUICulture provide more details.

Alternatives to .Net Reflector

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

RedGate recently announced that from the next version of Reflector (v7), they will charge $35 for a licence. Since the announcement a few weeks ago, there has been quite a backlash against the decision from the .Net community, mainly because RedGate have put a time-bomb in the currently-free version so that it will expire at the end of May 2011. In response to this announcement, several alternatives to Reflector have surfaced - some free, some commercial. The list below outlines all of the alternatives, some of which have been around for many years.

JetBrains ReSharper (commercial + free)
Within a day of the announcement, JetBrains put out a teaser suggesting that a decompiler was in the works. Two weeks later, they announced that the next version of ReSharper will have an integrated decompiler akin to reflector, along with a free standalone version to be released later in the year.
Telerik JustCode (commercial)
Just as JetBrains put out a teaser, Telerik followed suit and showed a decompilation feature that will be in the next version of their JustCode tool.
ldasm (free)
This tool comes bundled with the Windows SDK Tools (that get installed as part of Visual Studio). It is purely an IL disassembler, and so cannot decompile to C#.
ILSpy (free)
The team behind SharpDevelop have been working hard on ILSpy and have already released a major milestone of v1 of their decompiler. It can decompile to C#.
Cecil Studio (free)
This is a Windows forms UI based on the Mono Cecil library. It has already been around for a few years.
MonoReflector (free)
This is a WPF UI based on the Mono Cecil library.
MonoDevelop Assembly Browser (free)
Released for the first time in version 2.0 of MonoDevelop (currently at v2.4.2).
Salamander .Net Decompiler (commercial)
This is part of a larger tool called .Net Explorer.
Dis# (commercial)
This tool has been around for a while, but is not often mentioned. It is not as polished as Reflector and does not support never versions of .Net, but has some nice features not seen anywhere else. Once such feature is to rename the decompiled variables within the tool to give them a more meaningful name.
Spices .Net Decompiler (commercial)
As well as decompiling to IL, C#, J#, C++ and Delphi.Net, this tool has a feature to build code flow diagrams from the decompiled source to show the execution flow.
Decompiler.NET (commercial)
This is s decompiler combined with an obfuscator, language translator and refactoring tool that integrates with Visual Studio.
Keep Decompiling Free
This website popped up recently with nothing more than a teaser to get more information when it is available.
RedGate Reflector (commercial)
Of course, there is still the current king of them all, albeit in a now charged-for format. Still well worth the $35.

Which of these will turn out to be the best/most successful to take Reflector’s throne is yet to play out, but there seems to be a healthy interest from both the community and commercial aspects in making a replacement.

F# links

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I am currently learning F# and am starting to amass a selection of useful links. I though it would be handy to collate them all in the one place:

MSDN

C# and F# Equivalents

General F#

Temporarily disabling ReSharper

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I have ReSharper installed and think it is a great tool for productivity, but occasionally I find it useful to temporarily disable it to speed up Visual Studio (especially so on my old, slow laptop). This is achieved in two different ways, depending on the version of ReSharper.

In versions prior to version 5, ReSharper appears in the Add-in Manager dialog, accessed via the Tools menu. Using this dialog, you can uncheck the ReSharper add-in which will suspend it (the menu will still be visible, but its functionality will be disabled).

Checking it again will re-enable it. Both of these actions can be performed without restarting Visual Studio.

In version 5, ReSharper no longer appears in the add-ins dialog. At first glance, I though the ability to disable ReSharper was no longer available. As it turns out, it is now part of ReSharper itself and is accessed via the Tools -> Options -> ReSharper -> General dialog. Clicking the suspend button will suspend ReSharper and disable its functionality. Once suspended, clicking the resume button will re-enable it.

This applies to all versions of Visual Studio - the difference is based on the version of ReSharper only.

Extracting MSI files (revisited)

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A few years ago, I posted about how to extract the contents of an MSI file without having to go through the process of installing it. The tool used to do this was called Less MSIerables. This tool does do the job, but the UI is a bit clunky to use, it has a few bugs, and occasionally fails to extract the contents of a file. On top of this, it looks like this tool is not actively developed (it was last updated in 2005), so I recently started to look for an alternative.

It turns out that Microsoft provide this functionality as part of MSIExec that comes as part of the Windows installer. To extract the contents of any MSI file, simply run the following:

msiexec.exe /a installer.msi /qb TARGETDIR=C:\temp

This will extract the complete contents of the MSI file to the specified directory.

MSDN lightweight view

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Following on from my last post on the MDSN Low Bandwidth View, Scott Hanselman recently tweeted about the beta version of MDSN Lightweight View.

In a similar way to adding (loband) before the .aspx part of the url, putting (lightweight) before the .aspx part of the url will use the new lightweight view of MSDN, meaning a much neater and streamlined version.

In addition, Scott has previously posted about the other modes of MSDN:

Mode	Description	Example
-	The normal MSDN view	Example
(loband)	A minimal view, focussed on speed	Example
(lightweight)	A faster lightweight view, including quick links to switch between languages and .Net framework versions	Example
(pda)	Aimed at PDAs and phones. Turns off the tree and allows a 100% width	Example
(robot)	Optimised for search engines	Example
(printer)	A printable version	Example
(ide)	Used when viewing inside the IDE. Adds send and give feedback links	Example

Note that the dev10ide view Scott mentions seems to have been removed, and that the lightweight view is currently in beta, so may be liable to change.

MSDN low bandwidth view

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Several months ago, I read a tip about passing an extra parameter on the url to MSDN documentation to put it into “low bandwidth” mode. I remember doing it at the time, but almost immediately forgot the url switch. That was until last week when I read Eric Nelson’s post on how to do it.

The trick is to put (loband) before the .aspx part of the url. For example, the low bandwidth version of

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.object.aspx

becomes

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.object(loband).aspx

Once you have accessed it, you can persist it by clicking on the “Persist low bandwidth view” link.

Since Eric wrote his post, it seems that a “Switch on low bandwidth view” link has been added into the normal MSDN pages to enable it to be switched on without hacking around with the url.

Jon Galloway has a post that summarises the benefits of the low bandwidth view. For me, the biggest benefit is the speed of loading, since the page doesn’t run lots of JavaScript to sync the contents tree to the currently displayed article.

SQL Server SP3 released

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Service pack 3 for SQL Server 2005 was released last week. In it, they have fixed a curious bug that I reported back in January.

The bug occurs when trying to delete rows from a table that has a NULL value for an image column. This works fine normally, but if there is a foreign key referencing the table (to any of its columns), any rows that have had their image column updated to be NULL fail to be deleted. This SQL demonstrates the problem:

-- create two linked tables
CREATE TABLE [dbo].[TableA]
(
    [Identity] [int] NOT NULL IDENTITY(1, 1) PRIMARY KEY,
    [TableB_Identity] [int] NULL
)

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[TableB]
(
    [Identity] [int] NOT NULL IDENTITY(1, 1) PRIMARY KEY,
    [DATA] image NULL
)

ALTER TABLE [TableA] ADD CONSTRAINT [FK_TableA_TableB] 
    FOREIGN KEY ([TableB_Identity]) REFERENCES [TableB] ([Identity])

-- insert some data
INSERT INTO [TableB] ([DATA]) VALUES (NULL)
INSERT INTO [TableB] ([DATA]) VALUES (NULL)
INSERT INTO [TableB] ([DATA]) VALUES (NULL)

-- this delete works successfully
DELETE FROM [TableB] WHERE [DATA] IS NULL
SELECT COUNT(*) AS Remaining_Count_Should_Be_0 FROM [TableB]

-- insert some data
INSERT INTO [TableB] ([DATA]) VALUES (NULL)
INSERT INTO [TableB] ([DATA]) VALUES (NULL)
INSERT INTO [TableB] ([DATA]) VALUES (NULL)

-- update the data to be have a NULL value
UPDATE [TableB] SET [DATA] = NULL WHERE [DATA] IS NULL

-- this delete doesn't work
DELETE FROM [TableB] WHERE [DATA] IS NULL
SELECT COUNT(*) AS Remaining_Count_Should_Be_0 FROM [TableB]

-- this delete doesn't work
DELETE FROM [TableB] WHERE ISNULL([DATA], NULL) IS NULL
SELECT COUNT(*) AS Remaining_Count_Should_Be_0 FROM [TableB]

-- this delete does work successfully
DELETE FROM [TableB] WHERE EXISTS
    (
        SELECT * FROM [TableB] AS TB
        WHERE [DATA] IS NULL 
        AND TB.[Identity] = [TableB].[Identity]
    )
SELECT COUNT(*) AS Remaining_Count_Should_Be_0 FROM [TableB]

Not all of the delete queries work correctly. The output of the script is four result sets with the count of how many rows are in the table at each point. All of them should be 0 (as is the case on SQL Server 2000), but in SQL Server 2005 without SP3 they are actually 0, 3, 3 and 0.

The simple delete query:

DELETE FROM [TableB] WHERE [DATA] IS NULL

does not delete any rows after the values for the Data column have been updated to NULL, even though a similar select query:

SELECT * FROM [TableB] WHERE [DATA] IS NULL

Notably, if either the foreign key is removed, or the:

UPDATE [TableB] SET [DATA] = NULL WHERE [DATA] IS NULL

query is not performed, the script behaves as expected. Additionally, using text or ntext instead of image does not work as well, but using the new varchar(max), nvarchar(max) or varbinary(max) data types does work.

Apparrently, the distinction between NULL values stored as a result of an insert or an update has precendece in the WRITETEXT command:

If the table does not have in row text, SQL Server saves space by not initializing text columns when explicit or implicit null values are added in text columns with INSERT, and no text pointer can be obtained for such nulls. To initialize text columns to NULL, use the UPDATE statement. If the table has in row text, you do not have to initialize the text column for nulls and you can always get a text pointer.

This points to the “text in row” option having a bearing on this behaviour. Indeed, altering this option after creating the tables:

sp_tableoption N'TableB', 'text in row', 'ON'

results in the script working as expected. Useful as a potential workaround.

The bug is present in all versions of SQL Server 2005, but not in SQL Server 2000 or 2008.

A full list of what’s changed in SP3 can be found here, with a full list of the bugs fixed here.

Useful diagnostics tools

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I recently visited a customer site to diagnose some problems with an application deployed on a server. Because I was effectively “visiting blind” in not knowing what was wrong or even if I would have internet access, I had to pre-empt any potential problems and take whatever tools I would need to diagnose them with me.

The following is a list of the tools I took:

Active Ports
This is an equivalent to running netstat -nabv 5 from the command line, but wraps a nice GUI around it with the ability to look up the host names for connected IP addresses.
BareTail
This is a simple log file viewer that can “tail” a running log and apply highlighting based on custom searches.
CorFlags
This is a tool that comes as part of the Visual Studio SDK and enables a .Net application to be forced to run as 32-bit on 64-bit hardware. Existing applications can be tweaked without re-compilation.
Culture Launcher
This is one of my own tools that can launch an .Net application using a different culture/language. The culture and UI culture can be set independently of each other.
Error Lookup
This is a small tool that comes with Visual Studio (when you install the C++ components). It enables Win32 error codes to be translated into “meaningful” English error messages.
Managed Stack Explorer
This is a tool that can preiodically capture stack traces from running .Net applications. It also shows a variety of information about the managed processes and threads running on a machine.
Red Gate Diagnostics Tool
This is a tool from Red Gate that collects lots of system information from a computer. It is very useful because of the amount of data that it collects all in one place.
Snippet Compiler
This is like a cut-down version of Visual Studio. It has an IDE-like editor (with only basic intellisense) and can compile and run .Net applications. The biggest plus is that it requires no installation.
SpaceMonger
This is a tool that gives a visual representation of disk usage for a whole drive. This version is an older version of the tool, but is the last version that is free.
SysInternals
This is the famous SysInternals Suite of tools, now owned by Microsoft, but still occasionally updated with new features and bug fixes. This contains lots of file, disk, network, process, registry and system utilities.

This toolset (along with a few custom-written SQL scripts) provided me with everything I needed to collect all the information I needed to get to the bottom of the problems.

Setting a proxy server for Windows updates on Windows Vista

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve recently been trying to get automatic Windows updates working on Vista. Every time it tried to fetch the updates, it reported an error code of 80070057. After getting more detailed information from the WindowsUpdate.log in the Windows directory, the problem turned out to be the proxy server in our office. Whilst my user profile has the correct proxy server settings, the Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) that is used to download Windows updates doesn’t. The solution is to set the proxy server for the system.

To see the current proxy settings, run from the command line:

netsh winhttp show proxy

If it says “direct”, there are no proxy settings and Windows update probably will not work.

To set the proxy settings, run from the command line (you will probably need to run this with administrative permissions):

netsh winhttp set proxy proxy-server="yourproxy:port" bypass-list="<local>"

This will set the proxy server on the system to allow the BITS service to connect to the Windows updates servers.

Preventing accidental schema changes to the master database

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

If you have ever run some SQL within SQL Server Management Studio only to realise that you’ve run it against the master database by mistake, you’ll know that it can sometimes be hard to undo the damage.

A simple way to stop these accidental changes is to create a database trigger that will prevent any schema changes to the master database:

USE master
GO

CREATE TRIGGER StopSchemaChanges ON DATABASE FOR 
CREATE_APPLICATION_ROLE, ALTER_APPLICATION_ROLE, DROP_APPLICATION_ROLE,
CREATE_ASSEMBLY, ALTER_ASSEMBLY, DROP_ASSEMBLY,
CREATE_CERTIFICATE, ALTER_CERTIFICATE, DROP_CERTIFICATE,
GRANT_DATABASE, DENY_DATABASE, REVOKE_DATABASE,
CREATE_EVENT_NOTIFICATION, DROP_EVENT_NOTIFICATION,
CREATE_FUNCTION, ALTER_FUNCTION, DROP_FUNCTION,
CREATE_INDEX, ALTER_INDEX, DROP_INDEX,
CREATE_PROCEDURE, ALTER_PROCEDURE, DROP_PROCEDURE,
CREATE_SCHEMA, ALTER_SCHEMA, DROP_SCHEMA,
CREATE_STATISTICS, DROP_STATISTICS, UPDATE_STATISTICS,
CREATE_SYNONYM, DROP_SYNONYM,
CREATE_TABLE, ALTER_TABLE, DROP_TABLE,
CREATE_TRIGGER, ALTER_TRIGGER, DROP_TRIGGER,
CREATE_VIEW, ALTER_VIEW, DROP_VIEW
AS 
BEGIN
    RAISERROR(N'Do you really modify the master database?', 16, 1) WITH NOWAIT
    ROLLBACK TRANSACTION
END
GO

Any time you attempt to change the master database, SQL Server will fail with an error. If you do want to make a schema change, simply disable the trigger and then re-enable it once the schema change is complete.

(NB. this only works with SQL Server 2005 and above)

Box selection in Visual Studio

Wed, 28 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I was editing a large SQL script inside Visual Studio today and needed to insert several spaces into multiple lines to make the script more readable.

Turning something like this:

some text on line a
some text on line b
some text on line c
some text on line d

into:

some text      on line a
some text      on line b
some text      on line c
some text      on line d

I thought of doing it manually by hand, but as there were lots of lines to alter, I thought there must be a better way. I then remembered a feature of a word processor called ProText that I had many years ago on the Atari ST that had a feature called “Box Selection”. This enabled you to select text across multiple lines without having to select the whole line (a bit like drawing a box with the mouse).

A quick search later and I found the instructions on how to do box selections in Visual Studio in an article on Sara Ford’s blog.

Just hold down the Alt key whilst selecting text with the mouse and Visual Studio will switch from its normal “stream selection” mode into “box selection” mode. Once selected, you can indent the text using the tab key as normal and it will insert space to get the desired effect.

Blinking cursor in Firefox

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I have recently re-installed Firefox, and was getting more and more annoyed by what seemed to be a blinking cursor appearing in web pages. After a bit of searching, I found out what it was thanks to Rishi who has had the same problem.

It is a feature called “Caret Browsing” which places a cursor in web pages so that text can be selected using only the keyboard. To turn the feature off, just press the F7 key or change the accessibility.browsewithcaret option from the about:config page.

Building solutions without Visual Studio

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

When working with several source control branches, especially with a large solution with many projects, it is not always practical to open Visual Studio to perform a quick build. Using NAnt is one alternative solution, but this requires creating and maintaining a build script. Using MSBuild from the command line is another option, but this involves getting the command line arguments correct, and working with command line output is not easy to visually filter. The same goes for using Visual Studio from the command line.

Gaston Milano has created a simple tool called Build Console capable of loading both MSBuild and Visual Studio solution files, and building any of the available build targets.

It’s main features are:

The ability to choose which target/project to build.
A build report in a tree structure to show the status of each project built.
The ability to choose the verbosity of the build output.
A coloured build output log to distinguish different types out log output.
A ‘quick history’ to load recently built solutions.

Whilst a little rough around the edges, it comes in very handy for those times where you just need to compile quickly without the overhead of loading Visual Studio.

Browser toolbars for web development

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been doing a lot of HTML and CSS recently, and checking that pages appear and behave the same in different browsers can be a bit of a pain. Fortunatley, there are several toolbars that can be used to make this process easier.

Internet Explorer

Developer Toolbar
This is a toolbar for Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7 that adds a DOM and CSS explorer and editor, as well as tools for viewing pages structures and various type of validation.
Web Development Helper
This is similar to the Developer Toolbar above, but geared more for ASP.Net. It features several browsers for view state, caches, header and response details and call stacks, as well as a DOM explorer.

Firefox

Firebug (also here)
This is an extension that adds a CSS, HTML, Javascript and DOM monitor and editor to the browser, as well as a request monitor and a element inspector.
Web Developer Toolbar (also here)
This is a toolbar that adds lots of utilities and tools, including validation and page information and outlining.
HTML Validator (also here)
This is an extension that adds an HTML validator to the browser that validates pages in real time and displays warnings and errors in the page status bar.
Dust-Me Selectors
This is an extension that enables you to inspect CSS style sheets for selectors and styles that are loaded but not used when browsing pages. Useful for consolidating style sheets after a site redesign. NOTE: this didn’t install properly using the xpi file, but worked following a manual install.
Modify Headers (also here)
This is an extension that enables the viewing and modification of HTTP headers.
User Agent Switcher (also here)
This is an extension that allows the configuration of custom user-agent strings and enables switching them whilst browsing.
IE Tab (also here)
This is an extension that allows the viewing of pages using the Internet Explorer rendering engine, but within the Firefox application.
IE View
This extension is similar to the IE Tab extension above, but will open Internet Explorer as a separate window instead of embedding it inside FireFox.
IE View Lite (also here)
This extension is a rewrite of the IE View extension above, but written to be more compact and lightweight.
Opera View (also here)
This extension is similar to the IE View extension above, but will open pages in Opera instead of Internet Explorer.

Opera

Web Development Toolbar & Menu
This toolbar and menu set add a set of menus and a toolbar. The menus contain quick links directlry to HTML, CSS, DOM, JS and Unicode reference information. The toolbar adds tools for inspecting page contents, validation, page source viewers and form manipulation.
Opera Developer Console
This tool adds a button onto a toolbar that when clicked opens a windows containing a DOM, JS, CSS and HTTP browser for the current page.

Fixing database logins after a restore

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

For several years now I’ve been moving development databases between SQL Servers using backup and restore. When you restore the database on the target server, the logins for the database are invariably broken with the database user having an empty login name, meaning that they cannot log in to the database. My usual fix is to delete the database user and re-add it. Paul Hayman however pointed out a useful stored procedure to fix broken logins:

sp_change_users_login 'Auto_Fix', 'username'

where username is the name of the account to fix.

The Auto_Fix option will attempt to match the broken login with an existing user with the same name.

More information on this can be found in the MSDN documentation. Specific things to note are that it only works with SQL Server and not Windows logins, and that you must be a member of the sysadmin fixed server role for it to work.

Running the OUTPUT clause from C#

Tue, 01 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

SQL Server 2005 introduced a new feature called the output clause. This enables INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE queries to be run, with the original information which has been changed being returned. This is particularly useful if you want to run a query and know what has been changed by it by returning the identites of the modified rows.

The full documentation for the output clause can be found in SQL Server 2005 Books Online.

In trying to use this feature, I could get it to work in a query window, but when trying it using C# and ADO, it was not obvious how to execute the query and return the results because the ExecuteNonQuery() method of SqlCommand only returns the count of the number of rows that have been updated. After a bit of unsuccessful searching, I came across a post by Keyvan Nayyeri with something that gave me an idea:

OUTPUT clause works like a SELECT statement but its usage differs in INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE commands

Switching my code around to run the update query using the ExecuteReader() method of SqlCommand as would be used for a SELECT query proved to be fruitful, enabling the returned result set to be read.

Windows and .Net framework default versions

Tue, 24 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Aaron Stebner has compiled a list of which version of the .Net Framework is included in which version of Windows by default:

Operating System	Framework Version	Included As
Windows XP Home/Professional SP1	.NET Framework 1.0 + SP2	MSI Based Installer
Windows XP Home/Professional SP2	.NET Framework 1.1 + SP1	MSI Based Installer
Windows XP Media Center Edition	.NET Framework 1.0 + SP2	OS Component
Windows XP Tablet PC Edition	.NET Framework 1.0 + SP2	OS Component
Windows Server 2003 (all editions)	.NET Framework 1.1	OS Component
Windows Server 2003 R2	.NET Framework 2.0	MSI Based Installer*
Windows Vista (all editions)	.NET Framework 2.0 & 3.0	OS Component

^{* although it appears as an OS component, it is actually just an MSI based installer.}

The MSI based installers can be used to install or uninstall the .Net Framework from the OS, enabling it to be removed completely if needed.

Very useful if you are targeting specific platforms with your .Net applications.

AssemblyFileVersion compiler warning

Mon, 23 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

If you are using the AssemblyFileVersion attribute to mark your compiled assemblies with specific Win32 file version numbers, you may get a compiler warning with certain revision numbers. The compiler warning looks like this:

warning CS1607: Assembly generation -- The version '2.0.0.070105' specified for the 'file version' is not in the normal 'major.minor.build.revision' format.

This warning is documented as occurring when the version string is not in the major.minor.build.revision format, but does not explain why it happens for the example above.

Frans Bouma updated his existing post with the reason why. The revision part of the version number must not exceed 65535 (ie. a 16-bit number). If it does, the compiler generates the warning. The MSBuild Team posted about the same thing, but also provided the fact that it is the underlying operating system that imposes this limit.

The difference between format and quick format

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Having done several installations of Windows over the years and always chosen the “quick format” option over the normal format option (mainly due to the time it takes to do a full format compared to a quick format), I finally looked into what the differences between the two are. Microsoft’s site has a knowledge base article about this very thing.

A full format will wipe the disk, format it and run a check disk to find any bad sectors. A quick format will wipe the disk and format it, but will skip the check disk stage. As it turns out, the check disk stage is the thing that causes a full format to take a lot longer than a quick format.

If formatting a new hard disk, it is probably wise therefore to do a full format to find any sectors that may have been damaged whilst the disk was in transit. If formatting an old disk, it is already in a known state and so a quick format should suffice.

C# data types and other language features

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a nice little section on Microsoft’s MSDN site entitled The C# Programming Language for Java Developers that explains the basics of the C# language features.

Although not incredibly detailed, it’s quite a useful reference for simple language information, especially about the system types (such as the range of a double or what types can be implicitly cast to a short).

Accessing network file shares from a command prompt

Thu, 08 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

If you’ve ever tried to access a network file share in a command prompt by simply using the cd command, you’ll know that it just complains that “CMD does not support UNC paths as current directories”. Well, there is a way to do it (two in fact):

net use z: \\machine\share

pushd \\machine\share

Both of these approaches map the network share to a local drive letter that you can change to using the cd command.

The first one can be combined with the /user switch to provide additional user details:

net use z: \\machine\share /user:domain\username

The bonus of using the pushd command over the net use command is that it will automatically change the current directory to the mapped drive (which will be the first unused drive letter available in reverse alphabetical order). Also, when finished with the network share, you can use the popd command to remove the mapped drive.

Google page rank and redirection

Tue, 06 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

After reading Jeff Atwood’s recent post about URL rewriting to prevent duplicate URLs, I started to look at my own site’s redirections, specifically with regards to Google’s page rank. The first thing I noticed was that I had two different page ranks for this site.

http://adrianbanks.co.uk had a page rank of 3, whilst http://www.adrianbanks.co.uk had a page rank of zero, even though I’ve never really used the http://adrianbanks.co.uk version of the url.

Jeff’s ISAPI rewrite rules were helpful, but were not going to work on an Apache server. The Apache docs for the URL rewriting engine were very detailed, but a little too verbose to glean which exact rules I needed. Luckily, the Search Engine Promotion Help site has an example of exactly what I was after.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.adrianbanks\.co\.uk [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^report\.adrianbanks\.co\.uk [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.adrianbanks.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]

The only alteration I had to make was to add in an extra line to stop any subdomains of my site being redirected to the main site.

Now for a quick explanation of how the rules work:

The RewriteRule will only run if all of the preceding rewrite conditions (RewriteCond) are true.
Line 1 turns on the rewrite engine in Apache.
Line 2 will be true if the host url is not www.adrianbanks.co.uk.
Line 3 will be true if the host url is not report.adrianbanks.co.uk (this is my alteration for my subdomain).
Line 4 will be true if the host url is not empty.

Only if all of these conditions are met will the rule run.

Having made this change, the page rank for http://www.adrianbanks.co.uk has now jumped to up 3.

Ambiguous match found

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Whilst porting an ASP.Net application to the .Net 2.0 framework, I came across a spurious error when viewing a few specific pages. The error was occurring during the runtime compilation of these specific aspx pages.

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: Ambiguous match found.

To make this error more confusing, the error was reported on line 1 of the aspx page which contained nothing more than the page directive tag.

After a bit of searching, I found the cause of the problem. The cause was that there were two member variables declared with names that differed only by case (one was an ASP.Net PlaceHolder control, the other an int). Simply renaming one of the variables solved the compilation error.

Eran Sandler has also encountered this problem, but delves a lot deeper into what is going on.

Testing applications in different cultures

Thu, 08 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Having worked on an application that required localising so that it can be translated into different languages, I know how hard it can be to test the different possibilities while still developing the code. This is especially so if the language is automatically detected from the current culture of the operating system.

Shawn Farkas came up with a simple solution for quickly testing code under different cultures that involves creating a bootstrap application to first set the required culture on the current thread and then launch the application to be tested.

One downside is that only the culture of the main thread is set, but for simple GUI testing this should be adequate in most cases.

Selecting 'No to all' in a confirm file replace dialog box

Thu, 08 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

When copying files in Windows, you are sometimes prompted about replacing an existing file.

The available options are Yes, Yes To All, No and Cancel. But what if you are copying a large number of files and want to choose the non-existent ‘No To All’ option? Well simply hold in the shift key while clicking the No option and it will apply that choice to all subsequent dialogs within the current operation.

Running applications on different versions of the .Net framework

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Peter Laudati posted about migrating applications from .Net 1.1 to .Net 2.0. In doing so, he listed the different behaviours of .Net applications when running on computers with different versions of the .Net Framework installed:

Application type	Computer with 1.1	Computer with 2.0	Computer with 1.1 and 2.0
1.1 stand-alone application (Web or Microsoft Windows client)	Loads with 1.1	Loads with 2.0	Loads with 1.1
2.0 stand-alone application (Web or Microsoft Windows client)	Fails	Loads with 2.0	Loads with 2.0
1.1 add-in to a native application (such as Office or Internet Explorer)	Loads with 1.1	Loads with 2.0	Loads with 2.0 unless the process is configured to run against 1.1
2.0 add-in to a native application (such as Office or Internet Explorer)	Fails	Loads with 2.0	Loads with 2.0

Managed stack explorer

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

A neat little project on CodePlex called Managed Stack Explorer enables you to monitor running .Net applications.

Using this tool, you can view all currently running managed applications, monitor all of their threads, and even collect stack traces at regular intervals. Very useful for getting information about applications whilst running outside of a debugger.

Suppressing FxCop message

Wed, 23 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Using the latest version (1.35) of FxCop, it is possible to exclude generated warning messages in the source code instead of having to exclude them in the FxCop project file. This is accomplished using the System.Diagnostics.CodeAnalysis.SuppressMessageAttribute class.

To exclude a message, simply mark up the method with the SuppressMessage attribute, declaring both the rule category and the specific rule to exclude:

[SuppressMessage("Microsoft.Design", "CA1062:ValidateArgumentsOfPublicMethods")]
public string ConvertToString(object obj)
{
    return obj.ToString();
}

The above example will exclude the “Validate Arguments Of Public Methods” rule from the Design category for the ConvertToString method (although in this contrived example it is probably a bad idea to do so as passing in a null will clearly cause problems).

One extra “tweak” that can be utilised in this scenario is the Justification property. Altering the above code to:

[SuppressMessage("Microsoft.Design", "CA1062:ValidateArgumentsOfPublicMethods", Justification="I do have a valid reason")]
public string ConvertToString(object obj)
{
    return obj.ToString();
}

will allow the person excluding a message to provide a reason for doing so in the code, alongside the exclusion. FxCop (v1.35) currently doesn’t display this in its output, but will do in the next release (source). It does however output the justification to a generated report if the options are set to output exclusions to the report.

Excluding FxCop messages in the source code has advantages over excluding them in the FxCop project as it demonstrates that the message has been specifically excluded for that particular case, but also will withstand class and namespace changes. It also makes switching from the standalone FxCop to Visual Studio’s code analysis an easier process.

In order to allow the SuppressMessage attribute to work, a CODE_ANALYSIS conditional compilation symbol must be defined for the project. Without this, FxCop will ignore the suppressed attribute and will still generate a warning.

More details can be found on the FxCop blog.

SerializationException and System.Data.SqlClient.SqlError

Wed, 19 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

When remoting, it’s possible to get a strange exception if a SQLException occurs on the server.

The stack trace of the error is:

Exception: System.Runtime.Serialization.SerializationException
Message: Member name ‘System.Data.SqlClient.SqlError server’ not found.

Stack trace:
at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.ReadObjectInfo.GetMemberTypes (String[] inMemberNames)
at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.ObjectMap..ctor(String objectName, String[] memberNames, BinaryTypeEnum[] binaryTypeEnumA, Object[] typeInformationA, Int32[] memberAssemIds, ObjectReader objectReader, Int32 objectId, BinaryAssemblyInfo assemblyInfo, SizedArray assemIdToAssemblyTable)
at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.ObjectMap.Create(String name, String[] memberNames, BinaryTypeEnum[] binaryTypeEnumA, Object[] typeInformationA, Int32[] memberAssemIds, ObjectReader objectReader, Int32 objectId, BinaryAssemblyInfo assemblyInfo, SizedArray assemIdToAssemblyTable)
at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.__BinaryParser.ReadObjectWithMapTyped(BinaryObjectWithMapTyped record)
at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.__BinaryParser.ReadObjectWithMapTyped(BinaryHeaderEnum binaryHeaderEnum)
at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.__BinaryParser.Run()
at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.ObjectReader.Deserialize(HeaderHandler handler, __BinaryParser serParser, Boolean fCheck, IMethodCallMessage methodCallMessage)
at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.BinaryFormatter.Deserialize (Stream serializationStream, HeaderHandler handler, Boolean fCheck, IMethodCallMessage methodCallMessage)
at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.CoreChannel.DeserializeBinaryResponseMessage(Stream inputStream, IMethodCallMessage reqMsg, Boolean bStrictBinding)
at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.BinaryClientFormatterSink.SyncProcessMessage(IMessage msg)

What is actually happenning here is that the System.Data.dll on the client is a slightly different version to that on the server. When the SQLException is deserialised at the client end, there is a missing property on the client that cannot be deserialised.

This error usually occurs when remoting to a Windows 2003 Server box from a non-Windows 2003 client box. The client has a System.Data.dll of version 1.1.4322.2032. The server has a System.Data.dll of version 1.1.4322.2300. The difference is that the server property of the SqlError class is never set in v1.1.4322.2032, causing the serialisation error. More detailed info can be found on the DevNewsGroups site.

Microsoft has two knowledge base articles, KB884871 and KB887549, that pertain to this issue. The suggested solution is a .NET Framework 1.1 post-SP1 hotfix, but this is only available by contacting Microsoft directly.

The hotfix solves the problem, but then stops old SqlError types from being deserialised, resulting in the exception:

Exception: System.Runtime.Serialization.SerializationException
Message: Wrong number of Members. Object System.Data.SqlClient.SqlError has 8 members, number of members deserialized is 7.

Stack trace:
at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Soap.ReadObjectInfo.PopulateObjectMembers()
at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Soap.ObjectReader.ParseObjectEnd(ParseRecord pr)
at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Soap.ObjectReader.Parse(ParseRecord pr)
at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Soap.SoapHandler.EndElement(String prefix, String name, String urn)
at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Soap.SoapParser.ParseXml()
at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Soap.SoapParser.Run()
at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Soap.ObjectReader.Deserialize(HeaderHandler handler, ISerParser serParser)
at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Soap.SoapFormatter.Deserialize(Stream serializationStream, HeaderHandler handler)
at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Soap.SoapFormatter.Deserialize(Stream serializationStream)

This means that the hotfix is not backwards-compatible. The only way to get everything happy is to upgrade all Windows 2003 boxes to SP1 and all clients (Windows 2000 and Windows XP) to .Net 1.1 SP1 plus the hotfix.

Guidance explorer

Wed, 19 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Microsoft recently released Guidance Explorer, a tool that contains a browsable collection of best-practice patterns for developing .Net and ASP.Net applications.

Both the tool and its guidance library have regular updates, containing best-practices for performance and security related issues.

The tool also has the ability to add custom sets of guidance to allow corporate/team standards to be included.

The perils of sp_rename

Mon, 10 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Andras Belokosztolszki from Red Gate posted an interesting article about the sp_rename stored procedure in SQL Server and the pitfalls that can occur after its use.

When a stored procedure is created, an object is created in the sysobjects table (or the sys.objects view in SQL Server 2005), and the textual definition is stored in the syscomments table (or the sys.sql_modules view in SQL Server 2005).

When using sp_rename to rename a stored procudure, the definition is left intact and only the name is changed in the sysobjects table (or sys.objects view). This means that the definition of the stored procedure stored in database now has the wrong name.

The best way of renaming a stored procedure is to completely delete it and then recreate it with the new name.

The following SQL displays the definitions of all stored procedures in a database alongside their names:

SQL Server 2000

SQL Server 2000
SELECT V2.[name], V1.[text]
    FROM syscomments AS V1, sysobjects AS V2
    WHERE V1.[id] = V2.[id]
    AND (V2.[xtype] = 'P' OR V2.[xtype] = 'F')

SQL Server 2005

SQL Server 2005
SELECT V2.[name], V1.[definition]
    FROM sys.sql_modules AS V1, sys.objects AS V2
    WHERE V1.[object_id] = V2.[object_id]

It is worth noting that enterprise manager uses the sp_rename stored procedure when using the right-click rename option (although SQL Server 2005 management studio does try to correct this problem if you view the definition of a renamed stored procedure by replacing the original stored name with the new one).

.Net 2.0 installation

Mon, 10 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Aaron Stebner posted a recent article about the available installation modes for the .Net Framework 2.0.

There are three supported modes:

Standard Mode

All UI screens are displayed, including warnings about missing prerequisites, existing beta versions, errors and reboots.

The setup includes a multi-lingual UI that chooses the correct language from the user’s operating system UI language settings, so a user should always see the install in their preferred language.

Unattended Mode

All UI screens are suppressed, except for a progress dialog during installation.

To install in unattended mode, use the following command line:

dotnetfx.exe /q:a /c:"install.exe /qb"

Changing /qb to /qb! will hide the cancel button on the progress dialog, stopping the user from aborting the install.

Silent Mode

All UI screens are suppressed. This is useful for a custom installer to install the .Net Framework.

To install in silent mode, use the following command line:

dotnetfx.exe /q:a /c:"install.exe /q"

If using silent mode, any errors, previous beta versions or reboots must be handled by the hosting installer since the .Net Framework installer cannot display any dialogs to prompt the user. Aaron also provides details of possible return codes from the installer, how to detect previous beta versions of the framework and how to manage reboots.

ASP.Net web development helper For IE

Mon, 10 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Nikhil Kothari has made a nice little Web Development Helper for ASP.Net. It works as a plugin for Internet Explorer and is similar to the Internet Explorer Development Toolbar, but with more of an ASP.Net twist.

Some of its most useful features are:

-Rich error information for script errors, including call stack, script url and line number.

a DOM inspector with filtering to enable easy viewing of particular items.
a view state browser.
trace information can be shown in a separate dialog instead of in the page itself.
a full HTTP/HTTPS logger showing all traffic between the browser and the server.

The Web Development Helper requires .Net 2.0 to run and can only work on the same machine as the server, but this should not be a problem during development.

After installation, I had the same problem that lots of other people seem to have in that clicking the newly installed toolbar button did nothing. The suggested fix of installing the Internet Explorer Development Toolbar solved the problem though. Nikhil also suggested that a reboot (or killing explorer.exe) may also work because information about plugins is cached on startup.

Windows forms and the DesignMode property

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

In .Net Windows Forms, any form or control that derives from a Component has a DesignMode property that tells you whether the control is being rendered in design mode in Visual Studio. This is useful if your control has different behaviour at runtime than at design time (for example, if you show a connection dialog when a form opens but you don’t want it to happen in design mode inside Visual Studio).

The DesignMode property has its quirks though. Using Lutz Roeder’s Reflector reveals the implementation of the DesignMode property:

protected bool DesignMode
{
    get
    {
        if (this.site != null)
        {
            return this.site.DesignMode;
        }
        return false;
    }
}

This shows that design time support is not hooked up until the control is sited. Siting happens after the control is created, but before any properties are set, so if you check the DesignMode property in the constructor of a control, it will always be false.

There is also a bug with the DesignMode property whereby a custom control inside a custom control will always report its DesignMode property as false. Microsoft has more details of this in knowledge base article KB839202 and in their Visual Studio feedback website.

A workaround to both of the above problems it to use the following:

Application.ExecutablePath.ToLower().IndexOf("devenv.exe") > -1

A bit crude, but it works.

Setting a NULL field in SQL Server Management Studio

Thu, 29 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

SQL Server Management Studio provides a simple results view to show the data contained in a table. With this view, it’s possible to edit the data in the table but there is no obvious method of setting a nullable field to null - emptying the cell simply sets the value to empty, which may or may not work depending on the type of the column.

To set a null value, you have to use the Ctrl-0 (Control + Zero) shortcut. Why is there no option in the GUI to do this?

Microsoft icons

Thu, 29 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Microsoft’s Brad Abrams and Somasegar both posted about a set of standard Microsoft icons that ship with Visual Studio 2005. They can be found in a zip file in the Visual Studio 2005 installation directory (usually C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\VS2005ImageLibrary\VS2005ImageLibrary.zip). There are over 600 icons in total with a mixture of Windows, Office and Visual Studio icons, and are licenced for reuse in your own applications.

Extracting MSI files

Thu, 29 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The latest trend for even the simplest of tools is to provide the executables as an MSI file, requiring an installation to run the application. Lots of applications simply do not require an installation and will work if the .exe contained in the MSI file is run.

Scott Willeke has made a nice little tool called Less MSIerables (aka lessmsi) that can extract the contents of an MSI file directly to disk with no installation. Extracting the contents and running the .exe has worked successfully on every simple application I’ve tried so far.

SQL Server system table map

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

After trying to modify unique index names on tables in a database using the INFORMATION_SCHEMA views and getting nowhere fast, I delved into the system tables to see if they would shed any light on how to do it. This was even more confusing as it’s not obvious how these tables fit together. If only there was a map of the relationships between the system tables. Well, there is - Microsoft helpfully supply one on their SQL Server website. Very useful.

Sharing Strong Name Keys Across Multiple Projects In VS2005

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve recently been doing some work in Visual Studio 2005 which consisted of several projects in a single solution that I’d converted from Visual Studio 2003 format. Since the AssemblyKeyFile attribute has been deprecated, I began to add the shared strong name key to each project using the project properties view. The problem with this is that it copies the strong name key file to each project directory, making a shared key a bit pointless. This behaviour doesn’t happen (as explained in more detail by Shawnfa) if the strong name key file is added to the project as a linked item before setting it in the project properties view. This leaves a single strong name key file on disk, but still includes it in each project as with Visual Studio 2003’s AssemblyKeyFile attribute.

Visual Studio 2005 and proxy authentication

Tue, 20 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Using Visual Studio 2005 today, I received a “407 Proxy Authentication Required” message when trying to search the online help integrated into the IDE. KB910804 from Microsoft held the answer.

In order to allow VS2005 through an authenticating proxy, you have to edit the Visual Studio configuration file located at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Help 8\dexplore.exe.config. To add support for the proxy, make sure the proxy element is present:

<configuration>
    ...
    <system.net>
        ...
        <defaultProxy enabled="true" useDefaultCredentials="true">
            <proxy bypassOnLocal="True"
                   proxyAddress="http://yourproxy:port"/>
        </defaultProxy>
    </system.net>
</configuration>

where the correct proxy server is configured in the proxyaddress element.

If you use the integrated help viewer, you must also add this xml to the configuration file located at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe.config.

System.Diagnostics.Process and speed

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I was working on some code that seemed to take an age to get going. Simple I thought: run it throught the Red Gate ANTS Profiler, look at the offending code and sort the problem. I wish it was as straightforward. Profiling or debugging the code seemed to make it run quickly, so I had to resort to the good old technique of logging debug output line by line.

After finding the lethargic code, the line that stalled progress for almost a minute didn’t look that concerning:

Process.GetCurrentProcess().ProcessName

A bit of Googling turned up trumps. A post by Brian Grunkemeyer from the BCL team gave the answer:

The way the Process class currently works, the first time you try to do anything that requires knowing the state of the current process, we take a snapshot of all the processes in the system. So yes, this operation is slow the first time you call it. We could potentially limit this snapshot to just the current process by requesting MORE information about the current process from Windows (CreateToolhelp32Snapshot is a peculiar method), but that leads into peculiar situations where the snapshot information for the current process then gets out of sync if you call another method on the Process class to enumerate all the other processes.

This initial snapshot must have been the cause of the delay. A quick code-edit later to avoid the use of the Process class (I was actually interested in the name of the executing file so I used Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly()) and the almost 60 second pause was gone.

So why was it running quicker when debugging/profiling? I presume that the debugger/profiler would have been using the System.Diagnostics namespace, and more specifically the Process class, as part of its internals, thus the costly first call snapshot had already happened.

Fusion log viewer

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Whilst trying to work out why some code was running very slowly (see System.Diagnostics.Process and speed), I tried to see whether the slowness was caused by loading code contained in a separate dll. To get this information, I needed to look at the fusion logs. Configuring these logs is not fool-proof, so having spent a few hours getting it working, I thought I’d document the process.

Suzanne Cook’s blog was quite useful, as was the Assembly Binding Log Viewer article on MSDN, but neither of them contained exactly what was needed.

To set up the fusion logs ready for viewing, some entries need to be added to the registry in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Fusion key. The combination needed depends on what you’re trying to inspect. The keys are:

LogFailures = 1 (DWORD Value)
This turns on failure logging so that failed attempts to locate all assemblies are logged.
LogResourceBinds = 1 (DWORD Value)
This turns on failure logging so that failed attempts to locate satellite assemblies are logged. This is not logged by default.
ForceLog = 1 (DWORD Value)
This turns on logging for all assembly binds - both failures and successes. By default, only failures are logged. This is useful if you want to verify that an assembly is loading from a specific directory instead of from the global assembly cache.
LogPath = “C:\fusionlogs" (String Value)
If you want to view the fusion logs easily, set the LogPath to a directory to output them to. By default the log files go into the Temporary Internet Files folder of the current user’s profile. For an ASP.Net or a .Net Windows service application, the only way to view the fusion log is to use this option. This is because they run as users other than the current user. The directory specified must already exist and have appropriate file permissions to be written to. For ASP.Net applications, the ASPNET user must have write permission to the directory. If the permissions are wrong, there will be no log output.

Once you have configured the relevant logging options, running the .Net application will generation the fusion logs. Once generated, the logs can be viewed using the fuslogvw.exe tool that comes as part of the framework SDK (mine was inside the SDK folder inside Visual Studio’s installation folder). I found that either the 1.1 or 2.0 version will work, but the 2.0 version is a little better as it has a few more options in the GUI:

To view a specific log, choose it from the main section and click the view log button. The log will open in an internet browser showing the assembly binding details.

DNS error when adding a computer to a domain

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

After having several problems with my laptop accessing files on my server (the domain controller for my domain), I had a look in the event log and found this error:

The computer [computername] tried to connect to the server \\[servername] using the trust relationship established by the [domainname] domain. However, the computer lost the correct security identifier (SID) when the domain was reconfigured. Reestablish the trust relationship.

I figured that this may be the cause of the problems and so set about reestablishing the trust relationship between the laptop and the server. Sounded like a simple task, but the only (easy) way I could find to do this was to remove the laptop from the domain and then add it again. After removing it successfully, I kept getting an error when trying to re-add it:

The domain name [domainname] might be a NetBIOS domain name. If this is the case, verify that the domain name is properly registered with WINS.
If you are certain that the name is not a NetBIOS domain name, then the following information can help you troubleshoot your DNS configuration.
An error occurred when DNS was queried for the service location (SRV) resource record used to locate a domain controller for domain [domainname].
The error was: "No DNS servers configured for local system." (error code 0×0000267C DNS_ERROR_NO_DNS_SERVERS)
The query was for the SRV record for _ldap._tcp.dc._msdcs.[domain]”

After puzzling for ages as to why it wasn’t happy, I checked my IP settings and found the problem. Somehow, the IP settings had changed to a specified IP address instead of using DHCP. Changing them back solved the problem straight away.

Cats game

Tue, 13 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t really play games on my PC, but this Cats game from Ferry Halim’s site has me addicted. I think it must be because of the pure simplicity of the game, but I suspect it also has something to do with the hypnotic accompanying music. De doo de doo duh, de doo duh. Doo duh, doo de doo duh…

Security applications break .Net 2.0 remoting

Mon, 12 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Jamie Cansdale from TestDriven.Net posted about certain security software breaking remoting with .Net 2.0. He also includes a downloadable example to demonstrate the problem.

The current list of culprits is:

The common thread amongst these is that they all have some network monitoring functionality.

The error occurs whenever a .Net TCP remoting channel is closed. Perculiarly, the error happens not on the end that closes the channel, but in the application on the other end of the channel.

The stack trace of the error is:

Exception: System.AccessViolationException
Message: Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.

Server stack trace:  
at System.Net.UnsafeNclNativeMethods.OSSOCK.WSAGetOverlappedResult(SafeCloseSocket socketHandle, IntPtr overlapped, UInt32& bytesTransferred, Boolean wait, IntPtr ignored)  
at System.Net.Sockets.BaseOverlappedAsyncResult.CompletionPortCallback(UInt32 errorCode, UInt32 numBytes, NativeOverlapped* nativeOverlapped)  
at System.Threading._IOCompletionCallback.PerformIOCompletionCallback(UInt32 errorCode, UInt32 numBytes, NativeOverlapped* pOVERLAP)

I tried the sample code as described with NOD32, remoting to both localhost and to a separate PC but could not get the behaviour.

Update: Jon Cole from Microsoft has posted on the MSDN forums verifying that this is indeed a bug, and that it should be fixed in the next release.

ASP.Net 2.0 web application project error

Fri, 09 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Chris Sells posted a useful tip (courtesy of Scott Guthrie) about duplicate types when compiling using the web application project model in Visual Studio 2005.

The error displays as:

Compilation Error

Description: An error occurred during the compilation of a resource required to service this request.
 
Please review the following specific error details and modify your source code appropriately.
 
Compiler Error Message: CS0433: The type 'ASP.clientredirector_ascx' exists in both 'C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\sb2\4d76034e\bec2c8d0\App_Web_clientredirector.ascx.cdcab7d2.zmdrab5k.dll' and 'C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\sb2\4d76034e\bec2c8d0\App_Web_axhgbqrn.dll'

The solution is simply (although not obviously) to add the batch="false" attribute to the compilation element in the web.config file:

<configuration ...>
    <system.web>
        <compilation batch="false"/>

This generates a lot fewer assemblies and avoids the problem.

Update: According to Mike Harder (a Software Design Engineer on the ASP.NET team) in his recent post on the ASP.Net forums, this is a known bug in the ASP.Net compiler involving directory level circular references. An alternative fix to the batch="false" option is to reorganise the files in the web application to avoid a circular reference.