memory.Refresh()

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.