Scott's Blog

Visual Studio 2010 fails to open user control with "Could not load file or assembly"

nospam@example.com (Scott Waye) — Mon, 17 May 2010 10:44:38 +0100

First time, the control opens fine, you then do something and I'm not sure what the trigger is but it may be modifying a project in the solution externally (I do this with LLBLGenPro), and you find that the designer for the control fails with this message followed by the dll in question. In my case this was one of the CAB dlls, Microsoft.Practives.CompositeUI. Running procmon showed that it was looking for it in a few unusual places, but not the ones where it existed. One of these was \Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\DataDesign\Microsoft.Practices.CompositeUI.dll, so I copied it there. Not a big problem for me as this dll rarely changed.

visual studio 2010 cannot access a disposed object object name designerframe

nospam@example.com (Scott Waye) — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 21:43:42 +0100

Visual studio 2010 RTM, seems to have an annoying bug causing you to kill it from Task Manager and reload the solution every now and then, for me typically 2/3 times a day. The message above appears and clicking ok just causes it to reappear repeatedly. There is a Connect entry here, but my experience of Connect is not good to say the least. Someone with a PSS account could raise a ticket which would be nice.

Installing a CUPS printer in Windows 7

nospam@example.com (Scott Waye) — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 21:41:52 +0100

I used to use the Apple colour Postscript driver for my CUPS connected printer, but in Windows 7 that driver is missing. Instead I have used Xerox Phaser 6120 PS which seems to work fine so far.....

BPOSS v2

nospam@example.com (Scott Waye) — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 09:01:29 +0100

Based on my experience leading the BPOSS development team at BP, I am now working on a new and improved version for Hub Software Engineering

Monthly statistics

nospam@example.com (Scott Waye) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 10:18:51 +0000

If you have a table with a datetime column and you want to group the rows by month, then this can help:

select count(*), datediff(m, datetime_col, getutcdate())
from table
group by datediff(m, datetime_col, getutcdate())
order by 2

windbg - Examining exceptions

nospam@example.com (Scott Waye) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 12:28:23 +0000

This is a nice command to see all the exceptions in the heap (as long as your exceptions have the word Exception in the class name):

.foreach ( obj { !dumpheap -type Exception -short } ) {!DumpObj ${obj} }

Pinched from another blog, and tweaked, but I've blogged it here for my own reference.

Microsoft Connect

nospam@example.com (Scott Waye) — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 10:51:27 +0000

Seems to be more of a publicity stunt this, or at best a place for users to discuss problems with each other. Not sure anyone with any real power or knowledge from Microsoft takes any notice of it. Take this synonym bug in SQL Server. It's marked as fixed, but there is only a workaround posted. In my mind a workaround is not a fix, it's a workaround. I assume it's marked as fixed to make someone's performance stats look better. Just corporate bullshit.

Santa Barbara Bank and Trust - Non Resident Service

nospam@example.com (Scott Waye) — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 12:09:49 +0000

Rubbish. I had an account as a non-resident, they then said I needed to reside near the branch to have a non-resident account and gave me 30 days notice. Then, within 10 days, they just froze the account rendering me unable to access the account. Absolutely rubbish and this will cost me hundreds of dollars/pounds as I will now have to travel to the states to open another account at a proper bank.

Saving Outlook msg files using Redemption

nospam@example.com (Scott Waye) — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 12:49:03 +0000

Had a strange one the other day. Trying to save msg files using the Redemption library when using the html body property. If the html contatined a word starting with + and ending in -, e.g. +/- , then the text would be enconded in some format I dont recognise. Attempting to open the saved msg then gave the garbled text. I changed the text body using a regular expression to convert the + character to the correspoing unicode encode &# value (sorry dont have it to hand).

Problem compiling xine-ui on 64bit OpenSuse 11.0

nospam@example.com (Scott Waye) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:57:12 +0000

When running make I get:

error: '__xineui_global_lirc_enable' undeclared (first use in this function)

xine-ui's macro for checking for the existence of lirc does not look in the 64 bit library directories (/usr/lib64) and it only looks for the static library versions. On my installation the static (.a) library was only in /usr/lib64 so the configure script did not find it, and turned off lirc support. The fix for me was to just create a link in the /usr/lib directory:

ln -s /usr/lib64/liblirc_client.a .

Error 80040605 calling new RDOSessionClass

nospam@example.com (Scott Waye) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 22:12:54 +0000

This error has caught me more than once when setting up Redemption for the first time on a new server/workstation where Outlook has never been installed. Redemption needs (full?) access to the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows Messaging Subsystem which will probably not even exist if Outlook has never been run on the machine. You can create the key and the Profiles subkey manually and give the user creating the RDOSessionClass full access rights. That should get you past this error, but it may then fail trying to delete the temporary profile if you are using impersonation. I don't think Redemption supports impersonation, at least I could not get it to work.

Verruca treatment with a banana skin

nospam@example.com (Scott Waye) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:43:31 +0100

A few weeks ago I developed a verruca on the bottom of my foot. I read on the internet that a fresh banana skin was a cure, so I had to give that a go. I got a skin and sellotaped it across the width of the sole and put a complete loop of tape to hold it in place. That night I removed the skin and the thing had gone all soft. I scraped the soft stuff away and left it open overnight. The next morning I put another skin on, and it was a bit painful to work. Felt like the juice or whatever was coming off the skin was burning the sore that I had made by removing the dead skin. Took that skin of that night, and let it heal. Worked very well, not sure if the second skin was even necessary.

Z Wave reception

nospam@example.com (Scott Waye) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 07:39:41 +0100

I just have the 2 devices, the controller and the adapter. The controller is inside the house and the adapter is around 15 metres away through an outside wall (dual cavity concrete brick and render), and the garage wall, which is just wood. I've found reception is borderline. If the controller is low down I do not get reception, that may be understandable as when its low down I think the straight line has to go through the ground (the garage is lower than the house). Whats more interesting is that the orientation of the AeonLabs controller is a big factor. With the controller in the vertical position, reception (measured by the amount of times I have to try to send the message) is much worse than when in the horiztonal position, and it seems that reception is best when on its side in the horizontal position.

ZWave power usage

nospam@example.com (Scott Waye) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 14:48:41 +0100

Current use for the UK version of Advanced Control Technologies HomePro(tm) Appliance Module ZRP210:

In off state: 3.4mA
In on state 6.6mA

Z Wave

nospam@example.com (Scott Waye) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:28:15 +0100

My bits arrived and I've chopped the DCE stuff from ZWApi.cpp (thanks Hari) from LinuxMCE. Not changed much really and converted it into a standalone daemon the same as my IBUS stuff. I will create an IPC MQ to talk to the daemon which is not ideal but is easy to do. Right now the daemon can successfully query for the status of the switch. I'll post the code when its actually does something more useful.