Category: Tech

  • NHibernate 1.0

    NHibernate 1.0 has been released. More to come…. -Ben

  • New version of Oracle Developer Tools For Visual Studio .NET

    There’s a new version of the Oracle Developer Tools For Visual Studio .NET (ODT).  I haven’t tried it yet but the previous version was pretty decent.  Finally Oracle gives us some decent dev tools for the .NET environment.  It has always boggled the mind why Oracle has made accessing it’s database from Microsoft platforms so completely…

  • Playing with NHibernate RC2

    I’ve ignored NHibernate for much of the summer.  Lately I’ve been talking to potential clients, trying to drum up some business for Q4 and I’ve been surprised by how many questions I’ve gotten about NHibernate.  I’ve also been pleasantly surprised by the number of hits and emails I’ve gotten from random people in the NHibernate community since being listed…

  • Where is the (fabled) Combined Help Collection Manager?

    This is one of those things that you almost never go looking for but when you need it you NEED it.  The Visual Studio .NET Combined Help Collection Manager.  It allows you specify which help collections appear in Visual Studio.  I needed it because the help files for the Oracle Developer Tools were not showing…

  • Bug downloading file from IIS through ASP.NET

    Ok.  So this wasn’t a bug in either IIS or ASP.NET…it was a bug in my code.  The ASP.NET page reads a PDF file from the disk into a byte array (byte[]) and then squirts it out through the HttpResponse using BinaryWrite().  Here’s the code… private void WriteRequestedDocumentToResponse(string filename) { Response.AddHeader( “Content-Disposition”, “attachment;filename=” + filename);…

  • In praise of audit tables.

    When I first started doing software projects, I was really into audit tables.  Anything that I thought was even remotely possibly important, I slapped in a table that would track all the changes to the data.  For some reason or other, I gradually stopped using them.  Dunno….maybe the data just didn’t lend itself to that. …

  • NUnit, RegAsm, and "Failed to generate type library"

    I’m trying to use COM+ to manage database transactions in my unit tests.  All of a sudden, I start getting all these weird errors saying “Failed to generate type library.“  No clue what was going on. I ran “regasm“ over the unit test assembly and all was healed.  Weird, huh? -Ben   Failed to generate…

  • The dirty little secret about Visual SourceSafe -OR- How to backup and restore SourceSafe.

    I think that I may have found a dirty little secret about Visual SourceSafe.  Most people never back it up and even fewer people ever try to restore it.  I made this discovery the hard way after running into big problems installing/uninstalling Visual Studio 2005 CTP and the latest version of SQL Server 2005.  I…

  • Database call to 'ConnectionWrite (send()).' caused an exception.

    In my last post, I wrote about the process of discovering that my client’s SQL Server hadn’t had a single service pack applied to it.  We applied Service Pack 4 and good times were had by all….for about 12 hours.  The web applications all worked but then a .NET Windows application started serving up strange…

  • Problem: Login failed for user 'sa'. Reason: Not associated with a trusted SQL Server connection.

    The last few days have been a little bit hellish.  I’ve been on-site at my client’s office helping them do a Windows 2000 to Windows 2003 migration, set up their new server, and deploy beta versions of the applications that I’ve been writing for them.  I backed up their SQL Server database from the old server…