RiskFactor

Installing the 3.5 .NET Framework on Windows 10

David — Sat, 15 Aug 2015 14:44:00 -0600

Recently I installed Windows 10 on one of my many computers. I ran into an issue where I was unable to install the 3.5 version of the .NET Framework which I needed for one of my development tools. I tried several options including editing my Local Policy, registry settings and also downloading the full installer for 3.5 .NET. Ultimately I had to run the installer from the commandline and use the Windows 10 ISO as the source.

1. If you have the Windows 10 ISO file you will need to mount it as a DVD drive. Otherwise insert your Windows 10 disc.

2. Open a command prompt as administrator (Click on the Windows Start button and type "cmd". Right click on the program icon and select "Run as Administrator". Select Yes at the prompt.)

3. Use one of the following commands based on the bit version of windows and replace the "d:" with the drive letter of the mounted ISO or the DVD drive:

For 32-bit (x86): DSIM /Online /Enable /FeatureName:NetFx3 /Source:d:\x86\sources\sxs /All /LimitAccess

For 64-bit (x64): DSIM /Online /Enable /FeatureName:NetFx3 /Source:d:\x64\sources\sxs /All /LimitAccess

Using your AT&T U-Verse Static IP Addresses with OpenWrt (or not)

David — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 10:24:00 -0600

About a year ago I found out that AT&T had run fiber optics into my neighborhood and I was pretty pumped to switch from my 6 Mbps DSL service to the 26 Mbps U-Verse service. My big reason for switching was because I run Microsoft Small Business Server based network out of the house as well as hosting several websites and performing cross site backups so there is alot of demand on my bandwidth.

When I initially looked at making the switch I ran into a significant problem with my static IP Addresses. AT&T uses a 2Wire gateway device that assigns IP Addresses via DHCP to a NIC based on unique MAC addresses and does not have bridge mode like most standard DSL modems. This presented a problem because most routers, including my NETGEAR PRO FVS338 cannot present a single NIC as multiple NICs with unique MAC addresses. Well, after looking around a while I found a post that showed how OpenWRT could be used to create multiple virtual NICs on a WAN port and assign unique MAC addresses to each. This was a great find and allowed me to make the switch to AT&T U-Verse with static IP addresses and still manage them via a single router.

At the same time I hated switching over to OpenWRT because the UI is just not as clean and straight forward as my NETGEAR device. So, what I figured out was a way that I could leverage the OpenWRT router to assign the static IP Addresses but still use my NETGEAR router to manage the traffic. Essentially all I had to do was assign static IP addresses to my OpenWRT router but not create any rules for forwarding the traffic. Since the OpenWRT device is connected the 2Wire gateway will broadcast the traffic for all the static IP addresses across its own switch which means my NETGEAR device still receives the traffic and will answer based on the rules I have configured for each of the IP addresses in the NETGEAR device. So, I get everything I want, faster internet, static IP's, a clean and simple UI on my NETGEAR router and essentially all I need to do is have my little OpenWRT just sit there powered on but not doing anything.

Visual Studio 2012 Crashes on Startup

David — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 11:17:00 -0600

The other day I started to experience an issue where Visual Studio 2012 was crashing on startup. Even before the splash screen was displayed it would error out with a Win32 API error and the only successful option I could take was to close the program.

For the life of me I couldn't figure out what was causing the problem. I tried running the applicaiton as administrator but that didn't help. After uninstalling, I deleted as many Visual Studio 2012 related files and folders as I could find under my user account and then I reinstalled. Still no joy!

Finally I got smart nad downloaded the SysInternals ProcessMonitor app. After filtering the Process name to devenv.exe I fired up VS 2012 and watched the events tick off until the app crashed. One of the last couple of events logged was two registry queries. The first was HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers\C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe and the second was HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers\C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe. I started by opening the last registry key and that's when I found the problem and the resolution.

The Current User Application Compatibility flag was empty. I noticed that there was an entry for Visual Studio 2010 just above it which starts just fine. The value of the registry key for VS 2010 was "RUNASADMIN". So, I copied the value and placed it in the VS 2012 key and what do you know it fired right up without an issue!

SharePoint 2007 Error: The type or namespace name 'Publishing' does not exist in the namespace 'Microsoft.SharePoint' (are you missing an assembly reference?)

David — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 19:06:20 -0600

If your looking for the solution to the above error in SharePoint due to the use of the SPUrlExpressionBuilder (SPUrl) you will want to try a couple of things. The first is to include the following page declarations in the MasterPage if you have not already.

<%@ Register Tagprefix="PublishingWebControls" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.WebControls" 
             Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, 
             PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>
<%@ Register Tagprefix="PublishingNavigation" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation" 
             Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, 
             PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>
<%@ Register TagPrefix="PublishingVariations" TagName="VariationsLabelMenu" 
             src="~/_controltemplates/VariationsLabelMenu.ascx" %>
<%@ Register Tagprefix="PublishingConsole" TagName="Console" src="~/_controltemplates/PublishingConsole.ascx" %>
<%@ Register TagPrefix="PublishingSiteAction" TagName="SiteActionMenu" 
             src="~/_controltemplates/PublishingActionMenu.ascx" %>

If you continue to get the above error you might be having the issue that I ran into where I was using the SPUrl inside of an ASP.NET User Control. This has to do with the way that the User Control and MasterPage are parsed. The User Control is parsed by ASP.NET first prior to the MasterPage. This means that the declarations in the MasterPage are not present for the User Control. The solution is to also include the above declarations in the markup for the User Control. Including the declarations in the User Control insures that the SPUrl tag prefix has been registered prior to the parsing of the expressions that use it.

Getting C# Source Code From a COM Interop Assembly With ILSpy

David — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 15:43:02 -0600

Many of you were no doubt ticked when RedGate decided to stop providing Reflector as a free tool. Well, this post is not designed to harp on that or talk about how Redgate backtracked on that decision. Instead, let’s talk about a great replacement for it that is free and open source!

This great new tool is called ILSpy. It has a great feature that will let you output the disassembly code to actual C# files. This comes in super handy if you have a COM Interop assembly that you need to modify. I ran into this situation when working on a project leveraging the VirtualBox API.

The great thing is that it is supper easy to do. Once you open the interop assembly in ILSpy simply select the assembly node in the treeview and then on the File menu select Save Code… You will then be prompted to save a C# project file. Once you do that it will generate the project file and will create a .cs file per object in the assembly. And that is it!

Windows Server 2008 R2 Installation Problem: “Setup was unable to create a new system partition…”

David — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 02:32:00 -0600

Recently I decided to virtualize all three of the primary servers that I have running on my network. To do this I decided to install Windows Server 2008 R2 on two new servers. To save space I chose smaller cases and to save money I left out the optical drives since I have a USB DVD drive that would work for my installations. In addition I downloaded the latest drivers onto a large flash drive in preparation for the install.

The motherboard that I chose is the MSI 890FXA-GD65 which supports USB boot as well as RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, and JBOD. So, I chose to run a RAID 1 setup with two disks. After setting the array up in the BIOS I inserted the USB DVD drive, a flash drive with the RAID drivers, and cranked up the machine. Things moved pretty fast and I landed on the screen for selecting the drive to which I wanted to install Windows. It was blank and so I simply loaded the drivers from the flash drive and the RAID drive appeared with full capacity. Normally the next thing you should do is select the drive and hit the next button, but when I did that I got this wonderful error message:

“Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition. See the Setup log files for more information.”

To make a long story short I had a heck of a time figuring out the cause of my problem. In the end what worked for me was leaving the USB Flash drive out of the system until I was ready to install the drivers. I inserted the flash drive, selected “Load Drivers” and when through the browsing, selecting and loading. Right after the drivers were finished loading I pulled the flash drive and then hit “Next”. And the rest, as they say, is history… Windows installed fine from that point on and within about 30 minutes my new server was up and running.

An Old Trick for Speeding up .NET Compact Framework Builds: PlatformVerificationTask

David — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 11:48:00 -0600

OK! I know that most new mobile development is occurring on Windows Phone 7, iPhone or Android, but I have no other choice than Windows Mobile 6 for the application I’m currently working on due to customer requirements. So, here I am stuck back in VS 2008 developing a mobile application for Law Enforcement. In the past I played around with mobile development in my spare time, but never had to do any long term development for it. Since starting on this current project I noticed how long it took for my builds to deploy to the emulator and test devices for debugging. Deployment was taking from a few minutes to over 5 minutes at times. Well, you know as well as I do what that can do to developer productivity!

Now, I’m the type of developer that codes a chunk of code, builds, tests, and repeats the process in rapid succession so I was really not having any fun. So to figure out what was going on I set the Build output to “Diagnostic” in my Build options and hit F5. Well, I noticed that it was hanging on a build task called “PlatformVerificationTask”. Well, after digging around a little on Bing. I found this old blog post. The short of it is that the Platform Verification Task does a check on your assemblies at build time to make sure there are no unsupported properties, methods or events in your code. This process can really slow down the build process on large applications that have multiple DLLs. (Like my project does!)

So, what the solution? It’s a good ‘ole file editing trick. All you need to do is edit the file located at %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Microsoft.CompactFramework.Common.Targets and find the node:

<Target
    Name="PlatformVerificationTask">
    <PlatformVerificationTask
        PlatformFamilyName="$(PlatformFamilyName)"
        PlatformID="$(PlatformID)"
        SourceAssembly="@(IntermediateAssembly)"
        ReferencePath="@(ReferencePath)"
        TreatWarningsAsErrors="$(TreatWarningsAsErrors)"
        PlatformVersion="$(TargetFrameworkVersion)"/>
</Target>

Add the following attribute to the <PlatformVerificationTask"> node:

Condition="'$(DoPlatformVerificationTask)'=='true'"

Now restart Visual Studio 2008 and check out how much faster your build is!

Lecture Series on Technology

David — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 16:29:00 -0600

For the next 9 weeks I will be teaming up with a friend of mine, Adam Procella, to teach a series of lectures entitled, “Christianity in the 21st Century: A Biblical Worldview of Technology” at Memorial Presbyterian Church on Sunday Mornings.

Adam Porcella is a fellow classmate of mine who is, like me, working toward his Masters degree in divinity (M.Div.). Adam graduated from Covenant College just outside of Chattanooga, TN with a degree in Philosophy. Adam has previously co-lectured on Science and Christianity with another very good friend of mine, who is an internationally known astrophysicists, Dr. A.J. Poelarends.

In this series, Adam and I will cover some of the basic ground work toward a Philosophy of Technology and will also discuss how our life of faith intersects with Technology. It is designed to help construct a basic framework for thinking critically about technology in general as well as Information Technology in particular and how our daily lives as Christians impact and are impacted by technology.

We will cover a number of topics and areas that will include to a lesser or greater extent the following:

A History of Technology
Toward a Philosophy of Technology
Social Networking and Relationships
Identity and Technology
Video Games and Virtual Reality

Last week was the initial introduction to the series. This week I will be presenting a lecture entitled: “A History of Innovation: Toward an Understanding of the Nature and Course of Technology.”

I hope to have a running series of blog posts related to this that I will post on my other blog (technologian.us) which will be less technical than this one and geared more toward things such as what will be contained in the lecture series. If you are interested or want more info on this lecture series then shoot me an email.

Visual Studio 2010 Web.config Transform adds unwanted linebreaks and whitespace

David — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 11:12:00 -0600

One of the cool features in Visual Studio 2010 in the new web.config transform functionality for “automagically” changing the values in your web.config file based on your deployment scenario.

I’ve been working with this new feature now for a bit and just ran into an issue that was completely unexpected. In one of my web applications I have an application setting that hold a filepath. When I moved to using the web.config transform I encountered a bug where extra linebreaks and whitespace gets inserted into the body of the Value node for a given application setting.

Here’s an example of what you might have in you web.config file to begin with:

<configuration>

...

    <applicationSettings>

      <MyApp.Properties.Settings>

        <setting name="LocalFilePath" serializeAs="String">

          <value>C:\temp</value>

        </setting>

      </MyApp.Properties.Settings>

    </applicationSettings>

...

</configuration>

And lets say that you have the following in your Web.Release.config transform file.

<configuration xmlns:xdt="http://schemas.microsoft.com/XML-Document-Transform">

    <applicationSettings>

      <MyApp.Properties.Settings>

        <setting name="LocalFilePath" serializeAs="String" xdt:Transfrom="Replace" xdt:Locator="Match(name)">

          <value>D:\MyAppWebRoot\Files</value>

        </setting>

      </MyApp.Properties.Settings>    

    </applicationSettings>

</configuration>

After you publish the site and examine the the changes to your web.config file you will discover it looks like this:

<configuration>

...

    <applicationSettings>

      <MyApp.Properties.Settings>

        <setting name="LocalFilePath" serializeAs="String">

          <value>

          D:\MyAppWebRoot\Files

          </value>

        </setting>

      </MyApp.Properties.Settings>

    </applicationSettings>

...

</configuration>

The resulting extra linebreaks and whitespace will cause all kinds of problems in your code if you don’t modify your code to trim the value of the property. So, what can we do to fix this problem? Well, you have one of three options:

Add “.Trim” to your code in every place you use an application settings of type string. (What the heck! Who wants to do that!?!)
Forget about using the config transform until SP1 is release with a fix and just do it all manually. (Uh…have I ever mentioned how much I don’t like doing that now?)
Modify the “Settings” class that is auto generated so that it trims the value of any application setting of type string. (BINGO! I’ll take option three please!)

So, if your like me and you want option three then here is the code in both C# and VB that will get you what you want. All you really need to do is create a code file in your project and drop the appropriate code in it with the right namespace defined.

BTW, if you want to vote to have this fixed then here is the issue on the Microsoft Connect website.

namespace MyApp.Properties
{
    internal sealed partial class Settings
    {
        public override object this[string propertyName]
        {
            get
            {
                string value;
                if ((value = base[propertyName] as string) != null) { return value.Trim(); }
                
                return base[propertyName];
            }
            set { base[propertyName] = value; }
        }

    }
}

Visual Basic.NET

Namespace My
    Partial Friend NotInheritable Class MySettings

      Default Public Overrides Property Item(ByVal propertyName As String) As Object
         Get
            If MyBase.Item(propertyName) IsNot Nothing Then
               If TypeOf MyBase.Item(propertyName) Is System.String Then Return MyBase.Item(propertyName).ToString.Trim
            End If

            Return MyBase.Item(propertyName)
         End Get
         Set(ByVal value As Object)
            MyBase.Item(propertyName) = value
         End Set
      End Property

   End Class
End Namespace

My New Preferred PDF Viewer

David — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 10:44:00 -0600

The other day I was reading a couple of PDF docs on my TabletPC for a class that I am taking and found myself wanting to highlight and write comments in the PDF. Well, as you may know Adobe PDF Viewer does not provide any of those features. So, I went in search of a free PDF Viewer that did provide those features. To my surprise I found a great FREE viewer that provides extensive functionality for marking up a PDF with your own comments, etc. If you are looking for the same functionality in a PDF Viewer then check out PDF-XChange Viewer.