Scott Hanselman

OK, back to programming, as this is not a political blog.  Apparently there's some trouble with the .NET Framework Service Pack 1.  I personally have not experienced this problem, and I have to admin that it's so obviously weird that I am suspicious that it is in fact a bug.  Lots of stuff should/could never have worked if it is.  It's likely an install/permissions related bug.  That said, here's the details from a recent series of posts on Channel9.

Symptoms

• ASP.NET Forms stop posting back when they have validators on them
• Errors in Event Viewer like "Failed while copying the ASP.NET client side script files to directories under D:\Whatever. Error code: 80070005"

Fix/Potential Fix

• Copy a PRE-SP1 version of WebUiValidation.js over the one you have in aspnet_client.
• Certainly make sure you HAVE an aspnet_client folder either in that directory or mapped in another VDIR. (This is a common and unrelated problem.)

I'll get the details/diffs on the changes in this file and post them soon.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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There's a lot of talk on the blogosphere today about the Bush Memos being forged.  I looked at the memos (pdf) and it takes all of one minute to see that it's true.  The kerning is obviously a Times New Roman class.

BIG UPDATE: Turns out they ARE fake. "The man who gave CBS News disputed documents describes how he obtained them; in television interview, he admits he deliberately misled a CBS News producer."

UPDATE: This from Little Green Footballs - an animated gif showing the Word version and the Memo itself.

This fellow OWNS one of the TypeWriters in question and says he doesn't buy it either.  His site http://ibmcomposer.org/ is the only site dedicated to this typewriter.

Chris Brooks, my boss, had the most damning comment: Look at the superscript for crying out loud.  I gasped. It's the "autocorrect" feature in Word creating a "th" after a number.  Oy.  Someone needs to lose their job.  It's a shame, as I liked Dan Rather.

Here's IBM Composser guy's thoughts on making a "th" in 1973:

A: Yes, but not in one keystroke. To type 111th, you would first type "111", then remove the 11pt font element, and replace it with an 8pt element, then change the escapement (horizontal spacing) to the narrowest setting, half reverse index the paper, type "th". Then, you have to reverse that process by half indexing the paper back down, replacing the 8pt font element with an 11pt font element,...

Here's the Word version, compare yourself.

Steve Richter had a lot of links to bloggers who are following the story:

• http://instapundit.com/
• http://wizbangblog.com/
• http://www.powerlineblog.com/
• http://www.littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/weblog.php
• http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/
• http://ace.mu.nu/archives/045480.php

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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When you use SqlCommand.ExecuteXmlReader() you get an XML fragment - you get no root node.  What's a good (clean, elegant, performant, etc.) way to get an XmlDocument or XPathDocument (for XSLT purposes) populated with the data returned - without using the SQLXML 3.0 SqlXmlCommand stuff?  Secondary question - what good is ExecuteXmlReader() anyway?

Is this gross? It feels odd:

        using (SqlConnection conn = new SqlConnection(connStr))
        {
            conn.Open();
            SqlCommand command = new SqlCommand("select * from Customers as Customer for XML AUTO, ELEMENTS", conn);
            XPathDocument xp = new XPathDocument();
            XPathEditableNavigator xpathnav = xp.CreateEditor();
            XmlWriter xw = xpathnav.PrependChild();
            xw.WriteStartElement("Customers");
            using(XmlReader xr = command.ExecuteXmlReader())
            {
                xw.WriteNode(xr,true);
            }
            xw.WriteEndElement();
            xw.Close();
            xp.WriteXml(XmlWriter.Create(Response.Output));
        }

It works though, and produces this.  Of course I wouldn't output it like this, I'd style the XPathDocument.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Our IT Director has been slashdotted.  Heh.  And I did it.  I submitted a story about how he bought a Rio Carbon MP3 player just so he could take it apart and use the 5GB Microdrive.

dasBlog is holding up fine again, but his ISP is having trouble with the size of the images in his post.  He had a LOT of pics on the post.

Congrats Greg, you've joined a good group of slashdotted dasBlog users.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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In the vein of incredibly easy 1 or 2-lines of code, here's another that's too embarassingly easy program to mention considering I asked for help to write it! :)  It IS useful I think though. (Unless there was something included with the Framework that I missed!)

public class AssemblyVersion
{
    public static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        Assembly asm = Assembly.LoadFrom(args[0]);
        Console.WriteLine(asm.FullName.ToString());
    }
}

This will print out the assembly qualified name of any .NET assembly ala:

c:\>assemblyversion.exe clipboard.exe
clipboard, Version=1.2.3.4, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null

This can be useful for auditing and creating manifests/lists of assemblies that are included with a distribution.  We'll probably put it in a NAnt task to make a list of what's supposed to be there versus what IS there.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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