Dot Net Tips and Tricks

We have been looking at alternatives to Visual SourceSafe over the last few weeks and we’ve settled on the open source solution called Subversion. This product is the successor to CVS and adds a good set of features. We’ve documented a 8x improvement in remote performance when doing full gets of the entire project structure. There are many good open source clients: TortoiseSVN, SmartSVN, VisualSVN etc. Several have good IDE plugins providing the same or close to the feature set of the SourceSafe plugin. Also the VSSMigrate script , here was very easy to move all of the files and history from VSS to the new SVN repository.

For those looking for an alternative to VSS, due yourself a favor and look at Subversion. Best of all the price is just right, FREE!

Having recently spent several hours trying to configure DTC to communicate between my Windows XP workstation and a Windows 2003 Server, I recommend the following article for success. There are some security changes that occur in SP2 for Windows XP that require configuration before the two boxes will sucessfully talk.

My earlier article on the use of DTCPing for testing in the trackback will get you up to speed with this utility.
Set the appropriate values for the EnableAuthEpResolution and RestrictRemoteClients options on Windows XP SP2

Windows XP SP2 enhances security by requiring authenticated calls to the RPC interface. This functionality is configurable through the EnableAuthEpResolution and RestrictRemoteClients registry keys. To ensure that remote computers are able to access the RPC interface on a Windows XP SP2 computer, follow these steps:

Warning
Incorrect use of Registry Editor may cause problems requiring you to reinstall your operating system. Use Registry Editor at your own risk. For more information about how to back up, restore, and modify the registry, see the Microsoft Knowledge Base article “Description of the Microsoft Windows registry” at Description of the Microsoft Windows registry.

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit.exe, and then click OK to start Registry Editor.
   Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT
2. Under the RPC key, create the following DWORD entries with the indicated values. If the RPC key does not exist then it must be created.
   

   DWORD entry	Default value	Recommended value
   EnableAuthEpResolution	0 (disabled)	1
   RestrictRemoteClients	1 (enabled)	0

3. Close Registry Editor.

For more information about the RPC Interface Restriction functionality in Windows XP SP2, see the RPC Interface Restriction section of Changes to Functionality in Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2.

Link to the article: DTC Troubleshooting

Yeah!!!! it’s finally RTM.. I’ve worked with Windows Workflow Foundation throughout the beta program and I find it to a real accet to the several projects I’ve used the foundation in. The tracking store and monitor support for runtime applications is wonderful for showing the progress of business transactions to end users.

Do yourself a favor and try the new .Net Framework out. HERE

I regularly find myself creating constant strings or including Sql statements in c# source files. I like everyone else hate sitting there putting quotes around the lines of text, so I setup a web page with a parser to do it for you.

Very easy instructions.

• Specify the name of the variable you want to use.
• Paste or enter the text into the Input Code text area.
• Hit convert.
• Copy rendered code from Output Code text area.
• Your done.

Simple easy and works for almost all strings. I’ll be adding special character support and fixed width wrapping soon, but give it a try and see if it doesn’t save you some time.

I’ve added a link at the top of the page or here.

Whoops…. BUG in firefox doesn’t see the line breaks correctly. I’ll be testing and fixing this weekend.