Archive for the 'General' Category

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SBUG Mini Meeting – Integration Testing with MockingBird – 29th July at 8pm

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by
Nick Heppleston
on Monday, 27th July 2009
in General
. 0 Comments

The SBUG guys are holding their second online mini-meeting on Wednesday 29th July 2009 at 8pm (BST). Santosh Benjamin will be demonstrating the excellent Mocking Bird web-service mocking tool – I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks and I’m a convert; no need to stub our web-methods, just add virtual endpoints to a config and you’re done!

This should only be a 30-45 min meeting and is open to all via Live Meeting. Hope you can join us and see this excellent tool in action.

Full details – including registration – are available on the SBUG Website: http://sbug.org.uk/forums/p/156/232.aspx#232.

InfoPath Server: AbandonAllHope()

Published
by
Nick Heppleston
on Tuesday, 16th June 2009
in General
. 1 Comment

Recently seen on The Daily WTF:

Interesting Quirk when Formatting Guid’s as Strings….

Published
by
Nick Heppleston
on Thursday, 19th March 2009
in General
. 5 Comments

Originally posted by Nick Heppleston at: http://www.modhul.com/2009/03/19/interesting-quirk-when-formatting-guids-as-strings/

I noticed an interesting quirk last night while trying to format a Guid into a string representation – by default, Guid.ToString() does not return an accurate representation of a GUID with curly braces. Hmmmmmm…..

Consider the following simple test, here we are instantiating a new Guid and before outputting the value to the debugger, we capture its value – note the curly braces at the end of the Guid:

guidcontainscurlybraces

If we let the test run its course, we get the Guid formatted as a string (using the default formatter) written to the debugger, but there are no curly braces:

defaulttostringformatterstripsguidcurlybraces

After much head scratching and Googling, I decided to look at the MSDN documentation for the Guid.ToString() method – low and behold there are several format specifiers that can be provided to the ToString() method which determine the formatting provided to the resultant string. Using the format specifiers:

testguiddottostringformatspecifiers

we get the desired output:

testguiddottostringformatspecifierstrace

If no format specifier is used (i.e. we just Guid.ToString()), the default format is ‘D’ – no braces.

Twittering, Tweeting? Its far too Confusing….

Published
by
Nick Heppleston
on Tuesday, 24th February 2009
in General
. 1 Comment

follow-me-on-twitterOk, so I’ve finally sucumbed to the Twitter phenomenon and I’m now twittering, or is that tweeting? Eitherway, you can follow me over at http://twitter.com/nickheppleston if you are so inclined…

Permissions to Add Assemblies to the GAC

Published
by
Nick Heppleston
on Monday, 2nd February 2009
in General
. 0 Comments

Originally posted by Nick Heppleston at: http://www.modhul.com/2009/02/02/permissions-to-add-assemblies-to-the-gac/

I received an interesting error today while setting up a new TeamCity build-server. When running the MSBuild Microsoft.Sdc.Tasks GAC uninstall task – GlobalAssemblyCache.GacHelper.Uninstall – I kept receiving the following error:

C:\Subversion\Trunk\BizTalk\Build\Common-Deployment\Common\Deployment-Cleanup.proj(59, 3): A task error has occured.
Message = Failed to uninstall CandidateMarks.Canonical, PublicKeyToken=1b76b267b587386b from the GAC. AssemblyName = CandidateMarks.Canonical, PublicKeyToken=1b76b267b587386b

at Microsoft.Sdc.Tasks.GlobalAssemblyCache.GacHelper.Uninstall(String name)
at Microsoft.Sdc.Tasks.GlobalAssemblyCache.RemoveAssembly.InternalExecute()
at Microsoft.Sdc.Tasks.TaskBase.Execute()

It turns out that the user attempting to uninstall or install assemblies to the GAC needs write permissions to the %systemdrive%\Windows\Assembly directory (as documented here and here). Adding that user to either the local computer Power Users or Administrators Group provides the necessary permissions and the above error is no longer an issue.

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