04 Jun 09 Opera 10 Beta is out

Opera 10 Alpha last night prompted me to automatically update, and lo and behold it installed the Beta 1.

The most noticeable change is the default skin, which is lighter and more consistent, using some new etching effects and icons everywhere. More changes are on the horizon for this for Beta 2, from the skin designer John Hicks.

A cool new enhancement is you can drag down the tab bar to get thumbnails for all the tabs, known as Visual Tabs:

There’s now an interface to customize the Speed Dial (rather than manually editing ini files)

Opera Turbo, the Opera proxy service that offers compression of web pages (suitable for low-bandwidth connections) is built in and can be switched on or off or set to auto mode (turning itself on if it detects you’re on a slow internet connection). I have tested this out while I’m on 64kbps, and it’s ok but it’s probably not worth it unless Opera have some New Zealand or Australia proxies. I suspect it would work great in Europe.

Tags: beta, internet, opera, opera 10, web browser

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03 Jun 09 Unit testing multi-threaded, asynchronous code and/or events

I’ve been writing some unit tests recently that test some multi-threaded functionality.

Typically this involves hooking up some event handlers then waiting for some asynchronous code to fire the event before proceeding with the unit test and assertions.

The ManualResetEvent class (MSDN) seems a good choice for this, and this post has a small example of using it in a unit test:


[Test()]
public void AfterRunAsync()
{
    ManualResetEvent manualEvent = new ManualResetEvent(false);

    TestTestCase tc = new TestTestCase(1, "", 0, 0);
    bool eventFired = false;
    tc.RunCompleted +=
        delegate(object sender, AsyncCompletedEventArgs e) {
            Assert.IsInstanceOfType(typeof (TestTestCase), sender, "sender is TestCase");
            bool passed = tc.Passed;
            string output = tc.Output;
            eventFired = true;
            manualEvent.Set();
        };
    tc.RunAsync();
    manualEvent.WaitOne(500, false);
    Assert.IsTrue(eventFired, "RunCompleted fired");
}

Tags: .net, asynchronous, c#, events, mstest, nunit, threading, unit test

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28 May 09 Remote debugging from Visual Studio 2008 on a domain machine to a machine not on the domain

This details how you can debug an application running on a remote machine from Visual Studio on your local machine, as if the remote application was running on your local machine.

The keys are:

There must be a user account with the same username and password on the remote machine and the local machine (MACHINE account, not domain account).
Visual Studio 2008 Remote Debugger must be installed and running on the remote machine under the user account in point 1

Create local machine account

Right click My Computer > Manage
Expand Computer Management > System Tools > Local Users and Groups
Right-click Users under Local Users and Groups and choose New User…
Enter in the username e.g. DebugUser
Enter and confirm the password
Un-check “User must change password at next login” and tick “Password never expire”
Click Create
Click Close

Create remote machine account

Log on to the remote machine and repeat the steps for “Create local machine account”
You must use the same username and password
Find the user in the Users list and double-click to edit them
Go to the Member Of tab
Click Add…
Type in Administrators and hit Enter or click OK
Click OK

Run Visual Studio 2008 Remote Debugger

You have several options for launching the Remote Debugger.

If you install Visual Studio 2008, the Remote Debugger folder can be found in %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE. In the Remote Debugger folder are separate folders for the x86 and x64 versions. Perhaps the easiest solution is to share this folder over the network, allowing you to launch the debugger over the network without having to install anything on the remote machine.
Alternatively, you can find the Remote Debugger setup on the first disc for the Visual Studio 2008 setup, in a sub folder called Remote Debugger.
Or, you can download it from here

It’s a good idea to run this as a Windows application as recommended by the Visual Studio 2008 Remote Debugger Configuration Wizard (and in my opinion easier to troubleshoot).

At this point if you’re not logged in as the new user you created, you might want to do that now so that you can run the Remote Debugger under them.

Once you’ve followed instructions for installing, run the remote debugger if it isn’t already by going to Start > Programs > Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 > Visual Studio Tools > Visual Studio 2008 Remote Debugger.

It should say that it’s running an instance similar to DebugUser@RemoteMachineName

Connect to the remote machine with Visual Studio

In Visual Studio on your local machine, go to Debug > Attach to process…
Make sure the Transport drop-down at the top is set to Default
In Qualifier, type in the name of the Remote Debugger instance e.g. DebugUser@RemoteMachineName and hit Enter
You should then see the list of remote processes in the list and can select the one you want and click Attach.

Tags: .net, attach, debug, domain, local, machine, remote, remote debugger, remote debugging, visual studio, vs

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27 May 09 Set up IP filtering in uTorrent and keep your ipfilter.dat up to date easily

The IPFilter Updater application now has its own page: http://www.davidmoore.info/ipfilter-updater/

uTorrent is one of the most popular BitTorrent clients out there. In my opinion it’s the best.

You can set up IP filtering in uTorrent to block bad seeds and peers from a list maintained by the community.

How to set up IP filtering in uTorrent

Open up uTorrent and go to Options > Preferences from the menu or click the Preferences button in the toolbar
Select the Advanced option in the tree
Find ipfilter.enabled in the list and make sure it’s set to true
Click OK

How to get and update the ipfilter.dat

I’ve written a simple program that will download the ipfilter.dat from SourceForge and copy it into the file where uTorrent expects it.

Download uTorrent IPFilter Updater [ Requires .NET 3.5 ]

UPDATED 26 Jan 2010: Now requires .NET 3.5, and allows mirror selection

Extract the files to a folder, and run IPFilter.UI.exe

Wait for it to download the mirrors, select the one you want, and click Go

Once the file has downloaded and extracted, you can close the window

Enhancements

Done:

Download and extract zip file to speed up the download time and minimize the download usage

Allow selection of mirror you want to use

To Do:

Automation through command-line arguments, for scheduled tasks

Source Code: http://github.com/DavidMoore/IP-Filter-Updater/

How to get uTorrent to pick up the new ipfilter.dat

You have two options:

You can simply exit and restart uTorrent to load theIPFilter or
You can leave uTorrent open and reload the IPFilter by selecting the Peers tab, right clicking in the list and choosing Reload IPFilter. Annoyingly you need a selected torrent for this to work.

Looking in the Log should show a message similar to “Loaded ipfilter.dat xxxxxx entries)”

Because IP ranges and addresses change often, it’s a good idea to update your filter list often too.

Tags: .net, bittorrent, bt, ipfilter, ipfilter.dat, ipfilterupdater, torrent, utorrent

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26 May 09 Could not load file or assembly ‘x’ or one of its dependencies. Strong name validation failed.

In some of the work I’m doing right now, I’m manipulating an assembly after compile time – having it disassembled into IL, tweaked, then re-compiled back into an assembly.

The assembly is signed and what is being done to the assembly is breaking the strong name. This is quite comforting to know; the strong name wouldn’t be so strong if it was that easy to hack an assembly with a strong name.

When trying to load the hacked assembly, I am getting an exception (FileLoadException in this case but I’m guessing this may differ depending on your assembly load method) with the message “Could not load file or assembly ‘MyAssemblyName’ or one of its dependencies. Strong name validation failed.”.

The first interesting thing here is that the assembly named in the error message isn’t the hacked assembly; the hacked assembly is one of MyAssemblyName’s dependencies and is what’s triggering the error.

Make sure that you check the dependencies of the assembly named in the exception message when troubleshooting. The problem may be with one of the dependencies.

In my case the exception isn’t a surprise because of what’s being done to the assembly. But until I resolve that, how can I get around this for now?

You can exclude an assembly from strong name validation for development purposes using the Microsoft (R) .NET Framework Strong Name Utility tool aka sn.exe:

"%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\bin\sn.exe" -Vr "C:\Path\To\Assembly.dll"

Make sure you change the sn.exe path depending on which version of the .NET Framework SDK you have installed. If you’re having trouble, get into the ”%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows” dir and search for sn.exe, and use the newest one you can find.

You might find it handy to add this as a Post-build event command-line for your project from within Visual Studio in Project Properties > Build Events:

"%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\bin\sn.exe" -Vr "$(TargetPath)"

So how do you switch the strong name validation back on for your assembly?

Use the -Vu switch:

"%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\bin\sn.exe" -Vu "C:\Path\To\Assembly.dll"

Tags: .net, assembly, c#, exception, failed, sn, sn.exe, strong name, validation

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26 May 09 Disabling the Opera Bit Torrent support

Opera has built-in torrent support which is very handy and nice, but not quite as nice as a full-fledged client like uTorrent

To disable the Torrent support in Opera so that uTorrent or your default torrent client will be used instead:

In Opera, type in opera:config in the address bar and hit enter
Click the Bit Torrent section to expand it
Untick Enable
Hit Save
Click OK at the message box

You won’t have to restart Opera for this change to take effect

Tags: bittorrent, disable, opera, torrent, turn off, utorrent

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26 May 09 Moving your precious user profile and documents to another folder on another drive in Windows 7

One of the things I learned long ago was to always have more than 1 drive or have my single drive partitioned.

You keep your programs and operating system on the C drive.

On your D drive goes all your data, downloads and anything that you don’t want to vanish on you suddenly.

A couple of advantages of this are:

This keeps the C drive quite lean if you want to make an image of it. It contains the operating system files and installed software and nothing else.
The D drive contains everything in one spot that you can easily set up for a backup procedure
If something catastrophic happens to your operating system, you can (mostly) be comfortable with formatting and installing over the C drive without blowing away all your precious music, photos and docs.
You can store your favourite software installers and drivers on your D drive which you can reach easily if doing a reinstall – rather than having to download them all again if starting from scratch.

If you don’t partition or have more than one hdd, an operating system failure could mean the hassle of removing your hard drive and backing data up off it on another running machine.

Things can be difficult though with the way Windows likes to store the user profile data on the C drive by default like your application data and My Documents.

Here are some instructions for changing Windows 7 so that all your user data is stored on your D drive (or wherever you like).

This is starting from a clean install of Windows 7 but you could do it from an existing install; just that trying to change the location of an existing user profile is extremely difficult and not recommended (hence the Dummy account):

When prompted to enter a user name in the Windows 7 installer, use a throw-away username rather than your desired username e.g. Dummy
Once installed you should be logged in as Dummy
Open up C:\Users and copy the Public and Default folders to the new location e.g. D:\Users
Open up regedit and go to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList key
Change the Default, ProfilesDirectory and Public values to the new location (e.g. replace %SystemDrive% with D:)
You should also consider moving the ProgramData location too
Restart then log on again as Dummy (not sure if this is necessary but just being safe!)
Create a new user. This will be your preferred account. Name it what you want and add it to the Administrators group.
Log off Dummy and log on as the new user
Click the Start Menu and click on your folder name just below the profile grapic and above “Documents”. Right click on the folders and go Properties to verify they are stored in D:\Users

Now, if your Windows 7 install becomes unrecoverable, you can safely format and install on the C drive and your user profile will remain intact on D.

Tags: documents, move, my documents, profile, relocate, user profile, win7, windows, windows 7

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25 May 09 Swiss ball trick

Tags: flip, gym, swiss ball

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22 May 09 Making a bootable USB drive for installing Windows 7 RC1

Here’s the article I followed to create my bootable USB flash drive when installing Windows 7 – something that’s essential when you don’t have a floppy drive or an optical drive in your machine.

http://kmwoley.com/blog/?p=345

To make the process even simpler, you can use WinRAR or an ISO-mounting or reading application to get the installation files and boot sector from the Windows 7 RC1 ISO image without needing to burn a DVD.

Tags: boot, bootable, bootsect, diskpart, flash drive, mount, mountable, rc1, usb, windows 7

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22 May 09 Configuring NLog for your application when NLog is in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC)

If you have several applications that are using NLog, it can be a good idea to install NLog into the GAC and reference that.

A gotcha you must watch out for is caused by this piece of configuration from the NLog site:
<configuration> <configSections> <section name="nlog" type="NLog.Config.ConfigSectionHandler, NLog"/> </configSections> <nlog> </nlog> </configuration>

Because you are not using the strong name for the Assembly-qualified name of ConfigSectionHandler, it’s impossible to do a GAC lookup, therefore NLog won’t be found and you’ll get an application error (even if NLog is actually in the GAC).

This means your application will throw an exception when the configuration is loaded; there will be no NLog.dll in your application folder and it can’t check the GAC as it doesn’t have the strong name of the assembly you want.

You can fix this by including the strong name:
<section name="nlog" type="NLog.Config.ConfigSectionHandler, NLog, Version=1.0.0.505, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=5120e14c03d0593c" />

Tags: .net, assembly, c#, config, ConfigSectionHandler, gac, global assembly cache, NLog

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04 Jun 09 Opera 10 Beta is out

03 Jun 09 Unit testing multi-threaded, asynchronous code and/or events

28 May 09 Remote debugging from Visual Studio 2008 on a domain machine to a machine not on the domain

Create local machine account

Create remote machine account

Run Visual Studio 2008 Remote Debugger

Connect to the remote machine with Visual Studio

27 May 09 Set up IP filtering in uTorrent and keep your ipfilter.dat up to date easily

How to set up IP filtering in uTorrent

How to get and update the ipfilter.dat

Enhancements

How to get uTorrent to pick up the new ipfilter.dat

26 May 09 Could not load file or assembly ‘x’ or one of its dependencies. Strong name validation failed.

26 May 09 Disabling the Opera Bit Torrent support

26 May 09 Moving your precious user profile and documents to another folder on another drive in Windows 7

25 May 09 Swiss ball trick

22 May 09 Making a bootable USB drive for installing Windows 7 RC1

22 May 09 Configuring NLog for your application when NLog is in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC)

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