Derek Adkins

How to set a panel's default button to a button inside a user control

2008-06-03T07:34:00Z

I have an interesting problem where I have a panel control on a form and in the control is a user control that contains a button. Now I can easily get a reference to the button client ID but when I try use that as the panel.defaultbutton, it throws an error:

The DefaultButton of 'pnlControl' must be the ID of a control of type IButtonControl.

Um.. I thought a button already implemented that interface. And I have already checked the markup and the client ID that I am using, and they are correct.

Any ideas / solutions? (Option B preferred.) ;)

Damn spam. Got to make a plan. Because I can.

2008-03-15T03:59:00Z

That's it. I've turned off comments as there is more comment spam here than anything else. I've also been getting heaps of email spam through the contact me page, so I've had to turn that off too. Such a pity but I really don't need any more fake Rolex watches and everything on my body is as big as it needs to be already thank you.

Using the SharePoint Solution Generator tool to create new list feature definitions

2008-01-31T01:46:00Z

I discovered that the SharePoint Solution Generator adds a comment at the top of the generated aspx and schema.xml files for a list:

If this comment is left in the files when they are deployed, you will get an error when trying to view those pages:

"Only content controls are allowed directly in a content page that contains content controls"

To correct the problem, just delete that comment line, rebuild the WSP file and redeploy.

Weird.

Oracle errors: ORA-12154: TNS:could not resolve service name - Parenthesis problem

2008-01-15T04:17:00Z

Firstly, happy new year to everyone. I can't believe I've not written anything here since August.

Anyways, as a great start to my new year, I have been trying to run a console application that connects to an Oracle database but I keep getting the ORA-12154: TNS:could not resolve service name error. Nothing had changed in my tnsnames.ora file and when I ran the console application from an older archived branch it would connect fine.

I could also connect fine through Toad, so there was definitely nothing wrong with the tnsnames.ora file. I even checked access permissions on the local folder so make sure that my app had the rights to that folder. And it was all 100% ok.

After about a day of debugging connection code and trying to see where the Oracle drivers somehow got corrupted, I had an idea...

Here is the folder structure on my local machine where the EXE file resided: (Notice the parenthesis)

D:\SourceCode\Development\5674 - Online TV Guide 1(b)\Source\TVGuideImporter\bin\Debug

When I renamed the folder and removed the parenthesis, it worked. So my folder is now:

D:\SourceCode\Development\5674 - Online TV Guide 1b\Source\TVGuideImporter\bin\Debug

Apparently, Oracle doesn't like any access to tnsnames.ora from within a folder structure that contains parenthesis. I mean that is obvious from the error message not so? ;)

After I found the solution, I did some Google work and came across this blog post explaining the same thing:

http://joeydotnet.com/blog/archive/2007/01.aspx

I hope someone else finds this post useful.

TIP: Getting the public key token for signed assemblies

2007-08-08T05:46:00Z

I've always forgotten how to do this, but now I'll let Visual Studio do all the work for me.

Thanks to Andrew Connell's blog.

Set it up once, and have the option available all the time. Sweet!

TFS Merge issues - "The files are identical"

2007-07-18T03:55:00Z

I hope someone has the solution to this problem we're having:

When we run a baseless merge in TFS from the command line between 2 branches, we get roughly 3000 odd conflicts that the system refuses to resolve. Yet when we right click and select "compare - source to target" we get the dialog "The files are identical". This happens with most of the files in the resolve conflicts list that TFS can't seem to resolve.

Are we doing something wrong? Is there some setting in TFS that we can alter to correct this seemingly dumb behavior?

Google Reader shared items

2007-05-23T02:31:00Z

Here's the link to my Google Reader shared items: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/12782579416188578008

Or you can Subscribe directly from here: http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/12782579416188578008/state/com.google/broadcast

Feel free to add comments with your shared items URL.

Oh, and if you haven't tried Google Reader for your RSS goodness, then check it out! It rocks!

Installing Team Foundation Server

2007-03-01T06:07:00Z

I've come across a problem while installing TFS on Windows Server 2003.

Error 28925. TFServerStatusValidator:Calling the Team Foundation Server ServerStatus Web service failed.

Google has been some help (looks like this error has occurred often before) but I've still not found the solution.

I can access the webservice fine in a web browser (Localhost and the domain name in the path) and as far as I can see nothing else is running on port 8080 in IIS.

The other posts mention comparing DNS entries on the network, but I'm installing it all locally as a trial run so I'm not sure where to set that up... and if it's the problem either.

Has anyone got some advice, or the solution for me?

New rig.

2007-02-26T07:35:00Z

I thought I need to quickly make most of you a little bit jealous.. So here's my new PC specs:

Antec quiet case with rubber mounting for drives and dedicated ducting for the CPU heatsink.
Seagate 250gig 7200rpm drive (Media drive)
2x Western Digital 36.7gig sata raptor 10000rpm drives (Setup as RAID striped) (Boot drives)
Asus P5B deluxe mboard with built in wifi / firewire and kazillion USB ports.
Geforce PX8800GTS 640mb screen card (Most expensive thing in my box!!!) I should post pictures of this thing! It looks like a brick with heat pipes all over it!
2gigs DDR2 ram dual channel geil 4-4-4-12
Sound blaster audigy 4
Intel ATX dual core 2.4gig with 4meg cache.
Double layer DVD rewriter

I don't forsee any problems with whatever games I care to throw at it. I run all games on 1600x1280 res on maxed out graphics... :)

Oh.. um... should run VS2005 quite nicely too.

I've got some 3dMark scores if anyone wants to challenge me. Heh heh

Long time no see... and now from across the sea!

2007-02-23T13:16:00Z

Well, I can't believe just how long it's been since my last post here. And so much has happened since!

The biggest change is that I'm no longer in South Africa. My family and I are now permanent residents on the Gold Coast, Australia! Yeah baby! I now live by the sea, in a place where most Australians come for their holidays. We've been here since the beginning of January and we've only now started to get settled in. The house is almost fully furnished and our car is being delievered next week. And the biggest news is that I've FINALLY found work.

I had a few options open here, but most were in Brisbane city itself which is an hour drive each way from where we're living. That would have been a killer! Not to mention that parking in the city can run up to $25 a day. Then I applied for a position here on the Gold Coast at a company called "Austar". They are similar to DSTV and Multichoice in South Africa. They do pay TV, broadband and dialup internet and cellular subscriptions. So it should prove to be an interesting and challenging role for me.

At any rate, I'm looking forward to starting there, and finally getting back to work. I'll keep you all posted!

OT: MotoGP yesterday

2006-10-30T13:01:00Z

I have to just mention that yesterday's race in Valencia was, for me, the best bit of TV in a long time...

Firstly, Bayliss coming from winning the World Superbike Championship this year, riding Sete Gibernau's Ducati, wins the race in a glorious fashion by leading from the very first corner. (And embarrassing Sete at the same time who could barely manage a top 10 position on that bike the whole season.)

And... ROSSI BITING THE DUST on lap 4... handing the championship to Nicky Hayden!! I haven't been happier in a long time. :)

Yes, I know Rossi is a brilliant motorcycle rider, and yes he also deserved the championship... But I'm glad that finally someone else has wrestled it away from him, ending Rossi's complete domination of the class for the last 5 years.

I am so looking forward to the next season with the new 800cc bikes...

URL's with parameters in web.config

2006-10-17T11:37:00Z

How would you do something like this under appSettings in the web.config file:

Because the validation fails with " Expecting ';' " at the ampersand. I'm sure there must be an escape character I can use to store URL's with parameters in the web.config file.

Any help will be appreciated!

I rock at Basic!

2006-10-04T08:16:00Z

Oh man! I gotta get me one of these! I remember this from when my dad used to bring his work IBM XT home, and we would play Frogger and Digger and Montezuma's Revenge BOOTED from a 5 inch floppy! Good times!

http://www.glarkware.com/securestore/c181845p16832516.2.html

Found here: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000693.html

Timers, timers, timers

2006-09-06T11:29:00Z

Oh joy.

Let me explain what I've been battling with for easily the better part of a whole day.

I have a windows service that I want to wake up and process at a certain interval, so I dragged a timer control onto the designer and merrily set properties and compiled and when testing, nothing happens.

I noticed that the "elapsed" event was replaced with "tick", but I assumed that was a new .NET 2 change and thought it was the same kinda thing.

Anyways... After much annoying debugging, and failed debugging, I eventually went through an older existing project that I knew worked... and guess what:

System.Windows.Forms.Timer is NOT the same as System.Timers.Timer

Obviously there is no form in a windows service, so I was using the wrong timer control. (The System.Timers.Timer control was not enabled in my toolbox, so I just took the one that was there.)

What a mission.

Response.redirect with a target attribute

2006-08-29T12:55:00Z

I have a problem that Googling is not solving. Maybe someone can help out with this:

I want to redirect to an external site from my ASP.NET application but with a target=_blank attribute.

I also want to dynamically add querystring parameters to the URL in codebehind before doing the redirect.

Is this possible? I've seen some JavaScript that only works for static URL's. I want to append session variable values onto the end of the URL in codebehind before redirecting.

Any ideas?