Reflections on Software development

Updated 2010-01-24 by Christian

During my last assignment I ran into using some of the DevExpress

Updated 2010-01-04 by Christian

In the last four years of developing web-applications with a oracle database behind the curtains an old aqccintens rose again from the past.

The dark horror of getting the right assembly to be loaded. Microsoft has done a great job the dll-hell in the dotnet framework

Updated 2009-12-21 by Christian

Updated 2009-11-11 by Christian

Sitting here and thinking about some good ol' concepts when you are confronted with software problems you need to tackle. The first on is "Divide and Conquer", This old Machiavellian concept can be applied almost any time.

It outlines as following in bizarre psuedo code:
Divide (general procedures)
Is it trivial?
Solve it!
else
Divide into subproblems
Recursive subproblems until solved
Combine sub-solutions to get final solution
endif


Updated 2009-10-12 by Christian

Last week I passed the Microsoft certifikation for MCPD Enterprise Application Developer. Really sweet! A two year quest in getting a high certification has ended, successfully I might say.  Lets see what kind of celebration we can have at the office?

Updated 2009-09-01 by Christian

Have you ever wondered what you need to actually use the Wake-on-lan (WoL) functionality that you see so many times in the BIOS settings menus? Since it was never a important issue, I never took the effort to find out however I did it this evening. I googled for it and look, there was the answers.

The basic idea is to send a UPD-packet (the magical one), which is kind of not that magical at all, to a MAC-address of your choice.

• 6-bytes with 0xFF
• 6-bytes sequence containing the MAC address

Nothing magical there is it? Anyhow, the final trick is to send it to the broadcast address i.e. UDP 255.255.255.0 and random port. If you want to have this possibility of booting your home-computer thru the firewall you need to open a UPD port to your computer via port-forwarding or likewise. Remember to send you magic packet to that specific port. Imagine if you have a VPN-client on your laptop and you need to get some importent files from home. Then this comes in handy really well. Hook up your VPN-tunnel, send the WoL-packet, wait for your homecomputer to boot, access your files via a share or a remote desktop session. Just marvelous!

If and when I get into it, I will put the sourcecode for my little application here

Updated 2009-08-02 by Christian

We ran into the small annoying problem with KB971092 when installing it on a computer with Visual Studio 2008 without the c++ module. Look no futher, because the solution is mostly based on giving the right permissions to

%path_to_VS_install_dir%\Common7\Tools\vsvars32.bat file.

It has been blogged about http://msmvps.com/blogs/vstsblog/archive/2009/07/29/hotfix-kb-971092-for-visual-studio-2008-sp1-install-problems.aspx If you give the aformentioned file modify-rights to USERS then the installation will run smoothly.

Updated 2009-08-01 by Christian

In an attempt to broaden our perspectivs, we decided to build a htpc however very soon we ran into problem with the MSI Media Diva Live 5.1 mainboard we were going to use. The first card went up in flames = RMA. The second card didn't burst into flames but refused to POST = RMA. Basically is our guess that the components along the 12v feed somewhat defect or too cheap to give a great quality feeling about this mainboard.

MSI has worked around serveral design-error with this mainboard. These are in no order

• Amplifiercard holder don't fit the pci-bracket
• Size of conding to high
• Cooling of northbridge chip inadequate

but our problem is not a problem. Since the mainboard costs about 200€ in Europe ,which is a high price for a mainboard, we can not but wonder what on earth made MSI release such a product to the market in that price-range?

Our very limited attempts to get any explanations from MSI has not been successful. Read about it http://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?topic=128335.0

Updated 2009-01-26 by Christian

Have you ever bought an bluetooth device and thought that it will work just of out the box and get identified by Windows XP directly? I sure did. But after some bluetooth devices later I am not so sure anymore. After googeling the internet I found only one person who actually had made a kind-of-solution to it. I lost the link to him, but he suggested that you hack your bth.inf to give more support to different bluetooth devices in XP. If you want to skip doing that, I made myself a "hotted" version of bth.inf.

You can download it here: bth.inf

The file disclamer: We are not responsible for any damages this file would do to you operative system, this file is offered as it is.

You should always make a backup of your old original file before attemting to install this one. You should put it in the C:\WINDOWS\inf folder.