The using statement in the .Net framework is a really good way of neatly using and disposing of an object in your code. It is certainly much more elegant than having Try/Catch/Finally blocks where you manually dispose of your objects. I do however have a minor issue with nested using statements. I can’t put my finger on it, but it just doesn’t seem that ‘right’ to me. Maybe it just looks ugly.

The following is an example taken from John Papa’s latest Data Points MSDN Magazine article:

I got hit with an issue yesterday when the local path of a file in TFS had a length greater than 260 characters. I couldn’t run a Get Latest and the IDE also seemed to hang on opening other projects. It reminded me about a situation a couple of years ago when I hit this same issue using longer paths in the framework.

Using reflector, I can see the following code in quite a few places in the framework.

Have you ever needed to have nested databound controls using multiple ObjectDataSources, where the nested ObjectDataSource has a select parameter that requires a databound value itself?

You have no doubt tried the following:

Neovolve.Schema.Extensions is a project that will do entity mapping for web reference code generations from a WSDL.

When you update a web reference in the Visual Studio IDE, it will get the latest version of the WSDL and generate code to access the web service. As part of this process, it will generate any object types that are exposed by the web service. If you have access to those object definitions on the consumer end point, you will have problems with these object types because the code generated Reference.cs class will use it’s own code generated versions of your object types rather than the ones you really want to use.

The schema extensions get around this problem. When the IDE updates a web reference, it will check against the schema extensions to ask whether the extension understands the object type. The extension has the opportunity to return a different object type, include namespaces and also include assembly references.

This project is configuration driven so that when a web service changes, the configuration can be changed to support the new entity mappings.

After the package is installed, add your object mappings to the configuration file. The configuration for the mappings looks like this:

Sorry people. This is just a note to myself because every few months I come across the same problems with a new development build.

Failed to access IIS metabase:

aspnet_regiis -i

Mutex Could not be Created:

Solution posted here by Joao Morais.

I have got the same issue. It seems like Visual studio 2005 and the web application pool running ASP.NET 2.0 are having a conflict over the temporary folder.

The workaround I have got for now is:

• If you have visual studio 2005 is open, close it
• Go to the ASP.NET temporary folder for v2.0 of the framework
  <Windows dir>\Microsoft.Net\Framework\v2.0<extra numbers>\Temporary ASPNET pages
• Remove the folder for your application (or all of them)
• Reset IIS (on a command line window, iisreset) [not always needed, but I had to use it sometimes]
• First Browse your page from IE (http://localhost/your app)
• Then reopen Visual studio

Gaming is a tough calling.

This one is a couple of weeks old, but Soma has indicated that VS2002 and VS2003 will not be supported as development environments in Vista. This is yet another reason why you should make the move to VS2005 sooner rather than later.

Over the last week, I have been reading and commenting about CAPTCHA’s in Sara Ford’s post about her New Comment Policy. Sara has some really interesting things to say regarding CAPTCHA and accessibility. I wonder if anyone has actually implemented an accessible CAPTCHA system.

Today I have been playing with a WCF service hosted in IIS. Previously, I have always used the self-hosted services running from a console application.

I am having issues with IIS hosting because although the service code is running correctly, the client is throwing a response error because the connection with the server is being unexpectedly closed. Still haven’t figured this one out.

Tonight, I have been doing a little bit of reading about this topic and came across this interesting note from the Hosting Services page in the SDK.

The message-based activation provided for an WCF service by IIS 5.1 on Windows XP blocks any other self-hosted WCF service on the same box from using port 80 to communicate.

The Hosting Services page is a great reference for helping you to figure out the best way of hosting your WCF service. Windows Activation Service seems like the most comprehensive hosting solution, but obviously requires Vista as the platform.

I did a grading on the weekend with a few other students of my Taekwondo club. We started with some kicking and punching for a warm-up. The two beginners who were grading displayed their patterns. Myself and two other red belts then did the advanced patterns (Chil Jang and Pal Jang) followed by the first black belt pattern (Koryo). Patterns were followed by 3 and 1 step sparring which is always quite a bit to get your head around in a grading! This was all topped off with some board breaking (three for me).

The grading went really well and I was very happy with my performance. I am now a Cho Dan Bo.