Tim Mackey's Weblog

Here is the event log crash entry:

Faulting application devenv.exe, version 8.0.50727.762, time stamp 0x45716759, faulting module craxddrt.dll_unloaded, version 0.0.0.0,
time stamp 0x43068582, exception code 0xc0000005, fault offset 0x0d26e30f, process id 0x1180, application start time 0x01c75cae13960a41.

it would crash completely randomly, even if i had closed all crystal reports and was working in a style sheet or other such harmless file. As i later found out, it was because the solution opened by default with the last crystal report i was working on, and this seemed to start some crystal report ActiveX thing that craps out on Vista.  sometimes it would take 2 minutes and sometimes 5 minutes, but it would always crash, even if i closed the report straight away.  The only way to get rid of it was to load up VS, close the report immediately and safely close VS before it got a chance to crash!  then next time it opens, there is no crystal report and the ActiveX control never loads.  it works ok now, although this is just one of a long list of complaints i have with VS 2005.  i think i'm allergic to crystal reports.

i bought a 2gb SD card to replace the 64Mb one that came with my nokia 6233.  since the applications and games are stored on the 64mb card, i tried to copy them across to the new card, using my harddrive to help with the transfer.  problem is some of the JAR files are protected and cannot be read from the disk, i tried running as admin, xcopy, but access denied every time.  eventually i found Winimage which can create a 'virtual hard drive' from any disk (Micro SD in this case) and can then extract the files to the hard drive, bypassing the protection.  i then copied the files to the 2gb card keeping an identical folder structure.  seems to work nicely so far.

coming from the c# world of strict control flow and built-in bail-out for unhandled exceptions, i was caught out by something in SQL 2005 recently.
many of my stored procedures take this form:

    update sometable set whatever = @whatever
    exec SP_History 'joe bloggs', 'order taken', '€500'

i was assuming that if the update statement failed, the subsequent SP_History SP would not be executed.  however i was wrong, and i now have the following code where i want the SP to stop executing if something goes wrong:

if @@ERROR <> 0 
    RETURN @@ERROR    -- bail out

the exception is still caught by .net, any handling code you may have will be unaffected there by the return statement.

The full error i got was below:

Error    35    The type 'CrystalDecisions.Shared.ExportFormatType' exists in both 
'c:\Windows\assembly\GAC\CrystalDecisions.Shared\9.1.5000.0__692fbea5521e1304\CrystalDecisions.Shared.dll' and 
'c:\Windows\assembly\GAC_MSIL\CrystalDecisions.Shared\10.2.3600.0__692fbea5521e1304\CrystalDecisions.Shared.dll'   

The reason is because version 9 and 10 of crystal reports are installed on my dev box and VS needed help deciding which one to use.  the fix was to specify the exact assembly binding to use in web.config, as follows:

	<runtime>
		<assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1">
			<dependentAssembly>
				<assemblyIdentity name="CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine" publicKeyToken="692fbea5521e1304" />
				<bindingRedirect oldVersion="9.1.5000.0" newVersion="10.2.3600.0"/>
			</dependentAssembly>
			<dependentAssembly>
				<assemblyIdentity name="CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Shared" publicKeyToken="692fbea5521e1304" />
				<bindingRedirect oldVersion="9.1.5000.0" newVersion="10.2.3600.0"/>
			</dependentAssembly>
			<dependentAssembly>
				<assemblyIdentity name="CrystalDecisions.Shared" publicKeyToken="692fbea5521e1304" />
				<bindingRedirect oldVersion="9.1.5000.0" newVersion="10.2.3600.0"/>
			</dependentAssembly>
		</assemblyBinding>
	</runtime>

thanks to rick ersek for the solution.

CAST(FLOOR(CAST(GetDate() AS FLOAT)) AS SmallDateTime)

Cheers to this blogger, he explains why it works.

my Visual Source Safe database had grown very large and i couldn't see why.  digging around in the aaaaaaamb.a files revealed an episode of robin-hood that had accidentally been checked in to VSS.  the thing was i had deleted it through VS but it hadn't been purged from VSS.  with the VSS graphical interface, you can right-click any folder and it will tell you in the deleted items tab if there are any deleted (but not yet purged) items.  however this is very time-consuming.
thanks to a post on a newsgroup, i discovered the command line interface, which has an option to list deleted files, and you can then purge them. you still have to scan through the output, which is presented in a very crude way to say the least.  if there are deleted files, you would think it should just list them.  but no, it lists every directory and says 'no items found under ...' after it, which makes for a lot of noise when you are trying to scan for directories that actually contain deleted files. 
anway, here's the commands:

set SSDIR=C:\Data\VSS                                        ** the folder containing of your srcsafe.ini file **
cd "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual SourceSafe\"
ss dir -R -D $/*.*

if you're querying an MS access database from within access, you can use ? and # as wildcard single character/digit placeholders.
however, if you're querying via OleDb, then you have to use _
this took me ages to figure out. thanks to this useful entry in msdn2.

all of a sudden my dvd drive stopped working, and i couldn't figure out why.  there was no drive listed in explorer and the device was not working, code 39.  i eventually found this ms kb article that gets you to delete 2 registry settings to fix the problem.  they said it could be caused by installing Easy CD Creator.  i tried to uninstall AsusDVD and that may have done it.  in any case, it works now.

WMP 11 isn't so bad, but the big criticism of WMP all along is that it doesn't support global hot keys like winamp does.
enter "WMP Keys" from sourceforge.  It runs like a champ and does the job, using Ctrl-Alt-Right Arrow for next track, Left for previous track etc.  you need to register the plugin dll, and when i ran it from the command prompt first of all, it didn't succeed.  you need to register it with admin privilege, to do this right click the command prompt in the start menu and run it as administrator.