Problem using fuslogvw.exe

In case you try to use the Fusion Log Viewer (fuslogvw.exe) and you can't change the Log Settings because they are all disabled then simply run the application as an administrator. To make things really easy just create a shortcut to fuslogvw.exe and modify the shortcut properties (right mouse click). In the "Compatibility" tab tick the box for "Run this program as administrator". Notes:

• This worked for me using the Windows SDK v6.0A on Vista. It may also work for other versions and other operating system versions but I didn't test that.
• The Fusion Log Viewer is also known as "Assembly Binding Log Viewer"

Silverlight 3 Tools for Visual Studio 2008

On July 07, 2009, Microsoft published the download for the "Silverlight 3 Tools" for Visual Studio 2008. You can find a short list of what is included in the package and the actual downloads here. Make sure you have Service Pack 1 installed for Visual Studio 2008. Some more stuff to play with!

Background Color of TextBlock in Silverlight 2

In a WPF application (as of .NET 3.5) you can set the background color for a text block as follows:

<TextBlock ... Background="Red" ...> </TextBlock>

Despite being correct Silverlight 2 doesn't like this XAML code. Trying to set it programmatically leads to an exception. Therefore a different solution is needed. Here is what works in my case. I use a Canvas and place a Rectangle and a TextBlock inside of that Canvas. Unless you set the ZIndex use this order so that the TextBlock is in front of the Rectangle. I use the Rectangle as the background for the TextBlock. When the TextBlock changes its size I update the size of the Rectangle accordingly. This solution is pretty simple in the end. First the XAML code:

<UserControl x:Class="Foo.LabelWithBackground"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
             Width="200" Height="20">
   <Canvas>
      <Rectangle Name="_labelBackground" Width="20" Height="20"
                 Fill="LightSkyBlue"/></Rectangle>
      <StackPanel>
         <TextBlock Height="20" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Name="_label"
                    VerticalAlignment="Center" Padding="4,2,4,0" 
                    Text="The Label Text" MinWidth="20"></TextBlock>
      </StackPanel>
   </Canvas>
</UserControl>

Next the C# code-behind:

public partial class LabelWithBackground : UserControl {
   public LabelWithBackground() {
      InitializeComponent();
      _label.SizeChanged += LabelSizeChanged;
   }

   void LabelSizeChanged(object sender, SizeChangedEventArgs e) {
      _labelBackground.Width = _label.ActualWidth + 
                       _label.Padding.Left + _label.Padding.Right;
   }
}

Of course you can use this UserControl in either a page (Silverlight) or in a window (WPF). In both cases you will get a label with background.

---

Check out my blog on Agile Leadership

WPF and Silverlight: Sharing User Controls

Both WPF and Silverlight share XAML as the language to describe the layout, look and feel of a user interface. So I thought. There are differences, though, at least for .NET 3.5 and Silverlight 2. And the differences are not only limited to the XAML code but also to the code-behind regardless of whether you use C# or any other .NET language. Sure I did know that Silverlight doesn't support 3D graphics (at the moment) and so I didn't expect those to work. I'm also aware that Silverlight has a Visual Style Manager that is not available in WPF. And the root element in Silverlight is a Page while in WPF it is a Window. And Silverlight is more than just the UI part since it also represents a minimum CLR runtime environment and not a full .NET 3.5 implementation. So my expectations were along those lines. But I discovered more beyond my expectations. Small, yet sufficient differences that makes it hard to share UI components between WPF-based and Silverlight-based applications. And that's what I'd like to do since I want to leave the choice between using a native user interface and a rich internet application (RIA) to my customers. To reduce the gap I'm using I'm using components from the Silverlight tool kit that are in the "stable" band. Otherwise I wouldn't have available components such as TreeView. One example of a noticeable different is that in WPF a TextBlock can have an attribute named "Background" while in Silverlight you will get a parse error of you try to render the XAML code. There are also inconsistencies (or differences) in terms of how mouse events are handled. For instance the set of PreviewMouse* functions that are available in WPF don't exist in Silverlight 2. If you want to use Hittest() in your code-behind it won't work (or even compile) in Silverlight. Instead you have to use functionality of the VisualTreeHelper class. There are quite a few of these difference at the moment and I'll provide more details as I discover them along with code examples. My hope, though, is that over time the differences between the two are reduced at least for the features they have in common. It's pretty annoying that setting the background color is different between WPF and Silverlight. It's also pretty annoying that finding a component at a mouse cursor position is different. Maybe .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 3 are a step towards easier sharing of user controls. The community would love to see that!

---

Check out my blog on Agile Leadership.

ReSharper 4.5 Memory Consumption

Just tried ReSharper on a fairly large solution with about 38 projects (13 C# and 25 C++). With the ReSharper addin enabled the memory consumption is sitting at about 1.5 GByte for the solution. With the ReSharper addin disabled the memory consumption is sitting at about 300 MByte for the solution. The solution itself has over 90% of its source code in C++ (mix of managed and unmanaged) and only a smaller portion in C#.

JetBrains claim they have worked on the memory consumption of ReSharper 4.5. Looks to me as if more work is needed ....

On my 32 bit box I have to reboot once in a while because I'm running out of memory when the addin is renabled ... (Vista 32 bit, VS 2008, 4 GB RAM)

---

Update on 04 June 09: It looks as if the memory consumption goes up to the same value with R# disabled. This happens when IntelliSense creates/updates its database. However, with R# disabled the memory drops back to normal once IntelliSense has finished that activity. With R# enabled it appears as if IntelliSense doesn't free up the memory. So it looks as if the problem is caused by the combination of the two. A solution with just C# project (and hence without IntelliSense in C++) doesn't seem to have that issue either.
Since I am in contact with JetBrains at the moment let's see what they can find based on the info I can provide.

---

Update on 02 February 2010: I had some conversations with JetBrains and they have asked me to provide an example that show the behavior. The challenge is that is seams to happen (or become apparent) only when there is a large number of C++ projects in the solution and the entire C++ code base is significant as well. While I do have an example to demonstrate the behavior, I’m a bit challenged to provide the very example. Would you send your entire code base? At the moment some members of my team have switched off ReSharper when they are working with the solution that also contains C++ projects.

---

Also check out my blog on Agile Leadership.

A comment on McAfee

Right now McAfee is running a full system scan on my computer. Not only is it consuming a large amount of system resources - sometimes to the point of the system being unusable because of having to wait for some file operation to complete - there is also the following interesting 'feature'. Let's assume a full system scan is running. That seems to make sense since there are many different ways how viruses can find their way onto your computer. So that system scan is running, and you know that it will take an hour or more to complete. You have downloaded a file that you'd like to scan for viruses before you use it. Can you do that? Nope, not with the McAfee version I am currently using. It will display a dialog box telling me a different scan is running and that I have to cancel that one first before I can start a different one. My options are:

1. Wait until McAfee has finished scanning my system.
2. Cancel the system scan so I can scan the downloaded file

Option one makes me less productive. Option two has a potential security issue. None of the options meets my requirements. How about being able to explicitly scan files, e.g. from the context menu in the file explorer, regardless of whether other scans are running? I'll check whether other virus scanners work the same way or whether they behave differently. (Before someone asks: Automatic updates to keep McAfee up-to-date are enabled.)

I couldn't resist... - a quote from Subversion's web site

When assessing the memory consumption of the Subversion (SVN) 1.6.1 client, I also found the following on SVN's web site:

"all the memory we allocate will be cleaned up eventually" (Source: "Hacker's Guide To Subversion", retrieved 15 May 2009)

I like that quote since I think it is true for all software! "Eventually" all memory will be cleaned up, and if necessary when the process terminates. On second thought, though, here might be an opportunity for a new business model! What if we had one-way memory? You can allocate it once, and once a process has consumed it you need to buy new DRAM (or maybe it could be called OW-DRAM as in "One Way"-DRAM). I'm sure Intel and other chips vendors would love it! But seriously (and I'm sure I've got some funny things somewhere in my published text and code as well. Tell me!): A memory leak is a memory leak is a memory leak. Using add and commit for adding large amounts of files consumes about 1 KByte per file. In one case I tried to add about 13,000 files and the process fell over when it reached 1.3 GByte having added only 10% of the files. So this approach doesn't work for version 1.6.1. All indications are that this is a memory leak. It is proportional to the number of files you add and try to commit. OS tools show how the process grows in size. It never shrinks (unless the process terminates one way or the other). Admittedly I didn't use a memory profiler, but what do you think the issue is when an error is reported on the command line saying "out of memory"? The better option for getting large sets of files into a repository - and that's what I learned by now - is to use SVN's import functionality. I have made several tests now with up to 65,000 files in one batch (several hundred MB) and the memory consumption of the client process grew only very slowly - from about 10 MB to 58 MB at most. This growth - I suspect - is probably related to memory fragmentation but definitely within acceptable limits. So the recommendation is: Don't use svn add and then svn commit. Instead use svn import if you have large sets of files to import. If they go into the wrong place you can always move them later using a repository browser such as the one that comes as part of TortoiseSVN.

Handling of middle mouse click in Firefox 3.0

Just had a "experience" of the undesired kind. Normally when you use the middle mouse button on a link in Firefox, it opens the page in a new tab. Well, when you use the middle mouse button on the tab (even when not hitting the little close button) then it closes the tab! Not quite what I expected. I thought it would take the link of what is displayed in that tab and open a new tab with that link. I just lost quite a lot of work that I just had entered into a web form. :-( Oh, well...

SVN Client: Out Of Memory

With the client SVN 1.6.1 (32 bit on Windows) I ran into an issue today. I tried to commit 13,000 files with about 100 MBytes of size. Most of them are text files and just a very small number of them are binary files. No matter what, this commit didn't work. I actually had to take small portions of it and commit one portion at a time. Admittedly this is not a typical change set, and so I don't want to complain too much. There is one observation, though, that made me think: When the client starts to send the content (file data) then the memory consumption goes up. I'm not sure why that is because the file is still available locally (since we are uploading the file) and hence it's not quite clear to me why the consumption needs to go up. The client sends one file at a time anyways. If a buffer is used to get the data into the appropriate format for the wire transmission I can understand that. But can't that buffer be reused once one file has been transmitted and the next one is started? Maybe I'm overlooking something about the inner workings of Subversion. In that case please comment on this post. Otherwise I have that gut feeling that there might be a memory leak in the current implementation (SVN client 1.6.1)? --- An update: There are a few open bugs related to memory leaks, even one with regards to committing large number of added files. That one is from 2004 and still open.

ListView.GetItemAt() in WPF Application

At present (.NET 3.5 SP 1) a GetItemAt() method doesn't exist for the ListView class that is part of WPF. At least I couldn't find it. I always found it handy in Forms based development for instance when handling mouse events. Please note that the WPF class ListView is in System.Windows.Controls while the forms based class of the same name is in System.Windows.Forms. Don't confuse the two! In this post I'm referring to the WPF class ListView. I wanted a similar behavior to the method of the same name in the forms based library. As a result I want the client code to look like this:

      private void _replacementsListView_MouseDoubleClick(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs e) {
         var mousePosition = e.GetPosition(_replacementsListView);
         var item = _replacementsListView.GetItemAt(mousePosition);
         if (item != null
            && item.Content != null) {
            EditTokenReplacement((TokenReplacement) item.Content);
         }
      }

Since the WPF class ListView doesn't come with a built-in method I decided to implement an extension method as follows:

using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Controls;
using System.Windows.Media;

namespace Foo.Gui {
   internal static class Extensions {
      public static ListViewItem GetItemAt(this ListView listView, Point clientRelativePosition) {
         var hitTestResult = VisualTreeHelper.HitTest(listView, clientRelativePosition);
         var selectedItem = hitTestResult.VisualHit;
         while (selectedItem != null) {
            if (selectedItem is ListViewItem) {
               break;
            }
            selectedItem = VisualTreeHelper.GetParent(selectedItem);
         }
         return selectedItem != null ? ((ListViewItem) selectedItem) : null;
      }
   }
}

Please note that the position is passed into the method as an object of class Point. This means that the coordinates need to be relative to the list view object. In an event handler for a mouse button event, e.g. a double click, these can be calculated by using a method on MouseButtonEventArgs object that is passed into the mouse event handler. It's already shown in the first code snippet above but just to be on the safe side here are the relevant lines again:

      private void _replacementsListView_MouseDoubleClick(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs e) {
         var mousePosition = e.GetPosition(_replacementsListView); // gets position relative to ListView
         var item = _replacementsListView.GetItemAt(mousePosition);
         ...
      }

Getting Parent Window for UserControl in WPF

Again a small item that may take you some time to search and find on the internet. Suppose you are working on a WPF based application and you have a UserControl that you want to host inside of a window. In addition you need the window within which the UserControl is hosted. To find out that parent window you might wonder whether you could use the property 'Parent'. Well that might work in some cases but in other cases it might not. For example the parent might be a Canvas and then it starts to become tricky. So here is a solution that should make it a bit easier. It uses the static method Window.GetWindow() and passes a reference to the UserControl instance as a parameter:

   public partial class FooControl : UserControl {
      public FooControl() {
         InitializeComponent();
      }

      private void _barButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) {
         var window = new MyWindow {
            WindowStartupLocation = WindowStartupLocation.CenterOwner,
            Owner = Window.GetWindow(this)
         };
         if( window.ShowDialog() == true) {
            // Ok button clicked, do something useful here...
         }
      }
   }

OpenFileDialog in .NET on Vista

I'm working on a WPF based application and as quite some applications do, I need to display an OpenFileDialog as well. Trying to be compliant with what .NET 3.5 SP 1 is offering I tried Microsoft.Win32.OpenFileDialog first. I ran into two issues. The first issue I noted was that the dialog box positioned itself just about anywhere but not centered (or at least on the same screen) as the owner window, even if I set the owner window. I did some research and found that despite .NET having been around for years (I started using it in 2001) there is still no OpenFileDialog box available for .NET that inherits from Window (or Forms previously) and can be easily customized. And therefore - as an example - there is no WindowStartupLocation property. Oh, well ... Even with the latest WPF version running on Vista the old XP style dialog box is displayed: In addition even when I passed the owner as a parameter to ShowDialog() it wouldn't center relative to that owner window. Then I tried the previous System.Windows.Forms.OpenFileDialog(). Although it is not recommended to use that namespace within WPF I thought it would still be worth a try. And voila! Here is the result under Vista: Not only did it display the correct dialogbox under Vista but in addition it's location centered on it's owner is correct as well. To achieve this you have to fiddle a bit with the namespaces as there are a few classes that have the same name in both Microsoft.Win32 and in System.Windows.Forms. Since I wanted the client code to look as simple as possible I created two very small wrapper classes. The first wrapper class is basically a replication of the Microsoft.Win32.OpenFileDialog interface (I left out most of the code since it is simply forwarding):

using SWF = System.Windows.Forms;

namespace FooApp.Presentation {
   internal class OpenFileDialog {
      public OpenFileDialog() {
         _dialog = new SWF.OpenFileDialog();
      }

      public bool? ShowDialog(System.Windows.Window window) {
         return _dialog.ShowDialog(new WindowWrapper(window)) == SWF.DialogResult.OK;
      }

      public string DefaultExt {
         get {
            return _dialog.DefaultExt;
         }
         set {
            _dialog.DefaultExt = value;
         }
      }
      public string FileName {
         get {
            return _dialog.FileName;
         }
         set { _dialog.FileName = value; 
         }
      }
      public string Filter {
         get {
            return _dialog.Filter;
         }
         set {
            _dialog.Filter = value;
         }
      }
      public string Title {
         get {
            return _dialog.Title;
         }
         set {
            _dialog.Title = value;
         }
      }

      private readonly SWF.OpenFileDialog _dialog;
   }
}

The only really interesting piece is the ShowDialog() method which takes a WPF window. System.Windows.Forms.DialogBox.ShowDialog() requires a IWin32Window instead (for easy access to the window handle), so we need a second wrapper class that looks as follows:

using System;
using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Interop;

namespace FooApp.Presentation {
   /// <summary>WindowWrapper is an IWin32Window wrapper around a WPF window.
   /// </summary>
   /// <remarks>Add System.Windows.Forms to the references of your project to
   /// use this class in a WPF application. You don't need this class in a
   /// Forms based application.</remarks>
   internal class WindowWrapper : System.Windows.Forms.IWin32Window {
      /// <summary>
      /// Construct a new wrapper taking a WPF window.
      /// </summary>
      /// <param name="window">The WPF window to wrap.</param>
      public WindowWrapper(Window window) {
         _hWnd = new WindowInteropHelper(window).Handle;
      }

      /// <summary>Gets the handle to the window represented by the implementer.
      /// </summary>
      /// <returns>A handle to the window represented by the implementer.
      /// </returns>
      public IntPtr Handle {
         get { return _hWnd; }
      }

      private readonly IntPtr _hWnd;
   }
}

With this machinery in place the client code in a WPF based application looks very familiar and simple:

var dialog = new OpenFileDialog {
   DefaultExt = ".dll",
   Filter = "Assemblies (*.dll; *.exe)|*.dll;*.exe",
   Title = "Select Assembly"
};
if( dialog.ShowDialog(this) == true ) {
   // File is selected, do something useful...
}

As a result you have it all, simple client code, the correct OpenFileDialog on Vista and the dialog centered properly on its owner. The only thing that I still can't get my head around: After 8 years of .NET we still don't have a class available that is based on Window (or Form) and can be customized. It seems as if this is a puzzle that the guys in Redmond haven't figured out yet...

Separator for Menu Item in XAML (WPF, Silverlight)

Trivial task and yet worth mentioning: You want a separator in your XAML based application (WPF or Silverlight)? Use System.Windows.Controls.Separator. In XAML write as follows:

<Menu ...
  <MenuItem ...
     <MenuItem ...
     <Separator />
     <MenuItem>
  </MenuItem>
</Menu>

In C# use:

using System.Windows.Controls;

Menu menu = new Menu();
...
menu.Items.Add(new Separator());

LinearGradientBrush with more than two GradientStop's in XAML

Using Expression Blend 2 you may believe that you can have only two GradientStop's for your LinearGradientBrush in particular if you are UI addicted as I am. The UI of Expression Blend 2 doesn't offer adding another GradientStop. But funny enough it supports them! So just go to the XAML code for, e.g. select "View XAML" from the context menu and just add another GradientStop tag to the XAML code for the GradientBrush. Once you do that you will notice that the Expression Blend 2 user interface will happily display 3 (or more) sliders as demonstrated in the screenshot. Here is an example:

<lineargradientbrush key="WindowBackgroundBrush"
  spreadmethod="Pad" endpoint="0.5,1" startpoint="0.5,0">
<gradientstop color="#FFFFDCDC" offset="0.56" />
<gradientstop color="#FFFF6F6F" offset="0.77" />
<gradientstop color="#FFFFDCDC" offset="1" />
</lineargradientbrush>

TextBox and other Controls with Transparent Background in XAML

Again a small item but something you may have searched for quite a while. In a XAML based user interface (WPF, Silverlight) if you want your control (e.g. TextBox) to NOT have a background, that is you want the background to be transparent you can do one of the following:

1. Set its Background property to 'Transparent'
2. In Expression Blend select the Background brush and set the alpha channel to zero

Sounds simple but it might take you longer than expected to find this information on the internet (unless I'm completely hopeless to enter the appropriate keywords). Most sources explain for the 100th time how to set the background color.

"The file 'x' is not part of the project or its 'Build Action' property is not set to 'Resource'"

When working on a WPF based application and using the Image control you may encounter the following error message when trying to enter the source file name for the image:

The file 'x' is not part of the project or its 'Build Action' property is not set to 'Resource'

It's not quite clear to me what causes this and it's not quite clear why Microsoft didn't fix it in Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2008 but here is a solution that may work for you:

1. Add the file to your solution.
2. Set its 'Build Action' to 'Resource' (in my case the drop-down also offers 'Embedded Resource' but that's not what you want)
3. Select the image control.
4. Set its Source property to the image file name. It should show up in the drop-down list. Next it may display the error message mentioned above. Then rename the image file to a short filename. Try setting the Source property of the Image control again. It should be fine now.

In case you want to try editing the XAML code then here is an example of what you may want set the source property to:

<Image ... source="Foo.Gui;component/pictures/myLogo.jpg" ... />

The assumptions for this example are

• Your project is named 'Foo.Gui'
• That project contains a folder named pictures
• Your picture is in that folder and also included in the project. The name of the picture is 'myLogo.jpg'

"Configuration system failed to initialize"

If you see a ConfigurationErrorsException along with the information "Configuration system failed to initialize" in your QuickWatch window then in all likelihood your app.config (or web.config) file is not correct. In my case I simply forgot to surround the membership provider section with <system.web></system.web>. Once I added those it worked like a breeze. Also, in case your custom provider cannot be found, make sure you have added the proper assembly name to the 'type' attribute for the <add> element of your provider in the <providers> section. And yes, you can test custom providers without having to deploy to or run in a web server. Just ensure your app.config file contains the bare minimum by copying some content from web.config and you should be fine. For my scenario it was sufficient to copy the config section for NHibernate, the hibernate configuration, and the declaration for my custom membership provider.

Membership Provider Implementation using NHibernate

ASP.NET allows selectively replacing provider implementations with your own custom implementation, e.g. when you want to store membership information in a database other than aspnetdb.mdf. There are more details provided on MSDN. Microsoft provides one such example implementation for ODBC in C# here. For VB.NET a sample membership provider implementation can be found here. While the provider concept is essentially nothing more than Microsoft's flavor of service trays, it is not a surprise that by default Microsoft has a preference for their own products, in particular Microsoft SQL Server. And as long as you don't have a good reason to get into the details of a custom implementation it probably is a good choice to go with what comes out of the box. However, I (and my customers) would like a little more flexibility. Since I'm also experimenting with Fluent NHibernate I am attempting to implement a custom membership provider for ASP.NET based on NHibernate. The idea is that I could use in-memory databases for testing and SQL Server or PostgreSQL for production without having to change a single line of code. All I would need is changing four lines in web.config. So goes the theory. Let's see whether practice proves it right. So far the code looks much simpler than the ODBC sample implementation and yet easier to read and understand. I'll keep you posted.

csUnit 2.6 Released

csUnit 2.6 has been released and is available for download. More information is available here. The major points of interest are:

• csUnit is now based on .NET 3.5 SP 1
• Parameterized testing moved out of experimental
• Basic support for Microsoft unit testing.
• Several bug fixes.

csUnit 2.6 supports the following unit testing frameworks:

• csUnit (no surprise!)
• NUnit 2.4.7 (.NET 2.0)
• Microsoft Unit Testing (basic support)

When executing MSFT based tests no files (except the XML results file were applicable) is generated. This means improved performance in some cases and reduced disk space requirements. Please note, that csUnit does not ship with the framework assemblies for NUnit and MSFT Unit Testing. csUnit, however does not require any of those assemblies to run. So if you use only the csUnit testing framework you can safely ignore that csUnit supports other framework as well. There is increasing interest in a 64 bit version and we are looking into that option. We have also some more ideas with regards to integrating csUnit with other tools. In addition we are taking a very tough look at the usability of the tool since we feel that there are opportunities for improvement in this area as well.

"Failed to create a service in configuration file"

You may encounter this error message when you try to add a WCF base service to your web service project. The additional text of this error message is: A child element named 'service' with same key already exists at the same configuration scope. Collection elements must be unique within the same configuration scope (e.g. the same application.config file). Duplicate key value: 'FooProject.BarService'. The cause for this error message might be that you added a service to your project with the same name previously, then deleted it again. The remnants of that deleted service prevent the new service with the same name to be created. To resolve the problem do this:

1. In the web.config file locate the XML node within the node . For instance in the above example locate the node that describes the 'BarService'. Delete that node but leave in the file.
2. In the same file locate the node with an attribute 'behaviorConfiguration' and an attribute value of 'BarService'. This node also contains the endpoints for the service. Remove this node.
3. Try again, and this time it should work.

This is not a major problem but shows that a wizard for adding a service isn't necessarily coupled with an according wizard to remove the service in case you changed your mind. Removing means deleting the BarService.svc and its implementation file, e.g. BarService.svc.cs. It doesn't, however, delete the related entries from the web.config file.