Vlad Hrybok's Tech Notes

AT&T U-Verse Door-to-Door Sales People and Reality Are At Odds

2008-08-27T12:33:55.816-04:00

Here's what I didn't get from U-Verse despite sales woman's promise:

Static IP address: they don't do it. Period. The best they could do is to setup 28 day (instead of 24 hour) DHCP lease for my IP address.
Free receivers/STBs with U-Verse TV U100 package: Was charged for each additional receiver and had to negotiate with AT&T. Got credit to the current bill and six month promotional discount to bring the price close to the initially stated. What happens after 6 months - don't want to think about it right now.
Price lock-in: I was promised that price won't go up. Not the case - AT&T rep on the phone said there is no such commitment.

The bottom line: videotape or at least record what your sales person commits to, including your services and amount you are going to pay in recurring charges, plus make her state discounts and rebates you will receive.

AT&T U-Verse installer can wire your house with CAT5e Ethernet cable

2008-08-18T16:37:49.609-04:00

I asked U-Verse installation tech to use CAT5 Ethernet wiring instead of coax, and he didn't mind. He wired all rooms where I have TVs or computers with Ethernet CAT5e cable, and hooked them up using RG ports and a Netgear Gigabit switch AT&T provided. Needless to say, you can add any number of computers later if you deploy your own switches, preferably Gigabit ones to ensure there is plenty of bandwidth to carry multiple TV streams along with regular network traffic. Wiring up your house for Ethernet is a good freebie from AT&T. Be sure to tell your U-Verse sales person how many rooms you want to wire. Also make it clear to the installer tech which rooms with TVs and computers you want to wire BEFORE he starts. If you change your mind or remember you left out a room with a TV or PC, AT&T will charge you for added wiring.

How to Make iPhone 3G Check Email Automatically

2008-08-04T13:33:05.701-04:00

By default iPhone 3G is configured to check emails only manually. To make it check email regularly the change in the settings needs to be made. Since I spent more time than I expected finding out how to make iPhone 3G check email periodically, I decided that it's worth a blog post. I was looking all over Settings | Email, Calendar and Contacts, where I thought the setting would be, and could not find it. Instead it turned out to be Settings | Fetch New Data. That what drives frequency of email checking.

Thousands Separator When Formatting Numeric String in .NET (C#, VB.NET) Programming

2008-07-26T11:18:35.688-04:00

It's much easier to read large numbers when thousands are separated by commas. But I can never remember how the numeric format with thousands comma-separated is defined for .NET String.Format() method and for the databinding. So more as a note to self, here it is:

string

output = string .Format( "{0:#,#}" , 123456789); // Will produce 123,456,789

The same goes for data binding data sources to data controls like DataGridView. Specify format as "{0:#,#}".

Make Your ASP.NET Application FIPS Compliant for US Government Use

2008-07-23T14:23:18.934-04:00

If your ASP.NET 1.1 or 2.0 application throws "This implementation is not part of the Windows Platform FIPS validated cryptographic algorithms" exception, the easiest way to fix is to add
<machineKeyvalidationKey="AutoGenerate,IsolateApps"decryptionKey="AutoGenerate,IsolateApps"validation="3DES"decryption="3DES"/>
line to the <system.web> section of the web.config file of your application.

FIPS compliance is required for software installed on US government computers. The compliance requirement can be turned on and off.

Source: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/911722

Market Research Report on Home Servers

2008-07-21T14:35:19.419-04:00

Free Forrester Research report on Home Servers market (PDF).

UltiDev HttpVPN is in an incredible position to be the winner in this market.

AD Groups Must Have "Global" Scope to be handled properly by WSS and Reporting Services in TFS

2008-07-11T17:22:14.631-04:00

I went through the exercise of setting up Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2008, and needed to do group-level-only rights assignment, so that IT folks could manage security by simply moving people in and out of the Active Directory groups to grant/revoke TFS access rights, instead of setting up individual user rights in TFS, Windows Sharepoint Services and Reporting Services. Initially I created some groups for TFS with the "Domain local" scope, which allowed me to nest other, "Global", groups in them. But I noticed that with WSS and RS, assigning rights to "Domain local" groups does nothing - WSS and RS act as users are not members of the group, while TFS services were working properly. I had to re-create AD groups and make them of "Global" scope to make WSS and RS working properly.

Dealing with Missing Dataset Editor in Visual Studio 2008

2008-07-04T19:25:39.982-04:00

After I have upgraded the motherboard on my desktop, a few things got messed up, the most annoying of which was that Visual Studio 2008 has lost its XSD/Dataset editor. Opening a data set resulted in opening it as a text or XML, and when I right-clicked the XSD file and selected "Open With..." from the menu, the XSD editor was not there. Repairing and completely uninstalling and reinstalling VS 2008 did not help. After searching the web I found that some people have the same problem, but I found no solution for Visual Studio 2008. The solution that worked for me was described for the similar problem with Visual Studio 2005. I ran “devenv /resetsettings” and it didn't help. Then I ran “devenv /setup” and hallelujah: XSDs are opening again in the Design mode! To launch devenv you will need to start VS 2008 command prompt first.

Upgrading or Replacing a Motherboard on Windows Vista Machine

2008-06-23T14:24:24.751-04:00

(Updated 7/4/2008). Unlike Windows XP or Windows Server 2003, changing a motherboard on a machine running Windows Vista (in my case Vista Ultimate x64 with Service Pack 1) is not mentioned in the Microsoft Knowledge Base article addressing the MoBo upgrade. I tried a couple of approaches described below, but the bottom line is that the same process worked for Windows Vista, with one important difference: Vista upgrade process takes many hours. Waiting for that first reboot - the point where you replace the board - took close to two hours! And then it took a few more hours to complete the upgrade process. In the end the machine booted up and most of applications seem to be working fine.

Applications that didn't fare well are:

Daemon Tools
Symptoms: When system is booting, a cryptic error message is displayed, complaining about Windows version or something. Worse, an attempt to uninstall Daemon Tools failed. However, deleting the folder with Daemon Tools made the problem go away.
Solution: Uninstall Daemon Tools before upgrading the system, and reinstall it after upgrade is complete.
Windows Mobile Device Center
Symptoms: Connecting a smartphone caused Windows Mobile Device Center to crash.
Solution: Repair Vista installation again. After I ran an upgrade installation of Vista again (overnight, because it takes untold hours to complete), this problem went away. Please note that unlike XP, Vista does not have a separate Repair Installation option. You must run Upgrade installation (for that start installation from Windows) in order to repair existing Vista installation.
Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Dataset Editor
Symptoms: Opening and XSD schema or a Dataset in Design mode in VS 2008 resulted in opening the file either as a text, or as XML.
Solution: Please check this post.

Now a little more about how the first upgrade attempt went down.

Having to watch the upgrade screen for hours in order to intercept the first rebooting is no fun, and ironically can be mitigated by the bug on the "Vista x64 with SP1" DVD, which makes a rebooting process always stop indefinitely waiting for user input. This bug is a mixed blessing, because you can go about your normal life while waiting for the first reboot while the existentially-named "Gathering Files" step of the Vista upgrade sequence is running, but after you have replaced the main board you want the upgrade process do its reboots without your involvement, and that's where the bug turns from being a help to being a hassle. Anyway, you would be wise to allocate half-day for the motherboard upgrade on the Vista system, and by all means back up your system before the upgrade.

Failed Mobo upgrade approaches included uninstalling board-specific drivers before turning the PC off and replacing the motherboard. It didn't work at all - machine went into reboot loop. Attempts to boot in the Safe Mode stopped at BTHidMgr.sys, which I later found could be related to having Nero's InCD installed. I don't have InCD, but I do have Daemon Tools, which incidentally is the only application that stopped working after the upgrade. I never tried to remove Daemon Tools before trying the Vista upgrade path, so the next time I would recommend trying the quick "uninstall drivers, uninstall Daemon Tools/InCD, Reboot" approach first. Only if that does not work, get the huge bag of popcorn and do Vista upgrade.

Upgrading or Replacing a Motherboard on Windows Server 2003 Machine

2008-06-23T13:43:26.704-04:00

Upgrading or replacing a motherboard on a machine running Windows Server 2003 (in my case it was Windows 2003 R2 Standard Edition with Service Pack 2 x64) is relatively straightforward, and more or less works as described in the MS Knowledge Base article: you start upgrade process by running Windows setup while old motherboard is in-place, and once upgrade process reboots the machine, you intercept it by turning the computer off and replacing the MoBo, and then allow upgrade process to continue. It worked alright, and wasn't too long a process.

What the KB article didn't mention is that after the upgrade a few things may be broken or missing. In my case there were two big things broken:

IE was corrupted in a way that prevented downloading files by clicking a link. Page browsing still worked and "Save target as..." worked, but clicking a link that redirects to a file download resulted in the strange error message: "The requested look-up key was not found in any active activation". My way to fix it was to upgrade IE6 to IE7, but since IE7 download links were those redirect links that didn't work, I had to install FireFox, which had a link accessible via "Save target as", and then I used FireFox to download and install IE7.
.NET Framework 2.0 has disappeared, wracking havoc making pretty much all applications (SQL Server Management console, ASP.NET apps in IIS) not working. Fixing it was not too bad though - I downloaded and installed .NET Framework 2.0 x64, then made a couple of runs of Windows Update to ensure the server won't try to reboot soon after being brought online, rebooted the machine just in case, and that was it.

Overall entire process, although not completely seamless or worry-free, took only about an hour, not counting time required to physically replace the board.

Download WebService Studio 2.0

2008-05-19T10:32:03.716-04:00

WebService Studio 2.0 (a.k.a. Web Service Studio) is a quick & dirty web service client tool that can import your web service's WSDL and allow you to call web service's methods without having to create your own test client.

WebService Studio used to be hosted on Microsoft's GotDotNet web site, but ever since GotDotNet was replaced by Codeplex, Web Service Studio was nowhere to be found. Fortunately, some kind stranger made WSS available for download at his blog: http://mattharrah.com/blog/web-tools/net-web-service-studio-20/.

Update: BTW, if you are planning to use WebService Studio to test WCF web services, you will need to configure your web service to use basicHttpBinding instead of wsHttpBinding.