According to briankel, there's a new "hot" build of VS.NET 2005 CTP available that didn't make the attendee bag drop. Any TechEd attendee can pick a copy up at the Visual Studio booths in the Pavilion area.

Update: Michael notes that the May CTP is available for download. And in a very long time I'll have it.

Now this is just plain cool. If I had only had this several moons ago when I was developing the NNTP Posting Plugin.

Exerpt:

"yeah, you can fire a SELECT-statement against a newsserver now :-)"

Read more! GDN Workspace

Okay, so my boss has gotten my brain churning on a new project, something that isn't work related (wahoo!). As you can see from the title of this post, I'm going to attempt to make a TiVo Reader, aka - a RSS Aggregator for TiVo.

Here are my problems, though - I have about 20 days left on my free HMO trial (I think) and I cannot directly interact with the TiVo without hacking.

My plans are to create a Windows service/UI front end that will (on a timely manner) read RSS feeds and create images (probably using GDI+) to store them to the file system so the TiVo desktop server can pick them up and you can read them on your TiVo.

My boss already has a working implementation of this, however he's using Linux, some random scripts, and its just not that easy. I wanted an easy way of doing this that anyone already running the TiVo desktop software can work with.

What do you guys think? Can it be done in 20 days (so I can actually use it)? Would people want this?

PS - I've also had thoughts on using POP3 to connect to NewsGator's POP edition to download my posts, maybe a future item?

I took some more time late last week and this weekend to fix a few more known issues to my Drag and Drop List View control article on Code Project. Here's a listing of updated items:

• Fixed inability to have lines shown for Large or Small Icon listings.
• Fixed ability to fully move ListViewItems without loosing data.
• Removed hack to find the corresponding DragAndDropListView control.

Enjoy!

I took some time this morning to fix a few known issues to my Drag and Drop List View control article on Code Project. Here's a listing of updated items:

• Fixed ListView not scrolling.
• Added AllowReorder to allow turning row reordering and row transfer off.
• Added LineColor to allow you to set the color of the line drawn.

Enjoy!

The past few days I've been working on a Drag and Drop ListView that allows you to reorder list items within itself as well as transfer list items to other ListViews. I took some time tonight to write up an article and post it on Code Project. Luckily my manager allowed me to share this control with the world, and so I'm doing so.

So, what are you waiting for. Check out my Drag and Drop ListView article on Code Project.

Enjoy!

I posted this to the ASP.NET forums back in November of 2002, and, too much of my dismay, still is an issue and people are still having problems figuring this out. I don't really know how many times I've helped people with this problem, and just recently I had to do the same. So, for my own personal reference (mainly), and to share the information, I decided to re-post it in my blog...

First the good...

To upload large files, and not receive the DNS Error or the page stopping while uploading, we found several settings between the machine.config and the web.config files that you need to modify. There are specifically 3 places, 2 of which can be overwritten in your web.config file.

In your web.config, add a line under your system.web <httpRuntime executionTimeout="54000" maxRequestLength="512000" /> where execution timeout is in seconds, and maxRequestLength is in KB. executionTimeout, is basically the amount of time a thread will continue to run, and accept data by IIS/.NET. maxRequestLength, is the total amount of data that can be sent through HTTP Post to the server. The default is 4MB (4096)...and is generally set low so that your server will not be overwhelmed by possible DoS attacks.

In your machine.config, modify responseDeadlockInterval to equal the same amount of time for executionTimeout. responseDeadlockInterval, is basically the amount of time that the Client's browser and Server will continue to communicate. Every several minutes or so, the server polls the client, asking if they have any more information to send, if they do not receive anything back after several times, then the server stops the current thread and all communication is stopped. This is the cause of the DNS Error you may see sometimes.

These 3 changes will allow you to successfully upload large files.

Now...the bad...

Memory deallocation is a major issue, that has no current solution. Whenever you upload files via HTTP Post, the file is stored in the memory of the aspnet_wp.exe process, and never deallocates completely (if your lucky a few MB gets released). One of the config settings for .NET processes, allows them to utilize 60% of physical memory on the server, at which point the process is recycled and all execution is stopped. Whenever a new upload is started, though, some memory is de-allocated, but not enough compared to memory that was used in prior uploads.

Microsoft is aware of this problem, and has assured us that it will be fixed with some upcoming releases of the .NET framework. Some solutions that they suggested to us, was to use Classic ASP, Third Party Components, or Custom Built ISAPI filters. Because of our solution we were using this in, we could do none of the three, so we topped the server out at 2GB of RAM. This has provided us with some breathing room if several people start uploading huge files, and gives us enough time to restart IIS if we start nearing 1.3GB of RAM being used by aspnet_wp.exe.

Ahh, so I just had a revisit of why For loops are not as good as While loops sometimes. Most commonly, I try to avoid using While loops, but after trying to convert this Master Detail example I realized that I needed a While loop instead of a For loop.

Why? Well, if you look at that example, it shows that it is using a post processing incrementor, and well, VB.NET doesn't have this. So, I had to come up with the same basic functionality, but it posed definate problems because it wasn't going through all of the rows in the DataGrid.

My first attempt created a variable for the upper bound item which I had to go to, however this variable had to be modified when a new row was added (so it would get to all of the rows). Well, after playing with it for awhile, I realized that when using a For loop, you cannot increment that upper bound variable and have it applied on the fly. The For loop takes whatever it is and stores the value and not the reference to the variable.

Ahh - so this is where the While loop comes in. After changing the loop to it, I was able to increment my upper bound variable and gain access to all of the rows in the datagrid.

So remember:

Dim i As Integer
Dim j As Integer = 10

For i = 0 To j
  If somethingIsTrue Then
    i += 1
    j += 1
  End If
Next

will not work, but:

Dim i As Integer = 0
Dim j As Integer = 10

While i <= j
  If somethingIsTrue Then
    i += 1
    j += 1
  End If
  i += 1
End While

Will work!

Sounds like a nice headline for a newspaper, huh. I thought so too. Anyway, to the point of this post, I was struggling with formatting a Guid to the "registry" way of viewing it, you know - 32 digits separated by hyphens with curly brackets around it.

1st attempt - Code: String.Format("{{0}}", myguid)
1st attempt - Result: "{0}" <-- Which is very weird indeed, maybe a bug?

And then whammo! It dawned on me. I had just recently seen this post by Erik Porter...but I really didn't remember the meat of what Guid.ToString("N") meant (I hadn't pulled the post up yet).

2nd attempt - Code: myguid.ToString("N")
2nd attempt - Result: 23452345234235235242 (I know this isn't 32 digits)

Err - so that wasn't quite what I expected, but then again, I really wasn't sure what that "N" did. Ohh, so why not just open up the SDK docs, Microsoft had to have put something in there for the format I wanted. Ahh, sure enough, theres a "B" that gets what I want.

3rd attempt - Code myguid.ToString("B")
3rd attempt - Result: {2315123-2314-....}

Wahoo, Success! Man am I glad Erik saw & blogged about this the other week. Time saved, about 15 - 20 minutes wondering why the heck I'm getting {0} for the format of {{0}}. Thanks Erik!

PS - Whoever said blogs weren't a good source of information.