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Microsoft has released a static code analysis tool called the Source Code Analyzer for SQL Injection tool. It will check for SQL injection vulnerabilities in active server pages (ASP) code.

If you are in Perth this Thursday, July 3rd, join us at the Perth .NET Community of Practice for a selection of short talks on topics relating to the 2008 launch of Visual Studio and the .NET framework. Each talk will be approximately 10 – 15 minutes long with questions between topics. More details here.

Alistair Waddell: LINQ to SQL
Dave Gardner: New Web development features in Visual Studio 2008
Mike Minutillo: New C# 3.0 language features
Piers Williams: Continuous Integration with Team Build
Mitch Denny: Building a Testable Workflow

One way of figuring out what represents good design is by looking at bad design. Web Pages That Suck by Vincent Flanders is a great way of doing that. It’s also a laugh! I took a peek at one of this year’s contenders, Havenworks and I fear I will never be the same again!

Listen up homes!! MIT OpenCourse have published this introduction to solving things without proofs or exact calculations: Street-Fighting Mathematics. The course notes can be downloaded in a single .pdf here.

This course teaches the art of guessing results and solving problems without
doing a proof or an exact calculation. Techniques include extreme-cases
reasoning, dimensional analysis, successive approximation, discretization,
generalization, and pictorial analysis.

I posted a link to this MS learning site a while back; I was over there browsing this evening and noticed something odd. Does someone at Microsoft have a sense of humor? Scroll down to the “Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP)” section. It clearly states the certification “United States History Major” !!

Developers love free stuff right? Fancy a chance of getting a free .NET ebook or if your luck is in, the complete Manning .NET library?

To enter click on the advert below. One person will be drawn every day through July 17th, and one lucky entrant will receive Manning’s complete .NET library. (Thanks to Jon Skeet’s blog for the heads up)

If you are developing for a mobile device using the .NET Compact Framework and you get either of these error messages: “Could not find resource assembly” or “An error message cannot be displayed because an optional resource assembly containing it cannot be found”, the primary error is not caused because it could not find the resource assembly. [Both error messages are exactly the same. The first one was used in .NET CF V1 and second one is from .NET CF V2]

Basically, this means that some exception has occurred in your application for which a corresponding error message string could not be loaded due to a missing language dependent resource assembly. Having the actual error message would obviously be helpful in debugging what went wrong.

Why is the resource assembly missing? Quoting directly from the .NET Compact Framework team blog:

“Since the user is never expected to see this error message if the program works as expected and all exceptions are handled appropriately, it was decided (due to size constraints) that the resource assembly that has these error strings are never put on a user’s device. Thus the main target audience of these error strings are developers who would like to debug issues. Hence, when you do an F5 deploy onto the device, the System.SR.dll assembly which have these error strings are copied to the device and the developer can see the error messages. But in case .Net Compact Framework is installed from a redistributable or you are using .Net Compact Framework that come with the device, the System.SR.dll is not present on the device. Hence, if the application did come upon an exceptional condition that wasn’t handled by the application, this “Could not find resource assembly” message would be shown to the user.”

Personally, I think it was a mistake to not install the English resource assemblies by default. If you install the System.SR cab for your language then this error message should be replaced by the localized error message for what actually went wrong.

If Visual Studio does not install the SR cab when you deploy your solution, you can manually copy it to the device and run it there. Note: The cabs are named System_SR_ for non windows mobile devices (e.g. CE 4.2) and System_SR__wm for windows mobile devices.

With Visual Studio 2005 installed all the SR cabs can be found here:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SmartDevices\SDK\CompactFramework\2.0\v2.0\WindowsCE\Diagnostics

Or if you installed from a distributable they can be found here:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft.NET\SDK\CompactFramework\v2.0\WindowsCE\Diagnostics

A while back, I was talking to a developer colleague about checked exceptions and discussing why they had not been added to C#. I came across this old article, The Trouble with Checked Exceptions: A Conversation with Anders Hejlsberg which explains the reasoning behind not including them.

Nothing new (it happened back in May 2008) but the .NET Compact Framework team blog has merged into the Mobile Developer blog, and also includes Silverlight for mobile.

The C# FAQ for the microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.csharp newsgroup is a useful C# resource maintained by Jon Skeet.