Aaron Zupancic's Blog

.NET Regular Express Assembly Builder Tool (v2.0.0.3)

Zupancic Perspective (v2.0) — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 17:21:32 GMT

A few weeks ago I made some updates to my Regular Expression Assembly Builder that I wrote some time back. These updates have long been requested by users and I finally carved out some time to get them implemented. These are the new features in verion...(read more)

Caution: Avoid Using SELECT * in a SQL View

Zupancic Perspective (v2.0) — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 00:47:24 GMT

Suppose you have a table (tblDemo) and a view (vwDemo) over that table that joins tblDemo to another table to retrieve their results. The view might resemble the following: CREATE VIEW vwDemo AS SELECT d.*, o.OtherField01, o.OtherField02 FROM tblDemo...(read more)

Utah .NET User Group - Silverlight 2

Zupancic Perspective (v2.0) — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 06:14:44 GMT

I had a lot of fun preparing for and presenting on Silverlight 2 at the Utah .NET User Group the other night. It was a great evening. Thanks to all that come out to participate and help bolster the .NET development community. :) Read More......(read more)

Mysterious 32-bit on 64-bit Registry Redirection Dilemma

Zupancic Perspective (v2.0) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 02:37:44 GMT

Alright, this has been a downright stumper and I'm currently at a loss. For this reason, therefore, I'm opening up to the community to see if anyone out there has any recommendations to this dilemma. The issue revolves around running a 32-bit...(read more)

Battling SQL User Instance failures to start

Zupancic Perspective (v2.0) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 11:00:03 GMT

This evening, I upgraded an installation of SQL Server Express 2005 to its 2008 counterpart because I have a few small websites that I've developed that rely on SQL User Instances. The upgrade was smooth enough, but I was promptly and unexpectedly...(read more)

PDC 2008 - Day 01 (Silverlight 2.0)

Zupancic Perspective (v2.0) — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 03:26:17 GMT

I arrived to PDC 2008 (Professional Developers Conference) in Los Angeles, California yesterday and I can honestly say that the women have it lucky in one regard: no bathroom lines. :) Today I had the opportunity to attend a great pre-conference session...(read more)

The Case of the Invalid Action in Microsoft CRM 4.0

Zupancic Perspective (v2.0) — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 17:06:29 GMT

When I awoke this morning I was greeted with a high priority email indicating that our CRM server down. I promptly discovered that we were receiving a very descriptive "Invalid Action: The selected action was not valid" error message. I quickly...(read more)

UCNUG Meeting - Wednesday Sept 17, 2008

Zupancic Perspective (v2.0) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 18:36:12 GMT

Tomorrow night I have the opportunity to speak at the monthly Utah County .NET User Group meeting. Here's a synopsis of the talk: Delving Into the WinForms Control Designer Experience The .NET framework makes writing WinForms controls accessible to...(read more)

Resolving Localized System Account Names

Zupancic Perspective (v2.0) — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 01:08:42 GMT

When granting database permissions to built-in security accounts you need to be aware of potentially localized account names. Just this past week I ran into an issue when attempting to execute a SQL Server database script on a German server OS. The database...(read more)

Watch How and When You Check For Windows Themes

Zupancic Perspective (v2.0) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 05:50:27 GMT

I ran across some interesting (read 'unexpected) behavior the other day when writing a .NET WinForms control. This particular control has some logic that executes if and only if the host OS has visual themes enabled. In order to check for the existence...(read more)

Registering Design-Time Changes Programmatically in Custom .NET Controls

Zupancic Perspective (v2.0) — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 01:47:20 GMT

I've been putting together a nice little WinForms Wizard control recently that had a few twist and turns to its development. In particular, I wanted to make the design-time experience a good one for the end user. I wanted to support design-time navigation...(read more)

Using an SGEN.exe MSBuild task in TFS Build

Zupancic Perspective (v2.0) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:06:57 GMT

Earlier this year I posted an article demonstrating how to use the SGEN.exe utility to generate a serialization assembly. The article identified how to create a custom MSBuild task by editing the project file (e.g., csproj). I've recently come to...(read more)

Repairing TFS's Team Explorer Build Node in Visual Studio 2008

Zupancic Perspective (v2.0) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 05:34:53 GMT

I've had an issue on two computers (my primary development machine and a virtual pc dev box) which I was finally able to solve today after many hours of frustrated searching and experimenting. Interestingly, this issue only affected my two machines...(read more)

VS 2008 SP1 Fixes Missing .resources Issue

Zupancic Perspective (v2.0) — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 22:27:22 GMT

I upgraded my Visual Studio 2008 installation the other day to SP1 and everything went beautifully. One of the issues that Microsoft fixed centered around the naming of embedded binary resource files. Traditionally, binary resource files have an extension...(read more)

Succumbing to Peer Pressure

Zupancic Perspective (v2.0) — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 07:18:27 GMT

I finally gave in (for better or for worse) and signed up on facebook.com this past weekend. I've always had an aversion to such social networking sites for one reason or another. In fact, facebook.com and myspace.com have long been blocked on my...(read more)