Cameron Fletcher

An error was encountered. Please return to the previous page and try again.

If you are trying to use the ASP.NET website administration tool and are getting a web page stating "An error was encountered. Please return to the previous page and try again." it is possible that you have the same error as me (see below). Another symptom is clicking on the "How do I use this tool?" link and being presented with a message stating "Tool Has Timed Out". 

It would appear that Microsoft, in its wisdom, has developed a tool that cannot handle the path of the web application it is designed to administer containing non-standard characters. Or spaces. To fix, simply copy your solution to a path that doesn't contain any non-standard characters. Or spaces.

eg. Changing C:\Will (Not.) Work\see.sln to C:\WillWork\see.sln

It's an easy fix to a problem most likely created by a tool both from, and within, Microsoft. 

Posted: Jun 16 2009, 12:41 by flet0496 | Comments (1) |

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Sentence and Word Analysis #2

This as part two of my post on sentence and word analysis. In part one I discussed my motives for analysing the RSS feed in question. In this post I shall be building upon my initial findings and presenting the C# and SQL code that I used to do so.

I have continued to run the RSS reader periodically and now have 284 job descriptions to analyse. I have run through the initial results and identified the words and sentences that are irrelevant and placed these into a keywords table so that I may strip them from my results. This was quite a lengthy process as there were a significant number of these to exclude - nearly a thousand. Following that, I looked through the results and because of the different permutations of the keywords that I was looking for it was evident that I would need to look within the top 100 words/phrases to identify the ones that I was interested in. I made a decision to leave in keywords that related to job skills in addition to computer languages.

The top 100 keyword/skills results from analysis of 284 job descriptions. The analysis took 9.5 minutes to run.

A link to a backup of the database may be found here: jobs.zip (392.41 kb)
You will need to restore this into SQL Server before the .NET code (below) will work.

A link to the .NET code (C#) is here: RssReader.zip (3.48 kb)
You will need to modify the App.Config file to point to your RSS feed and database.

To run the analysis on the sentances in the database you'll need to execute the 'analyse' stored procedure. Once that has finished execuiting you'll need to perform a select from the 'analysis_results' view to view the results.

Posted: Jun 09 2009, 14:21 by flet0496 | Comments (1) |

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Telephones and 24 (the TV series)

Having watched 24 (the TV series), I have always wanted a Cisco phone that would ring with the same ringtone as used by CTU. To get the ringtone onto the phones I needed to enable the TFTP server on the router and edit the ringlist.xml file as so:

<CiscoIPPhoneRingList>
  <Ring>
    <DisplayName>CTU 24</DisplayName>
    <FileName>ctu.raw</FileName>
  </Ring>
</CiscoIPPhoneRingList>

Having tried to follow the Cisco guidelines to create the ringtone myself (unsuccessfully – it kept skipping and not repeating itself correctly), I stumbled upon a site that allowed me to download a ringtone that worked. That ringtone can be found here: ctu.raw. If you copy the ringtone onto your router and reset the phones then you should be in business.

Below are some images of my Cisco 7912G phone hooked up to Unified CallManager Express runningon my Cisco 2801 router.

Logged on to Cisco Unified CallManager Express, power suppiled via PoE.

Selection of the CTU 24 ringtone from the settings menu. 

Posted: Jun 09 2009, 13:01 by flet0496 | Comments (1) |

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My Server Room

Below are some images of my server room. It's located as far away from earshot as possible which isn't easy considering it's in a small flat! 

Well, here's my server cabinet. You can see I've still got 6U free, so that should leave space for UPS, NAS, and a few more servers!

Here's an up close image of my Cisco 2801 router and my Linksys SWR2024W switch. You can also see a bit of my 48-port patch panel.

Here is my messy wiring. About 40 of the ports are patched to outlets but you can see I currently have hardly any of them connected. I'm waiting on patch cables as I have a very low success rate when crimping my own.

Posted: Jun 09 2009, 11:39 by flet0496 | Comments (0) |

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Flat Schematics

Below is are the schematics for my flat. Alternativly, you can click on this link to view a PDF of the schematics: flatschematics.pdf (21.67 kb)

Posted: Jun 01 2009, 11:11 by flet0496 | Comments (0) |

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Sentence and Word Analysis #1

I was not put forward for a job recently because I had Windows Forms experience and not WinForms experience stated on my CV. The same agency also said I had not been singled out as they were looking for someone who had worked with MVC, unlike me as I had only worked with the Model View Controller framework.

I have come to understand that I have to not only write my CV to appeal to prospective employers who should know what I’m talking about but also for the multiple layers of incompetent individuals though which my CV must make its journey before arriving before someone who can actually read. I have come to refer to these individuals as the jam layer because whilst I am the icing on the cake (and most of the time, the cake itself - that is, after all, what I get paid for) they are the jam in-between because they have jam for brains.

So, I decided to analyse the results from a jobserve.com search for .NET roles based in the UK and identify the top used keywords and phrases so that I could litter my CV with them in the hope that someone with jam for brains would identify the correlation, even if they don't understand what that means.

To achieve this completed the following steps:

1. I wrote an RSS reader in C# that read my RSS feed (for .NET jobs based in UK) that I'd set up through jobserve.com.
2. The RSS reader then iterated through each posting and called a stored procedure in my SQL database that added the content of the job posting to a sentences table as a string.
3. I then had a stored procedure that split the string into words and added them to a words table along with details of the sentence they were in and their position within that sentence.
4. The more complex bit was looping through the words in each sentence concatenating from one to ten consecutive words together throughout the sentence and placing the resultant string into an analysis table.
5. I then performed a simple groupby query eliminating the conjunctives (and, or, as, etc.) to retrieve the results.

This took me a couple of hours and as jobserve.com only allows you to receive the last 24 hours worth of job postings via RSS I present you with the top 30 ranked words/phrases from 75 job postings (below). The rank column details the number of occurrences of that word within the 75 postings.

Annoyingly, these results are probably more use to anyone wishing to write an appealing CV profile about themselves. For my purposes I probably need a larger dataset to work on – I reckon about 500-600 job postings and more granular analysis of wordsets ie. group words into technical, competency based, business area, etc. – and also to look into maybe the top 100 from specific wordsets rather than just the top 30 generic words.

Part two of this post may be found here.

Posted: May 30 2009, 11:59 by flet0496 | Comments (2) |

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Microsoft Certifications

To help bolster the qualifications section of my CV I have decided to sit some Microsoft Certifications. This means I can start to use Microsoft Certified logos on correspondance and perhaps prospective employers will realise how awesome I am. I have decided to go down the .NET 2.0 route then sit the upgrade exams for .NET 3.5 (which haven't been released yet have now been released).

My planned Microsoft Certification roadmap can be found below. This is split down into phases in which I will do the exams. I have placed in brackets after each exam the number of people who currently hold the certification worldwide.

UPDATE: The exams that I've passed are marked with the pass dates in square brackets.

PHASE 1
70–536: MCP - Application Development Foundation (2,402,263 - MCP) [22/05/2009]
70–526: MCTS - .NET Framework 2.0: Windows Applications (20,194) [04/06/2009]
70–548: MCPD - Windows Developer (3,797) [08/06/2009]

PHASE 2
70-433: MCTS - SQL Server 2008, Database Development (456) [14/07/2009]
70-451: MCITP - Database Developer 2008 (213) [21/07/2009]

PHASE 3
70–528: MCTS - .NET Framework 2.0: Web Applications (43,207) [30/07/2009]
70–529: MCTS - .NET Framework 2.0: Distributed Applications (10,202) [03/07/2009]
70–549: MCPD - Enterprise Application Developer (7,717)

PHASE 4
70-432: MCTS - SQL Server 2008, Implementation and Maintenance (854)
70-450: MCITP - Database Administrator 2008 (358)

PHASE 5 (upgrade - this will also earn me 4 x MCTS in .NET 3.5)
70-568: MCPD - Enterprise Application Developer 3.5 (Part 1)
70-569: MCPD - Enterprise Application Developer 3.5 (Part 2) (25)

Posted: May 18 2009, 11:52 by flet0496 | Comments (2) |

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Internal Interfaces

Occasionally there is the need to expose, for the purposes of an API or such like, a property of a class that has different external and internal implementations. Consider the code below: a person class with an Id property that is set to -1 by default with an external get property and an internal set property.

public class Person
{
    private int _id = -1; // default value
 
    public int Id
    {
        get { return this._id; }
        internal set { this._id = value; }
    }
}

If there are several classes that implement the Id property in this manner and there is a need to reference them through a common interface externally then implementing the following on each of the classes should be sufficient:

public interface IIdentifiable
{
    int Id { get; }
}

However, to reference these classes internally using the same common interface may be insufficient as it does not allow a call to the internal set property. Clearly it would not be efficient, or necessarily easy, to cast the classes to their individual types prior to making the call. One solution is to use a separate interface for internal operations; an interface with internal scope:

internal interface IIdentifiableInternal : IIdentifiable
{
    new int Id { get; set; }
}

Here, we implement the IIdentifiable interface and declare the Id property as new, effectively hiding its IIdentifiable implementation. We don’t reflect this in quite the same manner in our implementation of the IIdentifiableInternal interface on our class though. Instead, we explicitly implement the IIdentifiableInternal interface:

public class Person : IIdentifiableInternal
{
    private int _id = -1; // default value
 
    public int Id
    {
        get { return this._id; }
    }
 
    int IIdentifiableInternal.Id
    {
        get { return this._id; }
        set { this._id = value; }
    }
}

The external members of the class now include the public get method of the Id property, as does the public IIdentifiable interface. However, internally the class can be referenced using the IIdentifiableInternal interface which allows access to both the get and set methods of the property.

What has been demonstrated is how to take a number of classes with common members that have both public and internal scope and provide a means to reference them through a common interface, both internally and externally.

As a final point, if you have a linked library which you want to have access to the internal interfaces then you can use the following assembly attribute to expose internal to the specified assembly:

[assembly: InternalsVisibleTo("MyLibrary.InterfaceExample")]

Posted: May 09 2009, 18:51 by flet0496 | Comments (3) |

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Overridden method OnMeasureItem is not being invoked

I just ran into an issue when subclassing the ComboBox class whereby the OnMeasureItem method that I was overriding was not being called. I had set the DrawMode to OwnerDrawFixed in the constructor for my ComboBox which had in turn filtered through to the designer (non-default value). When I amended the value in the constructor to OwnerDrawVariable the change did not then filter through to the designer (no surprises there). The result being that my constructor had the following code:

this.DrawMode = DrawMode.OwnerDrawVariable;

However, this was clearly at odds with the designer as illustrated in the figure below:

In order to stop this occurring again, and to stop any modification of the DrawMode via the designer, I changed the line in the constructor of my ComboBox to reference the base like so:

base.DrawMode = DrawMode.OwnerDrawVariable;

I then added the DrawMode property with the new keyword to replace the base version (see below). You need to include the property setter as the designer will still try to assign a value to DrawMode.

[Browsable(false)]
public new DrawMode DrawMode
{
    get { return base.DrawMode; }
    set { }
}

After tidying up the designer code everything works like a dream.

Posted: May 04 2009, 18:21 by flet0496 | Comments (1) |

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Failed to create web application: /Root/RequestHandlerExt

If you are on step 3 of the 172 steps required to install OCS 2007 and feel like banging your head against any wall you can find to relieve the pain then it is not unlikely that you are in the position I have been in all day and have been presented with the following error message during the webcomponents.msi installation against (in my case) Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7:

Failed to create web application. (-2147024809 /Root/RequestHandlerExt )

The log file, which the OCS installer recommends you look at, contains something like this:

WriteMetabaseChanges: Error 0x80070057: failed to create web application: /Root/RequestHandlerExt
Error 26105. Failed to create web application. (-2147024809 /Root/RequestHandlerExt )
MSI (s) (F8!14) [15:33:01:268]: Product: Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2, Web Components Server -- Error 26105. Failed to create web application. (-2147024809 /Root/RequestHandlerExt )
WriteMetabaseChanges: Error 0x80070057: failed to create ASP App

First check that you have the IIS 6.0 compatibility tools installed (see Lee Desmond’s blog for more info). If you have done this and are still getting this error then several sites mention performing an uninstall of OCS, IIS followed by a re-install as a solution.

In my case this was not really an option as I had several websites running on this computer already. It turns out that this was the issue (unsurprisingly, really) and that the installer is looking for the Default Web Site. I performed the migration of site id 1 to a new site and manually revoked the original configuration of the default web site. The install completed successfully after this. I would say to watch out for the IIS7 mmc snap-in and its massive inability to handle renaming of websites with host headers if you’re attempting this yourself and have sites with host headers, obviously.

Posted: Apr 20 2009, 16:21 by flet0496 | Comments (2) |

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