all day, no crashes:


Nick Hodges from the [TeamB] reports:
"I worked with Delphi 2005 yesterday for over 8 hours, and it didn't crash once, it performed marvelously, and I was well pleased to be using it. "

you can find the full "discussion" here:
http://groups.google.de/group/borland.public.delphi.non-technical/browse_frm/thread/36fcedcded76a2d0

obviously this caused all kinds of jokes and ironic comments, I specially liked this one:

"Sounds great, Nick. Maybe Borland could make that a selling point of the next version?
"Our cutting-edge IDE - now even better. Authenticated by TeamB to run for at least 8 hours without crashing." Eat your heart out, Microsoft.... "

now, on the serious part, that's, just plain bad and sad, when I need to create applications that run for months, and the development environment has been broken for a long time (Delphi 8 anyone?), and to get a bug fix (not all of the bugs fixed) costs you another 3,000 (Delphi 2005), and that still doesn't work right, and another bug fix will cost another 3,000, who has the money to keep up with buggy versions of software and why would you even bother?
I know from my company, we at least used to buy 200 licenses of Delphi, but that's gone, and I really don't think we'll magically go back to Delphi one day =o(

web services/FxCop gotcha: changing capitalization

I deployed a web service project yesterday and started testing and I was getting null response from the service, but of course when I was testing the web service on my machine it would work fine, so I started debugging and came to the conclusion that the test client was sending empty parameters to the service call, so I updated the web reference on the test project and everything started working on the production environment
After giving it some thought last night, I came to the conclusion that what caused this was that I put the web service project through FxCop and I had done some changes, and so I suspected that I had changed the signature of one of the functions, but only on the capitalization of the parameters, like
MyFunction(string TrackingID)
to
MyFunction(string TrackingId)

because that's what FxCop recommends, came in this morning, went to the source code repository to compare the actual version to one of the first versions and confirmed the above

so there you have it, be careful when using FxCop and changing the capitalization of variables around, if you change the capitalization of the parameters the call to the webservice/function will still work! but it will not return the expected results

copy VPN profiles to another computer

yesterday I wanted to copy the VPN profile to my new computer (I use Cisco Systems VPN Client), because I had saved the group password and didn't remember what it was and didn't want to bother the company network guy late at night, so I started lookin in the registry for the domain vpn.mycompany.com, nothing, so I searched for Cisco, nothing... I thought I could somehow export that part of the registry to the new computer with VPN installed but could not find anything that looked like my connection

so I opened a browser to
C:\Program Files\Cisco Systems\VPN Client
then saw a profiles folder there, opened and there it was, myconnection.pcf, the name of the connection I used in my laptop to connect to my company, I didn't think it was that simple but decided to give it a try anyway, I copied it to my new computer under the same location, started VPN, and the connection showed up there, double clicked it and I was connected!

while that can be a *good thing* is definetely a security issue, pretty much any program that can read files on your machine could steal this file and get access to whatever access you have at your company, pretty scary...