Red Gate SQL Toolkit: SQL Deployment example
Posted by Dave Mellors | Filed under Software Development
We are getting a lot of customers interested in using SQL Toolkit for deploying database updates to remote customer sites. Using SQL Toolkit you can distribute a single executable to your customers and use the Toolkit to do a schema comparison and then automatically update the customers database with the differences between a snapshot from your database and the customers database.
Tags: .net, Red Gate Software, SQL Comparison SDK, SQL Server
Error: The Add-in cannot be loaded by Outlook
Posted by Dave Mellors | Filed under Fixes to problems
After uninstalling Symantec Anti-virus I found that when I started Outlook 2007 it came up with the following error:
The Add-in “Symantec AntiVirus 10.1″ (c:\program files(x86)\Symantec Antivirus\vpnsece4.dll) cannot be loaded by Outlook. Please contact the Add-in manufacturer for an update. If no update is available please uninstall the Add-in.
The problem was that the addin didn’t appear in Tool->Trust Center->Add-ins so I couldn’t uninstall it from there.
Fortunately, deleting the file extend.dat from c:\users\<User Name>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook and restarting Outlook done the trick. That was obvious – NOT!!
Visual Studio development web server dynamic port numbering problem
Posted by Dave Mellors | Filed under Software Development
The problem
I had this problem in Visual Studio 2005 and now I have it in Visual Web Developer 2008 express edition where when debugging a web application using the development web server the dynamic port number used by the server didn’t match what Visual Studio had used for the web browser. It was always wrong and normally out by two or three port numbers.
For example the cassini web development server starts and I can see in the notification area what port number it uses
However the web browser started by Visual studio looks like this
Clearly that isn’t going to work.
The Solution
I managed to track down the problem to my firewall software part of the ESET Smart Security Suite. Now, I am pretty sure that when I was using Visual Studio 2005 and had the problem that I was using either McAfee, Norton/Symantec or possibly even the Outpost firewall software. My solution won’t work if you aren’t using Eset but hopefully it will help you to look in the right area.
Tags: ASP.NET, Visual Studio
Profiling with ANTS Profiler and MSTest
Posted by Dave Mellors | Filed under Software Development
After my first attempt at profiling only produced results for MSTest, I suspected that my tests were being run in a seperate process. Luckily MSTest has a /noisolation argument and once I used this everything ran as expected.
Tags: ANTS Profiler, Red Gate Software
Watin and Nunit for testing web pages
Posted by Dave Mellors | Filed under Software Development
I recently had to develop some new content for an online store. The store was developed using Lotus Domino and the code was complex for what should have been something quite simple. The deadline for completing the work was very near and I felt there was a real risk that the changes I made could break code elsewhere in the store. The Domino development environment is very poor and as far as I'm aware there isn't any unit testing software available for it. The only thing I could think of was do testing of the web pages but it was going to have to be done outside of the Domino software.
Being familiar with NUnit from my .Net development it was an easy decision to use it for this task, however I had never used NUnit for testing web pages before. A quick google and I discovered quite a few open source candidates for web testing tools that integrate with NUnit and Watin looked extremely easy to use and the web site gave a few good examples.
So, Watin and NUnit were chosen and some tests quickly developed. I've got to say Watin was extremely easy to use and within the afternoon I had a suite of tests ready and the next day I was able to start on developing the rest of the store. It worked incredibly well and I felt that my confidence was much greater in the changes I had made and I swear my actual code improved as well.
It just goes to prove you don't have to be developing a .Net application to benefit from .Net technology. I would recommend Watin and NUnit for any web developer whatever platform your developing on.
