Due to popular demand I (finally) got around to updating my Regular Expression Assembly Builder Tool.  If you're not familiar with it, you can read more about it and its history here and here, but suffice it to say, it's a handy little utility that compiles regular expressions into their own assembly (dll).  There is a lot of power behind this, not the least of which is that you can effectively pre-compile your regular expressions for your application and gain some performance improvements.  You can read more about it in my aforementioned posts.

The updates to the utility include the following:

• NEW: Upgraded to version 2.0.0.0.
• NEW: Upgraded to VS.NET 2008, .NET 3.5.
• UPD: Added resizability to regex dialog, supporting a larger text field for regex entry, line breaks, tabs (with a tabstop of 3), etc.
• NEW: Added scrollability to editor panels rather than not at all.
• NEW: Added support for a command-line-specified DLL to load.
• NEW: Added support for hierarchical (namespace) representation of regular expressions.
• UPD: Context menus add regular expressions to the hierarchy based on the user's selection.
• FIX: Fixed issue involving the various RegexOptions checkboxes where an invalid configuration of options could be selected (particularly involving ECMAScript, Multiline, and Singleline.

So, apart from some nicer UI interactions than in previous versions, this version most notably includes

1. Organization of your regular expressions my namespace.
2. Alphabetical listing of regular expressions.
3. The ability to provide an argument on the command-line designating the DLL to load.

Let me know what you like and/or don't like about it and I'll see what I can do to improve it for you!

Download it here

Enjoy!

I was working with a customer today that, after upgrading to the latest version of our software, was running into an error that I had never seen before.  The product, as you may be aware, is a web-based Product Configurator for Microsoft CRM.  Historically, our upgrades have been very clean and easy, but today the customer received the following error message when attempting to launch the application:

The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.

The error was occurring at launch (during the initialization of ASP.NET) and was caused by an IOException.  Inspecting the call stack it was apparent that it was happening during the System.Web.HttpRuntime.FirstRequestInit() method while loading the assemblies from the \bin folder (System.Web.HttpRuntime.PreloadAssembliesFromBin() method).

My first thought was that something security-wise was amiss.  So, via Windows Explorer, we inspected the security properties on the folder for the website.  Sure enough, some credentials were messed up so we fixed those; but the application continued to fail with the same error.

Something in the back of my mind told me it was still security related.  After considering it a bit the answer was obvious.  We proceeded to open \Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\vX.X.X\Temporary ASP.NET Files to the folder for the application.  Upon drilling down the folder tree Windows reported the exact same error.

To fix it, all we had to do was fix the security settings on the folder, perform a CHKDSK, and delete the application's folder in the \Temporary ASP.NET Files folder.  After that, everything ran beautifully.

As you're probably already aware, Microsoft recently RTM'd Visual Studio 2008.  Well, I had a moment to come up for air the other day and decided it was time to upgrade my machine to this newest encarnation.  I must say that the installation was probably one of the easiest I've ever done.  The product installed very smoothly without even a hiccup.  Also, much to my delight, ReSharper 3.0 continues to work flawlessly with VS2008!

Having played around with the Beta and CTP versions of VS2008 I was very excited to move onto the released version.  It's flat out awesome!

Highly recommended!

As a special treat this year my company was kind enough to bequeath me a copy of Adobe Creative Suite 3: Master Collection.  I've been giddy with delight as I'm a long time user of both Photoshop and Illustrator and absolutely swear by the products.  I've had it sitting on my desk here for a few days and just tonight am getting the opportunity to install it.

Of course, as with most everything, things don't always go according to plan.  Not two seconds after starting to install, I was greeted with the most pleasant and informative error message and the setup aborted:

Setup has encountered an error and cannot continue.  Contact Adobe Customer Support for assistance.

Internal Error 2739

Though slightly disheartened, I sought a resolution on Adobe's site and didn't find anything.  However, after a single search on everyone's favorite search engine I found a resolution.  Though the solution is simple (regsvr32 jscript.dll) I would have never guessed it.  Thanks, Gopinath M for the great tech tip!