Well as I alluded to in a few previous posts, I was running into issues with my 1.1 No-Touch Deployment smart clients I developed for a client of mine that ran across the internet.  Well I've finally found something official from Microsoft in regards to this issue.

Bug Details: .NET Framework 2.0 breaks No-Touch Depoyment (HREF exe) apps from the Internet

There are a few workaround's posted which you may get varying mileage out of.  I in fact took the third suggestion when I converted them to 2.0.  This actually worked out pretty well and from the looks of things, this was really the only good solution that worked in our situation.

This should be considered pretty critical as it breaks existing code which can cause great problems.  In our case, it was easy enough to convert them to ClickOnce apps which enabled us to take advantage of some other enhancements, but for others this may not be so simple or feasible.  Non of the other solutions look appealing either at least for our application. 

Having used Outlook for years and years, there is one feature I've always wished was there, though it has never been a show stopper, just a nice to have.  A Bounce feature that would take an email meant for someone else and send it on to them as if it was originally sent to them.  I know, nothing that couldn't be simulated with a forward.  I've also seen some 3rd party utils out there that have functionality like that (as well as some other email clients)....I've just always been curious why Outlook has never offered that feature.  Even just a button in the toolbar to bounce the current email would be fine with me.

At a former employer, one of my last tasks for them was to write an email client that integrated with their other custom software (they didn't want to integrate their software with Outlook, but wanted to write their own package to distribute to their clients).  The functionality rivaled Outlook (it was when Outlook 98 was the current version). 

One of the extra's I added was a bounce button.  It was one of the favorite features for them and came in handy for them.  The people using the client were often small offices that would have a central email setup (like a sales email) where all emails would come into.  The software did implement rules which could filter some out to the correct users, but often it would take a human eye to determine who the email should go to.  The bounce feature worked great for the situation as the email appeared to come from the original sender and was easily replied to.

While I don't have a huge need for this feature in Outlook, unless I am missing something, it seems that this might be a nice feature to have for some people.

I was trying out the VS 2005 Web Deployment Projects addin on one of my websites.  Wanted to merge all to one named DLL.  I was getting an error "Aspnet_merge Exited with Code 1" with very little other detail.  After some digging found the solution (at least in my case).  It appears that I had a duplicate class name in my project (actually had two of them).  Once those were cleaned up, build succeeded without problems.

Maybe this is something that is well know already, but thought I would share this with my few readers.  We just moved into our new home about 2 months ago and our 4 year old son decided (without our knowledge) to take a cup of grape juice in the the living room which has a very light colored carpet.  Needless to say, the worst happened, he tripped and grape juice all over.  Not only the main spilll, but splatter's of grape juice everywhere.

Being that we just moved in, we still have yet to unpack a lot of stuff and of course all of our carpet cleaners / stain removers could not be found.  We didn't want to let it sit for too long while we ran to the local store to grab something to remove the stain, but we had also heard that if you tamp the grape juice with towels, while it will soak up some of the juice, it often pushes it deeper into the carpet, making it even harder to clean up later.

Then I remembered my general science and remembered how well salt soaks up liquid, I thought what the heck, we'll give it a shot.  Dumped the salt on the stains and immediately the salt started to clump as it soaked up the juice.  I used the salt very liberally all over the stain and let it sit for about 30 minutes. 

After sitting, we vacuumed up the salt and believe it or not, most of the stain was gone.  While at the main spill you could still see the purple tint of the grape juice, it was tremendously lightened and alot of the secondary splatters were gone altogether.  After going to the store then and purchasing some chemical remedies, the stain was completely lifted and you'd never know anything happened.

Next time we have a staining liquid spill I'll be going for the table salt instead of the paper towels.

Here's a nice list of the new and improved security feature in the 2.0 framework.

New and Improved Security Features in the .NET 2.0 Framework

Good reference.  I need to go through this and learn what I can, I'm sure I'll have some comments as I read through this and play with some new things.

Now this is slick.  Thanks to Scott Munro where I first saw this.  I've often wanted to see the sizes of folders, but always seemed to be more of a hassle than it needed to be, but the FolderSizes tool (freeware from SourceForge) does just the trick.  You have to add a new column to your Windows Explorer view and it will display not only the file sizes but also the folder size for subfolders.  The calculations run in the background and I really didn't notice any slowdown as this background count runs.  In the past I've used the properties on the folder and/or other 3rd party tools to display folder size, now it's all right there in the explorer window.  Very slick.

Reading Geoff's post about the VS launch got me thinking when he made the following statement:

I'm sick of clunky-to-say product names. While I thought WCF and WWF were bad (and are :) VS, SQL and Biztalk are also bad.  The 98 in Windows 98 is easy to say. So's the 2000 in Windows 2000. 2002, 2003, 2005 - none of these roll off the tongue anywhere nearly so easily. After spending the day where the most common sentence included the phrase '...Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and Biztalk Server 2006...', damn I'm sick of both hearing and saying these lines - all those 2005s get very clunky when wrapping your mouth around them. From now on, I'm going to refer to each one as VS8, SQL9 and Biztalk3 (I think it's three...). If you don't know your version numbers, look them up! Actually, I'm still quite partial to the code names. You'll still likely still hear me say Whidbey and Yukon too.

I never really thought about it before, but I do tend to shortcut some of those names when I'm talking with people as well.  Windows 98 became 98, Windows 2000 became 2000, Windows XP is just XP, Visual Studio .NET simply became .NET until 2003 came out then I had to start distinguising between them by using 1.0 and 1.1 respectively.  Now with 2005 out, it's become 2.0.  I do still use the code names quite often as well, I called Windows 95, Chicago for quite some time.  Luckily, most of the people I talk with understand and use similar if not the same shortcuts. But I realize now that I should be careful when talking with others.

Be interesting to hear how others shortcut the names.

As I mentioned before, I had some issues with our smart clients developed under the 1.1 framework after installing 2.0 on machines.  I was also running into the same issue almost randomly on some machines that did not have 2.0 installed.  They would work for a few days, then for a few days trigger the file download dialog.   Never really figured out the reason.

Our solution was to convert our smart clients to 2.0 framework.  While at first I was nervous about taking that step, what a blessing it has been and it was very simple to do.  The wizard converted everything over with very few problems.  Only had a few things that I had to change due to being made obsolete in the new framework.  Other than that all worked fine, for the most part. 

The biggest issue I ran into was where I was doing some asynchronous FTP transfer and updating a progress bar.  You can probably guess the problem I ran into.  Cross thread issues updating the UI.  Took care of those problems with a few Invoke and all was well (nope didn't take time to use BackgroundWorker).  I should have caught those in the old version, but never ran into troubles and 1.1 let you get away with it without warnings.

The other added benefit is the ClickOnce technology that gives progress bars at every step when launching the app.  I had issues with the 1.1 smart clients when people would be impatient with the loading of the client (mostly after I had updated the program and they were downloading new components).  Now while the load time is not much different, it at least gives the appearance of faster loading and the user at least knows what is going on.  Very nice.