Cure Consulting

Packt Publishing 50th Oracle Book Offer

Packt publishing just announced the release of their 50th Oracle book, and to celebrate they are offering deep discounts on ALL of their Oracle books! More information is available at Packt Publishing's website

Stop Losing Ebay Auctions

I've been using Auction Sniper to save money and win auctions for a while now, and thought I should share with my friends. Click below and get a few free snipes on me.

AuctionSniper:
Your eBay sniping solution.

Conditional References

Ever wanted to include something when you are debugging,but want to use a different reference for the release compile? I stumbled across this a while back and it is EXTREMELY useful. Basically, you take the normal Reference Include statement in an ItemGroup and add a condition to it. In this case I have a fake dll that I used for testing, and another one that I use for production (release).

..ReferenceInterop.Galil.dll
True

Then you create another ItemGroup for Debug:

{AC8113BC-CCE2-4598-915A-9CF2FF918442}
FakeInteropGalil

Un-Scratch an LCD Monitor

I had a scratch in my LCD monitor from a recent move, and was totally bummed. It was over two inches long, and pretty annoying. A little googling came across this website on how to use a clean pencil eraser to remove it. I have to tell you, I had my doubts, but it TOTALLY WORKED! No more scratch, and it looks as good as new!

NHibernate 2.x Beginner's Guide

My book is finally out! After over a year of more work than I ever thought it would take, I was finally able to hold a copy in my hand on Friday!

You can pick up the book at the publisher's website, and for $5 more you can have the PDF version also: https://www.packtpub.com/nhibernate-2-x-beginners-guide/book

If you prefer, you can also pick it up at Amazon or Barnes and Noble

If you're interested, you can take a look at a sample chapter here, just click on the "Sample Chapter" button.

NHibernate 2.x Beginner's Guide

SSL Certs and Mono

I was recently plagued with an error while trying to make a connection to a secure website using Mono. After several hours of searching I came across this site talking about importing trusted roots. Having seen this same issue on windows servers, I knew I was in the right area.

What I ended up doing was running mozroots --import --machine to import all of the mozilla (aka firefox) browser trusted roots, and then certmgr -ssl -m URL to get the actual cert and add it.

Selecting the correct language in Word 2007

I know everyone has a favourite language, and so do I. Unfortunately, I don't like to spell it favourite, because in the US we spell it favorite! Word 2007 refused to do this for me on a couple of documents I had, until I found this little trick.

1. Ctrl + a to select all
2. On the ribbon, click on Review then click Set Language
3. Select the language you need

done and done.

Encrypting and Decrypting Config Files

I've talked for years about how you need to encrypt and decrypt Web.config and App.config files, but it took a spur for me to actually look it up. Here is the command for those of you as lazy as me:

c:windowsMicrosoft.NETFrameworkv2.0.50727aspnet_regiis -pef connectionStrings . -prov DataProtectionConfigurationProvider

Decrypting is just as easy:

c:windowsMicrosoft.NETFrameworkv2.0.50727aspnet_regiis -pdf connectionStrings .

Just a note, this only works on Web.config files. If you want to encrypt an App.config, just rename it Web.config, run the tool, then change the name back.

If you want to get hardcore and write your own tool, it's all available in the API:

Aaron Feng's Blog



Configuration configuration = ConfigurationManager.OpenExeConfiguration(appConfig);

ConfigurationSection section = this.configuration.GetSection("connectionStrings");

if (!section.SectionInformation.IsProtected) 

{

section.SectionInformation.ProtectSection("DataProtectionConfigurationProvider");

section.SectionInformation.ForceSave = true;

configuration.Save(ConfigurationSaveMode.Modified);

}

To decrypt just do the oposite:



if (section.SectionInformation.IsProtected) 

{

// �

section.SectionInformation.UnprotectSection();

// �

}

Outlook blocked access to the following potentially unsave attachments:

If you're like me, you've likely received an attachment from someone after spending half an hour talking them through attaching it, only to find that Outlook as blocked access to it. Here's all you need to do to make the ugly warning go away:

1. In the registry, under HKCUSoftwareMicrosoftOffice(VERSION)OutlookSecurity, add a string value "Level1Remove" and set the data to the extension of the file you need access to, like "tmp" or "exe;ini".

2. Restart Outlook and you now have access to these files.

Don't forget to remove this key when you are done!