USB Mass Storage Issues - v2

In an earlier post USB Mass Storage Issues I talked about uninstalling MS Windows drivers and installing Intel drivers.
Today I found the issues again and found that my drives are too old. To check for your drivers check the Intel site : http://www.intel.com/support/graphics/detect.htm . Please get the latest Intel drivers and install them. Post install you should have the latest chipset drivers and you USB should be working fine.

P.S: Ealier I preferred Intel over MS drivers. Therafter I read more documentation at the Intel site and found that Intel is supporting USB driver updates from Windows update site. So for latest drivers you can get it from MS Windows update site too. Still check for the latest updates at the Intel site too.

Virtual Provider Error

Recently I faced a Virtual Provider issue on which I spent considerable amount of time but to no avail. The issue is reported multiple times in google and also in Microsoft Bug 307978 and is even marked as closed but it still comes up.
The error message is:

The VirtualPathProvider returned a VirtualFile object with VirtualPath set to '/MasterPageDir/SharedMasterPage.master.cs' instead of the expected '//MasterPageDir/SharedMasterPage.master.cs'.

All the posts mentioned that its a compilation error but how to find it out. I tried a lot of code but did not help. So the solution is:
Use EventViewer. Under Application the error will be logged as a ASP .NET 2.0 error. Looking at the details you can figure out the details of the compilation issue. :)

How to work better

Was reading in the net and found this usefule advice:

1. Do one thing at a time.
2. Know the problem.
3. Learn to listen.
4. Learn to ask questions.
5. Distinguish sense from nonsense.
6. Access change is inevitable.
7. Admit mistakes.
8. Say it simple.
9. Be calm.
10. Smile :)

Enable Upload of Documents in Dokuwiki

Recently I installed Dokuwiki on IIS as the wiki for my team and projects.
The installation went on fine but it did not allow upload of images, documents, pdfs etc.

Looking through the internet I was able to find the solution step by step.
So I have consolidated all in here:

1. I have my wiki installed at C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\wiki. I created an upload folder to allow php engine to write files in there. I got in created at C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\wiki\uploads and gave Domain\Users , Internet Guest Account and Launch IIS Process Account "Full Control" over the folder. This allows IIS worker process to write files to the folder.
   
   
2. I have my php installed at C:\PHP. Open the C:\PHP\php.ini file and make the following changes:
   
   
1. Look for the config param "open_basedir" and set it to wiki base directory.
   
   open_basedir = "C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\wiki"
   
   
2. Look for the config param "upload_tmp_dir" and set it to the Uploads directory created in Step 1.
   
   upload_tmp_dir="C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\wiki\uploads"
   
   
3. You may also want to set the maximum file size that can be uploaded. Look for the config params "post_max_size" and "upload_max_filesize" and set it to the required file size.
   
   post_max_size = 20M
   upload_max_filesize = 20M
   
   
4. Just confirm one more thing i.e. the config param "file_uploads". It should be set to ON.
   
   file_uploads = On
   
   
5. You may also want to set the mail setting for php application under the "[mail function]" section. You will need to set the config params "SMTP" (SMTP server), "smtp_port" and "sendmail_from".
   


3. This should set you up and you should be able to upload to your dokuwiki.
   

Happy wiki'ing.

Solve "Access is Denied" error when opening .msc files

Today I got a very annoying error.


I tried to open services.msc and got the error:



The beauty of this error was the I was able to open the it through : My Computer :: Manage :: Services and Applications :: Services.

I googled through the error and found a lot of replies : Some of them suggesting some software restriction policy of the user not being Administrator and so on.
All did not apply to me as my computer is me personal home computer and not part of any domain and I was able to open it till a few days back (or the last time I openend it) and nothing changed in between.
So whats the issue. I am a Admin. I navigated to C:\Windows\System32 and checked the permissions for the services.msc file and as Admin I had Full Control over the file.

Then I found something special : I was able to execute "eventvwr" but not "eventvwr.msc" which gave the Access is Denied Error.

That was the Euraka moment. It had something to do the MS Management Control or "mmc.exe" which is used to open all these ".msc" files. I openend "mmc.exe" and loaded the snap-in "Services" and it loaded up fine.

Then the solution was simple :: The extension ".msc" has somehow lost the information that it needs to be "openend with" mmc.exe

So I did a right click on "services.msc" and selected "Open with". In the window I browsed to "C:\Windows\System32\mmc.exe" and phew it worked.
I checked "services.msc", "eventvwr.msc", "compmgmt.msc" and all worked fine.

Hope it works for you too :)

Unit Testing, Code Analysis and Code Metrics in VS.NET 2008

In .NET we prefer to use VS .NET to do unit testing.Both VS 2005 and VS 2008 Team Editions support unit testing.
Way to do :

1. Add a unit test project to your solution.
   Navigate to the method that needs to be tested. Do a right click : Create Unit Test on the method.

In the Wizard provided:Click on Setting. As of now MS does not support prepending Namespace before the class. This is of great value to us as need the namespace to distinguish similar class names in multiple namespaces. So we manual prepend the namespace i.e. 'Manager_' in the current case.

A dummy test case gets created:Modify the expected value to match whats expected. We can add more 'Asserts' to improve the test case.

To execute the test case, do a right click on the test case and select 'Run Tests':

The test will be executed and the run status displayer. We are re-run the test case or we can debug it with the appropriate buttons selected on the top:

To view the code coverage results, right click on the test case and select 'Code Coverage Results'.

The result will contain all the project which got invoked to make the test run:

Details of the method tested:

Similarly we can do a Code Analysis based on Coding Standards and generate Metrics

Coding Standards:

Coding Metrics:

My Election Consituency

I belong to Bokaro Steel City which is part of the Dhanbad Constituency.
I currently stay at Koramanagla which belongs to the Bangalore South Constituency.