I'm moving my blog to my own domain and will be blogging on it going forward. Please visit/subscribe my new blog - http://blog.rupreetg.com. Thanks!

---

If anyone of you has debugged managed crash dumps, I am sure you must have come across a situation when debugger keeps telling you it’s not able to load mscordacwks.dll. It usually happens when the dump was taken from a machine that had a specific version on .NET framework with patches installed and the machine where the crash dump is being analyzed ......

---

Setting the context… We have a web application which communicates with WCF based service façade for any business functionality. This service façade then loads assembly (based on configuration) at the runtime for making the system pluggable. By default the implementation is in the service assembly itself. Below is the sample code for loading the assembly ......

---

Assembly folder in windows directory is a special folder which shows files in a different manner. To view this folder in a normal view – with all files and directory structure in it, just a tweak in registry needs to be done. Add “DisableCacheViewer&#... DWord key and set its value to 1 at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE... ......

---

There are some scenarios where need to check programmatically if the given file is a .NET assembly or not. How do we do that? One way is to use reflection and try to load that file (assembly). If the assembly gets loaded, and doesn’t throw any exception, then yes, it’s a valid .NET assembly. If it’s not a valid file, then it’ll ......

---

I have been using ILDASM a lot for past few days when I encountered this bug. This problem is with ILDASM shipped with .NET 1.1 SDK. The problem: If you open an assembly built with .NET 2.0 and try to disassemble it, it throws error “error : Failed to open meta data” which is valid because we trying to disassemble an assembly built on 2.0 ......

---

Recently I was working on a utility very similar spy++, but could do more than what we have in spy++ - like besides getting me the window (not Windows :P) class name and its height/width etc, it could also give me the caption of the window. I read couple of articles and all suggested to use global hooks. Using hooks because we are doing all this stuff ......

---

Don't have a Pocket PC? Still want to write applications which require an Active Sync Connection with Pocket PC; Here is the way..... Below is what i did to test my RAPI based application which required an Active Sync Connection! Installations:1. Active Sync 3.7.1 on my PC2. VS 2005 Device Emulators on my PC. (I think there must be separate installation ......

---

---

You can use SOS from within your VS.NET IDE. First you need to unable “unmanaged code” debugging option in Visual Studio. Go to Project Properties -> Configuration Properties -> Debugging -> “Enable Unmanaged Debugging”. Set this option to “True”. Then you set a breakpoint in your code. When this breakpoint ......

---

Last evening, I was trying to write an application which could detect IR Devices from my machine and give its details. I was using VS2005 Beta 2 Winforms. I added System.Net.IrDA.dll from “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SmartDevices\SDK\CompactF... path. The program is simple, just create ......

---

Moved to this new blog site, my previous blog site link is here.

---

Last week, i got the resolution for one the Designer Issue we were facing and this week we bumped into another. Here is the Designer error message we get when we open up winform. One or more errors encountered while loading the designer. The errors are listed below. Some errors can be fixed by rebuilding your project, while others may require code changes. ......

---

Recently in my project we migrated from VS2003 to VS2005. The application I am working on is a smart client application so it has lot many Win Forms. After migration, when the solution was opened up in VS2005, we faced this strange problem. None of the Forms were opening in the designer mode. It was throwing exception (shown below) One or more errors ......

---