I noticed that I was running TortoiseSVN in SVN_ASP_DOT_NET_HACK mode (where Subversion clients use ‘_svn’ instead of ‘.svn’ directories) unnecessarily as I don’t have silly old Visual Studio 2003 installed anymore which caused this mess in the first place.

The _svn directories work just as well as .svn, but nevertheless (due to mild OCD?), I created a batch script that ripped through my project directory renaming all ‘_svn’ directories to ‘.svn’, so I could remove the SVN_ASP_DOT_NET_HACK mode. It uses the wonderfully flexible FOR command drive the whole process. We don’t need no stinkin’ Powershell round these parts…

Save this script as something like “SvnRenameDirs.cmd” in the root of your projects folder:

:: Make script directory current
pushd "%~dp0"

:: Unhide, rename and re-hide svn dirs
for /r /d %%D in (*) do @if exist "%%D\_svn" (
   attrib -H "%%D\_svn"
   ren "%%D\_svn" ".svn"
   attrib +H "%%D\.svn"
)
popd

rundll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL sysdm.cpl,0,3

At the end click the Environment Variables button in the System Properties dialog and remove the SVN_ASP_DOT_NET_HACK environment variable and then log out and back in again (or restart explorer.exe and TSVNCache.exe).

Having your ASP.NET error handling routine, which sends you emails when an error occurs on your site, itself fail is annoying. Especially when you think you’ve made the code robust enough. Anyway the error handler for one site I work on was failing with “ArgumentException: The specified string is not in the form required for a subject“.

So what is exactly “the form required for a subject”? Googling for this error message returns a lot of junk and misinformed forum posts. It turns out that setting the Subject on a System.Net.Mail.Message internally calls MailBnfHelper.HasCROrLF (thank you Reflector) which does exactly what it says on the tin. Therefore one forum poster’s solution of subject.Replace("\r\n", " ") isn’t going to work when your have either a carriage return or line feed in there.

So, obviously, the solution is:

message.Subject = subject.Replace('\r', ' ').Replace('\n', ' ');

Personally, I think that the MailMessage should to this for you or at least Microsoft should document what actually constitutes a “form required for a subject” in MSDN or, even better, in the actual error message itself!

As Brad Wilson points out one of the nice features of C# 3.0′s extension methods is that they work on null instances. Indeed, why shouldn’t they? They’re just static methods that are invoked in a slightly different way. But this allows a subtle but very pleasing (to me this morning anyway) bit of syntactic sugar for the very commonly used String.IsNullOrEmpty() method.

So instead of:

if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(myString)) ...

you can have the more-readable:

if (myString.IsNullOrEmpty()) ...

by using:

public static class StringExtensions
{
   public static bool IsNullOrEmpty(this string str)
   {
      return string.IsNullOrEmpty(str);
   }
}

It’s a very small thing but I like it.

After years of great service, our Draytek Vigor 2800 seems to be having problems after running for a few days of allowing HTTPS in to our network, which is only solved by rebooting the router. For the life of me I can’t upgrade the firmware using either the TFTP or FTP approach. So giving up, I’ve adopted the brute force approach of scheduling a reboot every night. To do this I considered scripting the appropriate Telnet commands to the router, but that would involve some custom or third party code. (Telnet, being a duplex protocol means you can’t simply pipe commands to telnet.exe from a batch file, you have to use something like expect to script a Telnet session.)

The simplest, lowest-tech approach (and they’re always the best, right?) I found was merely to mimic the reboot page on the router web management UI with the following Windows Scripting Host script:

////// RebootRouter.js ////////
// Change these for your environment
var ROUTER_IP = "192.168.0.1";
var ROUTER_USER = "admin";
var ROUTER_PASSWORD = "pA55w0rd";

var http = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
http.open("POST", "http://" + ROUTER_IP
    + "/cgi-bin/reboot.cgi", false,
    ROUTER_USER, ROUTER_PASSWORD);
http.setRequestHeader("Content-Type",
    "application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
http.send("sReboot=Current&submit=OK");

// For debugging/logging un-comment the following lines:
// WScript.Echo(http.status + " " + http.statusText);
// WScript.Echo(http.responseText);

Save this as RebootRouter.js, update the values accordingly and schedule for a appropriate time using Control Panel > Scheduled Tasks.

Visual Studio 2008 introduced a document switcher window that pops up when you do a CTRL+TAB. Nice idea, inspired by ALT+TAB application switching  but I find that the little previews it shows you are pretty useless. One code window looks like pretty much any other at that resolution. I prefer the previous behaviour of just immediately switching windows.

Sara Ford’s excellent series of Visual Studio tips prompted me to restore CTRL+TAB’s previous behaviour. You can do this by using the Keyboard binding page in Tools Options. In Tools > Options > Keyboard locate Window.NextDocumentWindowNav and remove the CTRL+TAB binding, then go to Window.NextDocumentWindow and assign CTRL+TAB there instead. Same drill for CTRL+SHIFT+TAB for Window.PreviousDocumentWindowNav and Window.PreviousDocumentWindow.