UAC Permission Problems in Visual Studio? Try a Restart…

I’m working on software that alters startup modes and starts and stops a bunch of services. Of course, since Vista there’s now all of this UAC ‘are you sure you wanna do that’ prompt crap. In order to get that prompt and the permission that come along with it, the easy method was to to create an application manifest and set the ‘requestedExecutionLevel’ to something higher than ‘asInvoker’. That’s all well and good however during debugging I was getting no prompt and definitely was not getting permission to affect a service or execute WMI calls. Oddly, after a complete machine reboot (not just restarting VS2010), upon entering debug I now get prompted to restart Visual Studio with elevated permissions and everything runs dandy. Still feels like there may be an app.manifest bug or two to be ironed out in VS2010 or Windows 7. Until then, follow standard MS troubleshooting practices; turn it off and back on again.

The Differences Between X++ (Dynamics AX) and C#

A twitter of a forward of an email of a blog post with links to two MSDN articles on the subject of X++ vs C# made it’s way from my computer screen onto the back of my eyeballs this morning. While the read was somewhat interesting it was more of a “here’s some nice things about one of our languages, and here’s a nice thing about another’ type of read. While highlighting the fairly minor syntactical differences between the two may be a valuable exercise to those completely unfamiliar with object oriented programming in general it’s $3 short of useless to the C# programmer ready to get his ERP on or the AX developer dipping his toes in the waters of one of the most popular programming languages on the face of the planet.

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Fitting Non-Dimensional Inventory into Dynamics AX’s Dimensional Inventory Model

In this article I chronicle the business and technical decisions and hurdles encountered in fitting a product that doesn’t fit a finite dimensional model (in this case steel pipe and tube) into Microsoft Dynamics AX’s dimension-driven inventory model. We’ll start off with a quick overview of the Dynamics AX item/dimension model, go into a bit of an overview of pipe and tube manufacturing and stocking and why this material doesn’t fit base AX (or likely any other out-of-the-box ERP) due to a need for ‘variable’ or non-exclusive item dimensions, and finish with the solutions successfully implemented in the marketplace. There will be a mix of business and technical jargon but none of it should be out of reach to a programmer, implementer, or analyst at any level.

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EARLib: Zero Config ORM Tool for php/MySQL

Well, I originally was going to write a php script that examined the mysql database and produced php classes with crud functionality for the tables but then I got to working on it and realized I can go one step further. Why write the classes to file when you can just dynamically load everything at run time (and cache it once it’s loaded). So here it is, an ORM for php/MySQL that requires no configuration (apart from mysql connection information), and provides most of the features of the more heavy-weight ORM libraries. It’s page is here.

PHP Schema Generator

So here’s an interesting project. This is a spaghetti-mess of php code that produces a very simple DAL by reverse engineering a mysql database. All you have to do is pass it the connection information and database name and it will read in all of the tables and their field types producing a simplistic but complete data access layer for every table in that database.
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Simple PHP Twitter Search API

Really I just wanted an excuse to make something with ‘Twit’ in the title. Anyway… it searches tweets. Using it right up there at the top of my page. Nothing earth shattering but much more easy to use and straightforward than the most of what I’ve seen out there. Article here.

SubSonic: A Kiss Followed by a Kick in the Crotch

I’ve really been enjoying SubSonic for both Web and WinForms .NET development. From a speed and ease point of view it is a fantastic tool. Yes, nHibernate or LLBLGen is a better fit for larger, more complicated projects, and straight up Linq to SQL or straight SQL for absolutely trivial stuff however SubSonic is just right for the medium sized bangers which are the majority of projects I’m working on.

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AX Form Performance: It’s the Auto-Arrange, Stupid

Now that TSI is running somewhat-kinda-almost smoothly there’s been a bit more focus on the speedy-ness of some of their forms. I was tackling one especially egregious time-sink one day and after having trimmed as much fat from the data retrieval and behind the scenes calculations as I could, I tossed it into the code profiler again. The biggest culprit? A simple little textbox.
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C’mon MS, It’s Been 7 YEARS!

Part of my job now-days involves jetting off to exotic locales, mingling with dignitaries, and overthrowing third world despots. Thus is the life of a software consultant. Naw… really, I get to convert a bunch of old C++/Powerbuilder programs to C#/.NET. Some of this stuff this is old, grody, and knee deep in the Win32 innards. I was certainly hoping that large swaths of that junk would have a nice, managed, simple to use replacement. I mean, the .NET framework has been out there for almost seven years. You’d think something as simple as connecting to a network printer wouldn’t require three structs, two UInt pointers, and a few lines of buffer allocation code. But nope… It actually takes fewer lines of code to write the thing in legacy C++ and that’s discarding the miles of extern and helper-class declarations.