Rick van den Bosch - Blog : Work

Unhandled exception installing SQL Server 2008 R2 on a Windows XP / Windows 7 machine

Rick van den Bosch — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 04:46:00 GMT

When installing SQL Server 2008 R2 on a Windows XP (or, according to the comments, Windows 7) development machine that has been around for quite some time, I got an error stating an unhandled exception occured in the application (see image). The error showed up directly upon startup and read:

An error occurred creating the configuration section handler for userSettings/Microsoft.SqlServer.Configuration.LandingPage.Properties.Settings: Could not load file or assembly 'System, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089' or one of its dependencies.

Repairing the .NET 4.0 framework didn't solve the issue. Neither did removing all SQL stuff through 'Add or Remove Programs'. Looking into the error a bit further...

The system cannot find the file specified. (C:\Documents and Settings\_USERNAME_\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft_Corporation\LandingPage.exe_StrongName_ryspccglaxmt4nhllj5z3thycltsvyyx\10.0.0.0\user.config line 5) ---> System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'System, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

So the problem probably wasn't that System.dll couldn't be found, but some user.config file for the landingpage executable. The solution is as simple as it is radical: remove the entire (temporary) folder 'C:\Documents and Settings\_USERNAME_\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft_Corporation' (where USERNAME_ is, of course, the current username). After this the setup should start up without any problems.

Making Valid choices

Rick van den Bosch — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 07:34:00 GMT

As of December first I'll be joining the ranks of Valid (www.valid.nl - Dutch website). I'm very excited to start over there and I am convinced we will be able to do great stuff together :)

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank BDO (www.bdo.nl - Dutch website) for the past period and wish them all the best with the plans for the future of 'our' system.

Update 14 Jan 2011
Valid now has (the beginning of) an English website available: see here.

Changing lanes

Rick van den Bosch — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 15:41:00 GMT

As you probably know I've worked for my own company for quite a while (see my post 'A new challenge' of October first 2008). Because business was good, I had way too little time to keep this blog up to date. Sorry for that...

Since the beginning of this month, that all has changed: I joined BDO (Dutch site) and can now work 'normal' hours in stead of 'I-own-my-own-company-and-have-to-make-every-minute-of-every-day-count' hours. I'll probably still be pretty busy, but there's a difference between busy and busy... ;)
I'll be keeping you posted about stuff I run into, think about or find interesting. As long as they have anything to do with software development of course... And if you have any suggestions, questions or requests: let me know.

Our company at frankwatching.com

Rick van den Bosch — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:48:46 GMT

Our company has been mentioned in an article at the (pretty well-known) blog www.frankwatching.com

Read it over here (Dutch): http://www.frankwatching.com/archive/2009/03/13/app-gespot-microsoft-bizspark/

Installing my laptop after a repair

Rick van den Bosch — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 23:45:05 GMT

I’m reinstalling my laptop after I got it back from a repair… EMPTY (grrr).

What tools shouldn’t I forget when preparing this laptop to be my development machine? Already have Visual Studio, SQL Management Studio, Office and the Windows Live tools installed… (and of course I have all kinds of tools at hand from my server like DebugView, Reflector and whatnot)

New website

Rick van den Bosch — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:01:10 GMT

Our company has (the first draft of) a new website online. We're still working on the content, but the design is now online. Check it out @ www.mediagarde.nl (Dutch).

Ajax Control Toolkit controls don't show up in Visual Studio toolbar

Rick van den Bosch — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 12:57:02 GMT

Because I stopped working at Avanade and started my own company (this web site is under construction and in Dutch), I had to buy and install a new laptop. Everything went great and I was up and running in half a day. Or should I say half an evening... ;)

The next day I wanted to continue developing a web site we are working on. I needed one of the Ajax Control Toolkit controls, so I added it to my toolbar the way you should go about this (create a separate tab, right click, 'choose items', browse for the assembly). Strange enough, none of the toolkit controls showed up in my toolbar. I tried again, restarted Visual Studio and even restarted my computer. All to no avail...
After a while, I checked the 'Show all' option for the toolbar, and there were my Ajax controls, all of them disabled (grayed out). And if you think that is weird, read on for the cause of this behavior ;).

After some searching, I found something that I thought could be a solution. Unfortunately this did not solve my problems. Not even after repeating the steps several times. Luckily there were several people that commented on that same post, stating the proposed fix didn't actually fix the problem. One of them said something about Microsoft wireless hardware being the culprit. I removed the wireless receiver of my Microsoft Wireless Notebook Optical Mouse, and the controls all appeared on the toolbar. Enabled and all...!

Now, whenever I need the Ajax controls in Visual Studio, I do the following:

Start Visual Studio (if not started already)
Open up a web page or a user control, or at least something you can place an Ajax control on
Open up the toolbox (note: no Ajax controls!)
Unplug the wireless device and see the controls appear like magic
Plug in the device: the controls should stay where they are

Hope this helps some of you...

A new challenge …

Rick van den Bosch — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 16:25:00 GMT

As of today, I am no longer working for Avanade. I had a good time over there, but my personal goals changed. I found a new challenge: I started a company with a good friend of mine. We’re still building the website, so the information is not there yet. But it will be soon. So check the website every now and again.

We’re very excited and can't wait to get started!

I8 converter - Download (sourcecode available)

Rick van den Bosch — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 21:31:00 GMT

One of my colleagues pointed out the new Fine-grained password policy feature in Windows Server 2008. As you can see in this post at The Sean Blog, some values have to be entered in the I8 format, which isn't very user friendly. Because of that, he asked me if I could whip up a tool that converts days, hours, minutes and seconds to the I8 format. I quickly put together this small tool for him. It hasn't been tested extensively, but I think it might be of some use to some of you.
For example, I used longs to store the info. When wanting to calculate huge values, this won't work of course. This could be improved by using the multipliers divided by for instance 10,000,000 and add the appropriate amount of zeros (7) to the string after calculation, so the numerical value stays a lot smaller. Still, I think it does what it should do at this point. You can find the sourcecode over here, or if you would like te change anything: be my guest. Let me know if you find bugs or add cool features: I would like to know.

Info taken from Technet:

When you use the ldifde command to create PSOs, you must enter the values of these attributes in I8 format, which stores time in the intervals of -100 nanoseconds. (Schema: attributeSyntax = 2.5.5.16 (I8).) Windows Server 2003 Default Domain Policy employs this exact time unit for its corresponding time-related attributes. To set these attributes to appropriate values, convert time values in minutes, hours, or days to time values in the intervals of 100 nanoseconds, and then precede the resultant values with a negative sign.

Links
Tool: http://www.rickvandenbosch.net/downloads/I8Converter.zip
Source: http://www.rickvandenbosch.net/downloads/I8Converter Sourcecode.zip

Update
Because of a hosting shift, the tool is no longer available from the above locations. When interested: drop me a line. I'll see if I still have the app/sourcecode floating around somewhere.

Finally getting some coding done

Rick van den Bosch — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 19:39:00 GMT

The last weeks have been filled with holidays and introductional days at my new employer. Because of that, I haven't had the time to realy dive into Visual Studio 2008, although I have played around with it since the RTM version was available. Since this week I've been writing some serious code in VS2008 for my new personal site (more about this later!). I can only agree with what Pieter de Bruin said in his post about the new line of developer tools and additions: "If you are building .NET 2.0 applications, you really should take a look at all of the above".

I'm already loving working with VS 2008. There have been numerous 'big' additions and changes which make a developers life so much easier. But how about all the little ones? The ability to run a unittest from the contextmenu of the code editor, the 'remove unused usings' possibility (finally!), the enhanced properties form for project properties and so on. All those changes are great! I'm curious what you think are the best additions/changes in Visual Studio 2008. Care to share? Add your favorite at my 'Best Visual Studio 2008 enhancements' list at Listas.

Blogging @ Almere

Rick van den Bosch — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 20:38:00 GMT

Today was the first of two introduction days at Avanade. Maybe you missed it, but I started there today. And that's why I'm writing this blogpost from a hotel in Almere, using my new Avanade laptop. ;)

I'm sure there will be lots of stuff to blog about, so stay tuned for more...

Why elaboration should be done with a SMALL team

Rick van den Bosch — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 22:26:42 GMT

A [wikipedia:RUP] project consists of 4 different phases. The elaboration phase (the second phase in the RUP project lifecycle) is normally done with a small team. One of the important reasons for this is that you want to define the basic form of your architecture. This means you think about concepts, elaborate on them, develop proof of concepts and select the ones that work best for your specific project.

If there is one thing you can not use (early) in an elaboration phase of a project, it's having too many team members. There's probably not enough work to go round. Because of that the members who do not or can not contribute to defining the architecture or developing the proof of concepts will eventually end up being assigned production (or construction) tasks.

That's where things go wrong: in an elaboration phase the architecture is designed and takes its basic form, but in construction the architecture should be stable and proven. In elaboration you define the standards and guidelines, while construction needs those things to be available. Tasks in elaboration take some time because they have to 'grow'. Because of this they are harder to plan, while tasks in construction have a hard deadline. And as one of the 'elaborators', it's pretty darn annoying when one of the 'constructors' comes up to your desk every two hours to ask if the part they are waiting on is ready. That kinda kills the whole goal of the elaboration phase...

010108: a new challenge

Rick van den Bosch — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 14:52:37 GMT

As of 01-01-2008, I'm joining Avanade. You might have heard Avanade opened an office in the south of The Netherlands the first of November. I'll be joining the ranks over there (Eindhoven!) and I am exited to get started.

I spent the past years at LogicaCMG. I had a lot of fun and, even more important, I learned a lot. I'll miss the guys (and girls!) I worked with, but I'm sure I will keep in touch with some of them. Thanks for having me. And of course: it's a small world, so we'll meet again...

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