Alex@Net

I will be in London from Jun 29 to Jul 7. If you are in London and want to talk about Artisteer, C#, PHP development, Zend Framework or living in Ukraine, send me a message or write a comment. See you :-)

For you site or application or presentation or something else (order by Alexa rating):

• IconFinder - 164K of icons, 551 sets. Browse by set, tag, author. Converter, API. Custom icons service. Alexa rank: 3,508.
• Iconspedia - browse by category, set. Alexa rank: 5,663.
• FindIcons - 291K of icons, 2170 sets. Browse by set, tag. Converter, API. Alexa rank: 7,374.
• FreeIconsWeb - 20K of icons for operating systems. Alexa rank: 11,618.
• FreeIconsDownload - icons for operating systems. Browse by set, category. Alexa rank: 14,646.
• IconShock - 913K of icons, 248 sets. Browse by tag, set. Custom design service. Alexa rank: 16,097.
• VeryIcon - over 20K icons, more than 1000 sets. Browse by category. Alexa rank: 23,994.
• IconSeeker - browse by tag. Alexa rank: 44,638.
• IconLook - browse by tag. Alexa rank: 52,052
• Iconlet - thousands of icons. Browse by format, license, size. Alexa rank: 55,359.
• WeLoveIcons - 473 sets. Alexa rank: 94,840
• IconsSearch - Alexa rank: 123,516

Some good sets:

• Fugue icons from Yusuke Kamiyamane.
• Tango Desktop Project, Gnome and KDE desktop icon set.

Google now supports HTTPS for search results, but by default Google Chrome sends requests over HTTP. To change this you need to create new search provider as follows:

1. Right click on the address bar and select "Edit search engines"
2. Add new search engine (URL copied from Google search engine and {google:baseURL} is replaced with https://www.google.com/):
   Name: Google SSL
   Keyword: https.google.com
   URL: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s (short URL, right-click and select "Copy link address" for complete URL)
   
3. Select Google SSL search engine and make it default.

After that direct searches from the address bar will be transferred securely.

I've released the very first version of the GalleryViewer extension that converts page image sets to good looking galleries.

Here is Google Chrome Extension API diagram that I've created while working on my extension for Google Chrome. It shows only stable API (does not contain experimental API classes). Auxiliary classes are added for displaying method parameters. I hope it will be useful for extension developers.

Click on the image to view the full diagram.

I've created and published an add-in for Enterprise Architect that increases speed of class diagram creation.

I have Virtual PC machine with Windows XP and .NET 2.0 and I need to start .NET application from the shared folder which is mapped to Z drive letter. But the application executable gives me "Application has encountered a problem and needs to close." dialog right after start.

I've tried to compile it with MSBuild from sources on Z: and it have displayed the following error:

...
System.Security.SecurityException: That assembly does not allow partially trusted callers.
...

Aha, incorrect permissions! MSBuild does not want to load and execute logger assembly from mapped drive because it is in the Intranet zone, which does not allow full trust. It looks like the application executable could not be started because of the permissions too. So how to give allow assemblies from mapped network shares run with FullTrust permissions?

As I have read this can be done in two ways: by configuring permissions in mscorcfg.msc, or by modifying code access security policy with caspol.exe.

Because mscorcfg.msc is not included in .NET 2.0 redistributable I've executed the following command in the Run dialog (Win+R)  to allow assemblies from mapped networking shares run with FullTrust permissions:

c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\caspol -q -machine -addgroup 1 -url file://z:/* FullTrust -name "Z Drive"

Works perfect.

As usual, my Windows XP starts asking me to reboot it after installing new updates. In Vista I can postpone notification for several hours and forget about it, but XP pop ups the notification each several minutes giving me a big chance to shut down the computer and lose my work. 

To turn it off just press Win+R and type the following command and press Enter:

net stop "Automatic Updates"

This will completely shot down the automatic updates till the next reboot. Remember that you still need to reboot your computer after completing the work unit to apply the updates - your computer may be vulnerable before reboot.

Just FYI, big companies and interesting people who use wordpress.com (or its VIP service) for blogging:

• CNN blogs - CNN anchors, correspondents and producers all over the globe.
• flikr blog - official blog of flikr.com, almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application.
• BBC Worldwide use WP VIP for some of its projects: Sunday Afternoon Club blog at topgear.com, Human Planet blog at bbcearth.com, etc.
• TIME blogs - time.com correspondents and producers.
• TechCrunch - technology events.
• Symbian blog - the official mouthpiece of Symbian Foundation, maintainer of Symbian OS.

If you rely on garbage collector, sooner or later you will be hit by the out of memory exception:-)

About memory leaks:

• Large Object Heap Uncovered
  
• How To: Use CLR Profiler (MSDN)
• How to detect and avoid memory and resources leaks in .NET applications
• .NET Memory Leak Case Study: The Event Handlers That Made The Memory Baloon
• Tracking down managed memory leaks (how to find a GC leak)
• Investigating Memory Issues
• Using GC Efficiently – Part 1
• Using GC Efficiently – Part 2
• Understanding Garbage Collection in .NET
• Debugging tools: Check out CLR Profiler 2.0, Debugging tools for Windows

About C# anonymous methods:

• The implementation of anonymous methods in C# and its consequences