IE 8/9 Not Enough Space Issue

We had an interesting bug report come in today. One of our customers who is stuck using IE8, reported that the spell checker in our rich text editor was causing the browser to lock up.

We are using CKEditor with the SSL Web Spell Checker product. So first thing I did was fire up IE, and test it out. I was greeted with a Javascript error of "Not enough storage is available to complete this operation." I verify my machine has 4GB of memory, plenty of disk space, paging file etc. Everything seems fine.

So I launch into the debugger and am greeted with: this.$.createStyleSheet(h)


The lightbulb went off in my head. This page is compromised of many small user controls written in ASP.Net. Sometimes our developers will put their style blocks in the control since they are building at a component level. IE stops processing style tags after the 31st. I guess it also causes an exception to be thrown if you try and add one and your past that point.

Just one more reason, I am pushing our customers to Chrome

USPS Woes

I heard recently that the USPS is facing major cutbacks. Thinking about this led me to an idea. What if the USPS provided a pay-to send email service for every postal customer in the united states. A major problem with email today is the amount of spam, and this is in part due to the extremely low cost of sending email out.

If the USPS provided a paid email service which charged the sender, a nominal fee that is cheaper to send paper mail, and at the same time more expensive then email, I think you would find a large audience that would adopt this. Since I am neither the post master general, or a politician, I'll leave all the thousands of details alone.

Is it not time for the USPS to go green?

SSIS Packages Loading Woes

I'm doing some work on an SSIS package, and I'm also updating the database schema it uses. The package isn't loading and VS appears to be hung. It says in the status bar that is validating the package. Is this what offline mode is for?

It's been like this for 45 minutes. Software today should detect it's in this state and then give the user to skip the validation. How long does it take to drop a column on a table with 150,208,363. I guess when you have 8 indexes where the column is included as part of a covering index it can take a while.

Especially when running on virtualized machines....darn you EC2!

Adding a new GUID column in SSIS

I just discovered there is no way in SSIS (at least in SQL2005), to add a new column of type guid. I have found some different work arounds one of which I will share quickly.

1. Add a new Script Component, to your data flow and set the type to transformation. 
2. Edit the component and go to the Inputs/Outputs tab. Under the output add a new column. Make sure it has a data type of Guid (FYI, I have seen references the type is called DT_GUID; however, my version of VS is not functioning properly. My data type field is all black and when I click in it, the edit dialog closes. I set the data type by finding the output column in the xml and setting the dataType attribute to "guid".
3. Go to the script tab and in the method add  Row.<YourColumnName>=Guid.NewGuid()

A very easy work around.

Reflector for free? Not no more...

Turns out that Red-gate has decided not to honor it's promise to continue to offer reflector for free. Reflector is perhaps one of the most beneficial and well used tools to help .net Framework developers. Show me a developer who doesn't know what reflector is and I'll show you a developer who is just learning .net.

Hopefully c#.next won't modify the IL it generates breaking the tool. But if it does, I guess 35 bucks isn't a lot to pay to avoid having to learn how C# maps to IL and translate it in your head.