A colleague of mine was fighting with CRM 4.0 at a client side. He was able to fix all their issues except one. They had changed from HTTP to HTTPS after installation and from that point on no one could connect externally. Anytime you changed something in the Outlook client the response was “The underlying connection was closed: an unexpected error occurred on a send.”. Not that much information to work with so I helped him to get the issue fixed. We dug through some log files to get some more information and found out that it was actually the audit plugin/service which was complaining with “the handshake failed due to an unexpected packet format”. Which clearly indicated it was something with the certificate or a specific HTTPS issue. Long story short, you need to change a registry value from port 80 to 443. We found all the necessary information on these sites:
Reading PDF files on the iPhone
You can natively read PDF files with your iPhone yet one feature that is lacking is a go to page feature. This is not an issue when you have a file which is only 2-3 pages long, typical size of a file being send through mail. But when you want to get some serious reading done and have already read a couple of hundred pages in the book, having to skip through all of them when you want to continue where you left off becomes a serious issue fast.
There are a lot of options when you look for pdf or ebook reader in the App Store some are payware some are free. I was very reluctant to get one in the past, hoping that Apple, in its infinite wisdom, would add the feature to the standard PDF reader.
Yet as of this date it’s still not implemented.
A friend suggested I check out Aji Reader, it’s free at the moment and I’ve used it for several months. I’m quite happy with it. You can get content on your phone with a desktop application that syncs your pdf files.
With the iPad around the corner I’ll probably read less on the tiny iPhone screen and move to this new platform but this blog post has been in my todo list for far too long.
October 2009 bookshelf
Sams Teach Yourself WPF in 24 Hours
I’m in the process of creating an application for a friend of mine who is starting his own company. He needs a little CMS system to support his business in the advertising world. He gave me a nice layout to use in the application so WPF seemed to be the best option. I jumped right in only to find that it was more complex than I first expected. After looking around what was available I decided to go for this book since it’s co-authored by Rob Eisenberg who is in charge of the Caliburn framework.
I’m just passed the first part of the book which introduces the layout containers (grid, stackpanel, wrappanel,…) and the basic containers. It already helped me getting the layout right for the application I’m writing. Also the code snippets in the book are in colour which certainly improves the readability of especially the XAML.
The Art of Unit Testing: with Examples in .NET
Though I’m convinced of TDD and unit testing in general I find it hard to apply when doing projects at work. I’m hoping this book will help me to structure my programming work around TDD and how to write good maintainable tests. The text is written in an easy to read manner and currently feels like a step by step guide on how to become a better test writer. You don’t need any prior knowledge to get started with this book. I’ve only read the first 100 pages but in my eyes it’s already a classic, go get it.
Earlier this week you could get this one for a mere $10 via a twitter promo code. Though I’m fairly confident I know what DI is, when to use it and what the advantages are you always need to keep an eye out for any new insights or information. Have only read the first couple of pages where the problem of coupling between your components is sketched. The book is still a work in progress, but you can already get it via the Early Access Program.
MacBook powering two external displays
I tend to hook up my MacBook on one of my external displays when I sit at my desk. I have two 22″ screens, one which I use for the MacBook the other I used for my desktop PC. A while ago I gave that one away and so the other screen was only gathering dust.
The MacBook only has one external display port so in order to hook up two displays you need to do some research. One possible solution is the DualHead2Go from Matrox. You hook this up on your display port and it basically directs half of the signal to one screen and half to the other. So you need to set your resolution to a rather big one, the MacBook is not powerfull to power two displays at 1680 * 1050. It wil also set you back around 300$/€.
Then there’s ViDock, a very powerfull solution but it comes with a powerful price, almost a new laptop (700$/€).
And then there’s DisplayLink‘s technology, which enables displays to connect via USB. They’ve been around for some time and now have drivers supports Mac OS X. I went for this solution from EVGA, compared to the others it’s relativly cheap at around 70$/€ for their best model (UV-16 +). Which can power displays up to 1680 * 1050, just the resolution I wanted. While it can’t play HD content smoothly, normal usage is just fine.
Updated to BE 1.5
Just a small post to see if everything is still up and running, only the lightbox extenstion is having a small design issue. Apart from that everything went smooth. For those using MS SQL 2000 as backend, you can just use the upgrade script that comes with the 1.5 release.
This week on my screen #5
- NHibernate 2.1.0 alpha 1 released, note that the dynamic proxy stuff has been changed so read the release notes.
- War stories from Joe Stump lead architect at Digg, very interesting!
- Roy Osherove reviews the tests from NerdDinner, interesting and funny. He also has a book out which I promptly ordered: The Art of Unit Testing: with Examples in .NET
- MIX, get a view on where Microsoft is going with Silverlight, .NET, ….
This week on my screen #4
- SOLID pictures, if you don’t know what it stands for visit this site.
- Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship.
- Windows 7 HTPC on Tom’s Hardware.
- Fluent NUnit.
- In depth article on BeginInvoke, Invoke. If you multithread your Winforms a must read.
- WCFMock, mocking for WCF, what’s in a name.
- SAML token with Geneva.
- Free eBook on ASP.NET MVC
Reduce PDF file size
When you’re busy in Pages and adding pictures to your document the file size increases dramatically, this is also reflected in the size of the PDF when you export it. There is however a very easy way to reduce the amount of MB by using the ColorSync Utility.
Just start that program, select ‘File’, ‘Open’. Choose your PDF, then select ‘File’, ‘Export’. In the dialog you now get choose as Quartz Filter ‘Reduce File Size’, hit save. You now have a PDF the fraction of the size of the original without any noticeable quality loss (depending on the original file).
I’ve been able to create a 1 MB PDF from an original of 60, while the pages document was 100 MB.
Windows 7 day 2
Came home, installed TortoiseSvn, rebooted, nothing. A reset didn’t help, still had a black screen saying “Starting Windows” but 15 minutes of starting time is more than enough I think.
Resetted the virtual machine again and followed the Startup Repair guide which does a system test. It asked if I wanted to go to a restore point, which I denied and did a complete checkup which stated that everything was ok and that it was probably a newly installed application that caused the problem. I rebooted the system again planning to use the restore option after all, but now, as by magic, the system booted without any problem.
Strange.
I also noticed that when using several instances of the same application, in my case Visual Studio, you no longer get all their window headers in your taskbar but they are all grouped under the same icon. Nice.
Yet another Windows 7 post
Like many others, I can report that Windows 7 is running successfully on my MacBook with VirtualBox. Ethernet and wifi started working after installing the Guest Additions of VirtualBox. Visual Studio 2008 is already installed and it seems to work.
