WPF "Advanced Layout"-Session at BASTA

Next week you can meet me at the BASTA - a German Conference about .NET, Visual Studio & more. I'll give a presentation about Layout-functionality in WPF on Tuesday at 13.30 o'clock. After the presentation you can meet me (on Tuesday only) and other "Trivadians" (the whole week) at the "Trivadis"-stand. I'm looking forward to see you there. :-)
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Use the Network Services Shell to unblock WLANs in Windows Vista

Yesterday I wasn't able to connect to my own WLAN. The day before yesterday I was able, but yesterday I got the message that my network administrator has blocked me from connecting to this network. "Your network administrator has blocked you from connecting to this network". blockedWLAN The ironic thing is that I am the network administrator of this network. :-) As I hadn't installed anything new on my machine, I wondered why my computer wasn't able to connect anymore. Then I remembered that I got a bluescreen due to my swisscom unlimited card. My computer awaked from sleep and didn't recognize the swisscom unlimited card anymore. I plugged-in the card again, and then I got a bluescreen. Unfortunately at this moment I was not in my home-wlan, so I didn't recognize that it didn't work anymore. So the question was how to unblock this WLAN. I didn't find any contextmenu or a Dialog to unblock it. So first I have deinstalled the software of the unlimited card. But that wasn't a helpful idea. My WLAN was still blocked. (Normally the software of the unlimited card (called unlimited data manager) can manage your WLANs, then you'll see them as blocked. But I didn't tell the software to manage my WLANs, so I thought deinstalling would help, but it didn't). After deinstalling the unlimited card software didn't help, I thought there's only a way like a real admin would do - by a commandline-tool that gives you a little bit of linux-feeling. Windows Vista contains a commandline-tool called "netsh" - the Network Services Shell. That tool was also shipped with XP and other Windows Operating Systems. Run that tool from the commandline with "netsh wlan" and you'll see the available commands for WLANs. I looked at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc755301.aspx, where you'll find all informations about administration of WLANs by netsh. There you'll also find the "delete filter" command, that was the solution to my problem. I've deleted the filters of denied infrastructure and adhoc networks by calling the following two commands in a cmd-Window with path to system32 >netsh wlan delete filter permission=denyall networktype=infrastructure
netsh wlan delete filter permission=denyall networktype=adhoc
Both times I got the message "This filter is removed from the system successfully". Here's the Console that shows what I've done. netshDeleteFilter After that step in the Console, my WLAN wasn't blocked anymore and I was able to connect again... puhh, however, I'm still still wondering that there isn't a GUI to unblock WLANs, even on a system called "Windows". ;-)
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How-to deploy the Crystal Reports Basic Runtime that’s included in Visual Studio 2008

This week I've to deploy an ASP.NET application containing about 20 reports that have been created with the Crystal Reports Basic Runtime which is included in Visual Studio 2008. (By the way, the application also contains a lot of AJAX-Functionality. It uses the "AJAX Control Toolkit-based" MultiColumnDropDown that I've described in a previous post). When deploying the application to a different machine than your developer-machine, the Crystal Report Basic Runtime must be deployed also. You do that by copying the necessary msi-file to the server and run it. The "necessary" .msi-file is already on your development machine and were installed with Visual Studio 2008. The .msi-files for different plattforms are located in the following paths:
Runtime | MSI-Location
(x86) C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bootstrapper\Packages\CrystalReports10_5\CRRedist2008_x86.msi
(x64) C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bootstrapper\Packages\CrystalReports10_5\CRRedist2008_x64.msi
(IA64) C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Crystal Reports\CRRedist\IA64\CRRedist2008_ia64.msi
(the table above is contained in MSDN-documentation here) The installation is very simple. You doesn't need to click anything, simply run the .msi and you see the window below. Just wait until it closes. crystalReportsBasic There's also the possibility to include the msi in your setup-application. For more information on that take a look at this thread in MSDN-Forums.
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