February 7, 2003

Yesterday was an interesting day to say the least. Since my machine was being affected by Sapphire, I had put the service pack on to download before I left work the day before yesterday but when I got in yesterday and tried to install it, it was corrupted. I’d taken my notebook in to work since I still couldn’t get .NET web applications to work on it and so wanted to apply the latest updates and patches and after two hours of downloading and updating, .NET web applications still wouldn’t work. In the midst of all this, I had discovered that they had a new version of the PlusMemo component (the same component that is used as the entry field for Blog and BlogMan amongst a few other of my apps) and had downloaded that and tried it out and discovered that the word highlighting code for the Find feature no longer worked (of course, this might not have worked before this new release since Tyran reported this a while back but I still found it to be working – now I”m not so sure since I think I might have been using an older version whereas Tyran reported on a newer version – or something like that :p) Actually, it isn’t as bad as all that since I found solutions to all these problems as the day progressed :p

I downloaded a different service pack file for MSDE and not only did it patch the worm vulnerability (at least I hope so), it also upgraded my MSDE installation. The only problem there is that I’m still not sure whether I’m fully patched or not. Symantec’s Sapphire detection utility simply keeps on saying that I have a vulnerable DLL even after I had applied the service packs. So I downloaded a scan utility from Microsoft itself and that reports that I’m not vulnerable. Since I hadn’t tested the MS utility before I applied the patch, I’m not sure who to believe – so I’m sort of keeping an eye on the traffic to see whether I’m totally safe or if it’s just a false sense of security :p

As for the problem with .NET web applications not working on my notebook, I did some further digging around and found that this was caused by an incomplete install of Visual Studio .NET and had nothing to do with Windows XP SP1 or anything else for that matter. Of course, since my Visual Studio .NET installation gave no indication that anything had gone wrong, I’m left wondering how many other people might have the same problem and not know that they had it? Anyway, the solution turned out to be simple enough – there is a file named aspnet_regiis.exe inside the .NET framework installation folder that had to be run with the -i switch which simply redoes the installation of the IIS registration stuff – which had actually been the problem all along – .aspx files and others produced by .NET had no valid handlers defined in IIS and so were being treated as normal HTML files. Now everything works fine on my notebook and on top of it all, I got my machine updated to use the latest service packs and patches 🙂

The found word highlighting problem with Blog and PlusMemo proved to be a bit more troublesome since there seemed to be nothing at all about using the particular PlusMemo helper component (a component for extended highlighting of specific words) on the Web that I could find. I couldn’t even remember how I had come up with the code in the first place :p I tried several things but nothing seemed to work but in the process I did find more help and insight into using the TExtHighlighter component since I found the actual references in (surprise of surprises <g>) the PlusMemo help file. I still couldn’t get things to work and so I wrote to the people at ECM (the company who code, distribute and support PlusMemo) and asked them for their help. However, in the evening I noticed something that I hadn’t before – the PlusMemo component itself had a property that held a list of keywords to which dynamic styling (highlighting being one of those dynamic styles) would be applied. I have no idea why I had never noticed this property before (maybe it was not there in the PlusMemo component itself originally) but I changed the code to use this property instead of the extended highlighting component that I’d been using and things worked fine again 🙂 So at the end of the day I had everything working fine again … except for some new problems which cropped up due to some new stuff that I’d done but that’s a story for another day :p

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Posted by Fahim at 6:19 am  |  No Comments