Juice

RFC 822 and System.DateTime

Sat, 01 Jan 2005 05:46:18 GMT

I've always known that the .NET System.DateTime class had some limitations converting RFC 822 formatted date-times. Here's an example test case where the .NET library fails.

[NUnit.Framework.Test]
[NUnit.Framework.ExpectedException(typeof(System.FormatException))]
public void Date4()
{
Convert.ToDateTime("Thu, 30 Dec 2004 13:52:52 -0500");
}

The problem is that .NET throws when parsing the timezone. And there are other situations where .NET parses the timezone but doesn't translate it correct. Here's an test case.

[NUnit.Framework.Test]
public void Date9()
{
   System.DateTime dt = Convert.ToDateTime("Thu, 30 Dec 2004 13:52:52 GMT").ToUniversalTime();
   System.Console.WriteLine(dt.ToString("r"));
   System.DateTime dt2 = Convert.ToDateTime("Thu, 30 Dec 2004 13:52:52");
   if (dt2 != dt)
   {
      NUnit.Framework.Assert.Fail(dt.ToString("r")+"|"+dt2.ToString("r"));
   }
}

The solution was to write my own RFC 822 date parsing class that compensated for these limitations. I wrote a dozen test cases that seem to confirm it's better than the default .NET behavior. Feedback would be nice.

using System;

namespace kb
{
	public class Rfc822DateTime 
	{
		static public System.DateTime FromString(string date)
		{
			System.DateTime dt;
			int pos = date.LastIndexOf(" ");

			try
			{
				dt = Convert.ToDateTime(date);
				if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "Z")
				{
					dt = dt.ToUniversalTime();
				}
				else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "GMT")
				{
					dt = dt.ToUniversalTime();
				}
				return dt;
			}
			catch (System.Exception x)
			{ 
				System.Diagnostics.Trace.WriteLine(x.Message);
			}
			
			dt = Convert.ToDateTime(date.Substring(0, pos));
			if (date[pos+1] == '+')
			{
				int h = Convert.ToInt32(date.Substring(pos+2, 2));
				dt = dt.AddHours(-h);
				int m = Convert.ToInt32(date.Substring(pos+4, 2));
				dt = dt.AddMinutes(-m);
			}
			else if (date[pos+1] == '-')
			{
				int h = Convert.ToInt32(date.Substring(pos+2, 2));
				dt = dt.AddHours(h);
				int m = Convert.ToInt32(date.Substring(pos+4, 2));
				dt = dt.AddMinutes(m);
			}
			else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "A")
			{
				dt = dt.AddHours(1);
			}
			else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "B")
			{
				dt = dt.AddHours(2);
			}
			else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "C")
			{
				dt = dt.AddHours(3);
			}
			else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "D")
			{
				dt = dt.AddHours(4);
			}
			else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "E")
			{
				dt = dt.AddHours(5);
			}
			else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "F")
			{
				dt = dt.AddHours(6);
			}
			else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "G")
			{
				dt = dt.AddHours(7);
			}
			else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "H")
			{
				dt = dt.AddHours(8);
			}
			else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "I")
			{
				dt = dt.AddHours(9);
			}
			else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "K")
			{
				dt = dt.AddHours(10);
			}
			else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "L")
			{
				dt = dt.AddHours(11);
			}
			else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "M")
			{
				dt = dt.AddHours(12);
			}
			else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "N")
			{
				dt = dt.AddHours(-1);
			}
			else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "O")
			{
				dt = dt.AddHours(-2);
			}
			else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "P")
			{
				dt = dt.AddHours(-3);
			}
			else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "Q")
			{
				dt = dt.AddHours(-4);
			}
			else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "R")
			{
				dt = dt.AddHours(-5);
			}
			else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "S")
			{
				dt = dt.AddHours(-6);
			}
			else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "T")
			{
				dt = dt.AddHours(-7);
			}
			else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "U")
			{
				dt = dt.AddHours(-8);
			}
			else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "V")
			{
				dt = dt.AddHours(-9);
			}
			else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "W")
			{
				dt = dt.AddHours(-10);
			}
			else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "X")
			{
				dt = dt.AddHours(-11);
			}
			else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "Y")
			{
				dt = dt.AddHours(-12);
			}
			else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "EST")
			{
				dt = dt.AddHours(5);
			}
			else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "EDT")
			{
				dt = dt.AddHours(4);
			}
			else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "CST")
			{
				dt = dt.AddHours(6);
			}
			else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "CDT")
			{
				dt = dt.AddHours(5);
			}
			else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "MST")
			{
				dt = dt.AddHours(7);
			}
			else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "MDT")
			{
				dt = dt.AddHours(6);
			}
			else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "PST")
			{
				dt = dt.AddHours(8);
			}
			else if (date.Substring(pos+1) == "PDT")
			{
				dt = dt.AddHours(7);
			}

			return dt;
		}
	}
}

M$FT Releases new VS Preview

Mon, 27 Dec 2004 16:38:41 GMT

eWeek: Microsoft Corp. has made available a new build of its Visual Studio 2005 integrated development environment.

window.onload, not onLoad

Mon, 27 Dec 2004 15:40:18 GMT

With growing interest in using Firefox, I've been spending a greater amount of time trying to debug Moz-based bugs in my software. Today, I was fixing a bug reported by David Sifry, Moz-OSX specific. Since I don't have an OSX box, I wasn't able to replicate his bug, but I did find another error. It seems that setting document.designMode outside of onLoad doesn't work all-the-time. A refresh corrects the problem, but that's not good enough for me. I tried setting document.body.onload and that didn't work. I then tried setting window.onLoad and that didn't work either.

Turns out, you have to use window.onload (note the capitalization). I've always known Javascript was suppose to be case-sensitive, but everybody has been treating it otherwise. Now, we have all this case-insensitive javascript and it's broken. I wonder how many window.onLoad's are causing websites to display improperly in Firefox?

A failure occurred writing to the resources file

Thu, 23 Dec 2004 17:14:35 GMT

Grandma: This bug has been documented by others, but for some reason has never been fixed. Consider the following error that I receive when building a very large solution:

xyz.resx A failure occurred writing to the resources file. The system cannot find the path specified.

The failure occurs because VS.NET has a limit on the length of path names, but only for .RESX files.

Randy: Arggg!

Unable to connect to the remote server

Sat, 18 Dec 2004 03:15:38 GMT

This week, somebody at the office was having a hard time connection to our SOAP Web service. The SoapHttpClientProtocol based proxy object was responding...

The underlying connection was closed: The remote name could not be resolved.

I searched and searched the Internet and couldn't figure out why this was happening. I tried every pretty much everything suggested by Microsoft, developers in online forums and .NET bloggers. No luck! Finally, I decided to try doing the SOAP request manually by opening up a socket and sending the bytes by hand. When I opened the socket, I got the following exception...

An operation on a socket could not be performed because the system lacked sufficient buffer space or because a queue was full.

This led me to a Microsoft Knowledge Base bug report and a solution. Hopefully, this will get picked up by Google and others can benefit from this experience and not have to spend countless hours banging their head against their keyboard, as I did.

NUnitForms SUCCESS!

Wed, 15 Dec 2004 16:44:38 GMT

An Tay Nguy: I also get this error too. I noticed that if I use the RichEdit or the PropertyGrid control on my form, I will get this error.

System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception : The requested resource is in use.
--TearDown
at NUnit.Extensions.Forms.Desktop.Destroy()
at NUnit.Extensions.Forms.Desktop.Dispose()
at NUnit.Extensions.Forms.NUnitFormTest.Verify()

I am using VS 2003 with NUnit 2.2.2

A.Bekiaris: u could override the UseHidden property of NUnitFormTest and set it to false that will fix it. I do not know of a better way that is how i use the framework.

Randy: Finally, the answer to all my NUnitForms problems. I hope this feeds into Google so that others can benefit from the great Bekiaris.

Category and Source

Sun, 12 Dec 2004 00:42:59 GMT

I'm adding RSS categories and source to my blogging software.

Adventures w/ NUnitForms

Thu, 09 Dec 2004 15:14:04 GMT

I got a couple response regarding my problems w/ NUnitForms on the NUnitForms help mailing list. The response was to public override void Setup() instead of [NUnit.Framework.SetUp] public void SetUp(). I had already tried this and I tried it again (just in case) and...

test.Forms.BloomForm.Test :
TearDown : System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception : The requested resource is in use
--TearDown
at NUnit.Extensions.Forms.Desktop.Destroy()
at NUnit.Extensions.Forms.NUnitFormTest.Verify()

No success.

Ampersands (&) in URLs

Thu, 09 Dec 2004 05:44:16 GMT

HTMLHelp: To avoid problems with both validators and browsers, always use & in place of & when writing URLs in HTML.

Just one Line of Code

Thu, 09 Dec 2004 02:45:27 GMT

I keep forgetting about this one line of code that makes Regex one of the best creations in the history of computing.

NUnitForms

Wed, 08 Dec 2004 15:46:30 GMT

I put some more effort into NUnitForms yesterday and this morning. I didn't have any success. Basically nothing works, not even the samples. Obviously, there's a big hole in there somewhere that I'm just not getting. I tried pinging for help on their mailing list and the response was denial that it didn't work; end of story. The sample puts the test cases directly into the executable, which seems kinda ridiculous. I'm not going to deploy the test cases w/ my application.

I created a simple EXE that referenced one of my DLLs. I then wrote one empty test as follows.

[NUnit.Framework.TestFixture]
public class CommentForm : NUnit.Extensions.Forms.NUnitFormTest
{

   public CommentForm()
   {
   }

   ss.PictureBar.CommentForm form = null;
   [NUnit.Framework.SetUp]
   public void SetUp()
   {
      form = new ss.PictureBar.CommentForm();
      form.Show();
   }

   [NUnit.Framework.Test]
   public void Test()
   {
   }

}

This generates the following failures from the NUnit GUI.

--TearDown
at NUnit.Extensions.Forms.NUnitFormTest.Verify()
test.Forms.CommentForm.Test :
TearDown : System.NullReferenceException : Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

I tried a thousand variations of this trivial test w/out success. Well, except the one variation where you remove the NUnitFormTest inheritance. Then it works just fine ;)

After a second failure to get anything runnig in NUnitForms, it'll be some time before I try it again.

Image Fade-In

Tue, 07 Dec 2004 04:12:00 GMT

Added to the iBLOGthere4iM channel image. The script. Add id='fadeinimage' to the image to fade in and set the visibility style on this id to hidden.

Source: LaughingMeme.

search feedster from google desktop

Sun, 05 Dec 2004 21:48:50 GMT

Jeremy Zawodny: heh.

Special QuickWatch for a DataSet

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 23:05:37 GMT

Lucius: It's a great add-in for VS.NET. It will put a new entry in your vs.net context menu, and now you'll be able to see the contents of your dataset, as XML, or grid of data.

Randy: Thanks!

Error while trying to run project

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 03:19:13 GMT

Ever get this while debugging a Web project in Visual Studio?

I get it all the time. It happens when I move projects around and forget to give the ASP and IIS user permission to the folder. If you run w/out the debugger, you'll get the following more obvious error message.

System.Web.HttpException: Server cannot access application directory '...'. The directory does not exist or is not accessible because of security settings.

Goto Folder Properties | Security and give access to the ASP.NET Machine Account and the Internet Guest Account. Next you may or may not incur a similar dialog but w/ a new error message; The project is not configured to be debugged. The happens when you're missing a Web.config file or when the Web.config file does not allow debugging.

I hit this problem so frequently, I figured it was worth more documentation so that next time I'm programming under the influence of alcohol, I'll more easily find my way home ;)