For the first time since I got my Ribbon Eel about 2 months ago, he ate a big piece of prawn... It took a couple of minutes of persuasion, but I knew he was hungry in the way he poked the lance fish I tried to feed him with initially.

I just hope he continues to eat...

Whilst implementing a .NET application for one of my clients, I recently ran into a problem where a long running task would just suddenly stop working after about 30 minutes. No error, no exception - nothing. I had been troubleshooting this for 3 days now, and that is a very long time for someone with my experience (if I may say so myself). The difficulty with this problem is that there are no - and I mean absolutely NO errors. The only thing I could gather is that the long running task stops because the IIS worker process dies. I even added detailed trace statements - none of which helped. The output stopped dead at one my of audit entries:

Workflow.Audit.AddAuditEntry(new XXXAudit.XXXAuditEntry(this,
   "Some message"));

A couple of minutes ago I decided to put trace statements in the getters I am using here:

Whilst working on my Windows XP SP2 machine, this kept on popping up.

<Missing Image>

(Update: For those who did not get it, \$BitMap is a MFT system file - for Windows to suggest I have to save it elsewhere is just downright hilarious - that would cause even more problems! They should have presented a different popup message for system files.)

I was busy implementing a system for a client using C++ on Win32 when I had to use the sprintf function. As I knew it was insecure I looked up the function's details - only to be caught in an infinite web of evasion.

An exert from MSDN:

Security Note There is no way to limit the number of characters written, which means that code using sprintf is susceptible to buffer overruns. Consider using the related function _snprintf, which specifies a maximum number of characters to be written to buffer, or use _scprintf to determine how large a buffer is required. Also, ensure that format is not a user-defined string.

This is both a tip and a rant. Vista RTM refused to connect to any of my SMB shares on my Mac OS X machines running Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4.8). It kept on failing with "Authentication failed" messages - even though it saw the clients on the network.

I consider myself an expert computer user in most aspects of computing - including networks. Now if I could not resolve this problem on my own and only by extensive searching on the internet found this article, I would have never solved it. How on earth will the average Joe Bloggs fix this critical issue when he goes out and buys Vista in a couple of days when it gets released to the masses?

Even though I knew Microsoft implemented SMB2 in Vista, I thought they had the savvy to ensure backwards (current?) compatibility with at least something such as Mac OS X 10.4.8. That is why I never suspected the problem has to do with an overly strict authentication policy.