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.

When my friend showed me the Christmas lights people were decorating their houses with in some areas in Centurion, I was amazed since I never realised we have some of the spirit one can find in Europe...

Here are a couple of pics.