At least we
had. One of our customers reported a strange error in one of our web app’s
running .Net 2.0. They got an error message after calling a web service
(running on .Net 1.1) in the web app (.Net 2.0) and we just couldn’t figure it
out.  We and our customer started to
investigate and our customer found that after uninstalling the Security Update
for .Net 2.0 (KB928365)
things started to work again! Nice work customer!

We started
to investigate what caused the problem and found that one week ago we had found
an error related to parsing Unicode. The problem is related to how the
framework (or rather UTF8Encoding class) handles invalid bytes (see KB940521), only we didn’t know that at the time. Here’s the short
version of the KB article:

…the behavior of the UTF8Encoding class,
the UnicodeEncoding class, and the UTF32Encoding class changes to
comply with the Unicode 5.0 requirements for Unicode encodings. Invalid bytes
are not removed. Instead, the invalid bytes are replaced by the Unicode
character U+FFFD.

We had an
invalid byte in the beginning of one of our xml documents that we manually
created and returned as a string using UTF8Encoding. Don’t ask why we parse it
to string; its old code that we haven’t replaced with XmlNode yet. Since this
is now (in 2.0 with security update) replaced as a Unicode character it uses more space and we had to remove
more bytes. Since this class was written in .Net 1.1 but is also used in 2.0,
we made a quick fix for checking which framework and change the behavior accordingly.
The KB articles states:

Earlier versions of the .NET Framework 2.0
followed the latest available Unicode standard, Unicode 4.1. The specifications
for Unicode 4.1 disallowed the passing of invalid UTF code points. Any invalid
data that was encountered was dropped. This behavior was considered to have
minimal effect on current programs.

And then:

Before this change, invalid characters in the
middle of text strings would be silently removed. For example, the string
“Ad\xD800min\xDC00istrator” would change to “Administrator”
because the Unicode characters U+D800 and U+DC00 are invalid. This could cause
a security problem for some programs. After you install security bulletin
MS07-040, this string now becomes “Ad\xFFFDmin\xFFFDistrator.” This
string is decoded to “Ad�min�istrator,” where the � is the Unicode
replacement character.

 So if you
have the same “bad” code or are using Unicode encodings with invalid bytes somewhere
you might experience the same problem and hopefully this would be of help.

Yes,
it’s important to distinguish between the two. At the partner conference in
Denver Kim Saunders (Senior Director, SQL Server Marketing) said that they
launch SQL Server 2008 in February, but the actual release will be in Q2. And
by launching they mean that they have all the marketing material and the final
product information, but not the product.

As for Visual Studio and Windows
Server I have not yet heard anything similar, so I’m still thinking 27th for these.

I’m in Denver at Microsoft World
Wide Partner Conference, and I find it strange. The conference itself is not
strange, but it’s strange for me. I’m a developer/architect and not a sales guy.
I’m used to devcons where the primary purpose is not to interact with as many
people as possible, but to get your hands on as much information as physically
possible. Here it’s a total different game. The sessions are just not the most
important. Making connections and meeting up with people you’ve been matched
with by the conferencing tool is!

The
first day I was the only attendant from my company since our COO arrived later
that day. Because of this I was supposed to set up some meetings with potential
partners. I just have to admit that this is so not me! So this brings up the
question; what am I doing here really?

When I first got the opportunity to attend this conference my first thought was
that this was not for me, but when I looked at the agenda and started to read a bit more about the conference I changed my mind. This
was really an opportunity to get a different view of Microsoft technology and set
it in another perspective. I think most devcons focus on the how, but at the partner conference its more the why.

Another
difference with this conference is that there are actually women here! We
tech guys are not spoiled with having many women on our conferences and I think
that is really bad. I notice right away that this conference has a different
tune to it just because of the mixed gender.

To sum it up I (surprisingly) can recommend
this conference for tech people as well because of the overview you’ll get of
the technology, but be prepared and bring your social skills! And
don’t expect 400 lectures…

Update: At TechEd Barcelona Microsoft announced today (2007-11-05) that Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5 will release in late November. See the official press release here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/nov07/11-05TechEdDevelopersPR.mspx

I’m at the Microsoft Partner Conference in Devner where
Microsoft just announced the release date for Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server
2008 and Windows Server 2008. Look forward to February 27!

Ever been annoyed by not being able to find the real object behind System.__ComObject? There is a solution and guess what; it’s VB.Net (or at least the VB API)! Carlos has a how-to article that explains the solution. In essence you just have to have a reference (if you’re running C# or a non VB language) to Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll. You can then use Microsoft.VisualBasic.Information.TypeName(someObject) to get the info you want. Thanks to Pablo Galiano for his blog post on this.