Daily Archives: January 31, 2006

Considering VB.NET 2.0 Network Ping

Just Rambling

I have a web service that I wrote for one of my smart client apps to check for one of three states of connectivity: no network, local network connection to web server, web connection to the web server.

So I ping the web service at the local i.p. The operation returns a mystical “hello world”. If that times out, then I ping the service at the i.p. of the web server as it is exposed to the web via ISA Server. If that times out as well, then they are told (politely of course) that they are S.O.L. and need some type of network access to run these particular functions.

I have a client side assembly dedicated to this as well as the web service.

Now Visual Basic .NET 2.0 has My.Computer.Network.Ping to which you pass a URI and a timeout period. There is one small code benefit to me as I have to dynamically construct the web service URL and using the new method, I can just ping the i.p. and not care about a complete path to the web service. However, the Network.Ping method requires a bunch of permission that I don’t need in order to hit the web service. So I think that for now, I’ll leave it alone and wokr on other things for my migration.



Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

IDX=GE Healthcare

dotNET

Well, it seems really official now. GE purchased Burlington based IDX in 2005 for $1.2 billion. Today I got an email from someone at IDX asking me to update his email address from @idx.com to @ge.com!

That’s going to take some getting used to.



Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Wrap it up – conclusions

Just Rambling

Writing a conclusion or summary at the end of an article is hard work. In addition to it being deflating after the fun of hashing over lots of ideas, you have to be careful to avoid cliches like “powerful features”.

Do you even read that last paragraph of a technical article? Does it help you get closure or is it just a dangling preposition, so to speak?

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Crystal Reports for .NET 1.1 needs to be reinstalled after CR .NET 2.0

Tools

As I begin deploying new apps at my client site,  we made a discovery that we were easily able to correct.

After installing a .NET 2.0 app that uses Crystal Reports, we were unable to run Crystal Reports from our .NET 1.1 applications. We got an error indicating that it could not find the CrystalReports.Engine assembly.

The short story is that reinstalling CR .NET 1.1 after CR.NET 2.0 fixes the problem.

For the more curious, I did a little more exploration. I uninstalled the CR for .NET 2.0 but whatever it had stomped on did not fix itself and the 1.1 reports still did not work.

Then I reinstalled 1.1 which worked again and then 2.0 on top of it which again broke 1.1. (Just verifying that this was the direct cause.)

Lastly, we installed CR.NET 1.1 after CR.NET 2.0 and then all of the reporting works fine.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org