After upgrading Ubuntu from 18.04 to 20.04, I noticed that my VM .desktop shortcut throws the error message
–startvm is an option for the VirtualBox VM runner (VirtualBoxVM) application, not the VirtualBox Manager.
Before the upgrade, it simply started the virtual machine referenced as parameter value.
It seems that VirtualBox moved the --startvm parameter from the previous VirtualBox executable to VirtualBoxVM. More infos and links can be found in this VirtualBox ticket.
The (easy) solution was to open the .desktop file in an editor, and change the line
SpecFlow steps are public methods adorned using the [Given], [When], and [Then] attributes inside classes marked with the [Binding] attribute.
To load the assembly containing the compiled SpecFlow steps, I found it necessary to load all other assemblies inside the bin directory. Otherwise an error would occur in the assembly’s GetTypes() method stating the references to other assemblies could not be resolved.
along with all [Binding] classes and there methods with the attributes listed above.
The attributes are collected in an array, as their Regex property contains the regular expression that will be used to search the .feature files using PowerShell’s select-string cmdlet.
:Outer foreach($a in $attributes) { foreach($ff in $featurefiles) { $found = $featurefilecontents[$ff] | select-string -Pattern $a.Regex -CaseSensitive if ($found.Matches.Length -gt 0) { #write-host "found $($a.Regex) in file $ff" $foundattributes += $a continue Outer } } write-host "did not found reference for $($a.GetType().Name) $($a.Regex)" $notfoundattributes += $a }
The script has been developed to analyze a project using SpecFlow 2.4.0, and is available on my PowerShell Snippets repository.
MSBuild provides the functionality to generate a production web.config (or app.config) from the developer’s web.config merged with a web.*.config transformation file named after the current Configuration. This web.config File Transformation is applied when you Deploy a (web) application.
But what if you want to apply the same file transformation during build? The scenario occurs if a team checks in the web.config file, but needs customization for each developer of the team (e.g. different local SQL connection strings, log directories etc).
Digging through the various .targets files that configure the VS build system, I found a reference to the <TransformXml> command in Microsoft.Web.Publishing.targets deep inside the Visual Studio installation directory. (see the answers on this SO question)
Putting it all together, I came up with an AfterBuild step in the .csproj file which applies the web.config transformation on build, rather than on deploy:
The sample grid only contains 3 columns, and sorting by multiple columns does not have much effect, but this is only about the sorting behavior, not the data being sorted.
As you check the “Enable multiple columns sorting” box, you’ll notice a behavior that I find counter-intuitive:
click on the Product Name column, and the grid is sorted by Product Name, showing 1 sort arrow
click on the ID column, and the grid is sorted by Product Name and then ID, indicated by the column order next to the sort arrows (Product Name – 1, ID – 2)
click on the Product Name column again, to reverse the sort order of the Product Name column.
What do you expect?
What the Kendo UI Grid does, it changes the order of columns so that the column clicked last ends up being the last in the order of columns.
My understanding is that the user wanted to change the direction of the sorted column (ascending vs. descending), and not change the order of the sorted columns.
Fortunately, the <kendo-grid> component provides a (sortChange) event, where you can implement your favorite sort behavior.
Microsoft provides a list of Latest updates for Microsoft SQL Server which gives you the latest Cumulative Update (CU) number for each Service Pack (SP) of each version of SQL Server since 2000.
But how do you check which version of SQL Server you have installed on your machines?
Sure, there internets are full of SQL scripts which retrieve this information (MS, SO, TN, etc), but those scripts require you to connect to every SQL Server instance and query it individually.
If you have direct access to the machine running SQL Server (such as your development machine), wouldn’t it be nice if you saw the list of installed SQL Server versions, whether the instances are running or stopped?
So I typed along in the PowerShell ISE, retrieving all executables named sqlservr.exe (the executable hosting SQL Server), retrieving their VersionInfo, and outputting the relevant information:
So, as a first step, I have the ProductVersion numbers.
As I found while researching this script, Microsoft also provides a list of product versions (“build versions”) indicating SQL Server version, Service Pack and Cumulative Update. The list can be downloaded as .xlsx from aka.ms/SQLServerbuilds.
So I have the installed product versions as list of PS objects, and the build numbers in .xlsx format, let’s combine both.
Fortunately, there is a PS library to read .xlsx files called ImportExcel (GitHub), and you install it by simply running
Install-Module ImportExcel -Scope CurrentUser
(you probably need to update PowerShell’s nuget, which is done semi-automatically in the process)
As it turned out, ImportExcel is PS code wrapping OfficeOpenXml.ExcelPackage, which I have dealt with in previous C# projects, so you do not have to have Excel installed when parsing the downloaded .xlsx.
The script uses Get-ExcelSheetInfo to query all the worksheets of the Excel file, and for each worksheet runs Import-Excel to retrieve the worksheet’s data into a hashtable indexed by the build number.
Finally, the original procedure is extended to lookup the ProductVersion number in the hashtable, and merge the Excel data with the original result:
I liked the Reference Assistant extension very much, but unfortunately it only works for Visual Studio versions 2010 through 2013, and I always wanted to adapt the extension to later versions of Visual Studio.
Since I had no experience in working with the VSSDK, I created a dummy project and clicked my way through it, and tried to figure out, where the original code hooked into VS, and how to migrate that code from 2010 to 2017.
One of the main obstacles was the setup of the Options page, which seems to have changed fundamentally. Fortunately, the Extensibility Samples also contain a project named Options covering the Tools->Options dialog.
Of course, migration also means upgrading .Net versions (implied by creating a VS2017 extension project), replacing assembly references with NuGet packages, and a little bit of tuning and tweaking.
What I like about this tool is that is lets you preview the changes it is going to make, and exclude references from removal you know are required, as the tool does not consider occasional implied references and assemblies referenced in .config files.
To import data from MySQL into a MS SQL database, we need to first analyze the output of mysqldump, the backup utility of MySQL. I have covered the most obvious differences to T-SQL in my previous post.
Fortunately, the output of mysqldump is line-oriented, i.e. every CREATE TABLE statement, table column or index, and INSERT statement is in a separate line.
In a brute-force approach, we can therefore parse each line using regular expressions, and do not require full parsing involving tokenizer and grammar.
I found a couple of interesting points that need to be considered when generating T-SQL statements:
As T-SQL did not support “DROP IF EXISTS” before SQL Server 2016, we need to provide the classical variant “IF OBJECT_ID() IS NOT NULL”
NVARCHAR(MAX) columns cannot be indexed
BINARY data needs to be 0x-encoded
UNIQUE INDEXes should not include NULLable columns
Multi-row INSERT INTO statements cannot contain more than 1000 rows
‘0000-00-00’ is a valid date in MySQL, but not in MSSQL. The value is being replaced by ‘1800-01-01’ to avoid the error message
The conversion of a varchar data type to a datetime data type resulted in an out-of-range value.
Some indexes may require manually editing column collations, e.g. for unique case-sensitive MySQL indexes.
When executing T-SQL statements in SSMS, a number of warnings or errors can occur:
A warning that indexed data is supported to a maximum length of 960 bytes
Inserting data may result in the error “String or binary data would be truncated.”
Some files are too big to execute in SSMS, and need to be executed using sqlcmd
A batch with too many too large INSERT INTO statements may raise the error
There is insufficient system memory in resource pool ‘default’ to run this query
so we break up the batch using “GO”
Multiple cascade paths
MS SQL Server does not support ON DELETE CASCADE clauses such that the grandchild record of a parent-child-grandchild relation cannot be uniquely identified. Creating such a FOREIGN KEY raises the error message
Msg 1785, Level 16, State 0, Line 1
Introducing FOREIGN KEY constraint ‘fk_xxx’ on table ‘xxx’ may cause cycles or multiple cascade paths. Specify ON DELETE NO ACTION or ON UPDATE NO ACTION, or modify other FOREIGN KEY constraints.
I developed mysqldump2mssql, a prototype implementing these rules, which is available on my GitHub. The program has been developed and tested against MySQL dumps of MediaWiki, Joomla, Bugzilla and Nextcloud.
The tool generates up to 4 files for each table defined in the source SQL file:
create.sql: the CREATE TABLE statement, optional CREATE UNIQUE INDEX statements
data.sql: the INSERT INTO statements
fk.sql: the FOREIGN KEY relations to other tables
fulltext.sql: the CREATE FULLTEXT statement
The filenames of the generated files consist of the sequence number of execution, the table name, and one of the endings mentioned in above table.
MySQL and MS SQLServer both can be accessed using SQL, but if you look closely at both SQL dialects, you’ll find a lot of differences.
Backups of MySQL databases are created using the utility mysqldump, which simply dumps all the SQL statements required to recreate the database into a SQL file, as opposed to SQLServer backup, which creates a binary file representing the database contents.
As we are interesting in parsing the SQL and converting it into valid T-SQL statements, we have to look at the differences between the SQL dialects. Fortunately, since the SQL files are output by a tool, the generated statements are fairly regular.
Here are some special features of the MySQL dialect, which need to be handled for conversion into T-SQL:
Identifiers are quoted with a backtick `, rather than square brackets
IDENTITY columns are marked by the auto_increment keyword
Binary columns may store text values
Text values may contain character codes with leading backslash \, as known from C# or C
Values for DATETIME, DATE and TIME columns need not be quoted as strings
‘0000-00-00’ is a valid DATE
A CREATE TABLE statement may include the definition of indexes, unique indexes and fulltext indexes
Both SQL engines provide support for collations, but they are completely different
I installed the latest verion of ScrewTurnWiki 5, first to obtain a valid database schema, and second to click through the Administration menu to figure out what can be configured in what I considered the last “official” edition of STW.
Unfortunately, I can only find the binary release, as opposed to all other versions of ScrewTurnWiki that come also with source code (or only with source code).
So I entered the Administration menu and clicked through the menu items, when suddenly a click on Global Admin Home redirected me to an ad site, and away from STW.
After a bit of research the code, it turned out that the version update check tries to retrieve information on whether a newer software version exists, but handles the result of the HTTP request incorrectly: The resulting HTML is simply copied into the admin back-end. Technically speaking, the HTML is passed through in an <asp:Literal>.
and it is obvious that embedding this content as literal HTML immediately performs a Javascript redirect with tracking parameters js= and sid=, and off it goes to whatever ad netware is being lucky.
The easiest workaround to solve this redirection attack is to locate the AdminGlobalHome.aspx file, and modify the <asp:Literal ID=”lblSystemStatusContent”> element to include a property Mode=”Encode” to disable harmful HTML:
When I replaced my original Ubuntu server with the (then) more current Ubuntu 18.04, I also moved MySQL databases and wanted to have them backed up regularly.
I had used the script AutoMySQLBackup which did the job fine, and installed it on the new machine. (When I first found the script, I adapted for PowerShell on Windows it to backup my SQL Server databases)
On the new machine, however, the tool mysqldump issued the warning
[Warning] Using a password on the command line interface can be insecure.
The change seems to have been introduced in MySQL 5.6, and the solution to the warning is documented in the MySQL 5.6 Reference Manual. There are also answers on SO regarding the warning
mysql_config_editor set --login-path=local --host=localhost --user=username --password
mysql --login-path=local -e "statement"
I guess I tried to change the .sh script to call mysqldump with –login-path instead of –user/–password.
As the original script is not maintained anymore, I found this fork of AutoMySQLBackup which is still active, and also documents the use of –login-path.
