A day in the life of...

Here’s what I did. 01: I created a support project which just has a logger class in it. namespace EcoSupport.pas; interface uses   System.Collections.Generic,   System.Linq,   System.Text; type   Logger = public class   private   protected   public     class procedure Log(Message : String);   end; implementation class procedure Logger.Log(Message : String); begin   System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(’Log: ’ + Message); end; end. 02: I created an Aspect which decorates methods, giving me the opportunity to intercept all method calls on the class it decorates. namespace EcoAspects; interface uses   System.Collections.Generic,   System.Linq,   System.Text,   RemObjects.Oxygene.Cirrus,   EcoSupport; type   [AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Class)]   LogAspect = public class(System.Attribute, RemObjects.Oxygene.Cirrus.IMethodImplementationDecorator)   private   protected   public     method HandleImplementation(Services: IServices; aMethod: IMethodDefinition);   end; implementation method

http://blogs.remobjects.com/blogs/ck/2009/02/06/p251 Read the comments I posted to see why I like it!

My employer's support contract has finally come to an end which means I have to look for another job, haven't had to do that in a while! Drop me an email if you have any positions vacant, in the meantime it's time to do a little "networking".

The outcome of this fairly long exchange on codeplex has made me very happy!

It seems they are unable to spell the word "money", because every time they send me their drivel of a newsletter they always want money. Usually it is for their "Van of truth" (which amuses me immensely) but this time it is to help them to become "the most technically advanced political party in the UK". So, what are they going to do to earn this esteemed title? Set up our own BNP call centre Set up the party campaign central office Purchase 18 computers/screens/software Activate our brand new central database platform Recruit more staff to cope Train all staff in new systems Set up central mailing and telephone points for party Open our new logistical distribution warehouse Riiight. Call centre – Surely other parties have these? Central office – I am pretty sure other parties have these! 18 computers / screens / software – Screens? Are they going to watch TV on them? MONITORS! At least we are talking I.T. now though. Central database

I'm trying to view this page in Firefox. When it loads the browser tells me I need Silverlight, so I download and install it and then restart my browser only to be told I need to install Silverlight. That's not impressive at all!

My app has a wizard approach, the current control appears within a panel with Align set to fill the hosting panel. My first wizard step control merely had an image on it which resizes with its parent control. When I resize the form the host panel resizes, which resizes the wizard control, which resizes the image; and boy does it flicker! I just had to spend some time upgrading my old Delphi DIB controls to D2009 just to get an image that doesn't flicker, crazy! By the way, I tried the same thing in VS2008 and there was no flicker at all, and I thought Delphi was supposed to be the tool that produced fast UI apps.

There was a potential deadlock in the last piece of code. When you obtain any kind of lock you will mostly use a try..finally block to ensure the lock is released when you have finished with it. The using() command expands to a try..finally block so the original code might look okay, however if you mentally expand the code you will see the problem. using (FileLockingService.FileReadLock(product1.ID)) {     //Some code here } This becomes var disposable = FileLockingService.FileReadLock(product1.ID); try {     //Some code here } finally {     disposable.Dispose(); } So why is this a problem? In a single threaded application it isn't, but this is a website so there are multiple threads running at the same time. Now take into account the fact that a web request has a timeout, what if the thread is aborted after the lock is obtained? Ordinarily this isn't a problem because the acquisition is followed immediately by a "try", but if we expand this code further it is ev

Apparently my boss used to be annoyed with something on his old website. When he wanted to upload an updated binary he often couldn't because his product was so popular that someone was always downloading it at the same time. He'd have to continuously hit Delete in his FTP client until eventually he'd slip in and manage to delete it before updating the new version. This obviously isn't an ideal solution because: He constantly had to sit there for around an hour trying to delete it. Once deleted from the disk any user attempting to download would get a 404 – Not Found error. During upload any user attempting to download would get an Access Denied error of some kind. For this website I have decided first of all to only update the files via a HTTP form post. So firstly any long running upload will not deny access to the currently available file, this eliminates problem 3. Additionally, using a form post means I can overwrite the existing file, so this eliminates problem 2.

If I had to write a large business app which accessed a DB, or a website, I would use .NET without hesitation. When it comes to small apps (less than 10MB) that will be downloaded by home users what should I use? I have such a project coming up soon, my boss has bought D2009 and wants me to use that because he is paranoid about people reverse engineering the binaries. I'm a little hesitant but I must admit that I think in this case Delphi 2009 probably is the best tool for the job, and I like to use the best tool for the job rather than the tool I like to use best for my job. Hopefully things will go smoothly, it will be nice writing apps in two different languages.

An odd title for a coding blog I know, but I love martial arts too, especially competitive ones. I'm just putting together a CD for my car. The tunes on the CD music really make my adrenaline pump, so I am putting together a compilation of tunes which make me want to win a fight...with style! Nirvana – Smells like teen spirit. Fat boy slim – Right here right now. William Orbit – Adagio for strings (Ferry Corsten Remix with first 2 mins cut off). The Prodigy – Breathe. The Prodidy – Firestarter. Chemical Brothers – Block rockin' beat. Chemical Brothers – Setting Sun.

I can't believe it, I really can't! I'm writing a shopping cart for a website. One of the features required is to give the user an X amount discount off their next order when they buy a specific product. So let's say the user has a £20 discount on their next order, how does PayPal let me apply that? Simple answer, it doesn't! You can't send a cart line with a negative price "Discount for 20 GBP", nor can you send a cart line with a positive price but a negative quantity (that was desperation). The way to do this apparently is to send a cart total. YES! By sending the entire order aggregated into a single order line. NOOOOOOO!!!!!! So PayPal wants my user to order £100 of goods, click Check-out, and then be presented with "Total for your order £100 (£20 discount)", that's it? In my opinion, that's not very good. In fact, considering PayPal is probably the largest Internet payment organisation in the world I consider this to be

Someone pointed this link out to me today: http://www.screensketcher.com/examples.html It's another application along the lines of Balsamiq. This app does seem very "sharp", it has very snappy response times etc, which is nice and everything BUT I still don't like these kinds of apps! I do prefer the name though, it suggests "I sketch screens" rather than "I am a bottle of vinegar ".

I've just spotted a "Publish to Blog" option in Word 2007. So I thought I'd give it a spin and see what happens. If it works then Blogging is going to be a much more pleasurable experience. My spelling is atrocious. I find complex formatting on BlogSpot is terrible. I will no longer have to edit HTML just to get my code to look right. Talking of code, I had better try that out too...     public class PreSaveConstraint     {         public readonly IObject Instance;         public readonly string Name;         public readonly Func<bool> CheckIsValid;           public PreSaveConstraint(IObject instance, string name, Func<bool> checkIsValid)         {             if (instance == null)                 throw new ArgumentNullException("Instance");             if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(name))                 throw new ArgumentNullException("Name");             if (checkIsValid == null)                 throw new ArgumentNullException("Che

Finally there is proof that God exists. The proof has come in the guise of a product named Balsamiq . Balsamiq allows you to create mock GUI when specifying an application. Rather than having graphics that look like real forms etc it uses a pencil drawing lookalike approach. Here is my reasoning. It does nothing you can't do for free in the IDE you undoubtedly already have. The result looks far worse than a mock up you can create in your IDE. Once you have the mock up you can't do anything useful with it except export it as an image or print it. You can't, for example, actually use that for a real form later in the project's life cycle. The result looks crap. Not poor, crap! It looks like a 7 year old has drawn it with a wax crayon....a blunt one. Balsamiq brought in revenue of over 100,000 US Dollars in its first 5 months. Now the way I see it is this. Lots of people are sending money to a guy to buy software that does something they can already do much better f

I am currently developing part of a website where I pass cart information to PayPal to accept payment. PayPal will call back a "secret URL" on my website to allow me to confirm the cart details haven't been tampered with. I hate installing software I don't need. This is especially the case with software like IIS which just feels so intrusive, which is why I use the ASP.NET Development Server when creating websites. The problem with this server is that it only accepts connections from the local machine. My computer is behind a hardware firewall and my web server wont accept remote connections, so how can I test my PayPal IPN call back? Simple. Obviously I have to open a port on my firewall and direct it to my machine. So I opened port 80. Then I used this tool to list on port 80 and redirect all traffic to port 10101 (the port my ASP.NET development server was listening on). The result is that a remote computer can now make a HTTP request to my computer, and I

I am just creating some classes that allow the user of an app to specify date/time validity. As I am modeling them it reminded me of some recurring event classes I once wrote to schedule payments between bank accounts. One day my customer phoned me up. "Has your invoice been paid this month?" he asked. "Yes" I said. "Ah good, your code works then!"

Jeff seems to have put it very well in his blog. Much better than I did myself back in December 2006 when I blogged about my "Onion" idea. My mistakes were 01: I was missing a domain services layer. 02: I tried to explain it using a specific example (wizard app with a "process stack" aka "task stack"), and later decided I didn't like the example :-) 03: When I drew my diagrams I showed them as a typical stacked diagram, because my graphics skills are crap :-) Here's my badly put idea of onion layered applications: http://mrpmorris.blogspot.com/2006/12/net-onion-part-1.html Here's Jeffrey's http://jeffreypalermo.com/blog/the-onion-architecture-part-1/ Well done Jeff, very nicely put!

[TestMethod] public void Meh() { var mockFileSystem = MockRepository.GenerateMock<IFileSystemService>(); mockFileSystem.Stub(fs => fs.CreateFileStream(null, FileMode.Append, FileAccess.Write, FileShare.None)) .IgnoreArguments() .Return(new MemoryStream()); var result1 = mockFileSystem.CreateFileStream(null, FileMode.Append, FileAccess.Write, FileShare.None); var result2 = mockFileSystem.CreateFileStream(null, FileMode.Append, FileAccess.Write, FileShare.None); Assert.AreNotSame(result1, result2); } This test case shows a problem I was having. The return value of the stubbed CreateFileStream method isn't calculated each time it is called, it is calculated once at the point you defined the stub method and then returned for every subsequent call. The problem with this is that my real test needed to call CreateFileStream twice and get two different streams, the test was failing because the method being tested disposes of the stream it uses; this was resulti

When I run my unit tests in my project I am seeing a result "Not executed" for every one. I have restarted my computer so I doubt this is some kind of hung process issue. Google has revealed nothing that is not related to load balancing, and I am not load balancing! Solved In order to determine the error you have to do this Open the Visual Studio command prompt Change to the directory where the binary output of your test project is. Type mstest /testcontainer:The.Name.Of.Your.Test.Assembly.dll At the bottom of the output you will see the following text Run has the following issue(s): In my case it was the following: Failed to queue test run 'Peter Morris@PETERMORRIS-PC 2009-02-09 10:00:37': Test Run deployment issue: The location of the file or directory 'C:\SomePath\SomeProject.Tests\bin\Debug\Rhino.Mocks.dll' is not trusted. Now if VS had told me this in the IDE I could have fixed it in minutes! All you have to do is open Windows Explorer and

I'm working on an app which uses a 3rd party library for producing SWF and FLV files. For some reason the trial worked perfectly but when I switched my app to the full version there was no audio output. We'd been looking at this problem for a while, emailing support etc, but just couldn't see what was wrong. It wasn't until I went back to my proof of concept app and ran it that we realised the full version did produce audio, it was just my main app that wouldn't work properly. Then I spotted the error... var compressor = new TVE4(); compressor.LoadSettings(SettingsPath); compressor.SetOutputFile(outputFileName); compressor.EncodeSequenceAudio(Composition.EffectiveProductionAudioFileName); compressor.Key1 = 12345; compressor.Key2 = 54321; (loop to encode frames) Do you see the error? It was only as I switched between the proof of concept code and my app code in the IDE that I noticed the two following lines moving up and down... compressor.Key1 = 12345;

I'm writing an app which basically performs the following steps in a wizard-like interface: Select an audio file of someone speaking + loads a text script in. Process the audio file and the script, can take about 5 seconds for a minute of audio. Select a character to use in the animation. Select some additional graphics and scene settings. Use the data generated in step #2. Sitting there for 5 seconds wasn't really a problem, not to process a 1 minute audio file. A longer audio file would take a little longer, but 10-15 seconds is okay, isn't it? Well, what if I could make it take no time at all? Obviously I can't, but I can make it look like it takes no time at all. The fact is that I don't need the processed data until Step 5. The user will probably spend at least 30 seconds twiddling settings in each Step 3 and 4. How much processing power does a bit of GUI interaction take? Hardly any at all! So I made Step 2 run in a separate thread. As soon as the user

My observations on data transfer objects They should not be a one to one representation of your domain classes. Sometimes you want a subset of the information of a single instance, sometimes your DTO will collect data from various instances (starting with an aggregate root ). You might create different types of DTO from the same domain classes based on what the user needs to do. Sometimes the user only wants OrderNumber + DateRaised + TotalValue (to show as a list of orders), sometimes they want the entire order details (including lines) for editing. The domain classes should have no knowledge of your DTO classes. So you shouldn't have any methods such as pubic PersonDto CreateDto(); public UpdateFromDto(personDto); DTO's are not part of the business domain, so you should never do this! The DTO you send out might not be the same type as you get back. For example you don't want the user to edit the order number or the date raised. If there are only a couple of properties

I am lazy.  I don't mean that I don't work, I mean that I like to get my work done with as little effort as possible.  Writing tests before my code used to look like too much extra work, but I've realised just how much time they actually save me. When you make a small change to something it's very easy to think to yourself "That's such a small change, I can't see how it can possibly fail", what I have also realised is this really means "Despite this being a small change, it will fail and I can't possibly see how". I recently observed a change to some code that introduced a simple if statement, and all existing tests passed.  The problem is that the existing tests only checked the expected behaviour worked (which it still did), but by introducing the "if" statement (and an additional parameter on the method) the developer had changed the expected behaviour under certain circumstances .  Thinking it was so simple it couldn't p

To me this book has been a huge disappointment. Someone told me "Pete, there's a name for what you do!" and pointed me to this book. Now personally I prefer technical books, as I read the Ubiquitous Language part at the start I thought to myself "Not technical, but fair enough some people will get value from being taught how to ask questions" and I stuck with it. The first thing I must say that I cannot stand and which happens a lot in this book is over emphasis. When you want to emphasise something it needs to stand out. This book not only emphasises whole paragraphs but does it far too often too. Being an Internet user for some time now when I read upper case letters the imagined vocalisation actually SHOUTS at me, when I read bold my brain vocalises it as a loud and punctuated word, so when I read a whole paragraph in bold I, READ, EACH, WORD, LIKE, THIS ; it makes it difficult to read. Another thing I don't like when reading something is reading i

I was just reading through the VBUG events list when I came across an event entitled "Domain driven design approach, using unit testing". "Sounds interesting!" I thought to myself, I hope I can make it! As I started to read it I thought it looked familiar. At that point I realised it was me doing the talk! So hopefully I will be able to make it :-) The posting is here . If you come along make sure you say "Hello".

You may already know that I used to own a Commodore 64, and (as is nearly everyone else who ever owned one) I am still very passionate about the music people used to produce on it. The question "Which was your favourite Commodore 64 tune" is a very hard one to answer as there are so many good ones out there, and people tend to go for the same short list "Delta", "Sanxion", etc. However, recently I was creating some ambient background music for a presentation video. It started off a bit like a Jarre tune, but as I started to add in the percussion (for which I used samples of car doors slamming) it started to remind me of a tune from an old C64 game; "Tetris". After downloading it and listening to it endlessly over and over as I write code I have come to a conclusion; TETRIS is my favourite C64 tune! It is just so unique, and unlike many other C64 tunes it hasn't aged, and doesn't actually sound that much like a C64 tune at all! Whenever

This morning I spent an hour on the phone to Microsoft support. I tried to log into my machine only to see the error message The user profile service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded. The guy on the phone got me to put my Vista install DVD into the drive, boot from that, go to system-recovery, and revert to a restore point. Worked nicely. The thing is, why did this happen? The only thing I can think of is the open source Firebird DB server. I installed it on Sunday to get an old app to run (installed as app, not service). I didn't install the control panel plugin due to a warning on the site telling me not to install it on Vista or it will trash my Control Panel. I suppose the warning about the control panel should have been enough to put me off. Still, it works now. I just wont be installing it again, at least for some time.

I wrote and now maintain a Pocket PC app for Imperial Tobacco (yes, despite supporting the ban on smoking in public places). It is important that the date/time on the PPC is accurate so part of the business flow is to get the user to check the date/time immediately after they log in. Despite this step we were getting invalid dates back from their collected data, in all cases it was always one day ahead of the correct time. We have recently introduced various additional common sense checks such as "You have missed a working day, are you sure?" etc, but the change that will have the biggest affect is the one that was the smallest to change. When the user enters the current date/time if it is less than the last known date/time on the server (sent in their database of work to do) I showed a message saying it was incorrect. The message read "The date you have entered is invalid" At this point the user looks at the date they have entered, thinks "but the date is r

One of the most important things to do when designing a system for a customer is to to try create a common business language between you and the people who understand the problem domain. A lack of what is known as "the ubiquitous language" can result in misunderstandings and a failed project. I had a real life experience of a ubiquitious language failure yesterday. My brother went to the shop to buy some credit for his phone and offered to take my children with him to buy sweets. When they got back my son asked me "How come uncle Stephen was able to buy credit for his phone?" When I asked what he was talking about he described the sign on the wall in the shop, it read "Please do not ask for credit as refusal often offends"

Very funny :-) http://www.quoted4truth.com/articles/I-do-not-have-any-money-so-am-sending-you-this-drawing-I-did-of-a-spider-instead and you can bid for the picture here http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=190265903424 I wish I had thought of ebay'ing it :-)

Aspect Oriented Programming looks great. It's something I have always wanted to use, but I avoid it because it doesn't work exactly how I would like it to. The first thing I want to avoid is lots of reflection at runtime (compile time is fine), it is for this reason I have mainly been interested in PostSharp . PostSharp looks great! You decorate your class with attributes that you create yourself. After compiling your assembly PostSharp inspects the result for Attributes that are descended from one of its own special PostSharp AOP classes. When it sees these attributes it modifys your code in a specific way. To use the same example as everyone else in the world (yawn) you could create an attribute from the method-boundard attribute. Override the methods declared on that attribute for entry/exit of the method, and write some code in there to write to the IDE's output window using System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(). Now when I add that attribute to a method on one of my cla

I have a friend who once decided to teach himself VB. We had a mutual friend who was the manager of a video shop so he decided to write some new software for him. He started off by creating an MS Access database to hold the data for his application. Each week I'd pop around to his house and he'd have MS Access open, reworking his tables etc. After a few months I asked "Have you started to write the app yet?". "No, not yet." He replied, "I am trying to get the DB right first, then I will get onto writing the application". I asked what he meant by getting the DB right. He explained that he wanted to make this the best video-hire software ever, and that I should hear about some of the features that are going into it as a result of the DB structure he has made. Record the cast of the film. Record the director, producer etc. Record the genre; horror, comedy, etc. Record film information for films due to be released in the future. All sorts of stu

I've just spotted something I omitted before zipping up my AccommodationManager app and making it available. When you run the app in Release mode you will experience SQL errors. These errors are intermittent, and a query that worked only seconds ago might not always work. The reason for this is that ECO executes all queries within a transaction; SQLite creates a journal file for every transaction and then deletes it when done; and my anti-virus decides it wants to take a look at this new journal file to see what's inside it; resulting in SQLite not being able to open its own journal file exclusively. This was something I noticed a while ago in another ECO+SQLite app of mine and the guy who writes the library spent a couple of hours with me on MSN trying to work out what the problem was (he had a fix to me by the next morning!). Anyway, I have updated the project so that the connection string tells SQLite not to delete the journal file when it has finished with it, as a conse

The technologies I used in an app I wrote for friends recently. The app manages properties at different locations, bookings, and tariffs. In addition to this the application (which uses SQLite) connects to their website using WCF and updates their database so that people can check prices and availability. I need to get them using it now so that there is data available by the time I put up their website .

I have a method that looks something like this public void DoSomething(SomeClass someInstance, User user) {   var persistence = someInstance.AsIObject.GetEcoService<IPersistenceService>();   persistence.Unload(someInstance.AsIObject());      if (someInstance.CurrentUser != null)     throw new ..........;   someInstance.CurrentUser = user;   persistence.UpdateDatabase(someInstance); } This unloads the local cache before ensuring someInstance.CurrentUser == null, it then sets someInstance.CurrentUser and updates the DB. The unit test I wanted would check what happens when two users try to perform this at the same time. What I wanted was User A: Unload User B: Unload User A: Check == null, it is User B: Check == null, it is User A: Change + update DB User B: Change + update DB + experience a lock exception What I didn't want was User A: Unload User B: Unload User A: Check == null, it is User A: Change + update DB User B: Check == null, it isn't To achieve two things runnin

Following on from my previous post about using(Tricks) here is an example which makes writing test cases easier rather than just for making your code nicely formatted. Take a look at the following test which ensures Article.Publish sets the PublishedDate correctly: [TestMethod] public void PublishedDateIsSet() {   //Create the EcoSpace, set its PMapper to a memory mapper   var ecoSpace = TestHelper.EcoSpace.Create();   //Creat an article   var article = new Article(ecoSpace);   //Create our Rhino Mocks repository   var mocks = new MockRepository();   //Mock the date/time to give us a predictable value   var mockDateTimeService = mocks.StrictMock<IDateTimeService>();   ecoSpace.RegisterEcoService(typeof(IDateTimeService), mockDateTimeService);   //Get a date/time to return from the mock DateTimeService   var now = DateTime.Now;   using (mocks.Record())   {     //When asked, return the value we recorded earlier     Expect.Call(mockDateTimeService.Now).Return(now);   }   //Check mo

Not so long ago I posted a solution to having a single-instance application. Rather than just preventing secondary instances from running the requirement was to have the 2nd instance pass its runtime parameters onto the 1st instance so that it can process them. My solution used remoting on the local machine. This appeared to work very well until recently when I needed an OpenFileDialog. Attempting to show the dialog resulted in an error about COM thread apartments. So, it wasn't THE solution. After a bit of research I decided to use named pipes instead. This meant I had to upgrade my app from .NET 2 to 3.5, but I think it is worth it. To implement the feature in an app you need to do 2 things. First you need to realize the interface ISingleInstanceApplicationMainForm on your app's main form in order to accept command line arguments from any subsequently started instances. Next you need to change your Program.Main method like so: [STAThread] static void Main(string[] ar

I've been writing a data importer which takes a specific data input format and outputs XML, this XML is then imported within my application. What annoyed me was the way in which the source code was formatted.... writer.WriteStartElement("data"); writer.WriteAttributeString("1", "1"); writer.WriteAttributeString("2", "2"); writer.WriteAttributeString("3", "3"); writer.WriteStartElement("systemData"); writer.WriteAttributeString("a", "a"); writer.WriteAttributeString("b", "b"); writer.WriteEndElement();//systemData writer.WriteEndElement();//data It just didn't look nice. I thought about splitting it into separate methods, but most of the time this would have been overkill as the methods would have been very short. Instead I wrote an extension method on XmlWriter: public static class XmlWriterHelper {   public static IDisposable StartElement(this XmlWriter wr

Whenever I generate OCL queries in code I find myself having to escape user input in order to avoid making the query invalid, or allowing malicious input. I've decided instead to use the ECO equivalent of parameterised queries (variables in ECO) and here is the result. public static string CreateParameterisedQuery(   this IEcoServiceProvider serviceProvider,   string query,   out IModifiableVariableList vars,   params object[] args) {   vars = serviceProvider.GetEcoService<IVariableFactoryService>().CreateVariableList();   for (int varIndex = 0; varIndex < args.Length; varIndex++)   {     string variableName = "autoVar_" + varIndex.ToString();     query = query.Replace("{" + varIndex.ToString() + "}", variableName);     vars.AddConstant(variableName, args[varIndex]);   }   return query; } To use this code you would do something like this //1: Create the OCL with string.format style parameters string query = "Person.allInstances" +   

I wanted to know how to authenticate users in a SilverLight app using their Windows login info. 01: Set the authentication mode to Windows and <deny users="?"/> in <system.web> within web.config 02: Move the silverlight control to Default.aspx and set that as your start page 03: Add the following Page_Load code protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { IPrincipal p = HttpContext.Current.User; if (p == null) throw new SecurityException("No current user"); if (!(p is WindowsPrincipal)) throw new SecurityException("Not a windows user"); if (!p.Identity.IsAuthenticated) throw new SecurityException("Not authenticated"); Xaml1.InitParameters = string.Format("user={0},session={1}", p.Identity.Name, Session.SessionID); } 04: In app.xaml.cs you can now read the InitParameters using e.InitParameters in the Application_Startup method.

My computer was recently running out of disk space. I couldn't believe it, I have 175GB on my partition, how could I fill it so quickly? I was considering buying a 500GB external drive to store my home videos etc on (which is where I assumed all the space was being taken) and earlier today I nearly went out and bought one too! I just decided to check where all that space was being taken up. Here are the folders on C and their sizes in GB apps 2.76 data 40.7 msocache 0.7 otherdata 0.8 program files 9.16 program data 0.9 users 1.64 windows 13.8 That's a total of 70.46GB, but Windows was reporting 173GB in use! I ran scan disk etc, no luck! Where was all the space being used? The answer was System Restore! After reading this article I realised my restore data was using 90GB of data! What a waste! I have now limited it to 10GB maximum. Can you believe that? It's ridiculous! Luckily I have just saved myself £70!