Competitors?

An opinion piece: are Apple and Microsoft competitors? This line of reasoning says no.

Who made the spoon that you used to eat your breakfast cereal this morning?

Every once in a while I’ll hear people talking about how Microsoft and Apple are competitors. As someone who’s technology agnostic, I don’t see the world in such shades of black and white. Here’s my reasoning as an outsider comparing the two.

Apple is a hardware company, their goal is selling as many units of whatever as possible, whether it be computers or mp3 players. With a focus on design and user experience, backwards compatibility takes a back seat to form and functionality. They excel at elegance and minimalism. They aim sharply at the home user. Disposability is ok. The next big thing is the future.

Microsoft is an operating system and business application vendor, their goal is to put that software on to as many pieces of hardware as possible. They are an industry leader in office applications and software development environments. They aim sharply at business and government. Backwards compatibility is highly important. They’d run on toasters if they could.

Is there overlap between the two? Sure, some. Is it a make or break difference? Not really, much is a matter of preference and familiarity.

I twitch anytime I hear someone say OS X is more “intuitive” than Windows; the word they’re looking for is consistent. Coarse application design is more similar, meaning once you get over the learning curve, subsequent new challenges have a ring of familiarity.

But more importantly, are the two environments mutually exclusive? Not at all. That’s why platform agnostics run both systems. Some things are just easier to do in some environments than others.

The operating systems wars and the phone wars are about luring people toward purchasing something from that camp. But look closer. MS-Office runs on OS X, and quite nicely. Safari and QuickTime run on Windows, and quite nicely. Once you’ve made the purchase of their crown jewel, the fighting appears to stop.

Users, on the whole, don’t care (and often don’t understand) about the underlying system. They just have a problem they want to solve, learn how to do it once and without change, and any tool that gets the job done will do.

Just like my spoon.

Defined in Multiple Assemblies

The predefined type ‘System.Func’ is defined in multiple assemblies in the global alias … mscorlib.dll and System.Core.dll. SOLVED!

Today I migrated a C#/WPF project in Visual Studio 2010 from .NET 3.5 SP1 to .NET 4.0. Immediately the compile failed issuing this set of errors:

  • The predefined type ‘System.Func’ is defined in multiple assemblies in the global alias; using definition from ‘c:\Program Files (x86)\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\.NETFramework\v4.0\mscorlib.dll’
  • The predefined type ‘System.Func’ is defined in multiple assemblies in the global alias; using definition from ‘c:\Program Files (x86)\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\.NETFramework\v4.0\System.Core.dll’

To resolve this error involved understanding a little bit more about C#, .NET, and the Common Language Runtime (CLR).

According to C# 4.0 In A Nutshell from O’Reilly Press, on page 181 it says:

Some of the .NET types are used directly by the CLR and are essential for the managed hosting environment. These types reside in an assembly called mscorlib.dll and include C#’s built in types, ….

At a level above this are additional types that “flesh out” the CLR-functionality, …. These reside in System.dll, System.Xml.dll, and System.Core.dll, and together with mscorlib the provide a rich programming environment….

So mscorlib and System.Core are both needed. This begs the question, why is Func declared in both and thus causing a conflict? Or is it?

Further on in C# 4.0 In A Nutshell from O’Reilly Press, on page 183 in a general note it says:

A notable exception is the following types, which Framework 4.0 have moved from System.Core to mscorlib.dll:

  • The Action and Func delegates

This suggests a case exists where mscorlib is from our current .NET (the later one has Func), and System.Core is coming from the old one (which is where Func lives for that version).

How is this possible? It’s our projects fault.

This question on StackOverflow provides some insight; check out Simon‘s answer.

  1. Right-click the project and select Unload Project
  2. Right-click the project again and select Edit Project
  3. Scroll down in the XML to find the ItemGroup element; it’ll have Reference elements insider of it.
  4. Locate the Reference element that has Include=”System.Core” as an attribute.
  5. If it has other qualifiers, remove them. If it has a TargetFrameworkVersion subelement remove it.
  6. Save the XML.
  7. Right-click the project and reload it; try a build now.

In my case, I had an entry that looked like this:

<ItemGroup>
  <Reference Include=”System.Core”>
    <TargetFrameworkVersion>3.5</TargetFrameworkVersion>
  </Reference>
</ItemGroup>

Removing the TargetFrameworkVersion, shown in red above, un-pinned the dll from the older .NET framework and things worked just fine.

Error 0x80070057 (SOLVED)

Copy File

An unexpected error is keeping you from copying the file. If you continue to receive this error, you can use the error code to search for help with this problem.

Error 0x80070057: The parameter is incorrect.

SOLVED!

Went to copy a directory on Windows 7 from one drive to another, something that I had done quite frequently, even earlier that day.

However, this time, and nothing had changed substantially with the source files, I got an Error 0x80070057 message stating “The parameter is incorrect.” At that point the copy dialog from my simple drag and drop would allow me to retry (useless) or abort mid-copy.

The error message was unusually cryptic and less that helpful:

Copy File

An unexpected error is keeping you from copying the file. If you continue to receive this error, you can use the error code to search for help with this problem.

Error 0x80070057: The parameter is incorrect.

The disk was not full and a check disk revealed no errors.

THE SOLUTION
The destination directory name that I was copying into was pretty long, I basically had used a descriptive prefix, a date stamp of YYMMDDHHMMSS, by a space dash space, and a short descriptive comment. All in all it was about ~55 characters in length.

The directory I was copying from was a fairly deep structure.

That made me wonder if the fully qualified name of some directory path wasn’t exceeding some limit. On Windows, it appears to be 256 characters. On a Mac it appears to be 1023 characters.

Tricks aside, I was limited to the file system limits.

So, on the same disk, with the same files, immediately after yet-another-failure to copy, I renamed the destination folder to something considerably shorter and tried again.

Quick experimentation showed that was indeed the problem: the resulting path name formed during the copy was too long.

Solution: shorten the destination folder name and/or tighten up the path.

Find and Replace in Word using C# .NET

Solution to how to do a global search and replace in MS-Word, including across floating text objects, in C#/.NET.

Heads up, this article contains high quantity of geek content. Non-geeks should move along.

I’ve been trying to use Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word to perform a global bulk search and replace operations across an entire document. The problem was, however, if a document contained a floating text box, which manifested itself as a shape object of type textbox, the find and replace wouldn’t substitute the text for that region. Even using Word’s capability to record a macro and show the VBA code wasn’t helpful, as the source code in BASIC wasn’t performing the same operation as inside the Word environment.

What I wanted was a simple routine to replace text anywhere inside of a document. If you Google for this you’ll get the wrong kind of textbox, the wrong language, people telling you not to use floating textboxes, and all kinds of weird story iterators.

One site seemed to have the solution; many kind thanks to Doug Robbins, Greg Maxey, Peter Hewett, and Jonathan West for coming up with this solution and explaining it so well.

However, the solution was in Visual Basic for Applications, and I needed a C# solution for a .NET project. Here’s my port, which works with Office 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 C#/.NET 4.0. I’ve left a lot of redundant qualifiers and casting on to help people searching for this article.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.ComponentModel;
using Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word;

// BEGIN: Somewhere in your code
Application app = null;
Document doc = null;
try
{
  app = new Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.Application();

  doc = app.Documents.Open(filename, Missing, Missing, Missing, Missing, Missing, Missing, Missing, Missing, Missing);

  FindReplaceAnywhere(app, find_text, replace_text);

  doc.SaveAs(outfilename, Missing, Missing, Missing, Missing, Missing, Missing, Missing, Missing, Missing);
}
finally
{
  try
  {
      if (doc != null) ((Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word._Document) doc).Close(true, Missing, Missing);
  }
  finally { }
  if (app != null) ((Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word._Application) app).Quit(true, Missing, Missing);
}
// END: Somewhere in your code             



// Helper
private static void searchAndReplaceInStory(Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.Range rngStory, string strSearch, string strReplace)
{
    rngStory.Find.ClearFormatting();
    rngStory.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting();
    rngStory.Find.Text = strSearch;
    rngStory.Find.Replacement.Text = strReplace;
    rngStory.Find.Wrap = WdFindWrap.wdFindContinue;

    object arg1 = Missing; // Find Pattern
    object arg2 = Missing; //MatchCase
    object arg3 = Missing; //MatchWholeWord
    object arg4 = Missing; //MatchWildcards
    object arg5 = Missing; //MatchSoundsLike
    object arg6 = Missing; //MatchAllWordForms
    object arg7 = Missing; //Forward
    object arg8 = Missing; //Wrap
    object arg9 = Missing; //Format
    object arg10 = Missing; //ReplaceWith
    object arg11 = WdReplace.wdReplaceAll; //Replace
    object arg12 = Missing; //MatchKashida
    object arg13 = Missing; //MatchDiacritics
    object arg14 = Missing; //MatchAlefHamza
    object arg15 = Missing; //MatchControl

    rngStory.Find.Execute(ref arg1, ref arg2, ref arg3, ref arg4, ref arg5, ref arg6, ref arg7, ref arg8, ref arg9, ref arg10, ref arg11, ref arg12, ref arg13, ref arg14, ref arg15);
}

// Main routine to find text and replace it,
//   var app = new Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.Application();
public static void FindReplaceAnywhere(Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.Application app, string findText, string replaceText)
{
    // http://forums.asp.net/p/1501791/3739871.aspx
    var doc = app.ActiveDocument;

    // Fix the skipped blank Header/Footer problem
    //    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa211923(office.11).aspx
    Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.WdStoryType lngJunk = doc.Sections[1].Headers[WdHeaderFooterIndex.wdHeaderFooterPrimary].Range.StoryType;

    // Iterate through all story types in the current document
    foreach (Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.Range rngStory in doc.StoryRanges)
    {

        // Iterate through all linked stories
        var internalRangeStory = rngStory;

        do
        {
            searchAndReplaceInStory(internalRangeStory, findText, replaceText);

            try
            {
                //   6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 -- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa211923(office.11).aspx
                switch (internalRangeStory.StoryType)
                {
                    case Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.WdStoryType.wdEvenPagesHeaderStory: // 6
                    case Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.WdStoryType.wdPrimaryHeaderStory:   // 7
                    case Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.WdStoryType.wdEvenPagesFooterStory: // 8
                    case Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.WdStoryType.wdPrimaryFooterStory:   // 9
                    case Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.WdStoryType.wdFirstPageHeaderStory: // 10
                    case Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.WdStoryType.wdFirstPageFooterStory: // 11

                        if (internalRangeStory.ShapeRange.Count &gt; 0)
                        {
                            foreach (Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.Shape oShp in internalRangeStory.ShapeRange)
                            {
                                if (oShp.TextFrame.HasText != 0)
                                {
                                    searchAndReplaceInStory(oShp.TextFrame.TextRange, findText, replaceText);
                                }
                            }
                        }
                        break;

                    default:
                        break;
                }
            }
            catch
            {
                // On Error Resume Next
            }

            // ON ERROR GOTO 0 -- http://www.harding.edu/fmccown/vbnet_csharp_comparison.html

            // Get next linked story (if any)
            internalRangeStory = internalRangeStory.NextStoryRange;
        } while (internalRangeStory != null); // http://www.harding.edu/fmccown/vbnet_csharp_comparison.html
    }

}

Let me know if it worked for you; bug fixes and enhancements welcome.