Visual Studio 2003, Subversion and Web-Projects

Today I ran into an error using VS2003 ASP.NET Projects and SVN for version control. The error I got when I opened a SVN-controlled web-project was “Refreshing the project failed. Unable to retrieve folder information from the server.” This error occurs, because Visual Studio 2003 cannot handle folder names starting with a period (“.”). So the most pragmatic way to get is working is to write two batch files to rename all “.svn” folders before opening the project and rename them back when synchronizing with the SVN-repository:

hide-svn.cmd
@ECHO OFF
FOR /R %%f IN (.svn) DO IF EXIST "%%f" (
ATTRIB -h "%%f"
RENAME "%%f" _svn
)

restore-svn.cmd
@ECHO OFF
FOR /R %%f IN (_svn) DO IF EXIST "%%f" (
RENAME "%%f" .svn
ATTRIB +h "%%~pf\.svn"
)


Note: this is one solution taken from tigris.org.

Before using the two batch files it may be necessary to clean the VSWebCache folder. This folder contains the structure of web projects so Visual Studio can load the projects faster. It is located in the users directory (e.g. C:\Documents and Settings\Username\VSWebCache).

Create an MD5 sum of a string

Use this little static method to create an MD5 hash from a string instance:

/// <summary>

/// Create an md5 sum string of this string

/// </summary>

/// <param name=”str”>the input string</param>

/// <returns>the md5 hash of the input string</returns>

static private string GetMd5Sum(string str)

{

// First we need to convert the string into bytes, which

// means using a text encoder.

Encoder enc = System.Text.Encoding.Unicode.GetEncoder();

 

// Create a buffer large enough to hold the string

byte[] unicodeText = new byte[str.Length * 2];

enc.GetBytes(str.ToCharArray(), 0, str.Length, unicodeText, 0, true);

 

// Now that we have a byte array we can ask the CSP to hash it

MD5 md5 = new MD5CryptoServiceProvider();

byte[] result = md5.ComputeHash(unicodeText);

 

// Build the final string by converting each byte

// into hex and appending it to a StringBuilder

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

for (int i=0;i<result.Length;i++)

{

sb.Append(result[i].ToString(“X2″));

}

 

// And return it

return sb.ToString();

}

Recursive file search

Find all files of a given pattern, loop through the results and print out the name of each file:

dir *.doc -recurse | foreach-object -process { echo $_.Name; }

Loop through argument list of a script

Access to command line arguments of Powershell scripts is very easy. Thanks to the new foreach statement looping through arguments is very easy too. Create a script with the following code:

myscript.ps1:
foreach ($argument in $args) {
echo $argument
}

Invoke the script with some random arguments:

PS >> c:\scripts\myscript.ps1 hello world this is a test

The output looks like:

hello
world
this
is
a
test

Simple if-statement

If-statements are just like in many languages (like C#). Note that the comparison operators are different:

if ($args[0] -eq "foo") {
echo "Argument 0 is foo..."
} else {
echo "Argument 0 is not foo..."
}