Just noticed that there will be Visual Studio 2005 RC1 released this month ahead of the final release in November.

I might be visiting Sydney late November, so I'll try and get along to the product launch if possible.

I attended TechEd on the Gold Coast last week, and took advantage of a free offer by Pearson VUE to take a free certification exam. I studied really hard (figuring that even if I failed, then at least I had experienced an exam without it costing me anything).

Well the study paid off, as I passed "Developing and Implementing Web Applications with Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET and Microsoft® Visual Studio® .NET" with an excellent result - 962!

I'm going to see if I can have a go at 70-310 before the end of the year, and maybe complete the MCAD or MCSD next year.

Here are links to resources mentioned in my presentation to the Adelaide SQL Server User Group (18th August).

• IPsec overview
• Nmap - Free Stealth Port Scanner For Network Exploration & Security Audits. Runs on Linux/Windows/UNIX/Solaris/FreeBSD/OpenBSD
• WinPcap - The Windows packet capture library (used by Nmap)
• Windows Server 2003 Security Guide - Member server group policy and server roles including domain controllers, file, print and IIS servers.
• Threats and Countermeasures Guide - Chapter 11 contains IPsec tutorial.
• Sample netsh script to configure IPsec on Windows Server 2003

I've been working on a program that needs to enumerate all the Control Panel applets in Windows, and ideally get the proper display name (rather than the .cpl filename). You can do this for a specific applet by using the DllImport Attribute to access the CPlApplet function that every applet implements: <DllImport("timedate.cpl", CharSet:=CharSet.Unicode)> _ Private Function CPlApplet(ByVal hwnd As IntPtr, ByVal uMsg As Integer, ByVal lParam1 As Integer, ByVal lparam2 As IntPtr) As Integer End Function My problem is that I needed to call this function for all applets (including non-Microsoft ones). .NET allows you to do dynamic P/Invoke code, but the only post I found in Google was from someone who was unable to get it to work. After using ildasm.exe to study what IL was generated by the static version, I noticed that the once major difference was that the dynamic version lacked the "preservesig" statement. The way to add this in is to use a custom attribute - you can't do it via a parameter for any of the methods. The final version in VB.NET is based on the sample code from http://www.thecodeproject.com/csharp/dynamicinvokedll.asp Imports System Imports System.Runtime.InteropServices Imports System.Threading Imports System.Reflection Imports System.Reflection.Emit Imports System.Runtime.CompilerServices Module Module1 Public Function DynamicDllFunctionInvoke(ByVal DllPath As String, ByVal EntryPoint As String, ByVal message As Int32) As Object Dim returnType As Type = GetType(Int32) Dim parameterTypes As Type() = {GetType(IntPtr), GetType(Int32), GetType(Int32), GetType(IntPtr)} Dim parameterValues As Object() = {IntPtr.Zero, message, 0, IntPtr.Zero} Dim asmName As AssemblyName = New AssemblyName asmName.Name = "tempDll" Dim dynamicAsm As AssemblyBuilder = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.DefineDynamicAssembly(asmName, AssemblyBuilderAccess.RunAndSave) Dim dynamicMod As ModuleBuilder = dynamicAsm.DefineDynamicModule("tempModule") ', "tempModule.dll", True) Dim dynamicMethod As MethodBuilder = dynamicMod.DefinePInvokeMethod(EntryPoint, DllPath, MethodAttributes.Static Or MethodAttributes.Public Or MethodAttributes.PinvokeImpl, CallingConventions.Standard, returnType, parameterTypes, CallingConvention.Winapi, CharSet.Auto) Dim myAttributeType As Type = GetType(MethodImplAttribute) Dim myConstructorInfo As ConstructorInfo = myAttributeType.GetConstructor(New Type(0) _ {GetType(MethodImplOptions)}) Dim myAttributeBuilder As New CustomAttributeBuilder(myConstructorInfo, _ New Object(0) {MethodImplOptions.PreserveSig}) dynamicMethod.SetCustomAttribute(myAttributeBuilder) dynamicMod.CreateGlobalFunctions() Dim mi As MethodInfo = dynamicMod.GetMethod(EntryPoint) Dim retval As Object = mi.Invoke(Nothing, parameterValues) Debug.WriteLine(retval) Return retval End Function Sub Main() DynamicDllFunctionInvoke("c:\WINDOWS\system32\timedate.cpl", "CPlApplet", 1) DynamicDllFunctionInvoke("c:\WINDOWS\system32\timedate.cpl", "CPlApplet", 2) End Sub End Module

Rellie's raison d’être Narelle has started her own blog!