Invalid or malformed application: check Manifest

I started building a brand new Silverlight 3.0 Application today and ran into this error message in my browser the first time I ran my new app:

Invalid or malformed application: check Manifest

I did some research and came across this hint:

In human-readable words, this is what fixed it for me:
1. Open the properties of your project.
2. On the first page, open the drop down list of "Startup object".
3. Select the page your project starts with. In my case, changing the name of the namespace broke the startup object.

from this blog post:
http://forums.silverlight.net/forums/t/11452.aspx

This pushed me in the right direction. I remembered that I had changed my initial namespace in my .cs files, but not in the project properties. I changed the default namespace and then selected the correct startup project, (xxx.app where xxx is my default namespace).

Problem resolved.

Lesson learned:
If your startup object is not correct in the project properties window, you will get the dreaded, "Invalid or malformed application: check Manifest" error.

ASP.NET Web Services vs. WCF Services

The term “web service” is similar to the term “cloud computing” in
that it’s pretty vague, and it can mean different things to different
people. So when I hear someone say we need a “web service that does
x”, I immediately start asking a few clarifying questions:

Is the individual referring to the traditional “.asmx” web service
or the WCF “.svc” web service?

Will it implement a SOAP or a REST architecture?

Is it really a web (http) service or some other type of
communication service, such as a named pipe communication, a tcp
communication, or a MSMQ messaging queue communication?

The answers to these questions help determine whether a web service, a
WCF service, (or something else), should be utilized.
In the next few paragraphs I’ll differentiate a web service from a WCF
service and point you to a nice link that further summarizes the
differences.

The key thing to understand about ASP.NET Web Services and WCF
Services is that they are very similar in implementation and concept,
but that there are some key differences to be aware of.
Both technologies define contracts for passing xml data and both
technologies can leverage SOAP and WSDL concepts and work over the
http protocol.

That’s where many of the similarities end. Windows Communication
Foundation, as its name implies, supports many types of communication
between disparate machines (or between processes on the same machine).
This may seem obvious, but it was especially eye opening to me as I
first used WCF for tcp communication and, later, worked my way
backwards to use it for http web service purposes.

ASP.NET Web Services were Microsoft's first attempts at building
service oriented concepts into the ASP.NET platform.
The core library for ASP.NET Web Services is the XMLSerializer.
Since there are other formats for exchanging data, such as POX and
JSON, WCF’s DataContractSerializer is expanded to accept these types
of data as well.

WCF Services came along after ASP.NET Web Services and it looks to me
like Microsoft saw the value in a service oriented architecture, but
saw some flaws in how ASP.NET Web Services were built.
It appears that they wanted to make sweeping improvements to their
service oriented architecture without breaking the existing code base,
so they built upon the concepts of ASP.NET Web Services, but on a new
platform.

I see this platform as a communication standard launching point for
the next decade, and look forward to the technological innovations
that it will spawn.

The following blog post by Kalyan Bandarupalli goes into more detail
about the specific differences between ASP.NET Web Services and WCF
Services:
http://www.techbubbles.com/wcf/wcf-vs-aspnet-web-services

What's the name of that color?

I would rather work in WCF, the middle tier and SQL Server. The reality is, when I work with end-users, I often have to work as a designer and get into screen layout and color schemes.

Here's one tool that makes working with colors easier - especially when the user has a named color and you need to find the RGB or Hex equivalent:

Name that color

It's also helpful when you are trying to find a color and Photoshop is not available.

SQL Server 2005 Restore Error: Exclusive access could not be obtained because the database is in use. (Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo)

I do a lot of prototyping, so I am backing up, moving and restoring SQL Server databases a lot. We are using SQL Server 2005.

I recently ran into this error:

I shut down all services and applications using the database, and I still got it. I then noticed that I had a query window open in Enterprise Manager. I closed all of the query windows, tried again and was able to restore successfully.

Hind sight is always 20/20 - duh, the query windows open a connection to the database - but when you work in Enterprise Manager a lot, as I do, it's easy to forget something like that.

Lesson learned.