No standard mail client

Today I encountered a nasty problem. I clicked on an e-mail address on a web page and instead of opening Thunderbird with a new mail message I got the following error "Der Vorgang kann nicht ausgeführt werden weil der Standard-Mailclient nicht richtig installiert ist.". This means something like "The operation can not be performed because the standard mail client was not correctly installed.".
I told Thunderbird to ckeck if it is the standard mail client under Extras -> Settings -> General -> Standard mail client (I don't know if that is correct because I have a german version); it told me that it is the standard mail client.

Finally to make it work I had to go in the Internet Explorer (7) to Extras -> Internet options -> Programs and there I selected Thunderbird as standard mail client.

Strange thing; but sometimes things stop to work without any obvious reasons :-)

Microsoft Certification

Today I passed the microsoft exam 70536 Microsoft .NET Framework - Application Development Foundation. I found it very interesting to prepare myself for this exam because despite that I program every day at work there were a lot of things that I simply didn't know that they exist. Other things I never understood completely and this exam helped me to find out how and why it works in this way. The exam itself was not very easy because the questions are very detailed and sometimes you simply have to have used some classes in order to know if a parameter is passed through the constructor or set with a property. The most difficult are the questions wher you have a list of steps and you have to bring them in the correct order; but not all steps may be needed. I find these kind of questions especially difficult because sometimes there is not only one way to accomplish the specified target. Anyway I am happy that I passed the exam and that now I can prepare myself for the next exam... a never ending story :-)

[Update]
Now I got access to the MCP website from where I also got the logo which I proudly put on the right menu bar :-)

Updating App.config

Today I faced the problem to update the App.config. There exist several solutions out there but I was not able to find a simple one. Therefore I decided to try out the new Linq to XML feature of .NET 3.5 and wrote the following method which updates the value of a specific key in the App.config file:

public static void UpdateAppConfig(string key, object value)
{
  if (key == null)
      throw new ArgumentNullException("key");

  if (value == null)
      throw new ArgumentNullException("value");

  XDocument doc = XDocument.Load(AppDomain.CurrentDomain.SetupInformation.ConfigurationFile);
  var result = (from appSetting in doc.Descendants("appSettings").Descendants("add")
                where appSetting.Attribute("key").Value.Equals(key)
                select appSetting).FirstOrDefault();

  if (result != null)
  {
      result.Attribute("value").SetValue(value);
      doc.Save(AppDomain.CurrentDomain.SetupInformation.ConfigurationFile);
      doc = null;
  }
  else
  {
      Console.WriteLine("The application setting with key '{0}' was not found!", key);
  }
}

Blog statistics 2008

As I saw it is common to post some statistics about his blog. So also I will follow this "trend" :-)

First of all here the graph of accesse per day. Ultimately there is an average of 25 visits per day. The most visits were on July 1. There were 57 visits :-)



As you can see here most people get directed by a search engine to my page.



The most visitors access from London my page, but there are visitors all over the world.





I wish everybody a happy and good new year 2009 and I would be happy if you continue to visit my blog ;-)