Luis’s Corner of (non) Wisdom

After I made the post about my car’s wheels, I went to a couple of sites where I had asked about it while researching, and wrote posts saying I had done it successfully, and included a link to my blog.

A few days later I received a comment on my post with just the word “Nice!” and a couple hours later another post with just “Cool.” I thought that it was nice, that people were starting to come to my blog.

But two or three days later I was receiving about ten to fifteen posts per day with those same words (there was one “Interesting” and one “Sorry”). And also a couple of different posts about drug and porn.

I started looking for spam plugins for WordPress (which I use to run this blog). I just installed two of them:

• Akismet which came preinstalled with WordPress, but I had to activate it. It is a filter that checks all new posts for possible spam.
• Peter’s Random Anti-Spam, which shows the user an image with random letters on it. Supposedly, this will stop most spambots.

From my quick tests, they seem to work fine. Let’s see how they work with real spam.

To my human readers, please accept my apologies. I know it will be a little of a nuisance, but that’s the way it has to be. Thanks for your understanding.

It seems obvious from the title, but it took me several hours to get it. I am working on a .NET application which I delay-sign in my development machine, and the automatic build process fully signs all the assemblies. When I started the project, I used the sn.exe tool that comes with Visual Studio to tell my computer to not bother checking that assembly’s signature. So far, so good.

Today I started localizing it, adding a second language. I decided that English would be the default language, and also added Spanish. I opened the main form, changed its Localizable property to true, and the language to Spanish. Then I started translating some UI elements.

My main form derives from a reusable base form I have on a DLL, so I did the same process to start translating that form to Spanish.

Then I added code at the beginning of Main to change the main thread’s CurrentUICulture to es-MX and ran the application. Oh surprise, everything came out in English.

I did everything I could think off. I stepped in the debugger through InitializeComponent for both the base and derived forms, and it just did not work. I created a new little project with a base form in a DLL and a derived form in the EXE, and it worked as expected. I read the entire Internet and still could not make my app work.

After a couple of hours or trying everything I could think of, I stopped for a moment, and while staring at Windows Explorer, I noticed my noverif.bat file. It is a batch file that I have on the root folder of my project, which simply calls sn.exe for all the assemblies. I run that once, and then I can use the delay-signed assemblies in that computer.

That’s when it struck me. Resource translations are stored in their own satellite assemblies, which also are delay-signed. I gave it a try (calling sn.exe on it), and then it worked fine.

I hate it when I spend hours trying to find the cause of a problem, and it turns out to be something totally unrelated!