Accept this license agreement

Upon installing Visual Studio 2005 I was politely presented a license agreement, partly English, partly something else !?

Subversion: Get the modified files between two revisions

There is a simple command to get the modified files between two revisions in subversion. All you have to know are the two revision numbers and the path to the repository folder:

svn diff -r revision1:revision2 --summarize URL

or if you want to list the files modified between an older revision and the head revision, type:

svn diff -r revison:HEAD -- summarize URL

If you do not type summarize you will also get to the console output all the differences between the two revisions.
Example: I need to see which files have been modified since revision 3880:

svn diff -r 3880:HEAD --sumarize svn://mysvnserver/repository/somefolder
The svn diff command is more complex, so you can get more details here:
http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.0/re09.html.

Serialize an array to XML in .NET Framework

Well, this is not too much of a big deal since with a little knowledge about Serialization you will be able to figure this out quite rapidly. I only thought of posting this here since I had in mind the issue of converting an array of (string) values into an XML format and then have it deserialized at a later time when I would have need the array again. For this purpose I used the XmlSerializer class and the MemoryStream class.
The example code I give below shows how to convert a string array to XML and then how to deserialize it from the XML format into a new array.

public static void SerializeDeserializeArray( )
{
    string[ ] strArr = new string[ ] {
        "C:\\Program Files\\myFile1.txt",
        "C:\\Program Files\\myFile2.txt",
        "C:\\Program Files\\myFile3.txt"
    };

    MemoryStream memStream = new MemoryStream( );
    StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter( memStream );

    XmlSerializer ser = new XmlSerializer( typeof( string[ ] ) );
    ser.Serialize( sw, strArr );

    StreamReader sr = new StreamReader( memStream );

    memStream.Position = 0;
    string str = sr.ReadToEnd( );

    memStream.Position = 0;
    string[ ] deserArr = (string[ ] )ser.Deserialize( memStream );

    if( deserArr != null )
    {
        foreach( string s in deserArr )
        {
            Console.WriteLine( s );
        }
    }

    Console.WriteLine( );
}


Error C2872 ambiguous symbol

I was trying to compile one of my C++ projects and ran into this error:

Error 1 error C2872: 'IServiceProvider' : ambiguous symbol C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\PlatformSDK\include\ocidl.h 8005


Among other files in the project, I had a header file which started like this:

using namespace System;
#include "MyHeader1.h"
#include "MyHeader2.h"


After a little research I have found the cause of this error. I turned on the /showIncludes option of the compiler and saw that one of my headers was actually including the "ocidl.h" file. The Build output will show, among others:
...
2>Note: including file: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\atlmfc\include\atlcomcli.h
2>Note: including file: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\PlatformSDK\include\olectl.h
2>Note: including file: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\PlatformSDK\include\pshpack8.h
2>Note: including file: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\PlatformSDK\include\ocidl.h
...

In order to fix this compile time error, I moved the using below the #include as below and it all started working again:
 
#include "MyHeader1.h"
#include "MyHeader2.h"

using namespace System;