Ryan Morlok’s Blog

I’ve normally avoided writing programming related entries on this blog, simply because most people who read my blog really don’t care. I thought I’d post this one on the off chance google will pick it up, because I spent several hours searching for the solution to this problem to no avail.

A couple different times while working on a customer project, I ran into the following compiler error:

error CS1583: ‘C:SVNRootValidChecktrunkValidCheckUIobjDebugCSC298.tmp’ is not a valid Win32 resource file

Not the exact same error, of course, the .tmp file changed each time, but I couldn’t figure out what was causing it. I was able to determine that a few other people had enountered this error message as well, but every solution I found involved checking DLLs or rolling back your code until the problem went away.

The latest time I encountered this error was immediately after I had changed the icon for the application I am developing. That cued me off that this might be some sort of unrecognized resource error. Clearly the error indicates that there is a problem with the resource file, but previously I couldn’t track down anything wrong with the resources, and the given file is a temporary one the compiler generates as it is compiling the .resx files, so it’s tough to figure out what’s causing the problem. This time, I knew it had to be with the icon I had just changed. Sure enough, when I replaced the icon with a dummy icon, the error went away.

The next thing I actually had to do was figure out what was wrong with the icon. I’m using Axialis IconWorkshop, so I opened up the offending icon and took a look. After much trial and error, I found that the largest version of my icon in the .ico file were being compressed. When I removed this option, everything worked file. Axialis indicated that this was a “Vista” option, so I’m not sure how it was checked. Windows itself displayed the icon fine, but apparently this older version of Visual Studio didn’t know what to do with it.

Another thing to note is that I only saw the error message when the problematic icon was set as the application icon (for the whole project), not for an individual window. When I used the icon elsewhere in the app, there wasn’t a problem. This might have been because when I used it for individual windows, it was using the smaller versions of the icon, which weren’t compressed.

Hope this solution gives other developers another thing to check when they run into this error in the future.

The Colbert Report Better Know a District (BKAD) master list has been moved to a “page” for easier access.  You can get to it here.

I was updating my resume this afternoon, and I stumbled onto a strange coincidence. I googled for “latex resume” and who’s website should I encounter? Yisong Yue (Cornell student, UIUC grad, and former ACM treasurer). I don’t know if I’m going to use his template, but I’m honorred to be close to such greatness. I don’t think you can google for much more than my name to find my website. Maybe Eigenface recognition, but I seem to have misplaced that content.

21 years, 3 months, 10 days, 12 seconds* of non-stop oppression from the American education system, and I am finally free. I depositted my thesis last Thursday at 4:00 p.m. CST. and for the first time in my life, no school has claims on my time. It feels good.

* OK, I made up the precision of those stats.

Yes Steve, even a dog has received a photo tribute before you…

I dropped the final revision of the VBA book Dusty, Marsha, and I have been writing off at the publisher this afternoon. It’s great to get that project completed, so I can fully focus on my thesis. The book was the single largest writing project I’ve ever attempted. I probably did about 70% of the writing for it, which totals about 100 pages. Granted, there are a lot of screenshots and code fragments in there, but that’s still a bit of writing if you’ve ever sat down at the keyboard and tried to crank something like that out.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the project, we set out to write a book that teaches VBA programming in Microsoft Excel. There are other books like this out there, but this one is specifically targettted to the material taugh in CS 105, the course for which I’ve been a TA for the last 4 semesters. The goal of the project not give the students more material in the book than we teach in class, and to explain things in complementary ways.

If you’d like to view it, I’ve posted it here, though I’ll probably take down that link in a few days, as that version doesn’t contain any of the copyright stuff. I wrote chapters 1-7, Dusty wrote 8-10, and Marsha was the principle reviewer.

The comments on my blog are starting to come under the fire of spam.  It’s not too bad now, maybe a few a week, but I’m sure it will be getting worse in time.  When I get a chance, I’m going to look into a solution similar to what Mikero has.  Basically you have to type in a word or phrase to identify yourself as human.  Maybe I’ll make mine that you have to solve a math equation.  That should keep Steve out.