Megaforce

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Oh the humanity...

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Roku OS 15.0.4 Breaks HEVC Decoding

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One of my hobbies is building my own streaming video library. I've been meaning to blog about it for awhile. Unfortunately, my intro to doing so is this . Last week, Roku OS 15.0.4 found its way onto my Roku TV and Roku Ultra 4800R. And while the TV took it fine, the Ultra did not . Playback of HEVC video is now hampered by pixelation and freezing. I wasn't sure if the Roku OS update was the culprit, or if it was the Jellyfin client for Roku that I use to stream videos from my Jellyfin server. But putting one of the (now) problematic videos onto a USB drive and playing it via Roku's own Media Player resulted in the same problem. I found my way to the Roku community forums where the most recently updated post was about this happening when using the Plex  app. As of today, that post is 17 days old. The response from Roku support has been...lacking. Very lacking. "It's under investigation." I left a comment mentioning this was unrelated to Plex and relayed my USB...
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How to Get Norton Security Suite Firewall to Allow Remote Desktop Connections in Windows

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I ran into an issue recently with RDP connections being blocked by the firewall in Norton Security Suite. I checked the traffic rules under Settings > Firewall > Traffic Rules  and found that it was enabled by default (and couldn't be edited): But during further research, I found  this page  on Norton's support site which discusses the different trust levels of networks and mentions that, for the Public trust level, "This setting also blocks remote desktop connections by default.". I checked my network's trust level, and sure enough, it was set to Public (I'm not sure how/why). (Sidebar: Notice in the screenshot above that allowing Remote Desktop for Public Networks is defaulted to Allow , though that rule is not active). Here's what my network trust level looks like now after changing the setting to Private (accessible under Settings > Firewall > General Settings > Network Trust ): After changing the network trust level t...
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The Cause and Solution for the "System.Runtime.Serialization.InvalidDataContractException: Type 'System.Threading.Tasks.Task`1[YourTypeHere]' cannot be serialized." Exception

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The other day I worked on some new code that ran fine locally, but when deployed to one of our internal web servers threw the following exception: "System.Runtime.Serialization.InvalidDataContractException: Type 'System.Threading.Tasks.Task`1[NameOfTheOffendingType]' cannot be serialized." This had me scratching my head -- after all, to use that old developer's saying, "it worked fine on my machine". Not only that, but the exception was occurring when I was calling a method that didn't use the type mentioned in the exception (according to the stack trace it looks like the exception was happening during one of the many calls made under the hood during the use of a proxy class method). But once I found the cause of the problem, it made total sense. In this case, I had added a new WCF service reference to the project, and the proxy class that was generated for it was including some new task-based asynchronous operations that are supported in .NET 4....
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Setting Default Values in an Angular Reactive Form

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Something I ran into a few months back was that Angular won't reset a FormControl back to its initial value if you call reset()  on the FormGroup unless that FormControl was created with nonNullable: true . Here's an example:   private createForms ( formBuilder : FormBuilder ) : void {     //For the initial values to be considered the *default* values, we need to specify nonNullable: true.     //There used to be a dedicated property for this, but they deprecated it.     this . searchForm = formBuilder . group < ISearchForm >({       adminYear : new FormControl < number >( null , { validators : Validators . required }),       admin : new FormControl < string >( 'All' , { nonNullable : true , validators : Validators . required }), //Validator is kind of pointless here, as there WILL always be a value       examName : new FormControl < string | null >( null ), ...
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How to Determine if a Column Exists in a DataReader

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I recently had to work on something which required me to query a database, open the results in a DataReader, and check for the existence of a particular column. While the DataReader doesn't have a method to do this, with just a few steps I was able to accomplish this task. Here's how. First, the DataReader has a method named GetSchemaTable() , which returns a DataTable consisting of information regarding the data contained in the DataReader. The first column in this DataTable is named ColumnName , and its value is (obviously) the name of the column. Knowing this, we can loop through the rows in the DataTable, checking the ColumnName column for a value that equals the name of the column we're looking for. To this end, I wrote a static method in one of my classes which takes the DataReader and the name of the column being sought: (C#) public static bool HasColumn(DbDataReader Reader, string ColumnName) {    foreach (DataRow row in Reader.GetSchemaTable().Rows)  ...
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