A few months ago I got a new VW Eos. I might have purchased the last manual transmission EOS in the U.S. - certainly in the southeast. It’s a shame they discontinued that option in the 2012 U.S. market.

There isn't a whole lot of information out there about bike racks on the American EOS, so I thought I would share my experience and some pictures, for anyone else that's wondering about this.

I got a Draw-Tite Sportframe receiver - this is rated at 200lb tongue weight and 2000lb towing.
http://www.etrailer.com/Trailer-Hitc...eid=2011208575.

For the rack I chose a Swagman XTC-2.

Some things about the install:
I had to jack up the passenger side a bit to get the receiver in place.

On my car, the passenger side bolt spacing is apparently non-standard. I couldn't put the exhaust hanger bracket bolts back into place. I called eTrailer, and they called Draw-Tite, and the spacing on the receiver is correct, at exactly the specified 4 inches. I guess there's some variability between cars, as to the exact spacing of the exhaust brackets. I expanded the rear passenger side bolt hole by about 1/4 inch with a dremel and grinder bit, to make everything fit.

I suggest checking this spacing before fishing the bolts into their holes with the provided wire tool. It’s not real hard to get the bolts into place, but it’s a real pain getting them back out again.

The receiver pushes up the rear fairing by about 3/4 inch. It's not really noticeable, because it's under the car, and it might be by design to keep it from vibrating.

The main bar of the receiver touches my trunk floor - in fact it was "in the way" by about 1/8 or 1/4 inch. I couldn't push the bolt flanges flush against the frame, and had to just torque the bolts down. Again I'm chalking that up to some variability in the car.

Some of the exhaust heat shield does need to be trimmed back, as the installation instructions say. The aluminum can be cut with a sturdy utility knife.

With the middle bar of the rack folded down, there's plenty of room for the top to open.

The bike closest to the car doesn't have a lot of pedal clearance, but the rack is very sturdy and I don't think it will flex enough for the pedal to hit the trunk. I'm going to put an sock over that anyway; I could bang it when putting the bike on the rack.

All in all, I'm very happy with the bike setup. The rack is sturdy, and easier to deal with than the roof rack I had on my Jetta.

I hate opening up a source file and seeing that. No, not the VB.NET, though I’m not a fan of that either. I mean the fifteen region directives in a 312 line file. Most of those have one method in them. I guess at some point that was a coding standard or something - but dude, you’re making the code harder to read, not easier.

Neither Visual Studio nor resharper has a direct means of quickly removing individual region directives, though resharper can be configured to remove all of them when you reformat the file.

To remove specific regions, follow these steps:

Type Ctrl+Alt+F to display resharper’s File Structure window, shown below. The gray outlines correspond to regions.

Click the ‘x’ in the upper right corner of the region box. The start and end region directives will be removed, but the code they contain will remain.

SQL1159 Initialization error with DB2 .NET Data Provider, reason code 7, tokens 9.5.0.DEF.2, SOFTWARE\IBM\DB2\InstalledCopies

For me the solution to this error was simply this: run my .NET website under IIS, rather than under Visual Studio’s development server. There are apparently other sources of this error, maybe related to x86 vs. x64 installations; IBM has some documentation of the error types.

If I had to guess, I would think that the IBM driver DLLs are trying to read from the registry, and the development server doesn’t have the necessary permissions. Reason code 7 is a registry error, and the tokens are an existing registry value and path under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.

The examples on Brinkster’s support pages are hit and miss, and they’re in VB.

static void SendMessage(string email, string messageBody) 
{ 
    var from = "you@yourdomain.com"; 
    var credentials = new NetworkCredential(from, "password"); 
    var message = new MailMessage() 
         { 
            From = new MailAddress(from), 
            Subject = "Subject", 
            Body = messageBody, 
            IsBodyHtml = true 
         }; 
    message.To.Add(email); 
    var mailClient = new SmtpClient("mymail.brinkster.com", 2525) 
        {
            DeliveryMethod = SmtpDeliveryMethod.Network, 
            UseDefaultCredentials = false, 
            Credentials = credentials 
        }; 
    mailClient.Send(message); 
} 

Things to note:

• The from address must be the same email used to authenticate.
• Port 25 is the standard, but if this doesn’t work (it didn’t for me,) try port 2525.

I’ll be speaking at the upcoming Baton Rouge .NET User Group (BRDNUG) meeting on April 13th. The topic: An Introduction to Windows Azure.

More information is available at brdnug.org. (That link will likely be broken soon – try the base site at brdnug.org.)

My employer Antares Technology Solutions is sponsoring the event. Drop by if you’re in the area!!