Problem with DATEV on changing computer name

Very simply: NEVER CHANGE THE MACHINE NAME once you installed DATEV.

You can join and leave domains and workgroups, but cannot change the machine name.

Once you’ve changed the machine name, you aren’t able to view old bookings and to enter new.

The only way is to revert machine to former name. Enjoy!

XMLWriter ignores XMLWriterSettings: generated XML is “UTF-16” instead of “UTF-8”

Once you need to generate a XML document in your ASP.NET application (for example, to offer it for download), you will sooner or later decide to use the XMLWriter class of .NET Fx.
So you’ll write a piece of code like: 
  
string fileName = buildDownloadFilename();

XDocument xmlDocument = generateXML();
if (xmlDocument != null)
   {
     StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
     XmlWriter xmlWriter = XmlWriter.Create(sb);
     xmlDocument.Save(xmlWriter);
     xmlWriter.Close();
     string strContent = sb.ToString();
     Response.ContentType = "text/xml";
     Response.AppendHeader("content-disposition", String.Format("attachment;filename={0}", fileName));
     Response.AppendHeader("Content-Length", strContent.Length.ToString());
     Response.Write(strContent);

And you’ll be definitely surprised seeing the output XML declaration with encoding “UTF-16”.

Well, extending the code snippet with explicit XMLWriterSettings, you’ll land on:

string fileName = buildDownloadFilename();

XDocument xmlDocument = generateXML();
if (xmlDocument != null)
   {
     StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
     XmlWriterSettings settings = new XmlWriterSettings();
     settings.Encoding = Encoding.UTF8;
     XmlWriter xmlWriter = XmlWriter.Create(sb, settings);
     xmlDocument.Save(xmlWriter);
     xmlWriter.Close();
     string strContent = sb.ToString();
     Response.ContentType = "text/xml";
     Response.AppendHeader("content-disposition", String.Format("attachment;filename={0}", fileName));
     Response.AppendHeader("Content-Length", strContent.Length.ToString());
     Response.Write(strContent);

And you’ll be still surprised seeing the output XML declaration unchanged with encoding “UTF-16”.

The reason is, the settings of XMLWriter target (in this sample – StringBuilder) override the XMLWriterSettings parameters already in XMLWriter constructor.

The way out is, use an alternate target for XMLWriter, supporting the encoding you need. For example:

string fileName = buildDownloadFilename();

XDocument xmlDocument = generateXML();
if (xmlDocument != null)
   {
    XmlWriterSettings settings = new XmlWriterSettings();
    settings.Encoding = Encoding.UTF8;
    MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream();
    XmlWriter xmlWriter = XmlWriter.Create(ms, settings);
    xmlDocument.Save(xmlWriter);
    xmlWriter.Close();
    string strContent = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(ms.GetBuffer());
    Response.ContentType = "text/xml";
    Response.AppendHeader("content-disposition", String.Format("attachment;filename={0}", fileName));
    Response.AppendHeader("Content-Length", strContent.Length.ToString());
    Response.Write(strContent);

Also check the solution here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kaevans/archive/2008/08/11/xmlwritersettings-encoding-being-ignored.aspx

Enjoy!