Chris May

I had been looking for a way to get the asp.net development server to run w/o a virtual directory settings.  It's really very stupid and short sighted to not enable this.  Just about every project I have ever worked on has some paths coded into the HTML that are based on / being the root, not the application root.  Stupid.

 

Anyway, ScottGu posted these steps on his site, and it works.  Not bad!

Step 1: Select the “Tools->External Tools” menu option in VS or Visual Web Developer.  This will allow you to configure and add new menu items to your Tools menu.

 

Step 2: Click the “Add” button to add a new external tool menu item.  Name it “WebServer on Port 8080” (or anything else you want).

 

Step 3: For the “Command” textbox setting enter this value: C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\WebDev.WebServer.EXE (note: this points to the web-server that VS usually automatically runs).

 

Step 4: For the “Arguments” textbox setting enter this value: /port:8080 /path:$(ProjectDir)

 

Step 5: Select the “Use Output Window” checkbox (this will prevent the command-shell window from popping up.

 

 Once you hit apply and ok you will now have a new menu item in your “Tools” menu called “WebServer on Port 8080”.  You can now select any web project in your solution and then choose this menu option to launch a web-server that has a root site on port 8080 (or whatever other port you want) for the project.

 

You can then connect to this site in a browser by simply saying http://localhost:8080/.  All root based references will work fine.

 

Step 6: The last step is to configure your web project to automatically reference this web-server when you run or debug a site instead of launching the built-in web-server itself.  To-do this, select your web-project in the solution explorer, right click and select “property pages”.  Select the “start options” setting on the left, and under server change the radio button value from the default (which is use built-in webserver) to instead be “Use custom server”.  Then set the Base URL value to be: http://localhost:8080/

Brian Noyes is the guest on DNR TV to cover databinding in .Net 2.0.

The video can bee seen here.

In our current applications we are using Assembly References so that you can load up a project without needing to load up every project it references, and all the ones that they reference and on and on.

However MS suggests that you use Project References whenever possible, so I think when we cut over to TFS we will be switching to project references.

I am at a Developer event at Microsoft right now, and the presenter just talked about some a way to setup a dependency on some data from sql server.

He didn't go over it much, but it is something I should look into a bit more.

I would guess it needs to poll the DB or something, will be interesting to see how it works.

There are times when it would be nice to pass a business object over a webservice and consume it on the other side.

This is made somewhat complex by microsoft auto generated proxy system that builds a stripped down version of you object for the client to consume.

You can manually go in and modify the proxy class files, which is what I had done, but now there are some other options available to you to achieve this. This article talks about how you can get customize the proxy creation, so that you can auto generate your proxies whenever you want, and you won't lose your custom code.

Here is another possible solution. But the latter link looks like it is doing a lot of mapping with the use of a wrapper class. A lot more work that I would want to do probably.

One of the parts where Unit testing seems to fall apart, or become a giant pain at least, is in applications or parts of applications that rely heavily on data access from a large relational database like sql server.

You run some operations against the database and end up with a result set. Is that result set right? Ok it looks good, now what? Well some people would say that you should restore the DB to the point before you started this last test. This can be very painful if you are trying to run hundreds, or even simply dozens of tests.

In this article on MSDN the author goes over some options for avoiding the use of database restore. There is some talk about using mock objects in conjunction with NMock, which of course Fowler would like to remind you aren't stubs, but the majority of the article focuses on the use of DTC to rollback changes made in each test teardown.

I had some problems getting DTC to run across machines, but it worked great locally, so there was some success in my tests.

This article covers an interesting topic that has shown itself in my current project: using the Cache across appdomains and web farms.

In the end his solution is basically to create a mechanism to write out cache information to files that each app domain watches for changes (or so I gleamed from glancing over it) but in our case we are storing little bits and pieces and not large things. In other words, the added overhead of reading/writing to the filesystem would probably eliminate the benefit of using the cache for our application.

I just read this article which seems to describe the situation I am seeing today with our application.

The solution is to boot the computer with the /3GB option to allow ASP.NET to use more memory, but I think we only have 2GB in the machine. Will need to investigate.

I have been messing around with NUnitASP a little, it is not exactly perfect.

I haven't been able to find out if there is anything in TFS testing that can do what it does.

Expinion.net has some interesting controls.

Mainly the one I am interested in is the multi calendar control. I have no idea if these work with asp.net or not, I will need to check it out.

Google Rankings, is a pretty cool website.

You can enter a phrase and your site and it will tell you where you come up on the index. I know these are not 100% accurate in the sense that a search one day could be very different from a search the other day depending on which set of servers you hit, but it can give you some idea of where you stand.

One of my clients was having a problem where every now and then a print job would fail, and it would eventually cause the server to die.

I found some info here: spoolsv.exe.

Stopping and restarting the print spoler service did the trick, I didn't need to clean out the files from the print attempt.

More decimal issues, but unrelated to the SQL stuff. The problem being that numbers like 1/10 can be easily displayed in base 10 as 0.1. But, in base 10 we have problems with numbers like 1/3, .3333333333. Well, in binary, they have problems with some of our decimal numbers that you wouldn't expect. e.g. 0.4 - 0.1 = 0.30000000000000000000004 while 1.4-1.1 = 0.29999999999999999999998.

The problem here is with rounding. I wrote a quick JS function to round these numbers to a significant number of digits.

Ok so, on a recent project, for some reason, I set up a few fields, and the corrosponding SP parameters as "decimal" datatypes. What a mistake.

After lots of rounding errors, which were partly ignored because the revised "specs" called for these figures to be integers (later changed to decimals), I found out that a Decimal datatype has no decimal places, unless you specifically declare it.

The reason for this is that a "decimal" is really just another name for a "numeric". So I guess I can understand that part... but how dumb is it that a decimal, by default, has no decimal places.

I went back and changed everything to float.

Use decimal(x,x) instead of float.  See here for the reason why.

When my wife and I first moved into our house, the first thing we wanted to do was get rid of this ugly, and seemingly useless bar in our basement.

To be honest I have no idea what anyone would have done with this thing, but at some point someone spent a lot of time to install this thing.

The day finally came when I decided it was time to take action (mostly because I have to sell my house very quickly and this thing is ugly).

I wish I had some "before" pictures, but I didn't think about that when I started.


Some of the junk that was removed, awaiting disposal.



The newly freed space. We are going to make this where we put our TV and stuff.



This was the most interesting part for me. I had to cut some pipes running to the sink in the bar and sweat on a cap. I had never done this before so it wasn't that easy, and it was made even harder by the fact that I had about 18" of space to work with in this area behind the bar. But, it's finally done.

I just came across this post by Carlos J. Quintero, a .net MVP.

He explains basically what I have been encountering in dealing with versioning of assemblies.

He even points out the bug I found with auto incrementing the AssemblyFileVersion number.

Carlos J. Quintero [.NET MVP] Jun 23, 3:34 am

Newsgroups: microsoft.public.dotnet.framework
From: "Carlos J. Quintero [.NET MVP]" <carl...@NOSPAMsogecable.com> - Find messages by this author
Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 10:34:05 +0200
Local: Thurs, Jun 23 2005 3:34 am
Subject: Re: AssemblyVersion numbers and recompiling code
Reply to Author | Forward | Print | Individual Message | Show original | Report Abuse

Hi Joe,


There are 2 versions that you need to take care of:


1) The version of the file: this is the version of "classic" Win32
applications or DLLs, that is, the one shown using the Properties dialog of
Windows Explorer.


It is set with the AssemblyFileVersion attribute in AssemblyInfo.vb file:


<Assembly: AssemblyFileVersion("1.0.2.4")­>


Notice that this attribute is not written by default when the file is
created so you need to add it by hand.


This is the version that should be autoincremented but, alas, using "1.0.*"
does not autoincrement it in each build. I would say this is a bug.


2) The version of the assembly: this is the version of .NET assemblies,
which is different than the file version. That is, this is the version shown
in the Property dialog of the GAC in the first tab (the second tab shows the
file version). For example, in Net Framework 1.1, System.Windows.Forms has a
file version 1.1.4322.573 and an assembly version 1.0.5000.0


It is set with the AssemblyVersion attribute in AssemblyInfo.vb file:


<Assembly: AssemblyVersion("1.0.0.0")>



Notice that this attribute is written by default when the file is created so
you don´t need to add it by hand.


This is the version that can be autoincremented using "1.0.*" but generally
you don´t want to do this because you want to keep the same assembly version
in each build until you break the backwards compatibility. I would say that
this autoincrement feature is another bug.


So:


- Change always the AssemblyFileVersion on each build.


- Change the AssemblyVersion only if you are breaking the backwards
compatibility. Do not change it for bug fixes or other minor INTERNAL
changes which won´t break clients.


- Clients can be configured through a config file to run against an exact
dll a.b.c.d or with any a.b.* build number (provided that major and minor
digits don´t change). See the .NET Framework docs about this.


--
Best regards,


Carlos J. Quintero

The LINQ Project is a codename for a set of extensions to the .NET Framework that encompass language-integrated query, set, and transform operations. It extends C# and Visual Basic with native language syntax for queries and provides class libraries to take advantage of these capabilities.

I have already been rolling my own AJAX based controls (and they are sweet, I have to say I am very proud of how OO I was able to make them on the client side). Microsoft has a set of extensions that are supposed to let you do this stuff with asp.net called Atlas. They have a website set up to talk about some of the specifics.

I am still working through all the FSBO crap.

It seems that http://www.buyowner.com/ doesn't put your site in any MLS, so it doesn't show up on ChicagoTribune.com or Realtor.com.
http://www.listmefree.com looks like they DO put you in the MLS, but you have to pay a buyers commission.
This site, which I think is just an alias of nuwaymls.com seems to suggest that they get your house in the MLS and Realtor.com but you don't work with realtors to do the selling... but you use a realtor to list it?

My brother showed me http://www.proclipusa.com/ today. It's pretty cool. They have a bunch of different clips that fit all kinds of cars and devices.

In a project I am working on, one of the requirements was that the application be allowed to browse its own pages (e.g. programatically open up a web request and browse the html pages that are served up by the site).

Anyway, this permission is not allowed on the hosting environment they decided to use. This page talks about the permissions available in ASP.NET 2.0, and the different levels of security you can set on applications.

Here is the documentation from Cisco, but again I don't see anything about if it resets everything

This article is supposed to show you how to reset the password from the terminal on a cisco router. Not sure if it will work or if it will erase the config. I will need to find out.

After making some newsgroup postings and researching a bit. I found out some info that might be a contributing factor to our problems with assemblies getting referenced correctly. In our assemblyinfo file we are auto incrementing the AssemblyVersion . From my reading, this attribute is actually meant to BREAK combatibility. What we need to be using is the AssemblyFileVersion. This can be incremented w/o breaking compatibility and still help us figure out what DLL we are dealing with (which version). This blog has an entry about it.

Note: I had to repost because I accidently used some tags in my article that don't show up.

After making some newsgroup postings and researching a bit. I found out some info that might be a contributing factor to our problems with assemblies getting referenced correctly.

In our assemblyinfo file we are auto incrementing the . From my reading, this attribute is actually meant to BREAK combatibility. What we need to be using is the This can be incremented w/o breaking compatibility and still help us figure out what DLL we are dealing with (which version).

This blog has an entry about it.

This article on MSDN details how assemblies are located by the Runtime.

Not sure if I have linked to http://script.aculo.us/ before, but they have some cool javascript effects on there. To top it off, they are free.

.NET was supposed to resolve the problem of DLL Hell.

Well that is exactly where I am right now: DLL Hell.

I have wasted so much time on stupid versioning issues and other problems that seem to have no cause whatso ever.

Right now I try to build and I get the error:
Cannot copy assembly 'ASDF.Web.Controls.DateTimeControls' to file 'C:\Data\WalshVSSRoot\ASDF.Web.Users\bin\Walshgroup.Web.Controls.DateTimeControls.dll'. The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.

Thats nice. No one is using the fricking file, and I haven't had this problem during my last ... oh I don't know... say ...10,000 builds, but now it is becoming an issue. Great.

My other new friend is this error:
The located assembly's manifest definition with name 'ASDF.Web.Controls.LookupControl' does not match the assembly reference.
Thats nice... manually updating the reference, removing it and readding it, rebuilding, manually copying the DLLs to the bin etc don't help. This is a POS. WTF.

It turns out that when I said:

It turns out that when I said: Turns out it is as simple as adding [ValidationPropertyAttribute("­Text")] to your class definition for the custom control. That's easy! it really wasn't that easy, at least to get client side support for asp.net validators to work. After a lot of research, and a bunch of looking through the page output I figured out what must be done. If you have a custom server control and it is named "MyDateTime1", then the HTML element that you want to check in your client side validation must also be named "MyDateTime1". In my control, I would output a bunch of different elemnts, using things like ClientID + "_textbox" and ClientID + "_Icon" etc... All I had to do was make sure the textbox (which is what I wanted to run the client side validation against) was named simply this.ClientID and presto!

It really isn't that easy.

I think this worked before because I was created HTML elements, and not ASP.NET Webcontrols. I am trying to basically do the same thing, and let me tell you, it isn't working. I am getting an error saying that there are more than 1 control w/ the same name. The problem (I believe) is that container control is registered w/ asp.net, and when I dynamically add an asp.net textbox with the same name as the parent control, it flips out. With my other control I was just adding an HTML textbox.

Just to keep a list of what I am working through here:

I am part way done with the loan process at this place, and they seem to have the lowest price so far (I need to get tax info from Kathleen to complete it). They were 5.375 + 660 closing.
Here is another place I was looking over, those rates are from mtgcapital.com.
I haven't yet gone through this site.
Here is yahoo's list of common closing costs.
I haven't called these guys.

Pretty much everyone has the problem of getting a something to show on top of a dropdown at one time or another.

I just found this solution and it appears to work for me. I made some modifications to their ideas to get it to work better for me, but the basic jist is that you dynamically create an IFRAME element and position it w/ a zindex just below the div's zindex, but it will hide the contents below the iframe because it is considered a "window" object

In VB.Net it has bugged me that some members simply don't show up in intellisense. For example, in asp.net pages, Me.RegisterClientScriptBlock will not show in in intellisense. Once you have typed out the full name, THEN it will show you the required parameters, but still I didn't understand why it did this in VB, and yet C# has no problem.

So I finally did some digging and found that VB HIDES what they call "Advanced" members. I guess they are protecting us dumb VB programmers from getting overwhelmed by extra options and methods. Idiots!

In VS.Net go to Tools > Options > Text Editor > Basic > General and then uncheck Hide advanced members.

After further review, it looks like I probably can't use the PreSendRequestContent event w/ an http module to do what I want. Using a Filter appears to be the way to go.

However, after MORE thought, I think I probabaly will implement what I want from within the specific application. I think there would be too much processing overhead to filter out stuff on every page of every request to the site, just for a minor amount of editing.

Here is an article on someone modifying their output into XHTML, and here is the discussion on it.

I am trying to figure a way to modify the output HTML from all pages on a site, while trying to avoid writing code into a base class.This page show the use of an HttpResponse Filter. Their example wires up the filter in the base class, but I am hopeful that I can do the same with an HttpModule, such as this page where they use the PreSendRequestContent event.

We are looking at getting a new house, but some of the ones we are looking at don't have a 2 car garage. I am wondering about how much it would cost us to erect one. This website has some "estimates" for home additions and building.

It looks like they think it should cost 12,000 (and up). But for some reason that sounds pretty low to me. Apparently these guys are doing a lot of garages in the web suburbs, so I am going to call them to see if I can get a "real" figure. I'll also call these guys.

This is pretty cool. Its an example of how to pick out motion detection on a video stream.

Coming soon: "How to find John Connor" :)

We are getting these stupid errors every now and then on our site.

I still have no idea. I think it is a combo of the fact that we are: 1) using frames, 2) using smart nav, and 3) dynamically loading controls, probabaly in the wrong spot in the life cycle.

Some dude posted that he fixed the problem with an added closing "/" on some of his server control tags, but I don't think this is our issue:

basicly the problem arises when you fail to in sert the closing "/" in custom component tag for instance <mynamespace:mycomponent > will produce the error but <mynamespace:mycomponent /> will not. Despite the fact that this error is so simple it held me up for some time and the error message produced was of course useless in finding the solution.

I will investigate this though.

I posted some of these before, but this one does a bunch of different languages and has source code available.

I was having a problem with some textboxes that I was adding to my control dynamically not retaining their value across postback. These textboxes were of course the ones that I was attaching a whole bunch of code to for a lookup control I am writing, so there was a bunch of stuff going on.

In testing I added another textbox and it DID retain its viewstate w/ no problem.

More debugging and testing and whatnot. In looking at some of the tracing from the postbacks and posts, I saw that it was naming the form element for the newly added test textbox as a generic name "cntl_1" or something like that, whereas the textbox I cared about was "TextField", the ID I was assigning to it programatically. I found that you HAD to give a webcontrol an ID in code in order for it to assign ANY ID to it in the code, which kinda sucks. I really don't care what it's ID is in the HTML, but it would only assign a NAME to it, which doesn't help me in all my javascript programming.

So long story short, I was assigning the ID value of the textboxes in a method that was being called from the prerender event. I guess what was happening was that, in the page lifecycle, it was trying to load the viewstate back into the control, and b/c I hadn't hit the prerender event of course, my textbox didn't have the ID value that was expected.

I moved the ID assignment to the constructor and everything is working fine... so far.

While I am at it, this article talks about composite server controls, which is what I am doing a lot of work with.

I haven't linked to this page on MSDN yet, so I might as well so I don't have to go searching again next time I need it.

This article from CodeProject looks pretty slick. It shows how to create an XP panel bar, and I guess it would use javascript to dynamically hide / show the important areas, but I didn't look really hard at the code.

Every now and then I want to decompile a dll and I want to use ILDASM instead of the Ankrino app I downloaded.

Of course it is buried in an obscure location: ( C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\SDK\v1.1\Bin\ildasm.exe ) and I can never find it.

Here is some code that kinda works. It could still use a little tweaks, but it's a good starting point:

       function IFrameHeight(){  
                     if(document.getElementById && !(document.all)) 
                     { 
                           h = document.getElementById('iframename').contentDocument.body.scrollHeight; 
                           document.getElementById('iframename').style.height = h; 
                           w = document.getElementById('iframename').contentDocument.body.scrollWidth; 
                           document.getElementById('iframename').style.width = w; 
                     } 
                     else if(document.all) 
                     { 
                           h = document.frames('iframename').document.body.scrollHeight; 
                           document.all.iframename.style.height = h; 
                            w = document.getElementById('iframename').document.body.scrollWidth; 
                          document.all.iframename.style.width = w; 
                     } 
       }

Ok. I'm trying to buy a house, but I don't want to pay someone 3% just to show me a few places and show up at the closing.

This place looks like they give you back 1000 per every 100,000 in home value. This site does the same thing, but they state 1% of the house, not the 1000 per 100,000 thing.

I think I used Seremak before, and they are now offering full buyers commission - $3000. Which isn't really a "2% Rebate" as they state... but its the best thing I have found so far.

On the topic of robots in our society in the future: Marshall Brain talks about his thoughts on this in an article called Robot Nation (and parts 2 and 3) , and the opportunity this presents out society. I'm betting on the darker side of options (more extreme seperation of the haves and have-nots). "Will Humanoid Robots Take All the Jobs by 2050?" is the slashdot discussion of the first part of the article, and "Distribution of Wealth in a Robot-Driven World" is the discussion of the 3rd part.

The idea is that, as robots and technology in general, take over more and more jobs, what will happen to the workforce, and to our society? It's an interesting and troubling question. A lot of people might not think this is a big deal, and follow the assumption that it will work something like this: "Well, if 90% of all fast food workers, and janitors are replaced by robots, then there will be additional jobs working for the companies that support the robots." This is clearly flawed. You don't replace humans w/ robots who required the same number of displaced humans to support them. Otherwise there would be no economical reason to replace them.

So if you can make these giant increases in efficiency, that COULD result in a giant increase in quality of life, and also less need to work. That would work like this: Jack likes to eat a McDonalds, so he works 40 hours a week to make enough money to eat every meal at McDonalds. McDonalds replaces all humans w/ robots and is able to cut the cost of their food to 1/2 its current price. Jack now only needs to work 1/2 as man hours to pay for his McDonalds, so he can enjoy an extra 20 hours of his life each week. But, I feel the way it probably would work is that Jacks employeer would suddenly have all the fast food employees begging for a job, and thus Jacks salary would drop as his value to the company will have decreased.

This is a basic economic question. Over the last 40 years many would argue that our quality of life has increased, and in some ways that is plainly clear. But 30 years ago someone working in a labor job could support a family and own a house. Factories NEEDED people. Now they don't, or they need a lot less people as robots and automation have continued to replace jobs.

DotNetJunkies has this article on the Ent Lib's DAAB and ConfAB (you basically have to use the Configuration App block if you want to use DAAB). They say they are going to have follow up articles on each of the app blocks.

This article shows how you can programatically alter the columns in your SQL Reporter reports.

I can't find much information aboiut this stuff. It looks like maybe he is enabling you to call public methods on a webpage code behind, and not really designed to consume web services.

Even though I really don't wan to use anything MS specific, I don't have the time to code what is provided by the Webservice.HTC file, and I know that supporting non-IE is not at all important where I work, even though my main concern is with being locked down to ANYTHING, not just MS stuff. Here is a good walkthrough of using the behavior.

The AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) framework on this guys site is impressive. With little coding I was able to return a string from a webservice into javascript, but I am not sure how it will deal with complex types but I guess it now can pass down an XML doc, which you could pass to an object constructor in JS. The dropdown is sweet (source).

This control is free, but it doesn't do any out of band lookups.

The methods discused in this article won't really "protect" your images, only make it a pain in the butt for someone to get them. So I guess that is a level of protection. The article references the free program HTMLEncrypt which encodes your HTML and uses javascript ( I assume ) to dynamically write it out. With this method, you would have to use a tool like the accenture Rainbow frame that I worked with one time to get the dynamically generated content.

The W3C Validator section has lots of cool tools that run online to check your documents. The header has a link to the link checker which will scan your website for bad or broken links.

This tool from Microsoft will help you analyze your current server configuration and help you migrate to SQL Server 2005.

This article from Code Project shows how to create a help balloon in DHTML.

Depending on how they implement it, this could be useful.

We are redoing a big project with a ton of files where the project has a "Root Namespace."

These root namespaces are a real pain in the butt!

So I found that if you use the Find / Replace in Files and you turn on RegExp, you can search for:
"Public Class"
and replace it w/
Namespace Old.Namespace\n\nPublic Class

That should work... we will see.

NUnit ASP is a tool for working with NUnit and the presentation layer of asp.net applications.

Some articles on how to get started w/ it can be found here and here/

My friend Phil sent me this snip for your .config files to allow multiple asp.net applications to share the same singon:

<!--Override the machine.config default behavior of the validation to allow authentication across apps

this is done by changing "AutoGenerate,IsolateApps"

to "AutoGenerate"-->

<machineKey validationKey="AutoGenerate"

decryptionKey= "AutoGenerate" validation="SHA1"/>

I haven't tried it in production yet, but will soon.