Chris May

When doing testing, you might find yourself wanting to delete cookies for some URLs on your development machine.

Now, you need to be careful about how you delete these cookies, because Microsoft decided to pull a little trick on you.  They created a folder:

C:\Documents and Settings\[user]\Cookies

This folder seems to contain all your cookies!  But, actually it doesn't.  Deleting these cookies really doesn't clear out the cookies you think you are deleting because the REAL cookies are stored in:

C:\Documents and Settings\[user]\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files

This folder contains cookies and other temporary internet files, but of the most importance here is that THIS is where you need to clear your cookies from.

I came across another thing on a recent project is that you can't test for the existance of an outbound cookie.

If Response.Cookies.Item("ASDFA") Is Nothing Then
     Response.Write("This Will Never Execute")
End If

Why is this?  It is because with the Response.Cookies collection (but not on the Request's cookies collection) when you request an item from the collection that doesn't exist it CREATES it, with a value of an empty string.

Using resource files (resx files) for globalization is a standard technicque.  ASP.NET allows you to create 1 resx file per page to help you manage your content.

But when it is time to convert those files into the correctly named localized version to send to the translator, you might find yourself doing a lot of copying and renaming.

So I wrote a little script that does this for you:

Imports System.IO
Module Module1

    Sub Main()
        Dim languages() As String = {"es", "pl", "de", "fr"}
        For Each filepath As String In Directory.GetFiles("C:\translationTest")
            If filepath.Contains("x.resx") Then
                For i As Integer = 0 To languages.Length - 1
                    File.Copy(filepath, filepath.Replace(".resx", "." & languages(i) & ".resx"))
                Next
            End If
        Next
    End Sub

End Module

This will generate all the files for you, and then all you need to do is send the off and wait for the translator to do the REAL work :).

Microsoft's Patterns and Practices group has released some guidance for creating MVP web applications.

http://www.pnpguidance.net/Tag/MVPBundle.aspx

I haven't checked this out, so I can't verify if they are worth looking into you, but I will be reading them in the near future.

I recently wrote about how the Flickr Uploadr tool sucks, but the other part of that article was how the web upload tools for Flickr is very nice!

FancyUpload is a set of code using Flash/Javascript to perform out of band file uploads.

This is basically how Flickr allows you to queue files for upload in their web client, and it is very useful in this sense because it would be extremely painful to be forced to post every single image individually.

For me, I am more interested in the ability to post very large files without leaving the brower in a fashion that seems to make it look like it is "stuck" when really it is just uploading a giant file.

This is a good article from Microsoft on globalization and localization of asp.net applications.

The article describes how to automate the process of moving static content from pages (inside labels) into resource files and setup the proper binding between the content controls and the resource files.

This article has some interesting and useful information as well about some other topics such as global vs local, implicit globalization settings, dealing with scripts etc.

So you have some code running in your itemdatabound event handler and you are trying to do someting with e.item.dataitem but it keeps bombing out with errors because e.item.dataitem is nothing.

So, why is e.item.dataitem is nothing??

Answer: Because you are probably using a header or footer in your binding object.  The header/footer will cause the itemdatabound event to fire, but there is no dataitem for them.

Check if the current row is the header or footer, and then you will have no issues with using e.item.dataitem.

My experience with developing for Sharepoint was very painful.  The jist of it was, unless you are truly going to hook into a lot of the core functionality of sharepoint (document collaboration and workflow) it will be MUCH harder to build an app to run in sharepoint than it would be to build a standalone application.

But MS has released some new extensions that will hopefully ease the pain a little bit:

Announcing: Visual Studio extensions for SharePoint – Developer User Guide

I don't know if I will ever have enough time to implement anything in sharepoint, but these will be nice to have.

We have been working with a pretty cool little javascript toolkit called Highslide.

http://vikjavev.no/highslide/

It gives you some nice lightbox type effects but I like it more because of some of the options to load in iframes and stuff.

Someone wrote some asp.net wrappers as well to make it easier to add to your pages:

http://encosia.com/

Ran into this again today.

<asp:BoundField
  DataField="FollowUpDate"   
  DataFormatString="{0:MMM-dd-yy}"   
  HtmlEncode="false"  
  HeaderText="Follow Up Date" />

If you are doing a boundfield in an asp.net gridview, and you play on using the DataFormatString, you have to set HtmlEncode to false.

Kinda stupid, but that's life.

I have been asked this a few times, so I decided to write up a little article on it.

The problem is that when you are using master pages in asp.net, the <HEAD> is usually inside the master page template.  So if you are on a page that needs a 1 off change or addition to the style of the rest of the site, you are unable to create a <STYLE> element in your content page.

Well, you CAN create one, but then VS.Net won't show you the designer for your page b/c it keeps asking you to clean up the HTML problems on your page.

The solution I have used is to create a 2nd content place holder in the master page head.  But, I might as well not duplicate effort here, as Rick Strahl has already written the article I am about to write (and apparently, even someone else beat him to the punch).

http://www.west-wind.com/WebLog/posts/5706.aspx

This works very well for this type of situation. 

Error:

Unable to cast object of type 'System.Collections.Generic.List`1[EditQuoteController+UnsavedQuoteItemInfo]' to type 'System.Collections.Generic.List`1[EditQuoteController+UnsavedQuoteItemInfo]'.

Yes, you read that right.  Unable to cast object of type X to type X.

I have seen this type of error once before and it was when there were multiple assemblies referencing different version of a common assembly, so even though their names were the same, their versions were different.

But in this instance there is nothing like this that could be having an impact.  All of the classes of consequence are in the same assembly.

Also, I don't get exception very often, only every now and then.

UPDATE:

I think maybe this is happening between builds on my development machine b/c I am storing some data in the session.  So the version in session was from the last build?  Doesn't sound like a great explanation, but it's the best I have at this point.

UPDATE 2:

I am pretty sure that what I wrote in the last update is what is actually happening. 

I used this code:

Try
    list = CType(view.Session.Item(Me.UnsavedKey), List(Of UnsavedQuoteItemInfo))
Catch ex As System.InvalidCastException
    Dim sError As String = "Unable to cast from type " & _
        view.Session.Item(Me.UnsavedKey).GetType.AssemblyQualifiedName & _
        " to type " & GetType(List(Of UnsavedQuoteItemInfo)).AssemblyQualifiedName & _
        ".  The session has been cleared."
    view.Session.Item(Me.UnsavedKey) = Nothing
    Throw New System.ApplicationException(sError)
End Try

Which producted the following 2 types:

System.Collections.Generic.List`1[[EditQuoteController+UnsavedQuoteItemInfo, App_Web_bp-bbqew, Version=0.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null]], mscorlib, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089

System.Collections.Generic.List`1[[EditQuoteController+UnsavedQuoteItemInfo, App_Web_ve7ziow-, Version=0.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null]], mscorlib, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089. 

I am guessing this is a by product of using the web site project, instead of web application project.  There are some other reasons why we wanted to use web site instead of web app on this project, so you don't have to scold me: we made the right choice.

But it seems that every time I make a change to the project, it creates a new dynamically named assembly.  So even though the classes are really the same, they are globally different as far as asp.net is concerned.

Rob Howard has a nice article on how to use the 301 redirect (permanent redirect) in order to get search engines to spider the new page, as opposed to just using Response.Redirect, which will send a 302 (temporary redirect) to the client.

I am always on the lookout for better and easier ways to automate testing of my applications.  Mostly, this stems from my teams not being too keen on implementing testing, so the easier I can make it, the easier it will be to convince others to write tests.

So Phil Haack has suggested a free framework called WebAii, and after taking a quick look, it looks promising.

It supports some nice features like mouse/keyboard actions for Ajax testing, and dom actions (find an element and click it, or whatever).  It also supports unit testing your javascript functions by having your test call the functions.  It also integrates with Nunit.  Nice!

Hopefully I can find some free time (HAHAHHAAH) when I can test this out more in a project.

These are some nice looking, cross browser compliant, ASP.NET based, free controls from Obout.com

Flyout can perform stuff like this:

But almost more interesting is how it can be used in conjunction with traditional controls.  For example, you can wire up a nice looking "Alt Text" effect for images and labels, and you can provide some nice explanation in the flyout for how to properly fill in a control.  The example they give on their site shows a textbox for "Routing Number" and when you click on the textbox it shows this in the flyout:

The alternating content control which is called "Show" (Show examples) can rotate through some content like so:

These are both free controls.  Very nice!

I recently ran into an interesting problem... my webservice application seemed unable to read info from the web.config file.

I tried adding some invalid < marks to the config file and the app still ran w/o any error (but still wouldn't read the web.config appSettings or connectionString sections).

So I created another IIS application and it worked as expected.

So I deleted the troubled IIS App and recreated it.  Still broken!

The solution was to clear out the ASP.NET Temporarly Files folder in c:\windows\...\...

Once that was gone, and I restarted IIS, everything went back to normal.

You've probably seen this one.

Whenever you do one of the following:

Response.End()
Response.Redirect("page.aspx")
Server.Transfer("page.aspx")

You end up with a ThreadAbortException, "Thread was being aborted".

I had previously dealt with this by swallowing the ThreadAbortException, which of course isn't a great method, but it worked.

Well today I came across a better way for all of these.

In a recent gathering of the ALT.NET group, ScottGu gave a demo of the upcoming MVC framework for asp.net.

The article (and video) can be found here.

Lots of people in the ALT community have been working with asp.net and MVC by using one of the OS frameworks out there like Monorail, but I am glad to see that MS is not sitting around waiting on this issue.

Hopefully this will make testing even easier. 

Recently I ran into a problem where browsing to a newly installed web app produced a bunch of javascript errors.  Stuff like: "'Type' is not defined" and "'Sys' is not defined".

After debugging it for a while, I found the problem to be that URLScan had been installed on the server (Windows 2000 Server), which was preventing any requests with dots in the folder name.

URL Scan is a tool that MS suggested everyone install a while back that acts to filter out many malicious attacks.

So, with the default settings any request for a file inside the scripts\System.Web.Extensions folder would be denied as a 404 b/c of URL Scan.

To fix this, you need to edit the UrlScan.ini file, located in %WINDIR%\System32\Inetsrv\URLscan.  Near the top of the file, change AllowDotInPath from 0 to 1.

The run iisreset to restart IIS and you should be ok!

More info on URLScan is available here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/326444

When I saw a new item in my RSS feed from Rob Conery about MV* I was immediately interested to read it, because I have been working on trying to create my web app pages using MVP, but am unable to find any examples beyond the most basic.

I would love to see how other people manage the interactions between the Controller and the View, to see how it compares to how I am doing it. 

My view interfaces tend to be kinda large.  For example, if I have a button that I hide and show depending on business rules, I will create a MyButtonVisibility property on the interface can set the properties from the controller.

I would be interested to see how others deal with things like the hiding / showing of items.  I could see wrapping more of that kind of functionality in the view, and giving the view some more logic but I think you would then start to lose some of the testability.

Anyway, the articl on Rob's blog was really to talk about creating an MVC style architecture for subsonic itself, not the pages that use it.  However, Rob seemed to suggest that the new changes would aid you in using MV* in your pages by forcing you into good habits.

But I really don't understand how that would work.  If you have code that does:

MyGridView.DataSource=Product.FetchAll();
MyGridView.DataBind();

And you change it so that you use a Controller (or Manager as I have called it when loading Business Objects or DTOs) to look like this:

Product product = ProductController.Get(newID);
product.ReorderLevel = 100;
ProductController.Save(product,"unit test");

I don't see how this helps you create an MV* architecture in your pages.

Maybe I am just not understanding.

The asp.net site has a section where they are putting up short videos showing how to do things in asp.net as well as VSTS and asp.net AJAX.

You can find the site here, and the RSS feed here.

There are some similar videos started to get produced for TFS here, with an RSS feed here.

I didn't notice that the Microsoft P&P team has released something they call "Software Factories" which are supposed to guide the developer in building different apps using best practices (at least that is what I think they do from the descriptions).

Specifically I am interested in the Web Client Software Factory:

... provides an integrated set of guidance that assists architects and developers in creating composite Web applications and page flow client applications.

These applications have one or more of the following characteristics:

• They have complex page flows and workflows.
• They are developed by multiple collaborating development teams.
• They are composite applications that present information from multiple sources through an integrated user interface.
• They support XCopy deployment of independently developed modules.
• They support online business transaction processing Web sites.

and the Web Service Software Factory, which as they put it is:

... an integrated collection of tools, patterns, source code and prescriptive guidance. It is designed to help you quickly and consistently construct Web services that adhere to well known architecture and design patterns.

The package covers: