Chris May

Here an article I was reading about some of the new (and from the looks of it... very useful) features of WCF.

One-Way calls, callbacks, and events.

I have been getting a few errors when trying to use the asp.net ajax framework.

The one error message is:

Error: Sys.ArgumentTypeException: Object of type 'Sys_Application' cannot be converted to type 'Sys._Application'/

Parameter name: instance

This is caused by having SmartNavigation turned on for the page. 

The other error I was getting was this Sys.ArgumentOutOfRangeException.  Value must be an integer.  Parameter name: X.  Actual value was NaN.

This error is caused by using a "yes" or "no" for "frameborder" for a frame.

Yes and No are valid entries but the framework is expecting a "1" or a "0".

This service is down right now, but it looks like it might be very useful!

I have been fighting with this lately, but here is something I haven't tried... rewriting the interface that is giving me problems.

Not sure if this will work, but I will give it a try.

More in the souce...

I think I saw this ABCUpload .Net tool being used by microsoft on one of their internal support sites for uploading large files.

I don't think it actually gets around the httprequest length and executiontimeout problems, but it does provide you a window showing your progress, which is nice.

Here are some nice step by step directions for getting HTTP Compression setup in IIS6.

They also link to a nice site that will do a compression test for you on the public side.

I was trying to test stuff that wasn't public, so I figured out how to test this with Fiddler.

Once you start a trace with fiddler, if you select a session, they will check a box next to the type of compression None/GZIP/Deflate, which was used.

I have recently needed to create some more complex mailto links than people normally use.  I need to populate the subject and body with text that is pulled from a DB, so there are lots of random characters in there like @, #, &, -, _, etc...

Most of these won't work, and need to be escaped.

The most effective way I found was to use the ascii HEX code in this format:

%2D = "-"

%45 = "E"

I'm not going to write too much about this, but we have been seeing a LOT of recycles of our web application, which makes us lose session for everyone logged it.

I am just going to archive a few links I have been using to track down this problem.

ScottGu has some reflection code to get the reason the process is shutting down that I converted to vb.net

Scott Gu's Article

And here are some places discussing the issue:

asp.net thread

Todd Carter's Blog Article

Scott Forsyth's Blog Article

This is a 3 part article on the use of design patterns in ASP.NET. 

http://www.devx.com/dotnet/Article/33695
http://www.devx.com/dotnet/Article/33889
http://www.devx.com/dotnet/article/34220

It looks like from this article that the author is showing how to use remoting to interact with a windows form running on a server.

http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/RemoteWinControls.asp

Pretty interesting.

I have written a few programs in .Net that utilize Active Directory (AD), and what a pain it was.

Here is an article where the author created classes to encapsulate some of the objects in AD, which is pretty similar to what I did.

Keywords: LDAP, AD, Active Directory

If you are Microsoft, why do you create a function "TypeOf" that has totally differnet applications in VB and C#?

Typeof in C# is like GetType in VB, where VB uses TypeOf to see if 2 types are the same or check for interface implementation.

Kinda dumb.

I came across this offer where you get $50 free (I haven't read the details) for using Microsofts adCenter (just like adwords I guess).

http://www.startadcenter.com/lcoff/

Here is a nice document showing the mailto syntax.

This is really cool.

I did a project just like this in 7th grade, but I only did it for the (then) 9 planets.

To not get prompted to download the Windows Desktop Search component, do the
following:

   1. On the Tools menu, click Options.
   2. Click Other, and then click Advanced Options.
   3. Under General settings, clear the Show prompts to enable Instant
Search check box.

Web development is number 2 of the most indemand skills for 2007:

http://www.hotgigs.com/pdf/contractworkforce2007_d.pdf?src=cwremailconsultantb

When they break down the web development category, I have extensive experience in almost but 1 of the top 10 sub categories, with my main area of expertise being the top item: ASP.NET development.

Good to know that I made a good decision to not focus on Fortran! :)

The built in options for validating an email address didn't include any way to validate phone numbers that include extension numbers.

Here is a regular expression that does this:

((\(\d{3}\) ?)|(\d{3}-))?\d{3}-\d{4}( x\d{0,})?

We had a problem last night as we attempted to update our site certificate on our NLB website.

We have 2 machines in the cluster, and after updating the certificate on both of them, the site stopped responding over https.

We spent a LOT of time trying to figure out what was wrong with our new certificate, or the way we had set it up.

In the end, it turned out that that when we updated the certificate, it AUTOMATICALLY removed the NLB IP address from the IPs that are listening for port 443. 

So the result was that each server would respond over SSL on it's own, but when you tried to access the cluster by it's IP address over SSL, there would be no response.

It was really easy to fix, but a real pain to find.