I am pleased to announce that i have just sat and passed the 70-536 exam. (Microsoft .NET Framework - Application Development Foundation )

Next on the radar.... 70-562 (Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5, ASP.NET Application Development)

Update:  I sat 70-562 today and passed.

Alastair

 

I was asked to help with an issue where the user was trying to update a column with a large amount of text. It was only inserting the first 4000 characters

The table has a column - nvarchar(MAX) and they were using SQL Management studio.

The solution was to

DECLARE @string1 nvarchar(MAX)
DECLARE @string2 nvarchar(MAX)
SET @string1 = 'SOME TEXT less than 4000 chars'
SET @string2 = 'The rest of the TEXT'

Update table
Set TheColumn = @string1 + @string2

It looks as if even though the declaration of the variable is nvarchar(MAX) it is actually nvarchar(4000) .

So I have been working on a new site that is in response to requests from people with disabilities, their families and carers.

We have tried to use as many accessibility points as possible such as good keyboard support, visual layouts that are friendly to vision impaired users.

All the database interaction is done using LINQto SQL and I have to say the performance is fantastic.

So check it out http://www.accesswa.com.au 

New reports are beign added daily, or you can hit the rss feed @ http://www.accesswa.com.au/rss.ashx

Alastair

I just heard about this on DotNetRocks.  (This post is for those who don’t listen)

http://searchdotnet.com/

Alastair

 

I had a very interesting problem to debug today.

An external company who are doing some contract work for us has been getting the error "The server committed a protocol violation" whist trying to communicate to one of our web services. They have a permanent VPN link to us. I got the call after they had spent several days trying to get things working, and they emailed me various links to FAQ's from around the place. It seems as though there 000's of hits when searching, but nothing worked. We knew the header was being changed, but by what and why?

I am very familiar with tools such as Fiddler and ieHTTPHeaders which are great for debugging and tweaking performance, but in this case they couldn’t help when the exception was thrown.

Then as if a light was turned on... why don’t we use the logging that asp.net has build into it. I added the code below to my web.config ran the application, and voila - had a rather lengthy log file sitting in my temp directory. Closer inspection revealed there was a nasty proxy server in the way. By-passing it for this site has things running as they should be

Now just need to find out what the proxy server is doing...but that goes to somebody else to resolve.

Alastair

<system.diagnostics>
    <sources>
      <source name="System.Net">
        <listeners>
          <add name="System.Net"/>
        </listeners>
      </source>
      <source name="System.Net.Sockets">
        <listeners>
          <add name="System.Net"/>
        </listeners>
      </source>
  
    </sources>
    <switches>
      <add name="System.Net" value="Verbose" />
      <add name="System.Net.Sockets" value="Verbose" />
   
    </switches>
    <sharedListeners>
      <add name="System.Net"
           type="System.Diagnostics.TextWriterTraceListener"
           initializeData="c:\temp\Webtraffic.log" />
    </sharedListeners>
    <trace autoflush="true" />
  </system.diagnostics>

John W. Backus, who assembled and led the I.B.M. team that created Fortran has died at the age of 82.

Ahh... I remember Fortran...

A

For the past few months I have been working exclusively with ASP.Net creating internal applications for the Disabilities Services Commission here in Perth.

I asked around the development team, and it appeared that whilst everybody was aware of accessibility most had never seen any of the accessible tools in play like Screen readers and simple input devices.So I had somebody organise a developer briefing where we got a couple of users to show how they actually use assistive technologies.

We got to see 2 technologies used - on screen keyboard accessed by index finger movement on a single switch and a screen reader (JAWS).

Some big points came across that we can all benefit from

TAB order - Learn it – Use it
Put Alt text in your images where appropriate
For data tables – Identify row and column headers
Title frames (if you must use them)
Try to keep menus in the top left
Never have the title of you page “…..My Page.….!” Screen readers actually say” dot dot dot dot dot dot dot  My Page dot dot dot dot dot dot dot  exclamation mark”
There are many more, but I just want to point our some that will benefit ALL users.

4 million Australians have some form of disability and 39% have and use the internet. And for some that is their gateway to interaction, online shopping, bill paying etc.

So by making your site better and more accessible, you may have just increased your traffic.

Some tools that I have discovered that help are the

Developer toolbar (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e59c3964-672d-4511-bb3e-2d5e1db91038&DisplayLang=en)

Web Accessibility Toolbar (http://www.visionaustralia.org.au/ais/toolbar/) very usefull for color contrasts.

And I have just seen this article on MSDN  Enforce Web Standards For Better Accessibility (http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/04/ASPNET20/)

Alastair

Lots happening with Sandcastle

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e82ea71d-da89-42ee-a715-696e3a4873b2&displaylang=en

Al

I have just watched 'An Inconvenient Truth' by Al Gore and I have to say this is a must watch. It raises some very shocking truths about global warming.

It is available for free via many sources including sharethetruth.us or can burn a copy for anybody interested.

"A waterfall starts with just 1 drop of water" I will be doing my bit when I can.

 Al

Yesterday saw Nick Randolph give a fantastic presentation on Microsoft Sync Services to our user group. I counted 24 people and with a few new faces it looks as though word is getting around. A big thaks to Nick. 

Looking forward, we have next months meeting topic set. So update your calendar. 2nd April 5:30 where Dave Gardner from Intilecta will be giving us a talk on AJAX.

I have had a couple people ask me lately what are the requirements to get SQL server 2005 (in particular IIS components) running on Vista

Go to control panel - Programs - Select Turn On or Off Windows Features - Double Click on Internet Information Services and select the following 

 

Component	Folder
Static Content	Common HTTP Features
Default Document	Common HTTP Features
HTTP Redirection	Common HTTP Features
Directory Browsing	Common HTTP Features
ASP.Net	Application Development
ISAPI Extension	Application Development
ISAPI Filters	Application Development
Windows Authentication	Security
IIS Metabase	Management Tools
IIS 6 WMI	Management Tools

Source: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/920201 

Alastair

 

I have had a couple questions regarding encrypting the identity section of the web.config file, so here’s how.

In my example, I use identity impersonate in my web.config file and the physical path is “c:\sourcecode\BigWebApplication\web.config”

<system.web>
    <identity impersonate="true" userName="Alastair" password="password" />
</system.web>

aspnet_regiis –pef system.web/identity c:\sourcecode\BigWebApplication

and to decrypt

aspnet_regiis –pdf system.web/identity c:\sourcecode\BigWebApplication

Last night we saw Greg Linwood from Solid Quality Learning deliver his presentation on "Indexing for Developers" to around 40 of our user group members. Both Mitch Wheat and Brian Masden have blogged about the session, so I won't repeat what they had to say except that it was fantastic.

A huge thankyou to Greg for an excellent presentation and for making the time to come over.

In my introductory comments to the User group I mentioned a PDF reader that I have found called FoxItReader. It's free, requires no installation and is less than 3Mb, so for those interested, check it out.

Alastair

So I just spent the last few days developing a web template that I plan to distribute to all the developers in the organisation.

-> Create the solution -> Select the export template wizard -> Voila

Then I put it onto the first developers PC - select file, new web site - click on the newly installed template, but I notice the location textbox is greyed. WTF?

Searching the web returned a big Nothing (null if your into c#)

The fix (workaround?) I discovered is to reset your environment settings to anything BUT "Visual Basic Development Settings"

Go figure....

Alastair

Read more at Somasegar's blog.

http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2006/09/26/772250.aspx

Alastair