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Alastair Waddell

March 2007 - Posts

  • "The server committed a protocol violation"

    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 - Fortran Developer Dies

    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

  • Accessibility Counts

    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

  • Sandcastle - March 2007 CTP

  • An Inconvenient Truth

    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

  • User Group meeting - Microsoft Sync Services

    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.

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