Alastair Waddell

Search Site for .NET developers

alastair — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 00:35:00 GMT

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

Alastair

"The server committed a protocol violation"

alastair — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 00:56:00 GMT

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

alastair — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 00:05:00 GMT

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...

Accessibility Counts

alastair — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 04:42:00 GMT

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

alastair — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 22:52:00 GMT

Lots happening with Sandcastle

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

An Inconvenient Truth

alastair — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 03:45:00 GMT

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.

User Group meeting - Microsoft Sync Services

alastair — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 05:22:00 GMT

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.

Install SQL Server 2005 (IIS Feature Requirement) on Vista

alastair — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 04:45:00 GMT

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

Encrypting the identity section of Web.config

alastair — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 04:26:00 GMT

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

User group Session - Greg Linwood

alastair — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 07:46:00 GMT

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

VS2005 Exported template problem

alastair — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 13:20:00 GMT

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

VS 2005 SP1 Beta Released today

alastair — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 23:22:00 GMT

SQL 2005 Reporting services User Group presentation

alastair — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 14:03:00 GMT

So the presenter we had lined up for our .Net user group session last Wednesday got too busy, so I had to quickly come up with a session to deliver. I chose SQL 2005 reporting services as I have just finished a large implementation with great results.

The session I put together generated great interest from our members, so much so that I am now going to put together a part 2.

Stay tuned....

Installer Class - What variables do i have available?

alastair — Wed, 31 May 2006 02:41:00 GMT

I was creating a custom installer for an application I was writing, when I needed the answer to "How do I get the install path from within my Installer class.

Well... In the installer class, you have access to "Me.Context.Parameters" This is a ReadOnly property which returns a System.Collections.Specialized.StringDictionary

It Contains 4 keys: "action", "installtype", "assemblypath", "logfile".

So to get the path to your assembly, then try Me.Context.Parameters("assemblypath")

Alastair

Great User Goup Sessions

alastair — Mon, 22 May 2006 06:44:00 GMT

Our last User group session saw some great content from some great presenters.

We started with Dave Lemphers presenting “Developing Multi-threaded Applications using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 2.0”

This session was extremely valuable for anybody, from Architects to developers, providing a glimpse into the future with respect to where hardware is going.

I would like to reinforce that just because we have more grunt available, don’t use it as an excuse to write non performant code.

Dave took us through many examples of multithreading, and there was some fantastic discussion amongst the room as to “Best Practices” and I know a couple of members got an opportunity to clear some misunderstanding they had about this advanced topic.

A really good example of some of the value you get being a member of a user group.

Adam Cogan from SSW delivered the afternoon session “Making VSTS integrate into your current systems”

Adam kept the packed room on the edge of their seats delivering a topic with the enthusiasm of a kid with a new toy that a lot of us (judging by the numbers) are going to become very familiar with over the coming months.

For those who are just about to embark on implementing VSTS he not only highlighted some of the hurdles that we may encounter, but demonstrated some solutions to these. We saw how we could extend / customize the environment to suit OUR needs and he showed us some third party products to fill gaps in the product. Finally he also demonstrated the data warehouse created from the install and showed the ease at which you can get good reporting data.

If you are interested in VSTS and could not make it, then grab the slide decks HERE.

A big thanks to both Dave and Adam.

Alastair