Rick Strahl's Web Log

Weblog Posts in July 2007

Shutting up Invalid ViewState from SPAM bots
July 31, 2007 @ 12:50 am

Somehow, sometime ago a spambot got into my Web Store and picked up a couple of pages and decided to just POST random (and randy <s>) SPAM to this URL to the tune of a few hundred POSTs a day by now. The funny thing about this is that the URL is just a product page that accepts only a...

24 comments

Web Application Project Conversion on Orcas
July 30, 2007 @ 12:19 am

I'm going once again through a conversion from Stock Projects to a WAP project conversion this time for my Web Store. I've done the conversion once before but returned back to stock projects because of a Visual Web Developer requirement. Recently though development on the store has been a lot...

3 comments

Vista's Explorer - Love Hate
July 29, 2007 @ 1:07 am

I have a serious love hate relationship with Windows Explorer in Vista. On the one hand there are lots of cool little improvements that make life much easier starting with the breadcrumb address bar that lets me easily jump anywhere in the current hierarchy, to the way file copies rename files, the...

26 comments

Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 Installed
July 28, 2007 @ 2:54 am

I'm happy to say that my VS 2008 Beta 1 to Beta 2 update went fairly smooth and I now have Beta 2 running on my dev machine with no problems. I was quite worried that this would be problematic - if you remember updating between betas during VS 2005 it was almost a requirement to pave over Windows...

17 comments

Moving Projects/Solutions between Orcas and Visual Studio 2005
July 26, 2007 @ 8:06 pm

With Orcas supporting multi-targeting it'll be common to work in Orcas with .NET 2.0 projects. But when you take a VS 2005 project/solution and open it in Orcas it wants to update to an Orcas solution and projects. Which is fine if you're working on your own thing, but if you share around projects...

13 comments

Resource Unloading in a custom ASP.NET Localization Resource Provider
July 24, 2007 @ 12:30 am

In ASP.NET 2.0 ResourceProviders allow extension of the native resource mechanism with your own resource backing store by implementing a custom ResourceProvider. It's fairly easy to create a new provider but figuring out how to unload resources with a dynamic resource store like a database is not quite straightforward. Here's how...

1 comment

nVidia vs. WPF
July 23, 2007 @ 11:13 am

As I've mentioned here in the past I still have major issues with my video drivers for my laptops nVidia GO 7800 GTX card. The biggest issue is that multi-monitor doesn't work at all, and well that the video driver crashes occasionally (better with more recent drivers). However, as I've started to...

6 comments

Loading an ASP.NET Page Class dynamically in an HttpHandler
July 23, 2007 @ 1:30 am

I ran into an interesting post on the ASP.NET forums today where someone is trying to dynamically invoke a page class inside of an HttpHandler. Basically the idea is that you have a class for the page that exist and you're dynamically invoking the class rather than letting the ASP.NET BuildManager...

4 comments

Better luck with C++ under VS.NET Orcas
July 22, 2007 @ 7:23 pm

I spent a good part of the day today moving a number of my Win32 C++ projects to Orcas from projects that ran under VS 2003. Most of these projects are system level DLL projects (a couple ISAPI DLLs, a couple of support DLLs for Visual FoxPro and a few system interfaces that simply easier to do...

4 comments

Some Subversion Questions
July 21, 2007 @ 5:26 pm

Since I know a bunch of you are using Subversion I'm going to lean on 'ya all for a few questions that I've run into while using Subversion here. Since I last posted about Source Control I started using Subversion for source control fairly extensively on a host of projects. As many had suggested in...

9 comments

Stupid Pet Trick # 522
July 20, 2007 @ 11:05 am

Thought I'd share a really silly developer story here. A while back I built a scheduler application for ASP.NET which checks a POP3 mail box and looks for certain content. The app just pulls all messages and deletes them as it finds them (optionally) and forwards them to another email address with...

5 comments

Intellisense in ASP.NET Orcas Beta 1 - what works what doesn't
July 19, 2007 @ 1:58 pm

A quick test to see what JavaScript features show up with Intellisense in the new Orcas Intellisense features. Unfortunately it looks like at least in Orcas Beta 1 a number of common JavaScript scenarios either don't produce proper Intellisense or actually break Intellisense altogether.

8 comments

Creating a data driven ASP.NET Resource Provider and Editor Article posted
July 18, 2007 @ 1:26 am

I finally managed to write up my data driven resource provider as an article. It ended up being quite a task getting it all to fit into an article and I actually ended up with TWO freaking articles - one an introduction and one for the resource provider and editor implementation. <s> Yeah,...

37 comments

ASP.NET Orcas: Quiet Revolution
July 17, 2007 @ 10:47 am

My monthly Code Magazine Web View Column is up at: http://www.code-magazine.com/Article.aspx?quickid=070123 This month I talk about what's coming in ASP.NET 3.5 and some of the new framework features that I think will have the biggest effect on day to day development. A good chunk of the editorial...

4 comments

Recent Patch hosing ASP Classic COM?
July 16, 2007 @ 4:16 pm

Since about a week and a half ago my server is jo-joing up and down frequently apparently due to IIS 6 Application Pool crashes. The problem started (in hindsight) right after installation of the maintenance patches from two weeks ago the week before Win2003 SP2 was released and installed (didn't...

4 comments

Generate Local Resources forces Culture="Auto" into Page
July 14, 2007 @ 4:23 pm

Here's a real annoyance in Visual Studio's Generate Local Resources feature: When you generate local resources within the IDE ASP.NET will automatically add Culture="Auto" and UICulture="Auto" to the page header. While this may seem Ok at first this is really, really lame if you are managing...

3 comments

Embedding JavaScript Strings from an ASP.NET Page
July 14, 2007 @ 3:06 am

I'm looking at a piece of code that's a custom control that embeds a bit of JavaScript into a page. Part of this JavaScript is generating some static string text directly into the page. I've been running this code for a while now as part of an application I'm working on with a customer. But a...

14 comments

Visual Studio 2008 and ASP.NET 3.x
July 12, 2007 @ 2:39 pm

I've been running Orcas quite a bit since Beta 1 was released in April and overall I'm pretty damn happy with this update to Visual Studio 2008. You may have noticed that I HAVEN'T posted a lot about Orcas issues and that's because overall Visual Studio Orcas and the feature set is working...

18 comments

GoDaddy and SocketPermissions
July 11, 2007 @ 1:29 pm

So I just got off the phone with support at GoDaddy for one of my customers and was told "Sorry we can't do that", when asked to provide socket permissions to go out and hit a POP3 server. GoDaddy has the web.config locked down and so you can't override the originUrl="site" so my customer is dead...

11 comments

IIS Application Pool Crashes due to Temp File Permissions
July 10, 2007 @ 4:15 pm

My Web Server has been throwing a bunch of nasty errors recently and I've been trying to figure out what the heck is going on. The problem is that apparently App Pools have been crashing hard fairly frequently. In most cases this isn't a big deal as IIS will immediately spin up another app pool,...

6 comments

Generics and COM Interop don't mix
July 10, 2007 @ 1:57 am

COM Interop is rarely fun, but it looks like it's getting to be less and less useful as time goes on and new .NET Runtime features come along that don't work well over COM. It appears that Generic types can't be exported over COM and be usable to a client like Visual FoxPro. When I create a class...

5 comments

64 Bit Servers, ISAPI and Managed Modules on IIS
July 06, 2007 @ 3:42 pm

So i took a support call from a customer of mine today who ran into problems installing Web Connection on a 64 bit machine. Web Connection works through a 32 bit ISAPI extension and sure enough a standard configuration will not allow this ISAPI extension to run. Any attempt to access a 32 bit...

4 comments

JSONP for cross-site Callbacks
July 04, 2007 @ 1:10 pm

Here's the JSONP code that uses the code I mentioned in my last post. JSONP is an unofficial protocol that allows making cross domain calls by generating script tags in the current document and expecting a result back to calls a specified callback handler. The client JavaScript code to make a JSONP...

10 comments

Have we turned into just a bunch Sheep?
July 03, 2007 @ 12:30 pm

Ok, the whole iPhone hype really makes me sick. Seriously. This is perverse. So here we have people - the tragically hip - who pretend to be the coolest of the cool, the hipster dufuses of the current age. We've got style, we've got it easy (screw you silly Windows users), we got class and...

32 comments

wwHoverPanel ASP.NET Ajax Control Update
July 03, 2007 @ 12:38 am

I've just uploaded a new version of the wwHoverPanel control. wwHoverPanel is a small AJAX library that provides some useful and common functionality in an easy to use and lightweight package. The library consists of a couple of controls that provide quick client side...

1 comment

Hosting the .NET Runtime in Visual FoxPro
July 01, 2007 @ 1:14 pm

Interop with .NET from FoxPro can be accomplished fairly easily by using COM Interop. With COM Interop you can take advantage of .NET's COM Callable Wrapper to wrap up .NET components and make them available as COM objects. I've written extensively about this interaction (here and here)...

16 comments