Rick Strahl's Web Log

Weblog Posts in March 2008

What can you keep in your Head?
March 30, 2008 @ 3:16 am

So as I'm sitting here working on a project I'm realizing that the information that I'm actually pulling up from my head is getting to be less and less, and information that I'm drawing on from old code I have sitting around from other projects or documentation, blog entries is becoming my primary knowledge source. Am I getting senile or is this just a way to be able to deal with the myriad of technologies that we are tasked to work with these days. There's just not enough room to store it all 'up there' any more...

36 comments

Absolute Positioning inside of a Relative Element with CSS
March 28, 2008 @ 2:39 am

Getting elements positioned absolutely inside of a container is not terribly obvious and not very discoverable using CSS. But it can make for a cool effect and is a useful feature for many overlay type operations in Html markup. Here's an example of a hover over delete button that pops up on focus of an element.

10 comments

.NET 3.5 Framework Distribution Size
March 27, 2008 @ 1:23 am

One of the considerations of whether to choose .NET 3.5 for your non-server applications might be distribution size. If you're building a vertical application that you're distributing over the Internet you are probably concerned about the size of your installation if you want people to download it. Recent versions of the .NET runtime have a made decidedly nasty turn for the worse when it comes to...

33 comments

LINQifying - getting rid of CollectionBase?
March 26, 2008 @ 1:57 am

If you're sitting on some old types that implement CollectionBase you might find that they don't directly work with LINQ. Here's how you can make these types work with LINQ.

8 comments

Where's my .NET 3.5 (on IIS), Dude?
March 24, 2008 @ 12:36 pm

I just delivered a small 3.5 application to a customer in compiled form and told him to install the application on IIS. The company is one I've dealt with on a few occasions and they are .NET aware shop where I deal with developers and a .NET familiar IT department. But it wasn't long after I sent my email that I got a call back from the customer who - slightly embarrassed - mentioned that they couldn't find the 3.5 Runtime option in the ASP.NET configuration panel.

17 comments

Justifying an iPhone
March 23, 2008 @ 3:39 pm

So last week I broke down and bought an iPhone. I know, I know I've talked trash about the hype around the iPhone some time ago and to be honest I still feel this way after buying the phone, although I also feel that after having used the phone for a last week that I made the right choice. My general feeling is that Apple is a pretentious company with their locked in tools and operating systems,...

26 comments

Book Review: LINQ in Action
March 21, 2008 @ 5:36 am

Just got done reading LINQ in Action and it's an excellent read. Rarely do I read books cover to cover, but this book definitely made me want to go through the whole thing as it's full of little gems of information, things I didn't know and lots of new ideas I can hopefully apply soon.

12 comments

A simple formatDate function for JavaScript
March 18, 2008 @ 5:12 am

JavaScript lacks unfortunately built in string formatting functionality. Here is a .formatDate function that provides basic dateformatting for displaying digit based date strings (ie. 10/31/2008 or 2008-10-31 20:22 or 10:24pm etc.).

8 comments

MS Tests failing due to Security Errors
March 17, 2008 @ 12:53 pm

Ran into an odd problem today while testing with a third party DLL. My unit tests failed to run complaining that the third party DLL was not trusted. Turns out the problem is related to the security tags applied to the file when it was downloaded and installed directly of a Web download.

2 comments

Cross Domain Support in IE 8 and Silverlight/Flash Applications
March 16, 2008 @ 1:19 am

Peter Bromberg posts a quick note about the IE 8 Cross Domain Request object which allows making cross domain calls from within the browser. If you'll recall traditionally the XmlHttp object now standard in all main stream browsers does not explicitly support cross domain calls, which are blocked for security reasons. What's a real pisser about this though is that there are other ways to make...

10 comments

Grayed out ASP.NET Toolbox Controls? Check your Mouse!
March 15, 2008 @ 3:23 am

Have you run into a problem with the ASP.NET where you can't access toolbox items for add-on controls? You're not the only one. Apparently there's a bug that causes some hardware configurations involving Microsoft Laser mice to cause problems with the idle state that the designer uses to refresh controls and certain designer aspects.

5 comments

Getting rid of Formatting Marks in Outlook 2007
March 14, 2008 @ 3:15 pm

I use Outlook mainly because I deal with huge volumes of email that I need to shift around into folders and groupings. Overall I'm pretty happy with Outlook even though there are lots of people who complain about how slow and unwieldy it is, but to me personally Outlooks rich desktop interface is still hugely preferable to the clunky Web interfaces from the major email providers. But there are...

11 comments

Debugging Http or Web Services Calls from ASP.NET with Fiddler
March 14, 2008 @ 12:45 am

If you've tried to trace Http requests to Web Services or WebRequest calls in an ASP.NET application you've probably found although ASP.NET requests show up in tools like Fiddler or Charles, but the Web Service or WebRequest/WebClient calls do not. You can make this work however by modifying the proxy settings in web.config explicitly.

1 comment

Firefox 3.0 XmlHttpRequest Default Content-Type change
March 12, 2008 @ 3:30 am

I ran into a small problem with some of my AJAX code that's checking content-type on inbound requests from the client - it looks like FireFox 3.0 is now including the charset on the content type from the client on POST operations which if not explicitly checked for can break existing code expecting only to see a content type. Small issue, but easy to miss especially in framework code like mine that frankly should have been prepared for this...

5 comments

Updated Data Driven ASP.NET Resource Provider Posted
March 11, 2008 @ 1:53 pm

I've update the source and samples for the wwDbResourceProvider component which provides an ASP.NET Resource Provider that is driven from resources stored in a SQL Server database. The tool also includes a real time ASP.NET resource editing front end and the abillity to import and export resources. This update fixes a few small bugs and enhances the ASP.NET resource editing front end with a few UI and AJAX tweaks.

2 comments

Watch out for Collection property Setters in ASP.NET Controls
March 10, 2008 @ 12:05 am

If you've ever run into the ASP.NET Control Design time error "Cannot create Control" you may have run into a small but easy to miss details about collection properties in ASP.NET controls: The controls can't have a setter if they are serialized from the designer or an error will occur in the designer even while code runs just fine at runtime.

4 comments

Sensible Debugging in IE 8
March 06, 2008 @ 11:03 am

One thing that caught my attention in the IE 8 notes and that eventually made me download and install it is that it will feature the Developer Toolbar which has been an add-in for previous IE versions as a built in tool. Not only that but IE 8 includes a very FireBug-like debugger that can be easily hooked up to page content. This is a very worthwhile improvement IMHO because the debugging...

12 comments

Odd string.Replace Chaining Behavior
March 05, 2008 @ 2:05 am

I ran into a bit of a head scratcher today with a routine that does some string manipulation. It's an old routine that I use to help me do the equivalent of ResolveUrl() outside of the context of the ASP.NET Page framework - typically in static code somewhere or as part of a handler or other component. The process is easy enough but I ran into a snag with the special case of resolving a root web...

14 comments

IE 8 to support Standards Mode out of the Box - Yay!
March 04, 2008 @ 11:30 am

Microsoft announced today on the IE Blog that IE 8 will run in high standards mode by default, which is a complete about face from the previous position that was going to require special meta-tag headers to force the browser to run this way. This is an unexpected, but very welcome turn of events and brings some hope that we'll in our lifetime will have a version of IE that is compliant with the remainder of the browser world.

4 comments

Watch out for XmlDocument.PreserveWhitespace when dealing with Digital Signatures
March 03, 2008 @ 12:42 pm

When creating digital signatures of XML documents its crucial that the Xml document settings on signing match the document settings that are expected for validating signatures. I ran into a problem where our signatures were failing with a vendor's site, due to the PreserveWhitespace property settings on our end and on the vendor's parser being mismatched.

1 comment

Back from the Dead - I think
March 01, 2008 @ 6:16 pm

Arggghh... it's been a week of hell being sick like a dog. I suppose this is a common thing - I got tagged by the flu this but in a way that I have never seen before. The sickness literally knocked me completely offline for 3 days which is unheard of. Other than time when I took a vacation in Baja I don't I ever been so sick that I've not been able to get online and take care of basic business....

10 comments