Rick Strahl's Web Log

Weblog Posts in May 2005

Daily Quadruple
May 30, 2005 @ 9:53 am

I took some time off yesterday for a very, very long and memorable day of sailing. It's amazing what that does for re-charging batteries and the attitude even when it comes to work.

ASP.NET projects aren’t 'real' projects in VS.NET 2005
May 25, 2005 @ 1:51 pm

In VS.NET 2005 ASP.NET projects are no longer real VS project, but rather a mere directory representation. This has some advantages - namely you no longer need FrontPage to load a project - but it also has some serious implications of how VS.NET treats your project resulting in different behavior for ASP.NET project files compared to other projects.

21 comments

DataRows, String Indexes and case sensitivity with Turkish Locale
May 23, 2005 @ 2:27 pm

Here's another caveat of dynamic locale switching: String indexes in things like DataRows and Tables may not return the correct values if the target locale doesn't interpret upper and lower case values as the same thing. Turkish apparently assigns different meanings to upper and lower case I and i chars, and DataRow["itemimages"] and DataRow["Itemimages"] produces very different results.

16 comments

SmartPhone Support in VS.NET 2005 disappointing
May 20, 2005 @ 12:56 pm

I've been preparing for my DevTeach SmartPhone session and it's been a rough road working with Vs.NET 2005. Up until beta 2 nothing worked and even now with Beta 2 there are major issues with the emulator that make go back to VS.NET 2003 for most of the code I have to write.

A cool use of Browser Client XML access on NetFlix
May 19, 2005 @ 2:17 pm

Netflix makes some good use of client side browser server interaction by passing XML back and forth to retrieve movie information without loosing the current browse context. The result is a pleasing and efficient mechanism to use their site for browing large lists of movies. It's a very cool and non-contrived use of the technology.

18 comments

Displaying useful Configuration and Status information in an ASP.NET app
May 19, 2005 @ 1:20 pm

When I build an ASP.NET or any kind of Web Application for that matter, one of the first things I do usually is add an informational page that captures some useful information about the application and echos it back. Several people asked about where this info comes from so I'm posting it here. Obviously there's much more information available and you can choose to include as little or as much of that as you see fit.

2 comments

Debugging real life
May 18, 2005 @ 11:44 am

Sometimes debugging real life has some odd similiarities to debugging software. Here's a kind of funny story.

Understanding ASP.NET Impersonation Security
May 18, 2005 @ 1:10 am

Understanding how ASP.NET's internal security works is important if your application needs to access resources on the local machine. Specifically it's important to know exactly which account your ASP.NET application is running under. This entry reviews different ways of how this account is affected by different versions of Windows, and ASP.NET configuration.

49 comments

ADO.NET Missing Field in a DataRow error driving me crazy
May 17, 2005 @ 12:11 am

I'm still struggling with an odd error that's causing a field to not be returned in a DataRow from a SELECT * query. Other fields are there, but for some odd reason under very rare circumstances that I haven't been able to trace the field is missing. Maybe somebody can see the error of my ways, as my sleuthing has run into the end of the line...

8 comments

More ASP.NET 2.0 Compilation Model issues - ASPX pages not visible to your app
May 15, 2005 @ 1:41 am

In moving an existing app from VS.NET 2003-2005 I've run into a number of issues that prove to be tricky to work around. Specifically I have a few generic page classes and bases classes that modify classes on a higher level and all of this code is initially broken when the VS.NET Wizard upgrades them to the 2.0 code model approach. The biggest issue is that ASPX pages are not visible as a classes at design time since they are generically generated at runtime. This has a few tricky implications t

9 comments

New Compilation Modes in ASP.NET 2.0
May 14, 2005 @ 12:20 am

In this entry I'll take a close look at the new Compilation models in ASP.NET 2.0. On first sight I think that these new models are more cumbersome than version 1.x for most common deployment scenarios, although they do offer new and secure ways to deploy a site. It will take some time and experimentation to find what works best...

71 comments

The new ASP.NET Beta 2 Page Model
May 12, 2005 @ 11:42 pm

The ASP.NET 2.0 Beta 2 Page Compilation model has changed once again.

6 comments

ASP.NET 2.0 Web Root ASP.NET 1.1 virtuals and Web.Config Conflicts
May 10, 2005 @ 2:36 pm

It looks like running ASP.NET 2.0 at the Web Root and having 1.1 virtuals below that can cause some compatibilty problems as the 1.1 apps will read the root Web's web.config file.

40 comments

ASP.NET 2.0 VS.NET Project Issues
May 10, 2005 @ 2:20 pm

The new way that VS.NET manages Web projects is very different from the way things worked in VS2003. For my first try at a relative simple tasks I was thwarted by the shortcomings of this new approach...

11 comments

Sucky Microsoft keyboards
May 09, 2005 @ 11:19 pm

Why do keyboard manufacturers keep screwing with keyboard layouts every now and then? I can't get used to my new keyboard's layout and I can't believe how much time i'm wasting fumbling for the right keys especially when editing code.

7 comments

Settting System Dialogs to the foreground in WinForms
May 07, 2005 @ 10:51 am

Here's how you get dialog windows to display consistently as the top level form at the top of the Window stack even if the 'parent' form is hidden or not active yet.

3 comments

Hooking up Help Content to Web pages with ASP.NET
May 05, 2005 @ 4:42 pm

There's no standard way to present Help in Web Applications. Here's one approach that I use to hook up Help content consistently in my ASP.NET Web aplications.

Odd ASP.NET DropDownList DataBinding issue
May 04, 2005 @ 1:28 am

Here's an odd one where I cannot seem to bind to a DataTable on a POST back with ASP.NET. For some reason the DataBind() operation fails with an ArgumentOutOfRange exception. However, manually binding by adding items to the list works just fine.

36 comments