Rick Strahl's Web Log

Weblog Posts in October 2007

nVidia Drivers hose me again
October 31, 2007 @ 1:48 am

Earlier today I downloaded updated nVidia drivers for my GeForce 8600M GT on my laptop with Windows Update and promptly dual monitor support started failing again. Single monitor works fine but the second monitor will simply not kick in with the new driver. I ended up having to roll back to the...

18 comments

WCF and segmented WSDL Files = Problems
October 30, 2007 @ 2:45 am

Web Services in Windows Communication Framework publish their WSDL in a different format than ASMX based services did and this can cause some problems with 'legacy' SOAP clients. Legacy ahem in this case makes up a rather large set of tools that won't work with WCF services out of the box. WCF publishes the WSDL with discreet XSD schemas for each of the subsections which results in an XML document that pulls from the server. For example here's a simple WSDL output...

WCF, Web Service Clients and Http Debugging Proxies
October 27, 2007 @ 9:36 pm

I depend heavily on using Fiddler or Charles for helping me debug Http issues in general and both work great for typical Web development debugging in the browser. This is especially useful for AJAX applications since you can't 'see' the output that travels over the wire directly most of the...

3 comments

jQuery Selectors
October 26, 2007 @ 5:26 pm

One of the things I love about jQuery (and a few other JavaScript libraries) are how selectors can make life very easy when dealing with many objects in the HTML DOM via JavaScript. For example, someone asked a question the other day during training of how to check client side validation in a...

1 comment

Update me!
October 26, 2007 @ 12:44 am

So how many times can you use "Update" in a single sentence? <g> In a dialog??? I get the idea I need to update... Got this dialog as I'm firing up a machine that's been sitting in my office since I left here in the spring. The real fun part though was the 55megs in 112 updates that needed to...

2 comments

Maui Bound
October 24, 2007 @ 9:42 am

I'm sitting here at Portland airport on my way back for winter migration to Maui. I love flying out of Portland - this airport is a great place to fly out of. My flight is delayed by an hour due to maintenance but hey, there's free Wi-Fi and the airport even has public office space like areas set...

13 comments

Good Service, Bad Service
October 22, 2007 @ 1:00 pm

It's amazing how much we've been conditioned to accept bad service as the status quo. So much so that when we actually get good service we are often surprised to no end. I spent the last week doing training for Web Connection in Arizona at the Arizona Golf Resort followed by three days at Southwest...

12 comments

Debugging a FoxPro COM Object under ASP.NET
October 15, 2007 @ 3:37 am

Some time ago I posted some code that you could use with ASP.NET to debug COM objects somewhat interactively in Visual FoxPro. The old approach used an old trick to instantiate VisualFoxPro.Application from within IIS and then actually launching code to instantiate an object created inside of VFP...

Why is Printing in Windows such a Pain in the Ass?
October 15, 2007 @ 2:16 am

Printing seem like a pretty basic process. You have a document you send it to a printer spooler and it prints. A simple queue and a file streaming interface, right? Well, for me printing always seems to be an excercise in meditated toe nail removal. The first issue is that Windows refuses to...

7 comments

HttpModule and HttpHandler sections in IIS 7 web.config files
October 10, 2007 @ 12:21 pm

Moving between IIS 5/6 and IIS 7 often causes some web.config conflict between the system.web and system.webserver handler and module sections. IIS 7 expects its handlers and modules defined only in its configuration section - if you still have handlers in system.web a configuration error occurs. Here's a useful switch that lets you turn off validation of system.web handlers and modules so you can ship web.config files that contain both.

5 comments

Implementing a jQuery-Calendar ASP.NET Control
October 08, 2007 @ 1:52 pm

I've posted a wrapper ASP.NET around the jQuery-calendar control from Marc Garbanski. This small client side calendar control is compact, looks nice and is very easy to use and I've added an ASP.NET wrapper around it so it can more easily be more easily used with ASP.NET applications by dragging and dropping onto a form and supporting postbacks of the SelectedDate.

26 comments

One heck of a frustrating Windows Install
October 08, 2007 @ 12:08 am

I'm reformatting my old machine, putting the original Windows Media Center Edition onto this machine so I can sell it. This has been one of the most nightmarish Windows installs I can remember. First off I installed from the MSDN CDs which are have multiple options on it. So I picked Media Center...

6 comments

FireBug debugging Bug in If blocks
October 07, 2007 @ 6:02 pm

Here's an odd JavaScript debugging issue that pops up in FireBug from time to time: Occasionally Firebug incorrectly steps into code conditional code blocks that apparently is not actually executing in the JavaScript parsing; the debugger steps through the code but the code is not actually executed and any of the assignments in the block are never actually made.

WCF and JSON Services
October 04, 2007 @ 2:50 am

I took a quick look today at WCF's new capability to work with JSON data. I was looking forward to having WCF services providing this functionality and there are a few cool things that work with it. It's now essentially possible to create WCF Web Services that take JSON as input and produce...

10 comments

Portland PADNUG Meeting follow up
October 03, 2007 @ 2:31 pm

Late night last night at the PADNUG meeting - which was, uhm interesting. I was speaking on - or supposed to be speaking on LINQ to SQL and Building a Business Layer. But as it turned out to a huge number of questions and various excited comments about basic LINQ syntax and the basic LINQ to SQL...

3 comments

Vista Explorer Shell Context Menu Default Actions
October 02, 2007 @ 12:52 am

Somehow I managed to hose my Explorer's default context menu actions for folders when browsing in Explorer. The default action when clicking on a folder now is Search... instead of Explore which brings up the Search dialog when clicking on a folder Ugh. A quick check in the registry comparing the...

9 comments

Complex Detached Entities in LINQ to SQL - more Nightmares
October 01, 2007 @ 12:04 am

Ok, so I thought I had the detached entity state in LINQ to SQL figured out, only to have that thrown back into my face. The word from Microsoft is that if you have an entity that was loaded through a LINQ to SQL DataContext at any point it cannot be re-attached to the DataContext.

33 comments