ASP.NET

Austin Code Camp 2009

sweisfeld — Sat, 30 May 2009 17:32:19 GMT

Coming from Florida where I attended every code camp and spoke at every code camp except for one, well until I moved it is nice to be getting into the swing of things out here in Texas. Today I will be giving my ASP.NET Dynamic Data talk at the Austin Code Camp and I cannot wait. I will be repeating the presentation at the Dallas Tech Fest on June 19 if you cannot make it today.

Austin Code Camp: http://www.adnug.org/AustinCodeCamp09

Presentation Download

Dallas Tech Fest: http://dallastechfest.com/ (while the early bird discount is over, you can still use the discount code DOTNET to get $25 off admission)

Data GridView Edit columns dialogue doesn’t display all items on load in ASP.NET Dynamic Data Projects

sweisfeld — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 01:08:00 GMT

NOTE: This is for ASP.NET Dynamic Data ONLY

Issue opened in Connect https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=422004

When I click on Edit Columns in the GridView smart tag

I cannot see all the Available Fields (there is should be a scroll bar here)

Workaround:
If you expand an collapse the CommandField option you now get your scroll bar and can now see the DynamicField option.

What do your error messages reveal?

sweisfeld — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 17:46:00 GMT

I know that most of you all know this already, but I figured it was worth a blog post since I just saw this from http://www.autosite.com. I got this very informative error message back when using their site earlier. . .

Query Of Queries runtime error.
Expected type STRING but encountered type NULL on the left of the LIKE condition
The error occurred in D:\INETPUB\wwwroot\content\Research\kbb\act_valueReport.cfm: line 74
Called from D:\INETPUB\WWWROOT\content\Research\kbb\index.cfm: line 21
72 :
73 : <cfmodule template="mod_kbbtable.cfm" width="#kbbModTableWidth#">
74 : <cfquery dbtype="query" name="qEquip">
75 : SELECT * FROM valueReport.Equipments WHERE GroupCode LIKE 'M' ORDER BY DisplayOrder
76 : </cfquery>

While it is important for us as developers to log this type of information, there is NO reason for us to show it to our customers. Now I know table names, physical paths, and other good stuff. In your asp.net applicaitons make sure you set your customer errors to “On” (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/h0hfz6fc.aspx). You also want to make sure that you have logging so that you as the developer can triage errors.

Oh and here is a BONUS TIP: Don’t use Select *, in most cases you don’t need all the columns and there is no reason to have the DB send them all back. . . .

Let’s start a campaign to call out any website that we see on the internet that doesn’t properly hide their dirty laundry.

A review of Professional DotNetNuke 5: Open Source Web Application Framework for ASP.NET from Wrox

sweisfeld — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 07:12:00 GMT

A few weeks ago I got a copy of Professional DotNetNuke 5: Open Source Web Application Framework for ASP.NET (http://www.amazon.com/Professional-DotNetNuke-Application-Framework-ASP-NET/dp/0470438703/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1235867832&sr=8-1). Figured since I had been to presentations by 3 of the 5 authors I just had to have the book. Brian Scarbeau, Stan Schultes and Ryan Morgan are avid speakers in the Florida .NET community and knowing them I knew this book was going to be a good read. A cross country flight from Dallas Texas to Seattle Washington provided the perfect opportunity to concentrate on reading a new book.

While waiting for my plane to take off I made it through the first chapter of the book written by the father of DotNetNuke Shaun Walker. This chapter talks about the history of where DNN came from and trials and tribulations that Shaun and his team had giving birth to what we know today. I think that anyone that is interested in starting an open source product should spend a few minutes and learn from the lessons that Shaun learned in the creation of DNN, especially if you are trying to build an open source product that sits on the very not open source Windows platform.

The next few chapters of the book provide information on just about everything that administrator/end-user would need to know in order to go from an empty hosting account to having a DNN site. This includes installation, an overview of the modules and how to administer the lot. The next chunk of the book talks about the architecture of DNN. For years I have been telling developers looking for reference architectures to look at products like DNN. This set of chapters not only includes information on how the DNN team did what they did, but perhaps more importantly WHY they did it that way. For me knowing the why behind these types of decisions allows me to leverage the lessons learned by other developers and apply that to my applications, even non-DNN applications. The ability to learn from the experience/knowledge/mistakes of others makes us all better developers. The last chunk of the book is the how to information that you need to extend DNN. They cover modules, skinning, and distribution.

This book provides a good overview of all the major components in the DNN products. It covers the architecture of the DNN infrastructure and how to extend it with your own custom modules and skins. This book provides the developer and the administrator what they need to get their feet wet with DNN, and as an added bonus you get a great narrative on the birth of an open source software package.

BTW: At the time I wrote this DNN was the second most popular download on codeplex with just fewer than 20,000 downloads in the last 7 days. The only thing that beat it was a plug-in for World of Warcraft.

Oh and when my family needed a website for their small business guess what they got? (http://www.apickygourmet.com)

ASP.NET charting controls

sweisfeld — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 19:04:00 GMT

Microsoft released a set of controls called the ASP.NET charting controls. I don’t know if they licensed this from Dundas, however in one of my projects I was able to replace Dundas with this in about 30 min. Most of the class names are the same. Oh and they are FREE!!!!! The only caveat is that you have to be using .NET 3.5.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/11/24/new-asp-net-charting-control-lt-asp-chart-runat-quot-server-quot-gt.aspx

Microsoft Web Platform Installer

sweisfeld — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 07:39:00 GMT

While I was not able to attend PDC, Microsoft did good by the community and has provided free recordings of many of the sessions (http://www.microsoftpdc.com). While this is cool and has some great content, the purpose of this blog post is to talk about the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (http://www.microsoft.com/web/channel/products/WebPlatformInstaller.aspx). This tool allows for single deployment model for all the bits and pieces needed to put together a clean PC image for a developer use (i.e. VS.NET, SQL SVR, and IIS). IMHO this is a great idea and Microsoft is only scratching the surface of what they could do in this space. Currently the tool works for the express editions, which is good for the hobbyist and more importantly at schools. With my experiences teaching .NET at the University anything that helps bring students into a working development environment faster and easier is goodness. However this will become much more valuable when it gets pushed into the enterprise environment. Currently one of the most frustrating jobs that I have my day job is helping team members with the setup of development machines. Anything that MSFT can do to stream line and reduce errors in the process of installing the entire suite of development tools is much appreciated.

Silverlight Deep Zoom (aka SeaDragon)

sweisfeld — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 17:03:00 GMT

In my second in the series of TechEd Questions I have a good one. Unfortunately it had nothing to do with C#, but that doesn’t diminish its cool factor.

The attendee, lets call her Suzie, volunteered to help organization working with an artist that recently passed away catalogue his work on the internet. She wanted a good way to post high resolution images on the web allowing the public to enjoy this persons artistic contribution. The first thing that jumped to mind with the Hard Rock Demo from Mix (http://memorabilia.hardrock.com) you have got to check this out! You can see the scratches on the guitars. Scott Hanselman has a great blog post with a how to if you want to create your own deep zoom images (http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DeepZoomSeadragonSilverlight2MultiScaleImagesAtMix.aspx). Remember to note that this technology is only as good as the original image so you will need good HighRes images to start with.

Building a solution with many projects is SLOWWWWWWW

sweisfeld — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:47:00 GMT

This week I am attending TechEd in Orlando FL and I was honored to be requested to work the C# booth by the MVP and C# teams. I got many great questions from attendees and I thought I would post some of the more interesting ones. So here goes.

An attendee, let’s call him Bob, came up and said that his builds were very slow. After some chatting Bob told me that he has a huge number of projects in his solution all “joined” together using project references. This is a convent feature of Visual Studio that provides for “cascading” builds. By that I mean if you change some code in a business library when VS does the build it will build that library first, copy the dll into any projects that reference it, then build those projects. This is very convent but as Bob noted when he changes one line of code in a method it causes the entire project to rebuild. This is not a big deal if the project is small and the builds are quick but if the project is large this could be a very painful experience. So we tossed around some things I would classify as workarounds like for example writing some post build steps that would move dll’s around and the like. But in my opinion the best solution is a properly architected solution. To that end I pointed Bob to an article put together by the P&P group at Microsoft that provides guidance for the architecture of large application with many projects and how to break them up into manageable chunks.

Structuring Projects and Solutions
http://www.codeplex.com/VSTSGuidance/Wiki/View.aspx?title=Chapter%203%20-%20Structuring%20Projects%20and%20Solutions%20in%20Source%20Control

Unable to connect to the remote server

sweisfeld — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 04:28:00 GMT

When attempting to call a webservice that lives outside my corperate firewall I was getting the following error:

System.Net.WebException was unhandled by user code
Message="Unable to connect to the remote server"
Source="System"
StackTrace:
at System.Net.HttpWebRequest.GetRequestStream()
at System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol.Invoke(String methodName, Object[] parameters)

After some research I stumbled across this post by Rick Strahl
http://west-wind.com/weblog/posts/3871.aspx

but my problem was a little bit different. In his case he desired to disable to the automatic proxy detection, but I needed to wire in the script that my corperate IT department requires that we use. Easy enough just add the following to the web.config

<system.net>
  <defaultProxy>
   <proxy scriptLocation ="url to script here" />
  </defaultProxy>
</system.net>

I think the cause of my problem was the same as Ricks. Everything works fine when using a console application running as me, but when I put the same method call in a web app runing as network service it appears that he doesnt have enough permissions to get the script location from the registry.

Central Florida Tech Fair

sweisfeld — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 17:59:00 GMT

Here you can download my presentations from the CFL Tech Fair.

http://onetug.net/Documents/CFL_Presentations.zip