Paige C#

TFS Compare Tool

noreply@blogger.com (Paige Cook) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 13:43:00 +0000

The very first thing you should do before starting to use the TFS explorer, is to replace the Diff/Compare Tool. The one that comes with Visual Studio is pretty bad. Here is a good blog post - Replacing the TFS Diff Tool that shows how to quickly setup a new tool.

I prefer to use SourceGear DiffMerge, but you can use whatever you like. Just, please do yourself a favor and change it to something other than the default.

Following Open Source via RSS

noreply@blogger.com (Paige Cook) — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 13:43:00 +0000

I have recently been working on an ASP.NET MVC project, where I have included many Open Source projects. Most of them were included using NuGet (a great tool by the way, you should get it if you don't already have it!). So, for a lot of these open source projects that I an now using, I like to keep track of what changes are happening in the projects. A great way that I have found to do this, is to track the commits to the projects via RSS. I have subscribed to the RSS feed of the commits for the projects in Google Reader and then grouped them into an OpenSource folder that I can monitor. For me, this is a really easy way to see what is happening on a project and to watch out for interesting updates.

My Git Ignore File

noreply@blogger.com (Paige Cook) — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 11:46:00 +0000

I am using Git more and more these days and I really love how easy it is create branches and switch between them. If you have not tried out Git before, I really would encourage you to do so. Here is my current .gitignore file. This file basically tells Git what files to exclude when looking at a repository for changes, etc.

Entity Framework Serialization - Circular Reference

noreply@blogger.com (Paige Cook) — Tue, 31 May 2011 12:31:00 +0000

I have been working with KnockoutJS recently and needed to serialize an Entity Framework model to the client as JavaScript so that I could convert it to my Knockout ViewModel. Here is the entity that I needed to serialize.

However, when I attempted to serialize this object, I was getting an error "A circular reference was detected while serializing and object of type Person". I did a little research on this issue and found a good blog post by Rick Strahl on LINQ to SQL and Serialization, that discusses this issue.

The problem is the public Tags property. The first suggestion is to change the access modifier from public to internal. I did this and it worked great. I have not fully explored the ramifications of making this change to the rest of my application, but will post an update if I find anything.

Synergy 1.4.2 with Mac as Server and Windows 7 Client

noreply@blogger.com (Paige Cook) — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 15:20:00 +0000

I was setting up Synergy today so that I could control my Windows 7 laptop from my Mac. So I went out and installed the latest version of Synergy - 1.4.2 and I followed the great installation guide to get everything setup. Note that I also am using QSynergy to get the GUI on the Mac. I have my Synergy setup with my Mac as the server and Windows 7 as a client. Once I had everything set, I was able to move my mouse over to the Windows 7 machine, but the keyboard was not working. So I did some googling and came across issue #57 on the Synergy Support forums that describes this issue. According to this, it looks like the official fix for this will not be ready until version 1.4.4 of Synergy is released. However, Matthew Toso posted the 1.4.2 version of synergys with a patch applied for this issue. See note #82 in this thread. Once I installed the patched synergys on my Mac, the keyboard was working properly when I was over on my Windows 7 machine.

Entity Framework 4.1 Entry Extensions

noreply@blogger.com (Paige Cook) — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 02:01:00 +0000

I have been working with the Microsoft Entity Framework version 4.1 aka "Code First" for about the last 3 weeks and have been really enjoying the ease and flexibility of setting things up and getting my CRUD operation working so smoothly. However, I had the need to create modify some entities in my database and was starting down the path of passing in the new entity, then querying the context for the old entity and finally setting the values of the old entity to those of the new entity. This worked for a little while, when I only had simple entities. However, my entities started getting more complex and I found myself adding more properties and always forgetting to update the modify operation.

So I started doing some research and found that I could use the Attach method on the DbSet to add the modified entity. However, this left the entity in the UnChanged state and that did not really do me any good. So with a little more research I found this Blog Post by Julie Lerman about Round Tripping a Timestamp Field in EF 4.1 with MVC 3 that discusses the DbContext.Entry method and how I can set the State as I attach the entity.

I had also in my secondary research found this post about creating extensions for the ObjectContext in the regular Entity Framework and this led to the creation of my own Extensions for the DbContext object as seen below...

I now use these extension methods as shown below.

Good Drupal Books

noreply@blogger.com (Paige Cook) — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 01:53:00 +0000

Had the following Drupal books recommended today...

I have read Pro Drupal Development and it was an excellent book that helped me get up to speed quickly on developing modules for Drupal. I would highly recommend this book. I have not read the others, but plan on checking them out soon.

Drupal, MAMP & Drush

noreply@blogger.com (Paige Cook) — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 01:47:00 +0000

I am attending a Lullabot.com Drupal API &Module Development course at work this week. Learning a lot of great thoings so far. I worked on a Drupal project last year and created a custom module, but what I have learned so far in one day, could have probably saved me a close to a week as I was trying to figure it out on my own.

At the end of class today, the instructors were going over some tips for Drupal developers and showed off the awesome Drush, Drupal Shell. It is amazing what this tool can do, and being able to have the power of the command line to very nice. However, since I am running Drupal on MAMP, I was getting an error about not having the correct amount of RAM configured. However, I found this "getting drush to work on MAMP setup" article that had the key that worked for me. Create a .bash_profile file and adding an alias:

alias drush='/Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/bin/php /usr/bin/drush/drush.php'
export COLUMNS

ASP.NET MVC & MvcBuildViews set to true causes Build Error

noreply@blogger.com (Paige Cook) — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 15:05:00 +0000

I recently set the property in my ASP.NET MVC web application for the Release mode as recommended by K. Scott Allen in Notes on Building Razor Views. This was working fine for a few days. Then yesterday, I started getting this error every time I would try a Release build.

It is an error to use a section registered as allowDefinition='MachineToApplication' beyond application level. This error can be caused by a virtual directory not being configured as an application in IIS.

I went back to the comments from the blog post and found this one, where someone else was having the same issue and they solved the issue by deleting the obj\ folder, as recommended by the StackOverflow MVC BuildViews not working correctly question. I tried this and unfortunately it did not resolve my issue. Another answer further down suggested changing the PhysicalPath value for the AspNetCompiler value in the BuildViews task. I tried the recommended path:

That also did not work for me, so I followed a link to the use of Web Deployment Projects with ASP.NET MVC and noticed that they were using the following PhysicalPath setting.

I changed my setting to this value, $(ProjectDir)\..\Web created this directory and now things are working properly again.

Flush DNS on a Mac

noreply@blogger.com (Paige Cook) — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 15:20:00 +0000

So there were some network changes over the weekend at work and I needed to flush my DNS entries, so I did a quick Google search and found this great reference for flushing DNS on almost any system.

Specifically for Mac OSX Leopard you issue the following command:

dscacheutil -flushcache

Verify Url Exists

noreply@blogger.com (Paige Cook) — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 17:57:00 +0000

I recently was working on a web site that displayed a lot of images. The image details are stored separately from the images, so it is possible that when searching images to be displayed, that the actual image no longer exists. So I needed some code to validate that the image was actually present. The web site is an ASP.NET application and searched on StackOverflow and found some really good suggestions on how to do this with C#

So I took the best of both of these posts and created the following helper method.

Please feel free to modify this if you find any issues or problems with.

Stack Overflow Questions in eBook Format

noreply@blogger.com (Paige Cook) — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 13:11:00 +0000

Yesterday, I saw a tweet by Joel Spolsky that contained a link to StackOverflow questions in eBook format. After checking out the list of topics that had been compiled and selecting the ASP.NET topic. It only took a little fiddling with how to get these into my Kindle Reader App for Mac and Android and I now have a very nice reference for some great questions that have been asked on StackOverflow over the past few years. Please go check them out, as they are a great reference for 50 different topics. According to Greg Hegwill's Live Journal Entry about the process he uses, it takes a while to generate all of these ebooks. If you find them useful, please be sure to let Greg know and show him some appreciation.

ASP.NET Impersonation and "Could Not Load File or Assembly" Error

noreply@blogger.com (Paige Cook) — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 18:52:00 +0000

When setting up an ASP.NET site on a server if you are using impersonation on the web site, typically set via the setting, you need to ensure that the user account being impersonated has access to the server. Typically this means you need to add that user account to the Users or Administrators group on the server.

If you do have the appropriate permissions granted to the impersonating user, you will most likely receive an error message similar to "Could not load file or assembly or one of its dependencies. Access is denied". This is because the account does not have access to write to the c:\Windows\Microsoft.Net\Framework\\Temporary ASP.NET Files" directory.

I have run into this issue numerous times and keep forgetting how to fix, so I finally decided to post it here, in hopes that I will find it the next time and hoepfully help someone else out as well.

Improving Your Brain Power

noreply@blogger.com (Paige Cook) — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 13:01:00 +0000

Last year my kids received a Nintendo DS for Christmas and my wife purchased Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day! We both really enjoyed the challenge and the kids were actually pretty good at it too. The other day I stumbled upon a website that provides similar (and probably better) brain training. The site is Lumosity and it is a great collection of brain training and grain games that can lead to:

VB.NET Sort Comparer

noreply@blogger.com (Paige Cook) — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 19:58:00 +0000

I found myself needing to sort Generic List of custom objects, in this case a list of the last seen users on a website. I wanted to sort the list by Date Last Seen Descending. I am primarily a C# developer, so I knew how to do this with a Delegate method. But, I am using an older version of VB and Delegates are not available. So I headed over to StackOverflow and found this great question, How to Sort A System.Collection.Generic.List in VB.NET. After looking at this article I created the following code:

public class UserLastSeen

{

public int Id { get; set; }

public string Name { get; set; }

public DateTime LastSeen { get; set;}

}

public class UserLastSeenSorter

{

public void GetSortedList()

{

List(Of UserLastSeen) userList = GetUserList()

userList.Sort(AddressOf UserLastSeenDescendingComparer)

}

private Function UserLastSeenDescendingComparer(ByVal user1 As UserLastSeen, _ ByVal user2 as UserLastSeen) As Integer

{

Return user2.LastSeen.CompareTo(user1.LastSeen)

}

This worked great and was very easy.

Issues with Windows Update KB2160841

noreply@blogger.com (Paige Cook) — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 20:30:00 +0000

If you experience issues with installing Microsoft Update KB2160841 on your machine, please try following the steps in MS Answers forum post - Can't Install KB2160841 to Repair the .NET Framework Client Profile.

I was having this issue on multiple Windows 2008 servers and repairing the .NET Framework 4 Client install worked every time.

Good Advice for Writing Well

noreply@blogger.com (Paige Cook) — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 18:31:00 +0000

Saw a link to How to Write Good come across on Twitter the other day. These are really good tips and advice to follow, in my opinion. Considering that today almost everyone writes email or text messages every day, you should read these rules and learn to follow them. I know that I am going to attempt to do that, starting now.

Too Many Encodings

noreply@blogger.com (Paige Cook) — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 20:44:00 +0000

Ran into an issue today where we were running too many encodings (url and html) on a string before I reached its final destination. This was causing some really weird behavior and was a little difficult to track down. But after some digging it was pretty clear to see what was happening…

Basically if you have a string like “Your $$$$$” that you wanted to search against. (In this case we want to keep the quotes as they are a search hint to find this exact phrase), you would want to url encode this to go across the wire to our REST based Solr search server.

However, we were applying an errant Html Encoding against this string before sending it on to the Solr server via SolrNet which was in turn performing the Url Encoding on the Html Encoded value. However, that really did not change the value.

Once I removed the extra Html Encoding things were back to working as expected and I learned a valuable lesson about encodings…

Here is an example:

String: “Your $$$$$”

Url Encoded: %22Your%2B%24%24%24%24%24%22

Html Encoded: %26quot%3BYour+%24%24%24%24%24%26quot%3B

While these look very similar they are no the same and managed to produce some very strange results for us as we ended performing searches on phrases like “quot” and “;”.

Debugging Drupal with Eclipse on Mac OS

noreply@blogger.com (Paige Cook) — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 11:46:00 +0000

I have been developing with Drupal for a while now, but had neglected to setup my Eclipse development environment for debugging my Drupal site. I am running MAMP 1.9 locally for my development, so I started following the instructions on the Drupal site for Configuring Eclipse for Remote Debugging with Zend. That got me part of the way there… but not fully there.

I ended up relying on the following articles and video to finally get it all working.

The key takeaways for getting this working were to download the Eclipse PDT and watch out for the superfluous zend_extension setting in the php.ini file.

Now that I am able to debug my Drupal site, my module development just got a whole lot easier!

Solr DataImportHandler and OData Service Issue

noreply@blogger.com (Paige Cook) — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 01:51:00 +0000

This week I was working on a proof of concept for indexing data from a SQL database with Solr. I had done something similar with xml files using some .NET code to read the xml files into a document class that I then inserted into Solr using the excellent SolrNet library. However, for this, I wanted to try out the Solr DataImportHandler (DIH), since this was a pretty straight forward table to index mapping. So I read up on using the UrlDataSource Import Handler in Solr and set about creating my OData Service to expose the data. I was able to create my OData service pretty quickly and then I setup the DIH following the steps at SolrWiki. However, when I attempted to call the OData Service from the DIH, it kept generating an error accessing the OData url. I was getting an HTTP 400 error. This was really strange, because I was able to access the OData Service without any issues from the browser. It was only when I use the DIH that I had this problem. With some help from another colleague, it was determined that the issue was in the http accept headers that were being sent by the DIH call to the OData service. The server was generating the error “Media type requires a ‘/’ character”

The Accept Header being passed is:

text/html, image/gif, image/jpeg, *; q=.2, */*; q=.2

The issue is last two media types “*; q=.2, */*; q=.2” - the OData services do not recognize the relative quality factor as found the Http Header Field Definitions in RFC 2616 – Section 14. I even tried connecting to the OData Northwind Sample Service, but had the same issue.

So in order to work around this issue, I created the following HttpModule to workaround the issue by removing these two bad entries.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Web;

 
namespace SolrIISModules
{
    public class AcceptFilter : IHttpModule
    {
        private const string ACCEPTHEADER = "HTTP_ACCEPT";
        private const string BADSOLRACCEPT = "*/*; q=.2";
       
        public void Init(HttpApplication context)
        {
            context.PreRequestHandlerExecute += context_PreRequestHandlerExecute;
        }

        private static void context_PreRequestHandlerExecute(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            var application = sender as HttpApplication;
            if (application == null) return;

            var request = application.Context.Request;
            if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(request[ACCEPTHEADER])) return;
            var acceptValues = request[ACCEPTHEADER].Split(',');
            var filteredValues = new List<string>();
            foreach (var value in acceptValues)
            {
                if (!value.Contains("/")) continue;
                if (IsBadSolrValue(value))
                {
                    //only add the */* back in, otherwise an http 415 error will be generated.
                    filteredValues.Add("*/*");
                    continue;
                }
                filteredValues.Add(value);                
            }

            application.Context.Request.Headers.Set("accept", String.Join(",", filteredValues.ToArray()));
        }

        private static bool IsBadSolrValue(string acceptValue)
        {
            return string.Compare(acceptValue.Trim(), BADSOLRACCEPT, true) == 0;
        }

        public void Dispose()
        {           
        }
    }
}

Now I just enable this module on my IIS website that is hosting the OData Service and I am able to get my DIH working as expected. I had tested this with an OData service hosted in both ASP.NET Webforms and ASP.NET MVC websites.

XML in Google Chrome

noreply@blogger.com (Paige Cook) — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:52:00 +0000

Have you ever tried to view an XML stream in Google Chrome and expected to see the nicely formatted XML document like you get in Internet Explorer... I know I sure did and was surprised when I did not see it. Do not despair, as there is a great Extension for Chrome - XML Tree by Alan Stroop. This was a life saver, as I love to use Chrome and wanted the same experience. If you need/want to look at XML using Chrome, then I would recommend getting this Extension.

Disable Logging for Folders/Files in IIS 7

noreply@blogger.com (Paige Cook) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:13:00 +0000

Since turning off logging for IIS 7 folders or files is not as straight forward (or intuitive) as it is in IIS 6. I thought I would post the steps here. For IIS 6 you can follow the instructions in this MS Knowledge Base Article.

Disable IIS logging for a folder

Open up IIS 7 Manager
Expand the website in the left pane to see the folder structure.
Click on the folder name to select it.

Double click on the Logging entry in the folder home page.

Click the Disable link under Actions on the right pane.

Disable IIS Logging for a file

The steps for a file are almost identical for an individual file.

After you select the folder where the file resides, click the Content View at the bottom of the middle pane to see all the contents of the folder.

Select the file that you want, then click Switch to Features view under Actions on the right pane.

Then follow same last two steps as above to turn off Logging for that file.

Local Version Control and Backup

noreply@blogger.com (Paige Cook) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 14:42:00 +0000

So I finally started using SVN to version control all of my local projects via VisualSVN and using the ankhSVN plug-in for Visual Studio. I have also setup my Repository directory to be in my local Dropbox folder so that I get automatic backup. Here are some useful articles if you want to start doing this yourself. You might also want to install TortiseSVN so that you can manage other files outside of Visual Studio.

Remote IIS 7 Admin stopped working after Installing .NET 4

noreply@blogger.com (Paige Cook) — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:56:00 +0000

I ran into a situation the other day where I was unable to connect to a remotely administer an IIS 7 (Windows 2008) server after installing the .NET 4 Framework. After some checking the steps that I used to setup the server in this blog post, I figured out that when .NET 4 installed it turned off IIS 7 Management Service and unchecked the Enable Remote Connections options on the service.

Once I checked this option again and restarted the service, everything was working again. Strange that installing .NET 4 would have done that… oh well, now I know.

Hope this helps someone else.

jQuery 1.4

noreply@blogger.com (Paige Cook) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 13:25:00 +0000

The newest version, 1.4 of jQuery was released yesterday. You can download it and watch the Q&A about the release at the official homepage jquery14.com. Also I found this great list of the 15 new features you must know.

Go check it out…