Roodev.com

Website Migration

Jason — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 17:06:00 +0200

I requested that my ISP migrate my hosting to Windows Server 2008 and it made a mess of things on my website. I'm in the process of migrating to new software, so please forgive the missing images and other artifacts in the meantime.

-j

IIS7 404 Page Redirect in Umbraco

Jason — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 23:53:00 +0200

I had a difficult time getting redirects to work properly in Umbraco on IIS7. This is partly due to the changes to the way IIS7 does redirects, and partly due to the confusion one has when looking at Umbraco's built in 404 redirection functionality for the first time. The Umbraco forums say quite a bit on the subject but nowhere will you get the whole picture. You only get bits and pieces. This is my attempt to put all those pieces together into a cohesive (I use the term loosely) explanation and solution.

Now I'm not an expert in IIS7 OR Umbraco so there is very likely a better way to solve this, so undersand that this is in light of my current half-understanding of what's going on under the hood.

The Goal: If someone deep links to a page that doesn't exist, or typo's the url, I want them to be redirected to a special 404 page that I created as a landing page for just such an occasion. That's it!

The Problem: I immediatly looked through the Umbraco documentation/forums to determine how to do this IN Umbraco. I discovered Umbraco has a really slick convention for doing this:

Browse to and edit the c:\inetpub\wwwroot\[Site Folder]\config\umbracoSettings.config file
Edit the <errors> section with the ID of the page you created to be the 404 landing page.
1. You find the ID by going to your content tree, clicking the 404 page you created, then clicking on the "properties" tab.
2. You should see a field called "ID." That is your "nodeId" which is the ID you want to put in config.
3. Below is an example, where my 404page ID is 1243.

</errors>

This should have worked, but IIS7 was "interfearing." This resulted in my receiving a standard 404 error from IIS rather than umbraco properly redirecting.

You have to explicitely tell IIS7 to leave it alone, and pass the request on to Umbraco so UMBRACO can decide what to do with a 404.

This is one way to accomplish that:

Edit the C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\config\applicationHost.config file and add the following to the <system.webserver> section.

<httpErrors existingResponse="PassThrough" />

Ok so it's working .... sort of ... only for the content that Umbraco is responsible for, namely the dynamic pages.

These all redirected correctly:

http://[domain]/pagethatdoesntexist.aspx
http://[domain]/pagethatdoesntexist

... but if someone were to link to some "static" content, such as a gif or a html file that doesn't exist it would fail.

http://[domain]/pagethatdoesntexist.html
http://[domain]/imagethatdoesntexist.gif

Now at this point I expect any Umbraco expert who is reading this (bless you!) is saying, "Why in the world are you worried about gif's and html files? Umbraco doens't use them that way!" Myy concern is with someone typing junk in and instead of getting gracefully pulled back to the website, they get a craptastic 404 error from IIS. It's easy to think this should never happen, but people do things ... such as typo, maybe they miss a piece of the url when they cut and paste something from an email... etc... I want to capture those customers appropriately!

Moving on ... I *think* the cause of this is that Umbraco isn't trying to dynamically manage this content, this is just standard IIS work. Since IIS is just "passing stuff on" to Umbraco, and IIS already knows not to pass static request on to Umbraco, you once again get a standard 404 from IIS.

I ultimately reconfigured the applicationHost.config file in the following way, to "replace" the standard 404 with the 404 page I created in Umbraco.

</httpErrors>

So far this works great in all the above cases. I have one last issue to resolve.

My Umbraco site is a multisite configuration. That means each site needs it's own 404page and I need to tell Umbraco to redirect to the proper one based on the domain name the user is coming in on. My hope is that as long as I use the same page name (In thise case "/404Page.aspx" for each site, it will be relative to the domain and will redirect properly as is. Otherwise I will have to write a control and do this: http://our.umbraco.org/wiki/how-tos/how-to-implement-your-own-404-handler

What I won't know until I try it is: Does my configuration above redirect a user before they even get a chance to hit the built-in Umbraco redirect functionality or will it allow the dynamic page requests through (but not the static ones) so my own umbraco 404 handler can take care of the multisite 404 redirects.

I'll edit this post with my results soon.

C# Enum and the [Flags] attribute: enum values with bit flags

Jason — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 01:11:00 +0200

Here is the best article on using bitwise enumerations in C# that I've seen.

This is useful for those times when you wish you can "select" multiple values from an enumeration.

C# 4.0 includes a .HasFlag method that makes it very simple to test which ones are set later. Very cool. Check it out, it's a good read.

http://geekswithblogs.net/BlackRabbitCoder/archive/2010/07/22/c-fundamentals-combining-enum-values-with-bit-flags.aspx

The device or resource (url goes here) is not set up to accept connections on port "The World Wide Web service (HTTP)

Jason — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 19:52:00 +0200

I was trying to use the WCFTESTCLIENT to test a deployed WCF service on a remote webserver. It failed saying that it could not fetch the metadata. I tried it from another machine and it worked fine. Huh.

So I try to hit the webservice via a browser and it also failed, but with a standard 404. What?? I do a Diagnose on the issue and it returns with the message, "The The device or resource (url goes here) is not set up to accept connections on port "The World Wide Web service (HTTP)."

So after spending maybe an hour trying to determine what is wrong with the server I stumble upon this article that explains it's an issue with IE on the CLIENT!

Heres is the short of it:

On the CLIENT having issues:
Open IE
Click on TOOLS
Click on INTERNET OPTIONS
Click on the ADVANCED TAB
CLICK RESET INTERNET EXPLORER SETTINGS

Sure enough, it worked great. That was a very frustrating waste of my time due to some HORRIBLE error handling in the bowels of Microsoft technology.

Continuity of Thought: How to help your developers write quality software

Jason — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 19:27:00 +0200

The number one way to help your developers write quality code: Continuity of thought.

To repeat a much-too-often-used tautology, writing software is like mental juggling. Often there are a lot of values changing states over the course of a process that a developer must "imagine" as she's crafting the syntax into something that provides the desired result. This can equate to "strenuous mental exercise." To rephrase simply, writing software requires a LOT of focus.

But here is where it gets interesting and, in my experience, difficult to explain to someone who is not a developer.

Interruptions:

I read somewhere once (Update: I found the article: http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/04/22/text.iq/) that getting interrupted by 1 email every 15 minutes while trying to concentrate on a task effectively lowers your IQ by 10 points. I don't know how much "intelligence" is represented by 10 points but the article compares this number to the 4 points your IQ is effectively lowered while high on marijuana. Regardless, my point is that we underestimate how much impact interruptions have on our ability to focus and produce quality work.

Slow Development Environment

Finally, the crux of this post: My PC at work is old. And slow. I'm trying to justify to my boss why I need an upgrade. Every time I find myself waiting for the background compiler to finish, or intellisense to populate, my continuity of thought gets interrupted and the net affect is the same as an email, or someone approaching me and asking for my attention. In fact, I argue that it's much worse, because it happens at a much more frequent rate. I tested this by working on my much more powerful machine at home. I can't provide metrics to back this up, but the difference it makes in my own capabilities as a developer are clearly visceral to me. To rephrase, It's like my brain runs best at a certain speed, and when I can concentrate at that rate, i'm in the "Zone". When my development environment is acting like a perpetual speed bump, I conclude that ANY developer would be negatively affected. In words my boss can understand, it costs more money to produce the same output, but with more bugs. The part that is truly aggravating however is that the machine isn't held accountable, the developer is.

So managers, the takeaway here is, if you want better code faster, limit your developers interruptions such as email (and tedious meetings), and make sure they have a smoking fast machine.

Cheers.

Leadership

Jason — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 20:40:00 +0200

Great managers turn raw talent into good performance through accountability. Great leaders don't have to.

Visual Studio CSS bug

Jason — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 19:45:00 +0200

I've had this issue for YEARS, starting in VS 2003 and then VS 2008 and now in VS 2010 where VS will modify every height and width attribute in an open CSS file to look like this:

w\idth: 300px;

h\eight: 41px;

I'm forced to go through the entire CSS file and fix every instance of those attributes. While Search/Replace makes it trivial to fix, I'm baffled that I can't find any reference to others having this problem on "the googles."

I've had this problem for years, on many different machines, and many versions of VS. Very very strange.

Visual Studio Fail

Jason — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 18:21:00 +0200

My VS2010 crashed, and I got a nice little dialog asking me if I wanted to debug the crash ... in VS2010.

Recursion Fail? or Win?