Work and Play

Fail!

2008-03-06T11:54:00.002-05:00

Ok, this blog is obviously beyond dead. Not sure I'm much for keeping up a random thought blog. I just started one for my new house though, to keep track of projects there. Being a little more focused I should be more motivated to update it. Plus, it will be nice to have a record of the work I've done (or had other people do :)).

See the new blog!

Accessing File Shares Without A Domain

2006-07-20T18:44:00.000-04:00

[This applies to ASP.NET 2.0, Windows Server 2003]
We have a load balancing setup for our web site, with two machines sharing the load equally. Any supporting files are stored on a third app server which the two web servers access. We didn't want the overhead of a domain, but initially had some trouble getting this to work.
We set up a virtual directory on each web server, pointing to the share on the app server. The virtual directory used an account name and password which was duplicated on the app server. This worked fine, until we tried to write files and directories. Since we had to resolve the virtual path to an absolute one, we were trying to write not with the special account we had set up, but the default Network Service account. This did not have permission, and since the account is managed by Windows it had a different password on each machine, so it could not be used to access the share.
What we ended up needing to do was have the user with permission on the share run the app pool (instead of the default network service). To ensure it had the permission needed to run ASP.NET we added it to the IIS_WPG group. We had to ensure the passwords were the same across machines so this would work.
Watch out here though. The Network Service account has permissions on WINDOWS\TEMP, but IIS_WPG does not. This cause problems with a web service call we had. Once we added IIS_WPG to the permission list, duplicating Network Service's permissions, we were fine. There may be other situations like this, but it's the only one we've come across so far. The next time we see a strange, unexplicable error though, this will probably be the first thing we check.

Why Didn't I Think of That?!?

2006-04-25T21:42:00.000-04:00

I'm starting a new section of links for good ideas that I didn't come up with. Some things that seem so simple once they're out there :-P.

I heard about prosper.com the other day, which is what prompted this post. It's a very good idea that seems to be well thought out and implemented. This is a person-to-person loan site. You enter a loan request, and the maximum interest you're willing to pay. Prosper runs your credit, and other people can bid in an ebay-style system up to your maximum rate.

It won't save you a ton of money borrowing, but you can probably shave a couple % off the interest rate at least. And for lenders, although it's a higher risk (people can default, although it hurts their credit just as much as if they defaulted on a bank loan) it's also much higher interest than you get in a bank right now.

Not too much else interesting going on in my life right now, as you can probably see from the lack of posts. I'll be going to the Daily SHow on 5/8, so I'll definitely have something to report again then, if not sooner!

Conversions and Global.asax

2006-02-27T17:51:00.000-05:00

We had an interesting situation pop up last week. Some of our pages use Peter Blum's VAM and/or Date controls. These require the licenses to be initialized in global.asax Application_Start (or other locations, but this option was best for us). On our development machines this worked fine, but when attempting a deploy last week any pages using these controls broke.
What we found was that this event was never firing, so the licenses were never initialized. The global.asax file was not in the deployed project folder, so we added it. The resulting error told us that the code was already in the compiled dll. Apparently, the issue here is that the conversion tool took the global.asax's codebehind file and put it into the App_Code folder. This is a "Bad Thing," as ASP.NET 2.0 gets rid of codebehind for global.asax - everything is in one file now.
Deleting the code file and incorporating everything into global.asax, then re-deploying, fixed the issue. I have seen some other posts with people having difficulty with Session events - hopefully this will help someone! :)

Seasons....

2006-02-26T23:01:00.000-05:00

Pretty standard thing you'd think. Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall.
I even accept that "The Holidays" or "Christmas" is another season now. It's annoying that unlike the others, this one gets more time added to it every year, but so be it.
However, there I have to draw the line. "Valentine's Day" is, unfortunately, trying real hard to get to the season status. I'm not a fan. That isn't what prompted this though. No, what prompted this is that apparently the other saints are starting to get greedy too. Why am I hearing about "St. Patrick's Day" season on TV now? IT'S NOT A SEASON! Like Valentine's, it is a DAY, as put forth in the name of the holiday. And a day is more than enough for the card companies and pubs, since the saints themselves don't seem to get too much attention on these days ;).

Yyama!

2006-01-23T21:40:00.000-05:00

Not much interesting in my life, but Donna found something funny for those of us who like llamas :).
http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/llama.php

Merry New Year!

2006-01-04T22:51:00.000-05:00

Well, it took me a while to get around to this one, but here it is :). Hope everyone's 2006 is off to a great start. Despite how long it took me to post, I really don't have too much news.

We're finally making the transition to .NET 2.0 at work. The new conversion tool seemed to work very well for us. We'll be hitting the errors tomorrow though, so I can't say for sure yet. The only errors we have so far are with third party controls, which we were expecting.

On the Linux front, things are not too good :(. I haven't really felt like putting the energy into it, hopefully now that the holidays are past that will change. Last time I used it I was trying to upgrade Firefox, wth the result that I now have no working browser. And this is the easy release :). It will definitely take getting used to.

Mostly I wanted to make this blog to throw out my thoughts leftover from work, and anything in my own life that might be worth mentioning to noone in particular. I've been kind of off the mark on it so far, in that any code stuff I've posted has really been too vague to be helpful (the idea was to put some solutions out there for others, as I have found many in other people's blogs). This comes from the fact that I really like to move my mind to other topics once I get home from work (such as hardware, troubleshooting, Linux, or - God forbid - something else entirely). I do want to start working on a site and playing with CSS design however - and at that point I'm hoping this will have a lot more detail as it will be my personal work, and as such I would be allowed to post it.

Gone In 60 Seconds

2005-12-28T17:24:00.000-05:00

Awesome movie, I highly recommend it (the most recent one with Nicolas Cage) :). However, don't get the director's cut. I watched this last night, and it sucks. They replaced a couple of good scenes with mediocre ones, changed some dialog for the worse, and added bits of conversation that served no purpose but to prolong the movie. I didn't catch the end, but I'm hoping they didn't mess that up too.
That's about all that's new in my world :).

Linuxant!

2005-12-26T23:00:00.000-05:00

Well, that was fun :). This is my first post from Linux. I was finally able to get my wireless lan card up and running. It will cost me $20, but I suppose that's more worth it than dragging cable up here from two floors below, or continuing to throw money M$'s way. Linuxant is an awesome tool for wireless drivers in Linux. It was able to use my windows driver, no problems. I tried a couple of free/open-source programs first, but they did not work :(. Given more time I probably could have made them work, but for now I'd rather spend my time using Linux. Anything else I might have put the time into, but an internet problem is 10x worse because whenever you run into a roadblock it's reboot into Windows to get online.

Windows is dead...

2005-12-21T19:55:00.000-05:00

and so is Linux :P. Let's just say you shouldn't look for me online for while unless I hit a stroke of luck. My Linux install died halfway in, and somehow took Windows with it :(. I'm on my parents' computer now, trying to re-download and burn the install CD. Hopefully the corrupt file was due to the CD I used, and not the ISO itself, or this party will get a lot more fun real fast!

Update: Luckily, it was just the CD that was bad. I downloaded and burned another copy and it went in fine. Unfortunately, I'm still posting this off WinXP because I need to find out how to get my wireless lan card to work in Linux :). But at least it's there. Thanks Monti, for the tip - Ubuntu is much easier than Gentoo to start with :-D.

More Fun With Dynamic Controls

2005-12-20T17:47:00.000-05:00

I thought I was done with this, but apparently not :). I decided (after my earlier post) not to dynamically load user controls on the project I'm working on, simply because it's almost complete and it will take too much time to tear them apart and put them on dynamically. Unfortunately, the only way I was able to correct the callbac lifecycle problem was by creating a flag, and only processing the prerender method on a callback after the callback event had been handled.

Anyhow, here was the situation today: my dynamically stored server controls were not always being loaded correctly at postback. I was doing testing today to make sure all of the components were working when I found this error. In addition, this was on a page which was not using callbacks, just standard ASP.NET 1.1 controls.
After some fun debugging, I found that the dynamic control had good values in it after the load method completed, but it was reverted to bad values again at PreRender. Part of the problem here is that I'm developing a wizard-style app, so on a postback I need to load the old control, populate the values, and then load the new control. Depending on which page is using this user control, the reload can be either the same information or a completely different control.
My first impression was to make sure I load the data first thing on PreRender. However, that is a very easy rule to forget, and difficult to debug later on if/when we reuse this user control. Next idea was just to create an event, so that when the control contains the postback data the event is fired and anyone who needs that data can handle it.
The event is what I went with, but unfortunately it was tricky. The event would have to be created after Load has completed (unfortunately overriding OnLoad or LoadViewState after they have processed events does not work). I had to implement IPostBackDataHandler and use RaisePostBackDataChangedEvent to be able to fire my event at the correct time. To get this to work you need to use Page.RegisterRequiresPostBack(this); in your OnInit. Too bad this project isn't in 2.0 - the extra events supplied by the page would have been very useful in handling this situation.

Goblet of Fire

2005-12-16T19:27:00.000-05:00

I got around to seeing the newest Harry Potter movie, finally :). It was awesome and disappointing at the same time. The disappointing part first - it was very rushed and impossible to follow without reading the book. Luckily I have read it, but many people (or at least many I know) have not. I think this spoiled it in a way, as the 4th book really picks up the pace for the series. For those who have read the book though, you could follow it and the visuals were awesome. As usual, they had to modify some things to fit them in, but this seemed to be done very well after the first portion of the movie.
I'm not much of a movie reviewer, so that's all I have to say :). If you've read the book, go see the movie! If not, I don't recommend going to see this until you catch up. (At about 730 pages, you better start reading now if you want to see it in the theaters!)

Dynamic Controls, Lifecycle, and AJAX

2005-12-16T18:26:00.000-05:00

Well, today turned out to be a fun day too :). For some reason, I haven't found the need to dynamically add controls to a page very often - but I certainly did today.
Using web custom controls and server controls built into .NET, this is a lot easier than I had thought it would be. So long as you recreate the control no later than the Page.Load event, it will participate in viewstate and postback events. I had a small hurdle to get around, in that each pageload I needed to get the new value and then replace the control, but no big deal. I originally thought I'd have to manually fetch the data from Request, so this made me happy.
However, dynamically loading User Controls is not quite as fun if you don't know how. Having never done this before at all, I thought I could instantiate the class and be done with it. Oops! I didn't entirely forget that the ascx side of the page is built into a class inheriting from the ascx.cs file, I was just hoping the environment could figure it out. It can, but you need to give some hints - before adding the control, you need to place the <%@ Reference Control = "MyUserControl.ascx" %> directive in the design side, and use the Page.LoadControl("MyUserControl"); method before adding it to a container code-side. I didn't get a chance to play with this too much - the reference I found showed using this method only on the first load, but I'm hoping it needs to be done whenever you want to see the control - I don't want it in the page on every load or I wouldn't be adding it dynamically.
The last bit of fun - and the one I left off on, is AJAX. We have the Teleric r.a.d. controls suite, so I have been making use of their callback controls - having developed callback functionality before, I really appreciate that these work just by drag and drop, no other wiring needed. However, many of my callbacks have begun to misbehave. Some just don't update the appropriate controls anymore, even though I haven't changed those files in a while. Others make the page lifecycle all whacky (I get two PreRender events, then my Click callback trigger event, then another PreRender event). This means that the PreRender wipes out the information I needed to get on callback. This problem is what led to the UserControl bit above - the project I'm working on has many nested UserControls, I'm hoping that if I dynamically load only the needed ones then any conflicts causing the weird callback behavior will be resolved.

Random Question

2005-12-15T20:09:00.000-05:00

Wish they limited the text entry of the random question to 150 characters, I found out after I wrote a book :-P. Nothing earth shattering, but I figured since I already bothered to type it all out I'll be darned if I don't post the full answer.

You're trapped in a well with a goat and a slinky. Describe how you will escape.
Sharpen the end of the slinky on the side of the well. (This better be a metal slinky or I'll be eating goat steaks and shouting myself hoarse for help). Shear off the goat's hair and braid a rope. This rope with miraculously be long enough to escape, strong enough to support me carrying the poor naked creature, and catch on something outside the well so I can climb out.

Jumping on the Bandwagon...

2005-12-15T19:26:00.000-05:00

Well, it took me long enough :). Not sure if I'll end up doing this for long, or even if anyone will read it, but hey. Since my personal life is boring, most stuff here will probably be problems I've dealt with at work. Most of those will probably have pretty obvious solutions because my mind was toast :-P. Hopefully some things may actually be helpful to other people though.

Microsoft problem of the day was source control with Visual Studio 2003 :). It suddenly decided to have anmesia about one of my projects, even though the other 6 in the solution were working fine. To fix it, I ended up having to...

Stop IIS
Delete the project folder
Delete WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\...\Temporary ASP.NET Files
Delete [User Profile Folder]\VSWebCache
Delete the virtual directory in IIS
Start IIS
Start VS and download the project from source control - still gives errors here
Close the solution
Restart IIS
Open the solution, click past about 5 warnings, and it works again

Ick! And why did this happen? Who knows! Just hope it doesn't happen often.

(I know I'm using the term CSS somewhat incorrectly here, but it's easier than saying "non-table layout" throughout.)
Design problem of the day (and week, month, year) is CSS. I've been doing a lot of reading over the last few years about CSS layout, but have always stuck to nested tables for the need to do things quickly. However, CSS Zen Garden has sold me on CSS- especially because we're facing a project where many clients use the same site with different skins. However, it looks like we're still using nested tables, and using .NET 2.0 themes to handle the visuals instead :(. Themes are a very nice addition, I'll admit, but I really like how clean the source of a page looks using CSS.
I would definitely like to use themes with CSS to make the site work very well, but unfortunately I don't have the CSS experience yet to make a valid argument, and we are fighting a deadline. This is actually one of my reasons for starting a blog; I hope to design my own site for it without tables (for layout) to get some general experience.
The other side effect of using nested tables for layout is that it makes it much harder to use CSS layout components. I've had to make a few user controls this week, and I've had to wrap them all in tables because of display issues when I only had a div container. I can't seem to find information on exactly why, but floating divs did not play well with either firefox or IE and I had to float a table instead - which still doesn't display correctly in firefox, but luckily this particular component is only used in house where I know IE will be used.

Lastly, I'm finally venturing again into open-source software territory. Since my computer is not being used for gaming much anymore, I've decided to dual-boot with Linux and WinXP. I still need to keep WinXP for VS.NET and gaming, otherwise I'd ditch it completely (I've gotten a little fed up having had to call to re-activate two computers this week because of minor hardware changes). I have already switched to Firefox, and am using OpenOffice since I refuse to pay a couple hundred for another copy of MS Office (my mom needs my copy). I haven't used it much yet, but Open Office looks very promising, and works with MS Office files.

Let me say now that I doubt I will ever have another post this big :). I've had a lot on my mind that I wanted to jot down, but didn't get around to doing it until tonight.