Web Development Adventures in a .NET world : Rant

Can’t view pages from the Web Development Server (Cassini)

ola karlsson — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 03:25:31 GMT

Are you all of the sudden getting “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage” / “Address Not Found” when trying to run a web application from inside Visual Studio?

This caused me a fair bit of headache yesterday, so now that I found the solution, I figured I’d try to spread the word.

Basically what’s happened is that an update for “Windows Defender and Microsoft Forefront Client Security” in the form of a new signature file was released on the 9th of March (Signature versions 1.53.283.0). This update was to address possible scenarios where a machines host file might get changed by a trojan or the like. Unfortunately however this had the side effect on some systems that the localhost entry in the host file was removed or corrupted, leading to any attempt to got to http://localhost/[whatever] will fail.

The solution as outlined in the links below in further detail, is to re-add the localhost entry (127.0.0.1 localhost) to your host file (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts).

I appreciate that these things are important etc. but for [insert appropriately bad word here] sake Microsoft, if you push out potentially breaking changes let us know!

In my case what happened was that, as a good Windows user I have automatic updates turned on and I let the machine restart when it needs to etc. Yesterday, after I’d not used Visual studio on my laptop for a couple days, all of the sudden while sitting on a bus trying to do some Silverligth stuff, I couldn’t display any html pages when running then from VS. After some attempts at working out what the heck was going on and being on a bus with no internet connection I had to give up and pack up my laptop. Later after 30 min of Googling I found these two post helping me work out what had happened.
ASP.NET Web Development Server Stops Working
Visual studio Development Server problem in Vista

So I guess Microsoft had let us know in the way that the “Visual Web Developer team” let us know on their blog but come on, this should have been more publically announced in some way, according to some of the comments there are people out there who have struggled for days with this issue. I’m not really sure how they should have done it and maybe I’m just irritated because I got stung, lesson learnt from this. Turn off the automatic update and apply updates manually, once you know what they’re doing!

Happy coding :)
Ola

Silverlight, Microsoft's Flash Killer - NOT

ola karlsson — Tue, 20 May 2008 15:39:00 GMT

As an early adopter of Silverlight etc. the one phrase that grates me each time I hear or read it is "Silverlight, Microsoft’s Flash killer".

And why does it so bother me? Well in my mind it's not a matter of one technology killing the other! As with most technologies, I believe that they'll quite happily live side by side, some people favouring one, some the other.

At least for the foreseeable future, it's not even a matter of who's got the bigger feature set etc., the hard reality, like it or not, is that corporate enterprise type of companies favours Microsoft technologies just like they lean towards Microsoft over open source solutions. While the smaller more fast moving Web 2.0 type companies favour technologies like Ruby on Rails, Flash/Flex and often use open source software.

I recently read a very interesting blog post called Post Microsoft MIX 2008 Thoughts, it's by a Flex/Flash developer called Jesse Warden and it gives an interesting insight into how Silverlight is probably viewed by many in the Adobe Flash/Flex camp.

The post is well written and fairly objective (not much of the MS bashing you might expect from a Flex/Flash developer), it covers his impressions of MIX 2008 and especially the Silverlight related topics that were demoed there. One thing that has stuck in my mind after reading it is how he felt frustrated over the "oohs" and "aahs" of the audience, over things now possible with Silverlight 2 but which according to him have been easily achieved with Flex and Flash for quite some time.

That exact type of thing however is one of the main reasons, which makes me believe that the feature set of the technologies play a lesser role than most may think.

Most people developing in the .Net space, who are often mainly focused on corporate enterprise type applications, just simply don't know anything about what is or isn't possible with technologies like Flex/Flash.

If we lived in a perfect world, we would all live and play together, .Net developers and architects with experience in building large scale enterprise applications, would be bringing their skills end experiences to the table. While the often more UX focused Flex and Flash developers would be bringing their expertise in building visually compelling and well functioning user interfaces along and together we'd be creating truly great User Experiences for the end users.

One can but dream ;)