Archives
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Weird Session State Problem and Computer Names
One of my colleagues installed one of our ASP.NET applications on a demo laptop recently and came to me yesterday since he couldn't get it to work. It didn't take a long time to figure out that he had forgot the Infragistics controls that we use, along with Adobe Acrobat, so I installed them and tested it using localhost. He came back a short while later claiming that while it was now running, it wasn't working correctly, since his entries kept getting ignored. I tested it again using localhost and it certainly worked for me -- so I assumed he was doing something wrong and asked him to try it again. This time he sent me a screen shot of what he was seeing, and I noticed that he was using the computer name instead of localhost to access it. That seems innocent enough, but I decided to try it and sure enough the session state kept getting lost when using the computer name, but not with localhost. I looked at all the settings for IIS and everything else I could think of but it just didn't make any sense, and I certainly couldn't find anything wrong. Finally, I looked through the posts in the ASP.NET Forums that are related to State Management, looking for anything about session getting lost. That's when I found this MS support link that states cookies, and thus session, will cease to function if computer names have an underscore! Yes, this particular computer name had an underscore in it, and of course localhost doesn't, and it all makes perfect sense now, although the solution isn't very pretty. Anyhow, I've never personally used underscores in my computer names, but I also never realized it was a potential problem, so beware.
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Have You Seen My Website Yet?
Have you seen WilsonDotNet.com yet? Well, you should take a minute and check it out. I'm using some really cool technologies to put out a simple yet effective website. Take the design for a second. You want to get a jump on MasterPages in ASP.NET 2.0? They you should check out MasterPages in ASP.NET v1.* (http://ASPAlliance.com/PaulWilson/Articles/?id=14). Its not just very effective, allowing me to not have to worry about mixing content and design, but it is MasterPages. I converted my entire site from MasterPages v1.* to MasterPages v2.0 in about 1 minute.
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Online Aggregator: BlogLines.com
I've been wanting an online aggregator for a while, but so far I had not been to impressed. Until now that is. So far I'm rather impressed with BlogLines.com -- you can even view my public subscriptions. Why an online aggregator? I can easily access all the feeds I want from multiple computers, even public computers, without multiple aggregators running. I can also catch up on new subscriptions, since the past feeds are already in their database in most cases. I can also save my favorites in a private folder, again from any computer. My main gripe so far -- I haven't found a way to have all the various feeds sorted together.
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Getting the ASP.NET Forums to Actually Work
I decided to download and install the ASP.NET Forums for DotNetAtlanta.com. I thought this would be a simple task, but it was not as simple as it should be. The download installed the web application, database, and source code locally just fine. However, those of us that use shared web hosts, like WebHost4Life, can't just run an exe to install our apps. Still, how hard can it be I figured -- just copy the web files and run the database scripts. I took my time with the database scripts, since I needed to make sure they didn't drop and try to recreate my database. I also needed to make sure they pointed to the correct database, instead of the default database name. Still, I got several errors that I didn't really understand the significance of at first. It turns out that the scripts assign dbo as the owner for the tables, but not for the views, stored procs, or user functions. This required a search for a script to fix this problem, one of which I know was posted here very recently. There were also two procs that required some changes (forums_GetAllForumGroupsForModeration, forums_GetForumsForModerationByForumGroupId).
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Introducing DotNetAtlanta.com with Forums
Introducing DotNetAtlanta.com, now with Forums also. My vision for this site is to provide a single community site for all .NET developers in the Atlanta area. We have several excellent .NET user groups already, and this is not intended to compete with them in any way. Instead, this site aims to highlite each of these existing .NET user groups, while at the same time adding other things currently lacking. These forums are obviously one such missing element, so I've taken the Microsoft ASP.NET Forums and installed them here. I've also seen many people interested in the Who's Who of .NET Atlanta, so I'm trying to create a list of leaders, MVPs, and bloggers. There are many other possibilities still, like a list of developers and their resumes, and maybe even an aggregated blog feed, so please give me your suggestions. Also, feel free to volunteer if you have the time, desire, and ability to either give this site a better look, or to code some of these other features.
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Random Observations
Has anyone else noticed that using the mouse to click in the scrollbar area now seems to advance or backup two pages instead of one? This is happening on all of my machines that have the latest MS patches that came out this last week -- really annoying behavior to say the least.
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The .NET Community in Atlanta
Atlanta User Groups are getting several .NET celebrities in the next month. First up is Rocky Lhotka, a long-time top VB author and speaker, next week, November 19 at 6:30pm, at the Atlanta VB Study Group. Then Alan Griver, a MS VB.NET PM, will give a preview of Whidbey (.NET v2.0) at the MS Internet Developer's Association on December 2 at 6:00pm. Finally, Jason Beres, an Ineta speaker and author, will be at the Atlanta DotNet User Group on December 15 at 6:00pm.
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ObjectSpaces to NOT be Slower Afterall
Andrew Conrad indicates that ObjectSpaces will not be slower afterall as was originally reported due to some misunderstandings. It will of course be 30% slower than using a DataReader, not a DataSet, but that's got to be expected, just like a DataSet is slower than a DataReader. It should, however, be very comparable to using a DataReader and creating your own custom objects, and probably faster than using DataSets. This is good news -- now they need to get support for Access and Oracle, or at least allow a provider-model so someone else can implement the support.
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Visual Source Safe to be Improved Afterall
Korby Parnell says VSS is going to get a decent upgrade in Whidbey afterall. It doesn't sound like its going to make it comparable to the alternatives, but its a start.