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• So long wizards!

  - by geekrutherford

  In an effort to make an application more robust I have been switching to a server-side method of tracking record selections vs. client side.   The pages relying on record selections utilized the ASP.NET Wizard control which seemed like a good idea originally. Unfortunately, the design of the control is not all that flexible. It appears to want to center everything vertically which might not be a problem if it did not always use the vertical size of the largest Wizard Step for positioning.   So, I am ripping out the Wizard controls and replacing with simple Panel controls that are turned on/off. Much cleaner and presentable.

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• Unexpected issues with SessionPageStatePersiste

  - by geekrutherford

  Several iterations ago I implemented the SessionPageStatePersister in an application as a way to cut down on the size of the hidden ViewState input on aspx pages.   At first it seemed utterly fantasic. The size of the ViewState appeared to be drastically reduced and the application did not appear to peform any slower than baseline.   Enter the iFrame & user control. I added a user control which pings the web server every 20 seconds in order to show updated application information to the user (new messages, reports, etc.) After releasing this nifty little control into the QA environment I quickly began receiving emails from testers about "post back" related error messages which mostly centered around invalid ViewState exceptions.   At first I dismissed it as something related to all of the AJAX requests happening on the page and considered turning off page event validation. However, upon further investigation I came across the following article:   Things That You Should Watch Out For When Using SessionPageStatePersister   In this article the author specifically states:   If you application uses frames than each frame request will create a new session view state item and as before it will remove items when reaching the maximum, you come into a situation that one of the frames will probably loose it session view state because other frames did post backs.   Oh snap! That is precisely what I am doing. That combined with multiple users on the application equals dropped ViewStates!   The temporary fix has been to disable the use of the SessionPageStatePersister in my application. This results in a bloated hidden ViewState input, but the web server is no longer tasked with maintaing/retreiving it and the app. no longer loses ViewState information.

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• Inline code within HEAD section of ASP Web Form

  - by geekrutherford

  Today I needed to include inline code within the HEAD section of an Web Form in order to dynamically include stylesheets based on the theme set for the application.   Below is an example:      <link href="../../Resources/Themes/<% = Page.Theme %>Grid.Default.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">   Upon saving and viewing the page I noted that the code was not being interpreted and instead was being treated as a string literal.  How to get around it?  Add a panel control in the HEAD section and place the links to the stylesheets as in the example above within the panel.  For whatever reason, ASP.NET does not want to interpret inline code in the HEAD section but will allow you to add .NET controls in the HEAD section.

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• Internet Explorer will not open Office files

  - by geekrutherford

  An issue was brought to my attention today at work where certain users were unable to open Office files (specifically Excel) from Internet Explorer 7.   The user would click on a button which simply generated an inline JS call to open a pop-up pointing to the .xlsx file on the server. IE would open the pop-up and then shortly thereafter the pop-up would disappear without the file ever opening.   I tweaked the security settings in the users browser...added the site to the list of trusted sites and lowered the security settings to Medium-Low. This allowed IE to at least prompt with the Save or Open message. Clicking either open resulted in "Internet Explorer Could Not Open the Site...".   Perturbed, I retreated back to Geek Central (aka my desk) and modified my application such that instead of simply pointing the browser to the file and now used Response.TransmitFile() to stream it to the browser instead. I thought to myself "this is perfect, it has to work!!!". Alas, no luck.   Bewildered and confused and returned to the lone users computer and started looking around the various IE options. I stumbled upon "Clear SSL State" under the "Content" tab. This appears to clear out all SSL certificates on the client forcing it to refresh. Doing this in concert with resetting the security levels for all zones back to their defaults seemed to do the trick.

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• ASP.NET Session Management

  - by geekrutherford

  Great article (a little old but still relevant) about the inner workings of session management in ASP.NET: Underpinnings of the Session State Management Implementation in ASP.NET.   Using StateServer and the BinaryFormatter serialization occuring caused me quite the headache over the last few days. Curiously, it appears the w3wp.exe process actually consumes more memory when utilizing StateServer and storing somewhat large and complex data types in session.   Users began experiencing Out Of Memory exceptions in the production environment. Looking at the stack trace it related to serialization using the BinaryFormatter. Using remote debugging against our QA server I noted that the code in the application functioned without issue. The exception occured outside the context of the application itself when the request had completed and the web server was trying to serialize session state into the StateServer.   The short term solution is switching back to the InProc method. Thus far this has proven to consume considerably less memory and has caused no issues. Long term the complex object stored in session will be off-loaded into a web service used to access the information directly from the database outside the context of the object used to encapsulate it.

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• Using ASP.NET Membership Provider with an ACL

  - by geekrutherford

  Up until recently one of my applications has used the membership provider within ASP.NET exclusively. However, it has been proposed that while the currently defined roles are beneficial, security needs to be more granular to restrict both access to certain pages and functionality present within a given page.   Unfortunately, the role based security ASP.NET gives you out of the box falls down in this area. This is not due to a lack of foresight by Microsoft, but rather it was simply not designed for implementing both role based security and any inherent ACL you may define within these roles. Mind you some would say an ACL is independent of the role to which a user belongs and is assigned to the user directly.   The application mentioned here has it's own User object (which encapsulates the membership provider user object as a property) and SQL Server table to store extended information not present in the aspnet_users table. While I could have modified the aspnet membership schema to suit the applications needs, it seemed smarter to simply create a separate table with a foreign key back to the aspnet_users table.   Since I have a separate object to store extended user information, I simply created an ACL object and expose it as a property of my user object.   This is all well and good, but it does not help in regards to the SiteMapProvider and restricting access at the page level based on the users ACL.   The straightforward answer would be to develop some code within the databound event for the menu that checks the page title and has hardcoded logic that dictates a user must have certain permissions turned on. The problem with this approach is that it's HARDCODED!!! If you need to change access to a page you'd need to do a build and go through your normal deployment process....ugh!!!   An alternative method, albeit not perfect, is to utilize the resourceKey property on the SiteMapNodes in the SiteMap file with the name of the required permission to view the page. Within the databound event for your menu you iterate the SiteMapNodes in the menus SiteMapProvider looking for a match at the page level based on title. When a match is detected, you have a switch/case on the SiteMapNodes resourceKey (the name of the ACL permission required). The case for the resourceKey ensures the users ACL permission is turned on and viola!!!   This is noteably not perfect in that it is using the resourceKey in a manner other than intended.  Since the application is not localized, using it in the manner described it not an issue.   Below is a sample SiteMap file with the resourceKey used as the ACL permission identifier:     Below is the ItemDataBound event. This application uses the Telerik Menu control:

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• My First Post with Windows Live Writer

  - by geekrutherford

  I receive daily newsletters from DotNetSlackers regarding various .NET topics.  Today I read an article from an apparent Microsoft employee who gave some insight to the organizational culture within the company.  Always on the lookout for new tools and technologies I noted that he used Windows Live Writer for editing and managing his blog content.  I thought I’d give it a try. Let’s try adding a picture and adjusting it’s placement within this blog post relative to this text. … Adding the image is quite simple using the “Insert” options given to the right of the blog content editor.  Inserting without using a table makes aligning text just so impossible, but that’s inherent with any WYSIWYG editor.  Instead using a table with at least 2 columns (1 for text and 1 for the image) works best.   Let’s try adding a map!   That’s pretty sweet!  You can map to any location within the editor itself.  A dialog opens which utilizes Bing! allowing you to enter the address, etc. Well, that’s enough for me.  Time to pimp this to my wife for use on our family blog.  BTW, Windows Live Writer allows you to post content to a number of blogging sites…fantastic!!!

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• Google Bot trying to access my web app's sitemap

  - by geekrutherford

  Interesting find today...   I was perusing the event log on our web server today for any unexpected ASP.NET exceptions/errors. Found the following:   Exception information: Exception type: HttpException Exception message: Path '/builder/builder.sitemap' is forbidden. Request information: Request URL: https://www.bondwave.com:443/builder/builder.sitemap Request path: /builder/builder.sitemap User host address: 66.249.71.247 User: Is authenticated: False Authentication Type: Thread account name: NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE   At first I thought this was maybe an attempt by a hacker to mess with the sitemap. Using a handy web site (www.network-tools.com) I did a lookup on the IP address and found it was a Google bot trying to crawl the application. In this case, I would expect an exception or 403 since the site requires authentication anyway.

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• Base Pages and Interfaces for ASP.NET Pages

  - by geekrutherford

  For quite a while I have been using the concept of base pages when developing pages in ASP.NET applications. It is a wonderful method for exposing common functions to all of your applications pages and also overriding certain events for various purposes (i.e. dynamic themes).  Recently I found out a new developer will be joining my team. This prompted me to review the applications code for readability and ease of maintenance. I began adding comments through out the code behind for all pages within the application. While doing so I noted that I had used common method names for such things as loading data, configuring controls, applying filters, etc.   Bringing a new developer on board, I wanted to make the transition as seamless as possible while also ensuring they follow existing coding practices we already have in place. While I could have created virtual methods for the common page methods allowing them to overridden, what I really needed was a way to ensure the new developer implemented the same methods for each and every page. Thus I created an interface to force the issue.   Now, every page not only inherits the base page class but also implements an interface. This provides every page not only common functions and overridden page events but also imposes rules for implementing certain common methods :-)   Interface   public interface BasePageInterface { /// Configures page based on users security permissions. void CheckPermissions(); /// Configures Filter Form control for current page.  /// Ensure you have set the FilteredGrid and PageAjaxManager properties of the FilterForm control in PageLoad!!!  void ConfigureFilters(); /// Sets event handlers and default settings for controls on the current page. void ConfigureControls(); /// Exports data bound to grid in selected format. void ExportGridData(ExportFormat fmt); /// Loads data and binds to grid. /// Columns are turned on/off in grid depending on tab selected and users permissions.  void LoadData(); }   Page code-behind class definition:   public partial class MyPage : BasePage, BasePageInterface Note, you could not use an abstract class to accomplish this considering C# does not allow for multiple inheritance.  Nor could the base page class be abstract since it needs to inherit from the System.Web.UI.Page class in order to override page events.

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• Deleting ASP.NET application subdirectories causes application recycle!

  - by geekrutherford

  This may not be news to most people, but was definitely a shock to me!   In the .NET 2.x framework a "feature" was implemented where by an ASP.NET application is automatically recycled if any subdirectory is deleted. This was apparently implemented to prevent stale content from appearing on a site.   The unfortunate side effect of this "feature" is that when using the "InProc" model for session management, all session data is lost if a subdirectory is deleted.   For those who progammatically may be adding/deleting directories within their application as inherent functionality, this causes a rather large problem.   The solution? Create your folder(s) which may be programmatically deleted outside of the root folder for the application. Alernatively, utilize a file based structure vs. folders since deleting files does not result in the same issue.

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• Why is my query soooooo slow?

  - by geekrutherford

  A stored procedure used in our production environment recently became so slow it cause the calling web service to begin timing out. When running the stored procedure in Query Analyzer it took nearly 3 minutes to complete.   The stored procedure itself does little more than create a small bit of dynamic SQL which calls a view with a where clause at the end.   At first the thought was that the query used within the view needed to be optimized. The query is quite long and therefore easy to jump to this conclusion.   Fortunately, after bringing the issue to the attention of a coworker they asked "is there a where clause, and if so, is there an index on the column(s) in it?" I had no idea and quickly said as much. A quick check on the table/column utilized in the where clause indicated indeed there was no index.   Before adding the index, and after admitting I am no SQL wiz, I checked the internet for info on the difference between clustered and non-clustered indexes. I found the following site quite helpful OdeToCode. After adding the non-clustered index on the column, the query that used to take nearly 3 minutes now takes 10 seconds! Ah, if only I'd thought to do this ahead of time!

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• Unintentional run-in with C# thread concurrency

  - by geekrutherford

  For the first time today we began conducting load testing on a ASP.NET application already in production. Obviously you would normally want to load test prior to releasing to a production environment, but that isn't the point here.   We ran a test which simulated 5 users hitting the application doing the same actions simultaneously. The first few pages visited seemed fine and then things just hung for a while before the test failed. While the test was running I was viewing the performance counters on the server noting that the CPU was consistently pegged at 100% until the testing tool gave up.   Fortunately the application logs all exceptions including those unhandled to the database (thanks to log4net). I checked the log and low and behold the error was:   System.ArgumentException: An item with the same key has already been added. (The rest of the stack trace intentionally omitted)   Since the code was running with debug on the line number where the exception occured was also provided. I began inspecting the code and almost immediately it hit me, the section of code responsible for the exception is trying to initialize a static class. My next question was how is this code being hit multiple times when I have a rudimentary check already in place to prevent this kind of thing (i.e. a check on a public variable of the static class before entering the initializing routine). The answer...the check fails because the value is not set before other threads have already made it through.   Not being one who consistently works with threading I wasn't quite sure how to handle this problem. Fortunately a co-worker recalled having to lock a section of code in the past but couldn't recall exactly how. After a quick search on Google the solution is as follows:   Object objLock = new Object(); lock(objLock) { //logic requiring lock }   The lock statement takes an object and tells the .NET runtime that the current thread has exclusive access while the code within brackets is executing. Once the code completes, the lock is released for another thread to utilize.   In my case, I only need to execute the inner code once to initialize my static class. So within the brackets I have a check on a public variable to prevent it from being initialized again.

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• Generating HTML Help files based on XML documentation

  - by geekrutherford

  Since discovering the XML commenting features built into .NET years ago I have been using it to help make my code more readable and simpler for other developers to understand exactly what the code is doing. Entering /// preceding a line of code causes Visual Studio to insert "summary" tags.  It also results in additional tags being generated if you are commenting a method with parameters and a return type. I already knew that Intellisense would pick up these comments and display them when coding and selecting properties, methods, etc. from a class.  I also knew that you could set Visual Studio to generate an XML file containing said comments.  Only recently did I begin to wonder if I could generate some kind of readable help files based on these comments I so diligently added. After searching the web I came across NDoc, an open source project which creates documentation for you based on the XML files generated by Visual Studio.  Unfortunately, NDoc has become stale and no longer supported (last release was back in 2005). Fortunately there is a little known tool from Microsoft themselves called "Sandcastle Help File Builder".  This nifty little tool gives you a graphical interface that allows you to specify multiple DLL and XML files from which to generate a MSDN like HTML Help File for your own projects! You can check it out here: http://shfb.codeplex.com/ If you are curious how to set Visual Studio to generate the above reference XML documentation files simply go to your projects property page and edit as shown below (my paths are specific, you can leave yours at the default values):

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• Entity Framework 4 - Generating Entities based on Views

  - by geekrutherford

  Just a quick post regarding a common issue and fix... When attempting to add a view as an entity to your model the EF generator may complain that it is unable to find or infer a primary key on your view. As a result, it will not add it to the model. The quick fix is to add the following to which ever column you wish to be the primary key within your view: ISNLL(TableA.ColumnA, -999) myPrimaryKeyColumnName Adding this will allow the EF generator to infer the primary key and add the view as an entity to your model.

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