Running MsDeploy is awesome for automated deployments of websites, but it’s also possible to use it to deploy other applications to the file system – such as associated windows services. You just need to jump through a few more hoops to get things up and running.
I’m using TeamCity for our integration server, but the basic steps will work regardless … Read more “Deploying windows services using MsDeploy”
I tripped up on a strange quirk working with the Image and ImageFormat classes recently. The intention was simple – load an Image object from an existing graphic, generate a thumbnail, and save it out in the original format. The Image class in .NET includes a handy “RawFormat” property indicating the correct format to save out in. So far, so … Read more “Saving thumbnails in the original file format with C#”
Just a quick note – if you switch from Community Server to WordPress like I have, in order to keep your links working you can add a simple regex rewrite rule to IIS. I simply used the following:
^/james_crowley/archive/(.*).aspx$ http://www.jamescrowley.co.uk/$1/
and
^/james_crowley/(.*)$ http://www.jamescrowley.co.uk/$1
where /james_crowley/ was where my blog was installed previously (on weblogs.asp.net as it happens).
Google Analytics supports a nifty feature called “Events”, which is designed to allow you to track non-pageview type events. This is particularly helpful if you have an AJAX type interface on which you want to gather statistics, but another use I’ve found handy is to track clicks on external links to other sites. If you’re using the asyncronous version of … Read more “Automatically tracking outbound links in Google Analytics”
We recently re-designed Developer Fusion and as part of that we needed to ensure that any external links were not broken in the process. In order to monitor this, we used the awesome LogParser tool. All you need to do is open up a command prompt, navigate to the directory with your web site’s log files in, and run a … Read more “Detecting 404 errors after a new site design”
If you want to post to a facebook page using the Facebook Graph API and the Facebook C# SDK, from an “offline” app, there’s a few steps you should be aware of.
First, you need to get an access token that your windows service or app can permanently use. You can get this by visiting the following url (all on … Read more “Posting to Facebook Page using C# SDK from offline app”
Visual Studio 2010 doesn’t have the same support for app.config files in the way that their web projects do, in order to vary connection strings and other configuration settings for different release modes – a real shame. You can vote on the issue here. In the meantime though, the ASP.NET team have a fix, detailed here.
All you need to … Read more “Applying app.config transformations (in the same way as web.config)”
If you’re trying to use web.config transformations in VS 2010 with nHibernate you might be hitting the same issue I’ve been getting the transformation to match the hibernate-configuration node. The reason is because you have to specify an xmlns="urn:nhibernate-configuration-2.2" attribute as part of the configuration:
<configuration> <hibernate-configuration xmlns="urn:nhibernate-configuration-2.2"> <session-factory> <property name="connection.connection_string">connection string</property> ... </session-factory> </hibernate-configuration> </configuration>To fix, just set … Read more “web.config transformations for NHibernate”
I run OpenX (an open source ad serving platform) under IIS and PHP …. but after upgrading to PHP 5.3 noticed the following error appearing in the PHP error logs file (c:\windows\temp\php-errors.log by default).
PHP Warning: date_default_timezone_get(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. … Read more “Running OpenX under IIS with PHP 5.3 – date_default_timezone_get errors”
I’ll keep this short and sweet as it’s covered in depth elsewhere. After installing PHP 5.3 suddenly my website stopped working – but instead of throwing errors, it simply sat there and eventually timed out (with no error). Turns out there are issues with both PHP and MySQL around IPv6. The most common solution is “turn off IPv6 support” – … Read more “PHP 5.3 and IIS 7 – beware of MySQL issues with IPv6”
If you’re thinking of upgrading to MVC 2.0, and you take advantage of the AntiForgeryToken support then be careful – you can easily kick out all active visitors after the upgrade until they restart their browser. Why’s this? For the anti forgery validation to take place, ASP.NET MVC uses a session cookie called “__RequestVerificationToken_Lw__”.
This gets checked for and de-serialized … Read more “Beware: Upgrade to ASP.NET MVC 2.0 with care if you use AntiForgeryToken”
Visual Studio 2010 includes much improved deployment tools – but by default it only includes files “needed to run this application”. If you’re using the Spark view engine for ASP.NET MVC, then the Spark views aren’t considered one of them!
The trick is to ensure your .spark views have a build action of “Content” instead of the default “None”. Clearly … Read more “Including Spark views in VS 2010 web deployments”