As some of you will know, I’ve run the developerFusion community for many years now, as a part-time hobby. Now, some big changes are afoot! 2 months ago I packed in my day job to focus on the site full-time, and have now made the first big step and re-launched the site.
You can check it out at http://www.developerfusion.com/.
Having been caught out by this issue once again this weekend, I thought I’d better blog about it so I don’t scratch my head searching around again for a third time!
If you’ve been getting some wierd “Cannot use a leading .. to exit above the top directory.” exceptions occuring on your site (you *do* log those, don’t you?), that … Read more “UrlRewriting, .NET 2.0 SP1 and Search Engines”
protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e) { // we use this so that we can set the enableViewState property in the web.config // although it sets it at the page level, it doesn’t pass it on to the master page this.EnableViewState = this.Page.EnableViewState; base.OnInit(e); }
For those of you foolhardy enough to be running Vista x64 (myself included!), VS 2008, and the latest build of the ADO.NET Entities framework… you may well hit the following error message:
The specified metadata path is not valid. A valid path must be either an existing directory, an existing file with extension ‘.csdl’, ‘.ssdl’, or ‘.msl’, or a URI that … Read more “Gotcha: “The specified metadata path is not valid.” with ADO.NET Entities on Vista x64”
I’ve been getting a *lot* of feedback recently over the changes we made to the C#/VB.NET code translation tools to try and tidy them up – but unfortunately broke a somewhat crucial ability to copy the code out in IE6! I’m still not sure why IE6 is so unhappy with the CSS and is preventing any sensible selection in the … Read more “C#/VB.NET Code Translation tweak”
I hit a small gotcha this evening. A visitor to Developer Fusion reported that they couldn’t gain access to the site at all, because our IP address detection logic was failing. We were checking the “HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR” header for an IP address, before falling back to REMOTE_ADDR, turning the IP into a long integer, and doing an IP-to-country lookup in our … Read more “Gotcha: HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR returns multiple IP addresses”
We’ve just updated our free C# to VB.NET and VB.NET to C# converters on Developer Fusion – they’re adapted from the neat little utilities within the free .NET IDE, #develop . They now keep your comments in tact too. Great for when you’ve found those bits of sample code in the wrong language! If you haven’t come across them before, they’re well … Read more “C# <-> VB.NET Converters Updated”
Another interesting side-point from the discussion this morning – Joe Black, director of Emerging Business and Technology at BT pointed me in the direction of their new Web 21C SDK – available in .NET, Java, PHP and Python. What this does is exposes a load of functionality allowing you to integrate with their systems – including sending SMS, voice messages, … Read more “BT Web21C SDK – Sending SMS, Voice Calls and Location Based Services”
It's perfectly possible to generate a PDF from scratch, using a library such as iTextSharp, a port of a free Java PDF library. However, it can be hard work defining all the code you need to generate the layout you're after, and impossible for someone to tweak the layout without going back to the developer.
One alternative, using the same … Read more “Dynamically Generating PDFs in .NET”
I had a thank you email from Pete LePage on the Web Development Tools team the other day – letting me know that I was one of the top ten valid bug finders (as in, bugs that were actually fixed) for the VS 2005 product cycle… It’s always nice to know that we can all make a difference to the … Read more “Bug fixes, and a week today….”
ASP.NET 2.0 gives us a Page.Title property, which we can set in code, or in the Page directive. Great! Unfortunately, I had a requirement so that whilst I’d be setting a portion of the title from the page, the rest would be pre-defined (ideally within the master page that I use). Obviously you can’t fiddle the stuff in the server-side … Read more “Why is the HtmlHead class sealed?”
I’m not sure I should really admit to not knowing this… but today was the first time I’d realised that the “class” attribute for elements within a HTML document can accept more than one class name. doh.
Update: Here’s a simple example. With the following in your style sheet…
.align-c { text-align: center; }.font-b { font-weight: bold; }
You can … Read more “Multiple CSS Classes”