ASP.NET

This past week has been pretty darn busy, actually, so far 2007 has been pretty darn busy. At work we've been cranking away on a pretty large project built upon DotNetNuke. It's like nothing I've seen done successfully with DNN before, so it'll be interesting to see when this latest version goes public how well it does. It's rewarding, but a damn lot of work lately. I can't wait for February. I keep telling myself in February I'm going to start working on my car again,...(read more)

You've deployed your app in prod server, you run it on the browser and you get an exception:

[NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an

	object.]
System.Web.Script.Services.WebServiceData.GetWebServiceData(Http

	Context context, String virtualPath, Boolean failIfNoData,

	Boolean pageMethods) +378
System.Web.Script.Services.PageClientProxyGenerator.GetClientProxy

	Script(HttpContext context, IPage page, Boolean debug) +45
System.Web.UI.ScriptManager.RegisterServices() +728   System.Web.

	UI.ScriptManager.OnPagePreRenderComplete(Object sender,

	EventArgs e) +244
System.Web.UI.Page.OnPreRenderComplete(EventArgs e) +2012740
System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBef

	oreAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint)+1566

It happens when your site use ASP.NET AJAX RC in a VS 2005 Web Site Project and you deploy with "publish web site" or "web deployment project" utility with checkbox "allow the site to be updatable" unchecked.

It's a bug from ASP.NET AJAX RC1 and will be fixed in next version.

Until this you can make everything work fine if you precompile with checkbox "allow this site to be updatable" checked.

I just put up my new web site at KenCox.ca which is based on Microsoft's Small Business Site Starter Kit . One of the problems with sample sites is that they're often too elaborate and completely undocumented. By the time you reverse engineer the code to figure out what's going on, you could have built your own site from scratch. This small business kit is quite easy to work with and has just enough functionality for my needs. If you're design-challenged like me, a starter kit is...(read more)

My primary idea for this post was how to use the small and beauty JSON format for data transfer in a windows mobile application. For that I use the infrastructure of AJAX. I implement a Webmethod in a classic ASPX page.

<script runat="server">

</script>

For calling the Method form the page (or from a webservice) i use a Winforms application and the httpwebrequest class. Then i call the URL following the method name. The second part is to use a specific content  type in header "application/json". To transfer complex data you have to build a json type. For my sample i used a simple string containing "test". The contextKey is a reserved word.

The result is in my sample also a string and can be passed to a textbox.

Private Sub Button1_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click

Dim wRequest As HttpWebRequest = HttpWebRequest.Create("http://url/Default4.aspx/Nachladen1")

wRequest.Method = "POST"

wRequest.ContentType = "application/json; charset=utf-8"

wRequest.Headers.Add(HttpRequestHeader.Pragma.ToString, "no-cache")

Using writer As Stream = wRequest.GetRequestStream

Dim send As String

send = "{""contextKey"":""test""}"

Dim data As [Byte]() = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(send)

End Using

Dim WResponse As HttpWebResponse = CType(wRequest.GetResponse, HttpWebResponse)

Dim recieve As StreamReader = New StreamReader(WResponse.GetResponseStream())

Dim result As String = recieve.ReadToEnd.ToString

End Sub

Small nice and sexy!

AJAX

My friend Chris posted about something that's really cool with .NET web services I never knew!

http://cgaskell.wordpress.com/2007/01/19/overloading-routines-in-webservices

Congratulations on being part of such a great local community. What a great group you have going! I had a great time with my presentation last night, and form the feedback I got, everyone seemed to enjoy it.

For the code. If you were one of about 20 people who stayed after and asked questions. You saw me add a data grid to the Web Project, and bind it against an the database using the MVP pattern. If you didn't stay then the code is very simple. I created a new Presenter named RetrieveFaqListPresenter, and a new Interface Contract called IRetrieveFaqlistView. Now the Web page we created implements both of those interfaces, and has a data grid on it.

After I got back to my hotel, I made another simple change. Since now we have two presenters going to the database, they both shouldn't be calling the same code, so the Presentation project has a new Singleton object, called FaqHelper, who has the simple job of fetching data.

If you're interested in getting to the next step, I challenge you to redo this presentation in your own typing, and if you're feeling up to it, create a windows form with a grid, that binds to our new View/Presenter.

The code we created in the demo, and that I slightly modified after is available here.

Also, in the root of this zip file, is a .sql file that will let you create the FAQ table we were working with.

For those that were lucky enough to win software licenses, I have to ship your emails off to the vendors, and I usually give them a week turn around.

Thank you so much for having me – you have a really great user group, and a great facility for the group, and great group leadership.

I was struggling for a while with some weird CDO errors using System.Web.Mail. I found the light with this very useful site System.Web.Mail . Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!...(read more)

I"ve just noticed that a new beta version of the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar is available! Not yet final but I like this Web Developer tool. No more toolbar menu in IE but a shortcut button instead, which open the bottom panel, the menu is inside this one now (but I think toolbar will be back again soon, or at least as an option).
Despite all the cool things in it I advise people NOT to install this version as it is far for stable and some features simply crash.
If you still want to try it, don"t forget to uninstall previous beta versions.

What"s new?
Still in beta but it comes with enhancements over previous versions, including:

• Style Tracer: Right mouse click on a style value for an element and select Style Tracer to find the style rule that is effecting that value.
• CSS Selector Matches: View a report of all style rules set and how many times they are used on the current page.
• View Source: View the formatted and syntax colored source of the original page, currently rendered page, element or element with the styles that are effecting it.

What is it?
In case you don"t know this IE extension, here is the official description:

"The Microsoft Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar provides a variety of tools for quickly creating, understanding, and troubleshooting Web pages. This version is a preview release and behavior may change in the final release."

What"s cool?
It works with Windows Vista and IE7 (and XP/IE6 too) and add lot"s of great features :

• Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a Web page.
• Locate and select specific elements on a Web page through a variety of techniques.
• Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings.
• View HTML object class names, ID"s, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.
• Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
• Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS Web feed links.
• Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text.
• Immediately resize the browser window to a new resolution.
• Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain.
• Choose direct links to W3C specification references, the Internet Explorer team weblog (blog), and other resources.
• Display a fully featured design ruler to help accurately align and measure objects on your pages.
• Find the style rules used to set specific style values on an element.
• View the formatted and syntax colored source of HTML and CSS.

Where is it?
You can download this free tool there : 
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e59c3964-672d-4511-bb3e-2d5e1db91038&displaylang=en

What"s next?
Words from the Microsoft team : "There’s lots more we hope to provide for the developer toolbar in future versions and all your ideas are welcome."
For me the killer feature would be a live CSS replacement panel, like the one in Firefox Web Developer Toolbar, with it you can edit your CSS on-the-fly without the need to edit/save/reload/repeat.
Also a javascript console like the one in Firefox would be welcome.
If you too have feedback or suggestions go to the Developer Toolbar Wiki on Channel 9 :
http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel9.InternetExplorerDevToolbar

Can"t wait for the final release!

While I was walking up the slopes with Frans to watch the World Championships Big air qualifications in Arosa, Switzerland during our annual Software Architecture Workshop, we talked about the support for Domain Model patterns in his product LLBLGen Pro. I shared my thoughts on language extensions and in the workshop, both on and offline, there were a lot of discussion on how to support the Domain Model in our languages, frameworks and tools. Mats wrote a very insightful post on Domain Model Management which covers some aspects of our thinking. Why not take this thought one step further? With all the great language innovations in C# 3.0! What about supporting the Domain Model directly in our favorite language. Imagine the compiler being able to validate the implemented Domain Model.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this idea!

coredomain Transportation
{
  aggregate Car
  {
    ..
  entity Wheel
  {
    ..
  valueobject Position
  {
    ..
  repository CarRepository
  {
    ..
  service FuelTransfer
  {
    ..
subdomain Navigation
{
  ..

Do you hate bland directory listing pages that most web servers have these days? Many of us do on the IIS team, and so over the past several years we"ve built a few directory listing modules to spice up IIS directory listings. I figured I should put an end to this by writing one that is oh so much better then all the other ones - and then give it to you to build some cool templates, and create complely customized directory listings for your website. Read more on http://mvolo.com/blogs/serverside/archive/2007/01/21/Get-nice-looking-directory-listings-for-your-IIS-website-with-DirectoryListingModule.aspx...(read more)