Posted my Annual Free Software Advice last December and despite a wild year in Microsoft development technologies, I don’t have a major updates to this list other than:

• Vista is a solid OS now. It will take more resources then XP and will take you a while to get use to it, but I don’t know of any reason the average home user could not use it. I would not upgrade a current XP computer to Vista, but I also would not downgrade a brand new Vista machine to XP unless I had a specific reason. Bottom line if you buy a new PC use Vista.
• Keep in mind Windows 7 will be out in late 2009.

Since I don’t have any real updates I will give out a couple free tools/web site that I like:

• Woot - they (mostly) sell one thing a day until it sells out. Great deals and very humorous product descriptions.
• Digsby - great multi-client chat tool (AOL-MSN-Yahoo).
• Microsoft Live Search - love the artwork on this search site

Gmail is a nice web based email system, and Google Search is my default search engine (though I do like live.com for its stunning images), but has ZDNet’s editorial staff simply been replace by Google Adwords? Are there suddenly no other web technology companies in the world to report news about?
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A long time ago before the world of Visual Studio’s Integrated Web Server and .NET you had to test web sites a bit more “manually”. Here is one trick that is a somewhat lost art.

If you want to test your web application and/or web service (very handy trick for web services)  for some reason you need it to be at a specific URL, such as http://www.testingURL.com. You will need to assign a separate IP address for your web site/webservice.

On windows servers and desktops, you can modify the “hosts” file (note there is no file extension). If you have not modified this file it should look like the following: Read the rest of this entry »

Had a great day on Saturday learning new skills and mingling with my peers at the Tallahassee Code camp. Thank you Capitol City .NET User Group for putting on such a great program.

I hope to work with you soon to get some speakers over to your user group and to bring in you presenters as well.

We use a custom exception handler which utilizes the MS Enterprise Library Exception Block. I recently had an ASP.NET page I was testing that failed a test and I received “Inaccessible logs: Security Error” message.

Problem:

Root problem is the first time a ASP.Net application attempts to write to the Event Log an exception type for that application is created. In this case the Application Pool was running as the “NetworkService” identity.

Solution:

Simple fix is to change the identity that the Application Pool is running as an identity that has administrative privileges. In this case, I switched the identity to “LocalSystem”. Run the offending page again one time and the exception’s event type is created, then switch the Application Pool’s Identity back to “NetworkService”.

Just a quick pass through to the original blog article on the SharePoint team’s blog.

Read the article here.

Thank you Keith Brooks for contributing to this article.

If you have ever tried to capture exceptions in your codebehind and display friendly messges the users using Microsoft’s AJAX toolkit, you may find the very simple idea becomes complicated very quickly. I ran into this when I had some projects that I wanted to AJAX’ify by using a typical alert method that registered a block of client side javascript and was fired on the pages Load event, but found that method failed when using AJAX. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday a few of us at the office had to track down a frustrating bug/feature that prevented ASP.NET 1.1 Framework web application from running on Internet Information Server 7 (IIS7) and Windows Server 2008 (Windows 2008).

Situation:

We host several client sites on our public hosting server. We migrated the 1.1 Framework Applications to Windows 2008 / IIS7 running the pool pipeline in ‘classic mode’. One site appeared to work fine, except that a button on a particular page did now work. It appeared as if the asp:button, which is generated in the HTML as a Submit button, did not post back to the server. The button did work on the Windows Server 2003 / IIS6 environment. Read the rest of this entry »

I have seen both great technically savy developers and great managers fail at being a Technical Lead on software development projects. It seems of takes a special personality, skill set, and drive to take ownership of a project in this special capacity.

A former co-worker of mine sent me the following link to a great article that captures a  checklist of some of the ideals needed to pull off this great balancing act.

I hope he wasn’t suggesting I should study some more :-)  Of course I did review them and ask myself how I was doing.

Note: I’m less sleepy and much more patient today, so now I’m correcting this blog entry.

This evening I was setting up a new instance of MOSS (Microsoft Office Share Point Server 2007) and ran into a error during installation. The installer would almost immediately display the following message and show a simple ‘Close’ button. Obviously this would be a bit better user experience (UX) if there was some way to determine what the particular error was that caused the installer to quit. (I have faith that the MS SharePoint team is working on this as we speak) After checking a few blogs and TechNet, I found the solution at David Longnecker’s blog which, ironically, is named Ramblings of the Sleepy.

“Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 encountered an error during setup.”

The fix was to install and run a tool from Microsoft called the, “Windows Installer Clean Up Utility“, and then reboot the machine.