THE BLOG
Exploration of Thought
Thoughts on autonomy, self direction, digital business and life.
Handling unexpected exceptions and tracing
I was browsing a site earlier and I came upon the dreaded Yellow Screen of Death (YSOD). It reminded me of when I had to implement some diagnostic tracing for an application that happened to be built prior to my time at the said company. The Problem The application was written in ASP.NET 1.1 and was…Donn Felker - April 1, 2007
ASP.NET HOWTO: Enable Default Enter Button in ASP.NET 2.0
In certain forms, such as search forms, users enter a value into the search query box, then press the enter button. If you are develolping in ASP.NET, the page will refresh, but nothing will happen. The buttons click event wont fire... UNLESS, you explicity enable a default enter button on the form. A problem that…Donn Felker - March 29, 2007
Overcomplicating simple things – ASP.NET AJAX Confirmation Button Extender
Web 2.0, the big hit. Its everywhere, everyone is doing it. Microsoft has made it very easy for us developers to implment some very cool features of AJAX through the ASP.NET Ajax.NET framework. Simply install, drag and drop and deploy, blammo, you're done. But there in lies the problem. What about developers who take this…Donn Felker - March 28, 2007
error CS0030: Cannot convert type (Login.master)
I ran into an interesting error today and for a minute I didnt understand why it occurred. Exception c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\exampleapp\571e5472\336672e2\App_Web_login.master.cdcab7d2.gh4qw4cs.0.cs(115): error CS0030: Cannot convert type 'ASP.login_master' to 'System.Web.UI.WebControls.Login' http://localhost/exampleapp/login.aspx?ReturnUrl=/exampleapp/default.aspx /exampleapp/login.aspx The site ran fine when running under the local cassini web web server but when we pre-compiled the website through our continuous integration system…Donn Felker - March 27, 2007
IIS 7 – This configuration section cannot be used at this path.
If you're new to IIS 7 (you probably are) you might receive this nice little gem when you first start working with it: HTTP Error 500.19 - Internal Server ErrorDescription: The requested page cannot be accessed because the related configuration data for the page is invalid. Error Code: 0x80070021 Notification: BeginRequest Module: IIS Web Core…Donn Felker - March 26, 2007
Using Excel to help with Data formatting (SQL Scripts)
(Download Excel Spreadsheet example at the bottom.) Sometimes when developing I need to work with data. Sometimes this data is from external sources such as other partners in the business. Unfortunately when I get this data does not follow a consistent format therefore I'm left with formatting it for entry into a data store, usually…Donn Felker - March 23, 2007
HOWTO: Build a Store Locator in ASP.NET
Full Visual Studio 2005 solution included at the bottom of this post. Update 2023-12-08: Source Code Moved Here: Download Zip of Source Update 2008-12-31: Fixed a bug with the variable equality. Updated to the source on the codeplex site: codeplex.com/StoreLocator Update 2008-11-22: Fixed a bug with the variable definition. Also Moved the source code to…Donn Felker - March 17, 2007
HOWTO: Debugging JavaScript using “debugger;”
There are a lot of developers who write custom JavaScript or need to debug pre-written JavaScript, yet do not know that they can debug it in Visual Studio 2005. This is a fairly simple process. Visual Studio offers the developer the ability to utilize the IDE to debug, just like you would debug if you…Donn Felker - March 15, 2007
Notepad++ Shortcuts – Vista 64bit Update
In a previous post I gave an example of how to run Notepad++ from the command line by typing the letter n. This was the solution for Windows XP. Shortcutting the name is a tip I learned from Scott Hanselman, check out his blog for tons of other good stuff. I recently upgraded to Vista (x64) and found out that…Donn Felker - March 14, 2007
C# Google Geocode (Latitude and Longitude) Class
Update 2007/05/07: There is also a Microsoft MapPoint v4.5 project I've written that does the same thing. Click here to go to that post. Retrieve the Latitude and Longitude of any addresses in the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan (link) with this class. View the class below and download the class…Donn Felker - March 13, 2007
aspnet_wp.exe could not be started?
I got this odd error message from an internal web service today that stumped me for ~30 minutes. It was: "aspnet_wp.exe could not be started. The error code for the failure is 80070545. This error can be caused when the worker process account has insufficient rights to read the .NET Framework files. Please ensure that…Donn Felker - March 12, 2007
Open Source .NET Wiki
I've been on the hunt for a good .NET wiki that was open source and I think I've finally found one. The folks over at ScrewTurn Software have developed ScrewTurn Wiki. Its GPL'd, built on .NET 2.0, does not require SQL Server 2005, works in a medium trust enviroment (that means that you hosted types…Donn Felker - March 11, 2007