Mamanze Consulting

Been watching Mr. Galloway ’s progress with his CSS Manager stuff very closely. I’ve done a few things around this in the past, which work, but never seem quite right. Here’s the problem they invariably come down to:   In order for the urls it spits out to survive app restarts and be farm friendly, they have to either: a) Be persisted to shared storage. b) Be totally descriptive. ASP.Net team went with (b) for the ScriptManager’s CombinedScripts functionality. Beautiful in that it works, but...

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Just rewrote the same code for the 100th time this week (bouncing between third party solutions for auth, don’t get me started). Finally get to a clean place and run, looks good. Hit sign on, runs through all the logic, writes the cookie, redirect to home page. Good to go right? Wrong. Next hit is to the sign on page again. Happened to have code already wired up to the post authenticate event, so check there first thing. No FormsIdentity, ok, so Forms Auth doesn’t think this is a valid user… What...

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Quick Tip: Just found that ‘ (apostrophe) is a valid character in urls, thus doesn’t need to be encoded. Switched over comma separated lists to use an apostrophe and it saves considerable space in the url: Default.aspx#v=3'10'14'15&a=524'200524 vs Default.aspx#v=3%2C10%2C14%2C15&a=524%2C200524 My general fallback of | also gets encoded. What do others prefer to use for simple CSVs?

Until recently I've avoid the update panel like the plague that it is. However, do to some serious time constraints, I've begun using it in a few instances. One usage went something like this: < asp : UpdatePanel ID = "foo" runat = "server" UpdateMode = "Conditional" > < ContentTemplate > < asp : Button ID = "bar" runat = "server" Text = "Bar!" /> </ ContentTemplate > </ asp : UpdatePanel > < asp : UpdatePanel ID = "bang" runat = "server" UpdateMode = "Conditional...

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Just setup velocity. Installed fine, admin tool shows it running without problem... Client gets this error: ErrorCode<ERRCA0002>:Cache::GetAndLock : Could not contact the cache service. Contact administrator and refer to product help documentation for possible reasons. Which led me down the road of banging my had against the wall thinking I'd messed up the configuration. Triple checked the configuration, nothing wrong. Turned off the firewall, still nothing. Dawned on my when I was looking...

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Every now and then, I accidentally do something like copy my AppData folder to another location. Invariably, this leads to the links being traversed recursively. It ends up with dozens if not hundreds of levels deep repeated evaluations of the links. This, of course, means the directory paths are too long to be deleted. Explorer fails, rmdir fails, couldn’t find anything else that worked. Then I stumbled upon the following trick: 1) mkdir foo 2) robocopy foo <target> /purge 3) rmdir foo...

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Really shouldn't have to say this, but _again_ I've just been bitten by mistakenly assuming that the .net framework developers believed me to be a competent programmer. It's just rude. Seriously.   What is it this time? Check out this pattern: using(var resource = new Resource()) {   // do something with resource   using(var utility = new Utility(resource)) {     // do something with utility.   }   // do something else with resource... } let's walk through...

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Recently started using Live Mesh (I'm a big fan of most live products, in case you are curious) and am absolutely loving it. Currently have a dozen or so folders synced up between my two laptops and two desktops. This is fantastic because A) it is 5 gb of space, B) I don't have to do anything to maintain it and C) almost any folder can be a mesh folder (except nested for some reason). K, that's the main feature of mesh, syncing folders across computers (and the web of course). The other big feature...

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Took a bit to track down why I didn't have search folders in my OWA account. Turns out there are a few things that need to be done to set them up: You must open the account in outlook and access the search folder. You must do the above while in "online" mode. Note: Default, when you let Outlook set up the account, will be "cached exchange mode", which of course is not "online". One thing that's striking me as odd is that while most of the OWA UI is very similar to outlook...

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Was debugging some DNS issues I've been having on my desktop, and as a random attempt, turned off IPV6 on the network adapter on my SBS machine... Turns out, this disables Exchange, RDP and causes most of the explorer windows to crash. Few hours until I realized that if I restart in Safe Mode, I can probably get the network window to come up... quick fix from there. So, here's a tip: Don't do that ;)