First blog post for over 2 years
I'm back! you missed me right?
Okay, so it's been a while... and I have no one else to blame except myself! So whats changed? well... I lost about 4 and a half stone since we last met, now married to my beautiful wife Katharine and 10 months ago was promoted at work for a new role as Solution Architect ;)
I have to be totally honest though, the reason why I have not been able to blog for a few years is not because I have been crazy busy and trying to balance work and home life... nope, it's is because I broke my website!
It was only tonight, well actually about an hour ago that I finally decided thatenought was enough and I should really go work out why it was borked!
How I fixed it:
At first I thought it was probably permissions on the app_code folder for the aspnet user account,, but havng checked my discountasp.net admin page everything seemed fine...
The site worked fine for anonymous users, it seemed to just be the forms authentication that was borked, having given a successful password, the loginpage just redirected me back to the mainpage witout changing my authentication status.
After an hour of comparing my web.config with the blogengine.config that comes OOTB, I decided it must be a configuration setting lower down in the configuration inheritance that was upsetting the blog web.config (I host another site for a friend www.biteboards.co.uk at the root of my hosted space).
It turned out I was right, it seems the YAF (YetAnotherForum) site that I host at the root level of my domain was to blame, and a little blighting url-rewriting httphandler was the culprit. A quick <remove name="urlwriter" /> fixed the issue... easy when you know how... right? only took me two years to work that one out!
Okay, so I admit that I couldn't actually be arsed to work it out before now... but now it's fixed, I have no excuse not to start blogging more. Actually quite looking forward to start putting stuff up here :)
Next up is to migrate the blog to .NET4.0 (BlogEngine v2.5) and move duncangoodall.com/.co.uk to my other dedicated hosting space so I don't run into other conflicts and can run the site at the root as it should.
first update after 6 months
It has been a busy year, firstly I moved hosts and data center and promptly got locked out of my control panel. Six months later, I manage to sit down for half and hour and work out what the issue is, corrupt web.config!
So what's happend recently? Well I'm the daddy again! Please welcome Constance May Goodall, born 3rd April 2009... now 13 weeks.
I have decided that I am going to make an avid effort to post more this year.. been so busy with Constance, Beatrice (now 3 years old) and work, but things now settling down... for now... :o)
ASP.net MVC RC1 now ready to Download
ScottGu just announced ASP MVC is now ready to ship (RC1).
All you need is right here: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/01/27/asp-net-mvc-1-0-release-candidate-now-available.aspx
Also check out Phil @haacked's blog and announcement too: http://haacked.com/archive/2009/01/27/aspnetmvc-release-candidate.aspx
Well done asp.net team
what ya waiting for? go get it
IE8 RC1 is now ready to download
Redmond are getting Release candidate fever as they have just released IE8 RC1 and is now ready to download from http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/worldwide-sites.aspx
The RC1 behaves just like the final version according to @MikeO, more features and news ont his release on his blog http://blogs.msdn.com/mikeormond/
go get it.. installed on my vista laptop fine, should upgrade from beta2 for vista users without having to un-install previous installations.
Download ASP.NET MVC RC1 Futures
XML real-time quotes code just went live
Just Retirement (the company that I work for) just went live with Assureweb, a quote comparison site for IFA's (independant financial advisors).
My code went live on Tuesday and we now get over thousands of quick quotes a day.
Phase II is planned for next year where I will write code to allow full medical assessment's to be made and calculated for the quote premium, this should increase the daily quote count dramatically, I've got loads of work to do between now an then :)
Gears of War 2
I'm not a big first person shooter fan... believe it or not, I' rather play racing games or even strategy (yes worms counts!) but... I have to say I am strangely drawn into playing GOW2.
I actually think it may be the first game hat I could complete...so the far the action and story line is very good. I play online with a few friends on Thursday evenings, so if you fancy a game come find me in a party and join in.
email me for my gamertag if you don't have it already.
blog gets a facelift
found more time to add more content...
oh added a twitter feed too, seems to be sporadically misbehaving so don't be surprised if it's blank...
think it's a cache issue with my ISP, set to 15 minutes but seems to return an empty object sometimes? will have to debug when I do my next update...see last comment ;)
AOL UK block snipurl.com and snipr.com :-(
I was following MikeO's tweet annoucement and went to follow his link (http://snipurl.com/5a5h6) .. it was then I realised that my ISP would not resolve the snipurl domain, how annoying!
I checked it with a proxy website (babelfish) and yeah sure enough the site was up, but not accessible through my connection. I think it may just be a mistake with the DNS settings, but I will have to wait until tomorrow to find out as apparently it takes AOL technical team 24 hours to reply to my ticket!
In the meantime, I told Mike Ormond about this and he changed his powershell script to use tinyurl.com instead, he did not realise that the API was available and apparently is a more simplified model! anyhoo, great news for me as I'm now working :-) thanks Mike!
ObjectDataSource UK Date bug - a workaround
OK, so the first time I get to play with the ObjectDataSource for binding my gridview on my asp.net application...I find a bug! - typical
It appears that the culture information seems to be ignored when firing the object update command. This may mean nothing to you if you are a user in the states using the en-US culture, but for us guys over here in the UK who use the en-GB culture this is a seriosu problem as we will edit our dates in the UK format but when we go to update the row, we will ge the following error...
Cannot convert value of parameter 'dtyourdatefield' from 'System.String' to 'System.DateTime'
So I did a google..as you do and found Microsoft's visual studio team have acknowledged this as a bug but won't fix it as thy say the workaround is much easier to implement than the fix...hmm....
So I have to work around this problem by writing my own code so here is my implementation of a workaround:
1: Private Function ParseNewGridValues(ByVal pe As System.Web.UI.WebControls.GridViewUpdateEventArgs) As System.Web.UI.WebControls.GridViewUpdateEventArgs
2: Dim oValue As System.Collections.DictionaryEntry
3: For Each oValue In pe.NewValues
4: If IsDate(oValue.Value) Then
5: Dim oGB As New Globalization.CultureInfo("en-GB")
6: Dim oUS As New Globalization.CultureInfo("en-US")
7: Dim dtParsed As DateTime = DateTime.Parse(oValue.Value, oGB)
8: Dim tFormatted As String = dtParsed.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss", oUS)
9: pe.NewValues(oValue.Key) = tFormatted
10: End If
11: Next
12: Return pe
13: End Function
14:
15: Protected Sub GridView1_RowUpdating(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.Web.UI.WebControls.GridViewUpdateEventArgs) Handles GridView1.RowUpdating
16: e = ParseNewGridValues(e)
17: End Sub
As you can see form the code, I handle the row updating event and go run a function which converts the date values in my datagrid form UK (how my data gets selected as!) back to an Isodate format using the en-US culture. We then save the new converted date values back to the original event arguments (NewValuesauesnewvalues collection). easy! right???!
If you are interested…here is the bug documentation from MSFT
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=105016
Please let me know if anyone finds a better more elegant way to handle this!