Rick Strahl's Web Log

Recent Weblog Posts

ASP.NET Connection Session Slides and Samples Posted
Monday @ 12:45 am

I've published my session slides and samples from the Fall 2008 ASP.NET Connections conference. The sessions include: jQuery and ASP.NET, WCF REST and JSON with ASP.NET and Dealing with Long Running Requests in ASP.NET.

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Wipeout
Saturday @ 2:11 am

Just got a funny picture from the Gorge Hood River from last summer that I’d thought I’d share. It’s one heck of a wipeout: I remember this day and this wipeout on a backloop in particular – the board just got away from me as I slipped out of the footstraps. I went one way (down) and the board went another. There are a couple more pictures in this sequence as the board gets backwinded in...

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jQuery Intellisense Updates from Microsoft
November 09, 2008 @ 4:13 pm

With Microsoft's recent releases of the jQuery Intellisense file plus the hotfix released this week using jQuery in Visual Studio has become a lot easier and more convenient. Here is a little more detail on what you need and how it works.

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From ASP Stock Projects to Web Application Projects in VS 2008
November 06, 2008 @ 12:59 pm

Had to do a conversion of a stock ASP.NET project to Web Application projects after not having done so in quite some time and it looks that this process still is not any easier than it was when WAP was a separately installed project type. Here are steps to move a project from stock to WAP with a few hopefully helpful hints.

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Debugging a WCF REST/AJAX Serialization Problem
November 04, 2008 @ 12:06 am

Ran into a painful self-inflicted problem today with WCF Services for AJAX access where a service failed to serialize some data and simply returned no data of any sort. No error, no message - no HTTP content, not even headers. Here's what the problem was and the steps to debug the service to try and figure out what was wrong.

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My PDC 2008 Wrap up
November 02, 2008 @ 5:50 pm

Ugh, I’m finally back and settled from a long 3 week road trip. Ah, it feels good to sleep in my own bed again :-}. PDC last week was the last stop of the trip and as always it’s been an interesting experience. More than anything events like these are great to catch up with other developers and meeting people I’ve only seen virtually. I made face contact with a bunch of folks I only know through...

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Amazon Kindle – a few Things I would improve
October 29, 2008 @ 1:05 am

I love my Kindle and it's been a blessing for my recent long periods away from home and keeping me in plenty of reading material without lugging books around. Still there are a few things that could improve and Scott Watermasysk blog post kicked me into writing them down.

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Dealing with Complex Client Interfaces: Html or RIA?
October 25, 2008 @ 7:44 pm

I'm working with a client who has a new project that needs to be built that is based on a complex window based layout and the app needs to be built for the Web. We've had a bunch of back and forth over which tools to use: AJAX/HTML or a RIA solution like Silverlight or Flash. In this post I have a few thoughts and comments on this discussion and talk about what we ended up with.

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Using jQuery to search Content and creating custom Selector Filters
October 24, 2008 @ 12:57 am

jQuery makes it easy to search content of matched elements by using the :content filter which allows for some pretty cool search effects you can implement with a couple of lines of code. Unfortunately :contains is case sensitive though, but never fear jQuery allows creation of custom filters that allow you to provide a custom case insensitive version.

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Making Element Position Absolute with jQuery
October 21, 2008 @ 1:15 pm

It's common for me to create DOM elements that pop up ontop of existing content by making them absolutely positioned. Here's a quick plug-in that makes an element absolute.

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HTML Mangling with Literal Controls in the <head> tag
October 20, 2008 @ 2:28 am

Ran into an odd problem with Literal controls in the head tag of the document causing HTML to get corrupted today. It appears that literal controls - and only literal controls - are causing some odd designer manglage that can result in broken HTML.

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Client Templating with jQuery
October 13, 2008 @ 5:32 pm

Client templating in Javascript can be a great tool to reduce the amount of code you have to write to create markup content on the client. There are a number of different ways that templating can be accomplished from a purely manual approach.

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LINQ to SQL DBML fails to build or open
October 10, 2008 @ 3:50 am

Arrgh. Today I got back to a LINQ to SQL app that’s been sitting idle for some time. It’s a demo app and as I started the app up and compiled the solution I got: Error 1 Build failed due to validation errors in C:\projects2008\TimeTrakker\TimeTrakkerBusiness\model\TimeTrakker.dbml. Open the file and resolve the issues in the Error List, then try rebuilding the project....

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No Empty Selector in jQuery
October 03, 2008 @ 12:41 am

One thing that bugs me about jQuery selectors is that empty or null selectors return the HTML document object, rather than an empty jQuery object. This has bitten me on a number of occasions and requires some

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Introduction to jQuery Article posted
September 28, 2008 @ 2:04 pm

I've posted Part 1 in a two part series on jQuery today. Part 1 covers the client side features of jQuery from the basics all the way through creating simple plugins and extending jQuery. This is a long article that discusses a host of the really useful features that jQuery brings to the table for client side Javascript development. Part 2 will then follow up with server side ASP.NET integration.

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Calling JavaScript functions in the Web Browser Control
September 27, 2008 @ 4:37 pm

If you're using the Web Browser Control or the Internet.Application Shell object, you might need to call Javacript t code inside the pages loaded in the browser to manipulate the page from say a WinForms app that interacts with the Web Browser control. Some things are just much easier to do with client side script code and being able to initiate this code from .NET can be very useful. This entry describes how you can access the DOM to call script functions both in .NET and FoxPro.

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Browser Rendering Differences and Browser Resets
September 24, 2008 @ 5:31 pm

As ASP.NET develoers it can be really easy to not pay attention to good CSS style layout practices. But CSS is vitally important especially when dealing with different browsers and consistent formatting. Using browser resets in particular is a big help in taking some of the pain out of cross browser rendering differences.

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jQuery.position() on Invisible Elements fails
September 20, 2008 @ 4:02 am

Ran into a little issue today with jQuery.position() failing when elements are not visible. Apparently when elements are hidden jQuery is unable to retrieve the computed styles necessary to get the positioning information and bombs. Making the element visible first fixes the problem.

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ASP.NET Designer Control Problem in VS 2008 SP1
September 18, 2008 @ 4:55 am

I've been running into problems with VS 2008 SP1 where controls appear to be failing frequently with property assignment errors that seem completely unwarranted. Controls work fine on a page, and next thing I know they fail for no apparent reason.

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Running VisualSVN Server for Subversion Source Control
September 14, 2008 @ 3:39 am

I've been running Subversion for some time, but only recently did I switch over to using HTTP as the protocol to transfer files. I checked out Visual SVN Server and it makes the process of setting up Subversion and Apache for serving over HTTP super easy.

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jQuery CSS Property Monitoring Plug-in updated
September 12, 2008 @ 3:30 am

I've revisited a jQuery plug-in that can be used to monitor changes in CSS properties and be notified when a specific property changes providing an Observer style callback. This can be a handy feature when building behavior components that attach functionality to other elements and need to keep these behaviors in sync with the original object. This update utilizes a more efficient approach and allows monitoring many properties at once.

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Client Script Resources in ASP.NET Controls revisited
September 09, 2008 @ 4:05 am

Embedding script resources as part of ASP.NET Control development is tricky business and requires a bunch of options to ensure that script code loads correctly and maybe more importantly allows the page developer to decide whether the resources should be used at all. Here are a few thoughts and some work in progress on how I deal with script resources in my controls.

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Retrieving Web Resources and Content Types in Code
September 08, 2008 @ 1:39 am

One of my components requires to serve specific Web Resources directly and optionally compress them optionally. While serving resources is straight forward, also grabbing the content type to know what type of resource you're dealing with is a little more work. Here's how.

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Mousing Around: Mobile Mouse with Desktop Mouse Radio
September 07, 2008 @ 8:14 pm

I travel a fair bit and use my machine on the road a lot when I do, so portability is reasonably important to me. One thing is that in the process I got really used to the small 'mobile' mice that Microsoft makes - the small Soap bar kind. I've really grown attached to this mouse and I really can't get comfortable with the monster desktop mice any more. So the small mouse works great but one of...

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jQuery Form Serialization without ASP.NET ViewState
September 04, 2008 @ 2:31 am

When building AJAX applications that send client form content to the server, ViewState and EventValidation fields can get in the way. Using jQuery you can make short work skipping over these fields and send only the raw POST data to the server.

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DataTable JSON Serialization in JSON.NET and JavaScriptSerializer
September 03, 2008 @ 1:22 pm

I've recently made a switch to JSON.NET for my JavaScript parsing which has been a great move for flexibility. One thing missing from JSON.NET though that I had previously running is DataTable serialization I have in use in a few older apps. In this post I describe how to use JSON.ENT and how to add a custom DataTable/Row/Set converters. For completeness sake I've also provided similar Converter classes for JavaScriptSerializer.

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Watch out for Date Kind in JSON Deserialization
September 03, 2008 @ 1:54 am

If you're working with dates in JSON serialization make sure you carefully normally dates returned from JSON deserialization. Reason is that especially the Microsoft Serializers return dates as Utc dates which can produce some unexpected and often missed results.

FireFox 3 and Static File Caching Problems
August 31, 2008 @ 2:12 pm

FireFox 3.0 apparently is much more aggressive in caching content than previous versions of FireFox. While this is good for performance in many situations I've noticed that this is seriously becoming a problem in some of my applications where support files like scripts and CSS files get updated in applications and FireFox doesn't recognize those changes. The problem appears to be that FireFox is...

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Unable to debug Web Site with Top Level Location
August 28, 2008 @ 3:05 am

Ran into another fun little problem a few days ago. Working on my root Web site which is rather large and contains a huge number of sub-webs. The root site is very light in terms of ASP.NET functionality used - primarily stuff like cookie tracking and logging tasks, serving banners etc and a few utility applications. Most of the heavy lifting on the site and 'real' applications are managed in...

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Lost (and found) Visual Studio Templates in Web Project
August 27, 2008 @ 7:04 pm

So I just lost all of my project templates in Web projects. I've been working on a small utility page on my site that generates help documentation on the fly. I've been working happily along on this site when all of a sudden when I needed to add a config file to control debugging and authentication on this page/app. could not find a part of the path 'C:\programs\vs2008\ Common...

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Accessing a SafeArray Result from a COM Call in C#
August 26, 2008 @ 6:18 am

I'm calling a COM object from managed code that's returning a binary response, which is returned as a SafeArray of bytes from the COM server. The problem is the SafeArray is not exactly easily accessed in .NET and the debugger provides some misleading information for the returned COM type. Here's how to access the SafeArray from C# code.

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EXE COM Server Invokation leaking Handles
August 24, 2008 @ 5:46 pm

Last week I started looking into a problem that causes my IIS Worker processes to have errors on shutdown. After some mind numbing debugging I finally seem to have traced the problem down to COM object invokation and a handle leak that results because of it. What I ran into here though is very odd as it appears to be not specific to my code but a general handle leak when instantiating EXE...

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ISAPI Module Crashing on Application Pool Shutdown
August 22, 2008 @ 2:37 pm

So I have an odd issue with an ISAPI DLL that one of my products uses. The ISAPI interface provides a gateway interface to application servers and the actual module itself works fine without any problems. The problem is that the module is apparently crashing occasionally when the Application Pool is shutting down, but it's crashing after any of the DLL code has long stopped running. However, on...

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A simple jQuery Client Centering Plugin
August 21, 2008 @ 9:30 am

Centering content is a useful client side UI feature especially when working with pop ups or popup windows when displayed for the first time. Here's a little jQuery plug in that handles centering in the window and in other container elements easily.

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Sql 2008 Management Tools: Can't save changes that require Recreation of Database
August 16, 2008 @ 6:31 pm

Ah here's a silly new default in SQL Server's Management Tools: When you design a table in a database and then try to make a change to a table structure that requires the table to be recreated, the management tools will not allow you to save the changes. Instead you'll be greeted by this friendly dialog: Notice that there's no option to save the changes - it's a hard rule that is applied and you...

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Monitoring Html Element CSS Changes in JavaScript
August 15, 2008 @ 1:17 am

I have the need to monitor movement of elements in an HTML document via JavaScript. Unfortunatey there are no events that fire if HTML elements are moved around the document either via dragging or by programmatic location changes. As a workaround I created a jQuery CSS monitoring plugin that fires event when a given CSS property changes.

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