Last week I installed IE7. Didn't have any problems with it up until today. I had to make some changes to one of my web applications through Web Application Administration Tool (VS 2005 menu: Website -> ASP.NET Configuration) so, I launched Administration website but none of the links worked. After being confused for a couple of minutes I went on googling and it apperars that I'm not the only one who have this problem. To fix it you have to add localhost to the list of trusted sites. Here is how you do it:

• Open up IE7 window
• Go Tools -> Internet Options -> Security tab
• Click on "Trusted sites" icon in the list, then click Sites button
• In "Trusted sites" dialog UnCheck "Require server verification (https:) for all sites in this zone
• Type http://localhost in the textbox and click Add button
• Click Close and then Ok in the "Internet Options" dialogs

Now try Web Application Administration Tool. All links should work like they did in IE6.

Here is a link to my presentation

Very nice and clear explanation of .NET exceptions and ways to deal with them in this article. Too many times I've seen people get confused with exception handling. Speaking truth it's haven't been clear for me as well up until I visited Wintellect's Devscovery conference a couple of years ago where Jeff Richter had the whole 2-hour session devoted to exception only...

More as a note to myself. Today I stumbled to a nice article on exception handling in .NET applications. Here is the link.

Here is a link to the new version of DCMCSD demo website. Update include WebParts implementation for tonight's presentation.

dcmcsd3.zip (7.91 MB)

Tonight I'm going to do a demo at DCMCSD discussion group.

I'm going to show how to configure you web application to use membership, role management and personalization providers. I'll show how to use new security controls (Login, CreateUserWIzard etc). The big part of this demo will be devoted to the new personalization feature of ASP.NET 2.0.

Here's a link to sources for this demo: DCMCSD2.ZIP (7.89 MB)

Come and see how easy it is to create ASP.NET 2.0 website with membership, role-based security and personalization features.

Eric J Smith, the author of CodeSmith code generator, published a great tutorial and video on how to create Data Acceess Layer for your .Net application using free .NetTiers template. I've been using .NetTiers for couple of my last projects, and I have to admit that it's really worth trying. What's cool is that this template is based on Microsoft Enterprise Library from Microsoft Patterns & Practices. That means you get all the benefits of following those P&P guidance almost for free (by almost I mean the cost of CodeSmith itself ).

Here is what you ahve to do to run this little website:

1. Unzip all files in a folder on your hard drive
2. Change path to the database in connectionStrings section of Web.Config to your local path
3. Set permissions for you ASP.NET and IIS accounts to read/write on Repository folder
4. Either configure virtual folder in your local IIS or just open this website from file system in VS 2005 (Visual Web Developer Express works just fine)

Warning: You have to have MS SQL Express installed on your machine!

Last night a lot of people were amused by the trick with enabling IntelliSense in Web.config. So, I decided to post it here. All you have to do is to remove xml namespace attribute (xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/.NetConfiguration/v2.0") from <configuration> element of your Web.config. Yes, it's that simple

Don't forget that you'll have to do this procedure each time after you launch ASP.NET Administration Web Site because it consistently puts namespace back in.

Enjoy!

PS You can read about enabling IntelliSence in .skin files here.

Tonight I'm going to do a presentation on "ASP.NET 2.0 Master Pages, Themes and Skins" at DCMCSD discussion group. This will be my first time presenting such a big topic, so come and see my public humiliation

Here you can find PowerPoint presentation and Demo project files:

MasterPagesThemesSkins.zip (29.41 KB)

DCMCSDWebSite.zip (7.99 MB) (Read instructins to run this demo here)

IntelliSence everywhere! That's one of the biggest features in new Visual Studio .NET 2005 (VS 2005). But guess what, it doesn't work out of the box in .skin file  - the place you really need it. Those of you who worked with ASP.NET 2.0 themes understand me . Good news - there is a workaround to enable this feature. Do the following:

1. Go to Tools->Options menu.
2. Pick Text Editor -> File Extesion fom a tree at the left part of Options dialog.
3. Type skin in Extesion text box.
4. Select User Control Editor from Editor dropdown.
5. Click Add and then Ok to close dialog and re-open your skin files.
6. Say something corny about Microsoft.

Enjoy!

PS You can probably skip step 6 but it really helps you to feel better

Last week I've spent few hours fighting really weird problem. One of our clients host their website at GoDaddy's shared hosting. There is a contact form on this site, that after being filled with some data sends email to site owners. We've been testing this feature on our developments environment and our local production servers and everithing worked just fine. But after we moved to GoDaddy's hosting emails just stoped working. I've spend couple hours trying different approaches using both - new System.Net.Mail (.NET 2.0) and deprecated System.Web.Mail (.NET 1.1) namespaces. Same thing, works at our environment and doesn't work at GoDaddy's hosting.

That's where I gave up and started on googling. I stampted on this post at ASP.NET forum and that's what solved my problem. Turns out GoDaddy doesn't allow to use any smtp servers other than ones they host. Unfortunate thing is that our customer host email server at their ISP and all my attempts to create email account ended up with "pening. validating MX record" status. I found solution by using GoDaddy's smtp relay smtpout.secureserver.net. In order to use it you had to create domain level email acount (for another domain this customer use) through their online "Hosting Account" console and for this account enable smtp relay. Unfortunatelly they limit it to 250 messages per day but that was more than enough in our case. Hope this will help somebody to find a quick way out, out of the shared hosting forest.