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• Fix: Orchard Error ‘The controller for path '/OrchardLocal/' was not found or does not implement IController.

  - by Ken Cox [MVP]

  Suddenly, in a local Orchard 1.6 project, I started getting this error in ShellRoute.cs: The controller for path '/OrchardLocal/' was not found or does not implement IController. Obviously I had changed something, but the error wasn’t helping much.  After losing far too much time, I copied over the original Orchard source code and was back in business. Shortly thereafter, I further flattened my forehead by applying a sudden, solid blow with the lower portion of my palm! You see, in testing the importing of comments via blogML, I had set the added blog as the Orchard site’s Start page. Then, I deleted the blog so I could test another import batch. The upshot was that by deleting the blog, Orchard no longer had a default (home) page at the root of the site. The site’s default content was missing. The fix was to go to the Admin subdirectory (http://localhost:30320/OrchardLocal/admin) . add a new page, and check Set as homepage. Once again, the problem was between the keyboard and the chair. I hope this helps someone else. Ken

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• Fix: Windows Live Mail Error ID 0x8004108D

  - by Ken Cox [MVP]

  Over the last few days Windows Live Mail stopped fetching my Hotmail. I assumed it was a problem with Microsoft’s NNTP Web service, so I went back to using the browser to check my Hotmail. Well, it didn’t right itself, so I started probing and discovered the fix… no default connection. To repair it: From the Tools menu, click Accounts. On the Accounts screen select Hotmail and then click Properties. On the Connection tab select Local Area Network and check the Always Connect to This Account Using...(read more)

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• Display ‘–Select–’ in an ASP.NET DropDownList

  - by Ken Cox [MVP]

  A purchaser of my book writes: “I would like a drop down list to display the text: "-Select-" initially instead of the first value of the data it is bound to.” Here you go…   <%@ Page Language="VB" %> <script runat="server">     Protected Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As Object, _                            ...(read more)

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• Help A Hacker: Give ‘Em The Windows Source Code

  - by Ken Cox [MVP]

  The announcement of another Windows megapatch reminded me of a WikiLeaks story about Microsoft Windows that hasn’t attracted much attention. Alarmingly, we learn that the hackers have the Windows source code to study and test for vulnerabilities. Chinese hackers used the knowledge to breach Google’s accounts and servers: “In 2003, the CNITSEC signed a Government Security Program (GSP) international agreement with Microsoft that allowed select companies such as TOPSEC access to Microsoft source code in order to secure the Windows platform” “CNITSEC enterprises has recruited Chinese hackers in support of nationally-funded "network attack scientific research projects." From June 2002 to March 2003, TOPSEC employed a known Chinese hacker, Lin Yong (a.k.a. Lion and owner of the Honker Union of China), as senior security service engineer…” Windows is widely seen as unsecurable. It doesn’t help that Chinese government-funded hackers are probing the source code for vulnerabilities. It seems odd that people who didn’t write the code can find vulnerabilities faster than the owners of the code. Perhaps the U.S. government should hire its own hackers to go over the same Windows source code and then tell Microsoft how to secure its product?

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• ASP.NET and Visual Studio 2010 – Service Pack 1

  - by Ken Cox [MVP]

  Want to have a say in what goes into the ASP.NET bits of service pack 1 for VS 2010? Well, spend a few minutes filling out the online survey posted by the ASP.NET team: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MLCDPN7 If your most urgent fix doesn’t make it into service pack 1, it might be because you didn’t speak up and provide details at the right time – like now!   Ken...(read more)

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• EF 4’s PluralizationService Class: A Singularly Impossible Plurality

  - by Ken Cox [MVP]

  Entity Framework’s new 4.0 designer does its best to generate correct plural and singular forms of object names. This magic is done through the PluralizationService Class found in the System.Data.Entity.Design.PluralizationServices namespace and in the System.Data.Entity.Design.dll assembly. [Before you ask… Yes, I’ll post my example page, the service, and the project source code as soon as my ISP makes ASP.NET 4 RTM available. Stay tuned.] Anyone who speaks English is brutally aware of the ridiculous...(read more)

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• Extracting the Date from a DateTime in Entity Framework 4 and LINQ

  - by Ken Cox [MVP]

  In my current ASP.NET 4 project, I’m displaying dates in a GridDateTimeColumn of Telerik’s ASP.NET Radgrid control. I don’t care about the time stuff, so my DataFormatString shows only the date bits: <telerik:GridDateTimeColumn FilterControlWidth="100px"   DataField="DateCreated" HeaderText="Created"    SortExpression="DateCreated" ReadOnly="True"    UniqueName="DateCreated" PickerType="DatePicker"    DataFormatString="{0:dd MMM yy}"> My problem was that I couldn’t get the built-in column filtering (it uses Telerik’s DatePicker control) to behave.  The DatePicker assumes that the time is 00:00:00 but the data would have times like 09:22:21. So, when you select a date and apply the EqualTo filter, you get no results. You would get results if all the time portions were 00:00:00. In essence, I wanted my Entity Framework query to give the DatePicker what it wanted… a Date without the Time portion. Fortunately, EF4 provides the TruncateTime  function. After you include Imports System.Data.Objects.EntityFunctions You’ll find that your EF queries will accept the TruncateTime function. Here’s my routine: Protected Sub RadGrid1_NeedDataSource _     (ByVal source As Object, _      ByVal e As Telerik.Web.UI.GridNeedDataSourceEventArgs) _     Handles RadGrid1.NeedDataSource     Dim ent As New OfficeBookDBEntities1     Dim TopBOMs = From t In ent.TopBom, i In ent.Items _                   Where t.BusActivityID = busActivityID _       And i.BusActivityID And t.ItemID = i.RecordID _       Order By t.DateUpdated Descending _       Select New With {.TopBomID = t.TopBomID, .ItemID = t.ItemID, _                        .PartNumber = i.PartNumber, _                        .Description = i.Description, .Notes = t.Notes, _                        .DateCreated = TruncateTime(t.DateCreated), _                        .DateUpdated = TruncateTime(t.DateUpdated)}     RadGrid1.DataSource = TopBOMs End Sub Now when I select March 14, 2011 on the DatePicker, the filter doesn’t stumble on time values that don’t make sense. Full Disclosure: Telerik gives me (and other developer MVPs) free copies of their suite.

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• VSTO is Free But Aspose is Speed

  - by Ken Cox [MVP]

  I’ve taken over the completion, deployment, and maintenance of an ASP.NET Web site that generates Office documents using VSTO. VSTO’s a decent concept and works fine for small-scale scenarios like a desktop app or small intranet. However, with multiple simultaneous requests via ASP.NET, we found the Web server performance suffered badly. To spread out the server’s workload, I implemented MSMQ task queuing via a WCF Windows service.  That helped a lot. IIS didn’t drag with only one VSTO/Office instance running. But I  still found it taking too long to produce a single report. A nicely formatted VSTO Excel document was taking 45 minutes.  (The client  didn’t know any better and therefore considered 45 minutes tolerable.) On my own time, I pulled out an old copy of Aspose.Total for .NET. Within an hour, I had converted the VSTO Excel C# code to Aspose Cells code. The improvement was astonishing: Instead of the 45-minutes, the report took under a minute! I’ve pasted the client’s exact chat response after he tried the speedy Aspose version: “WWWWWOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Microsoft’s VSTO is a free product while the Aspose components cost $$$.  Certainly, it can be a tough call when budgets are tight. If you’re trying to convince the client to shell out for something more suitable for the application, get an eval version of Aspose.Total and offer a direct comparison demo. Ken Full Disclosure: Aspose (like several other component vendors) gives free copies of their suite to MVPs and other .NET influencers.

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• Fix: WCF - The type provided as the Service attribute value in the ServiceHost directive could not

  - by Ken Cox [MVP]

  I wanted to expose some raw data to users in my current ASP.NET 3.5 web site project. I created a subdirectory called ‘datafeeds’ and added a WCF Data Service. I wired the dataservice up to the Entity Framework class and, on running the ItemDataService.svc file, was greeted with: The type  <> provided as the Service attribute value in the ServiceHost directive could not be found So why couldn’t it find the class? It was right there in the… oops! Instead of putting the ItemDataService.vb...(read more)

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• ASP.NET/IIS Fix: The 'Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0' provider is not registered on the local machine.

  - by Ken Cox [MVP]

  In my latest ASP.NET project, I refresh the sample data using an Excel spreadsheet from the client. After upgrading to Windows Server 2008 R2, I suddenly discovered this error: The 'Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0' provider is not registered on the local machine. The error message is totally bogus! The problem is that I’m running IIS on a 64-bit machine and the ol’ OLEDB thingy just isn’t up with the times. To fix it, go into the IIS Manager and find out which Application Pool the site is using. In my case...(read more)

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• Fix: Azure Disabled over 49 cents? Beware of using a Java Virtual Machine on Microsoft Azure

  - by Ken Cox [MVP]

  I love my MSDN Azure account. I can spin up a demo/dev app or VM in seconds. In fact, it is so easy to create a virtual machine that Azure shut down my whole account! Last night I spun up a Java Virtual Machine to play with some Android stuff. My mistake was that I didn’t read the Virtual Machine pricing warning: “I have a MSDN Azure Benefit subscription. Can I use my monthly Azure credits to purchase Oracle software?” “No, Azure credits in our MSDN offers are not applicable to Oracle software. In order to purchase Oracle software in the MSDN Azure Benefit subscription, customers need to turn off their {0} spending limit and pay at the regular pay-as-you-go rate. Otherwise, Oracle usage will hit the {1} spending limit and the subscription will be immediately disabled.”  Immediately disabled? Yup. Everything connected to the subscription was shut off, deallocated, rendered useless - even the free Web sites and the free Sendgrid email service.  The fix? I had to remove the spending limit from my account so I could pay $0.49 (49 cents) for the JVM usage. I still had $134.10 in credits remaining for regular usage with 6 days left in the billing month.  Now the restoration/clean-up begins… figuring out how to get the web sites and services back online.  To me, the preferable way would be for Azure to warn me when setting up a JVM that I had no way of paying for the service. In the alternative, shut down just the offending services – the ones that can’t be covered by the regular credits. What a mess.

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• EF 4 Pluralization Update

  - by Ken Cox [MVP]

  I previously wrote about playing with EF 4’s PluralizationService class . Now that OrcsWeb is running ASP.NET 4, you can play with my little pluralization page and its WCF service online. The source code (such as it is!) can be downloaded from the MSDN Code Gallery here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/PluralizationService BTW, one annoyance is that the WDSL still includes the default namespace:  namespace="http://tempuri.org/" I swatted a couple of these instances, but if you know...(read more)

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• Not Happy With the Monochrome Visual Studio 11 Beta UI

  - by Ken Cox [MVP]

  I can’t wait for a third-party to come out with tools to return some colour to the flat, monochrome look of Visual Studio 11 (beta). What bugs me most are the icons. I feel like a newbie when I have to squint and analyze the shape of icons on the debugging toolbar just to get the one I want. (Fortunately, the meddlers didn’t mess with the keyboard commands so I’m not totally lost.) Not sure what usability studies told MS that bland is better. Maybe it is for most people, but not for me.  Gray, shades of gray and black. Ugh. And don’t get me started on the stupidity of using all-caps for window titles. Who approved that? I see that there’s a UserVoice poll on the topic (http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/2623017-add-some-color-to-visual-studio-11-beta) but I doubt that anything will change Microsoft’s opinion in time for the release. Once a product gets to a stable beta, most non-crashing stuff gets pushed to the next version. I hope I’m proved wrong. Fortunately, Visual Studio is quite customizable. Unless ‘Bland’ is hard-coded, some registry tweaks and a collection of replacement icons should allow dissenters like me back to productivity. BTW, other than hating the UI, VS 11 beta is working quite well for me on a .NET 4 project.Note: Although my username for the ASP.NET domain includes the letters "[MVP]", I'm no longer an MVP. Apparently it's nearly impossible to change a username in the system. My apologies for the misleading identifier but I tried to have it changed without success.

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• The Importance of Using !important in CSS Styles

  - by Ken Cox [MVP]

  I just lost time trying to hide a CSS border in a third-party control, so it’s worth a quick post to help others avoid similar frustration. I could plainly see in the Internet Explorer 8 developer tool that an unwanted border in the Telerik RadRotator   was coming from the style classes named .RadRotator_Web20 and .rrClipRegion. So, to remove the border, I inserted my own style in the page as an override: .RadRotator_Web20 .rrClipRegion {     border: 0px; } No change! WTF??? Okay...(read more)

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• Repairing The Visual Studio 2012 UI

  - by Ken Cox [MVP]

  I have sympathy for ‘Softies who don’t like the controversial ‘Metro’ UI changes but are afraid to say so. After all, who wants to commit a CLM (Career-Limiting Move) by declaring that the Emperor has no clothes (or gradients) and that ALL CAPS IN MENUS ARE DUMB? Talk about power! Here’s a higher-up (anyone got a name?) who has enforced a flat, monochrome, uninteresting user interface in Visual Studio 2012  that has been damned with faint praise by consumers. The pushback must have been enormous. Some ‘Softies disengage from the raging debate with, “It’s not my decision” while others feebly point out that the addition of some colour pixels in the icons is a real improvement over the beta version. True, I guess. With the UI pretty much locked, its down to repairing the damage. Fortunately, some Empire dissident has leaked the news to a blogger that  those SHOUTING CAPs aren’t hardcoded afterall: How To Prevent Visual Studio 2012 ALL CAPS Menus And so it goes. By RTM, I’m sure there will be many more add-ons to help us ‘de-Metro’ VS 2012 and recreate our favourite Visual Studio 2010 themes for it.

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• Free Team Foundation Service a Boon for Play Projects

  - by Ken Cox [MVP]

  My ‘jump in and sink or swim’ learning style leads me to create dozens of unbillable ‘play’ projects in Visual Studio 2012.  For example, I’m currently learning to customize the powerful auction/fixed price/classifieds software called AuctionWorx Enterprise.  I make stupid mistakes as I grasp a new API and configure projects. It’s frustrating to go down a rat hole and discover the VS IDE’s Undo doesn’t reach back to a working build from the previous weekend. Enter Visual Studio’s Free Team Foundation Service.  Put your play projects into the free source control and check in (or shelve) a snapshot before embarking on something risky. (I already use Discount ASP.NET’s Team Foundation Server hosting for client projects so there’s zero TFS/VS learning curve for me and first class GUI support.) TFS is free right now for teams of five or fewer. I’m not naive enough to expect ‘free’ to last forever. So, it’ll be interesting to see how much Microsoft intends to charge in 2013 for TFS. In the meantime, why not grab some free source code storage? BTW, it’s weird to realize that Microsoft is backing up my junky little playtime code on three physically-distinct servers every day - and taking incremental backups every hour.

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• MIX10 Big Announcements Speculation

  - by Ken Cox [MVP]

  What’s your speculation on the big announcements to come from MIX10 ? A date for VS 2010 availability on MSDN? A release candidate for Silverlight 4 on the desktop? An SDK for Silverlight on Windows Mobile 7? A CTP of Internet Explorer 9? Something (anything!) new on Windows Live ID development? More JQuery in ASP.NET? Alas, the vast majority of .NET developers (me included) can’t attend the MIX conference again this year. Fortunately, Channel 9 is putting much of the important content online . They...(read more)

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• Tell Visual Studio 2012 UI Designers What to Fix

  - by Ken Cox [MVP]

  If you hate the default interface themes in Visual Studio 2012 as much as I do, you have another outlet to vent. The UI designers have posted a survey where you can tell them how distracting and annoying you find the gray themes and black icons. You even get to comment on the (fixable) all-caps issue. The UI people didn’t listen much to the (largely hostile) developer feedback during the product design – or more likely were constrained by some edict from on high - but seem more willing now to create decent themes for updates. Here’s the Visual Studio 2012 Visual Theme survey URL https://illumeweb.smdisp.net/collector/Survey.ashx?Name=VS2012ThemeSurvey VS 2012 is a great product hampered by a lousy UI. If I could have a Visual Studio 2010 theme (with its coloured icons) I’d be more than satisfied with the 2012 release.

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• Get the following error when running Software Updater

  - by Curtis Cox

  W:Failed to fetch cdrom://Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal - Beta i386 (20120926)/dists/quantal/main/binary-i386/Packages Please use apt-cdrom to make this CD-ROM recognized by APT. apt-get update cannot be used to add new CD-ROMs , W:Failed to fetch cdrom://Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal - Beta i386 (20120926)/dists/quantal/restricted/binary-i386/Packages Please use apt-cdrom to make this CD-ROM recognized by APT. apt-get update cannot be used to add new CD-ROMs , E:Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

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• Value Not Updating? Check for Caching!

  - by Ken Cox [MVP]

  Here’s today’s dumb mistake: A value that was supposedly updated by a routine on one page, wasn’t changing on another ASP.NET screen. I carefully traced the progress of the update and everything looked right – all the way to the database. After puzzling over why the value wouldn’t show correctly on the ASP.NET grid, it finally dawned on me: <%@ OutputCache Duration="30" VaryByParam="none" %> Ouch! To improve efficiency, I had told the page to cache the output for 30 seconds...(read more)

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• Web Development Goes Pre-Visual InterDev

  - by Ken Cox [MVP]

  As a longtime and hardcore ASP.NET webforms developer, I’m finding the new client-side development world a bit of a grind.  I love learning new technologies, but I can’t help feeling we’ve regressed and lost our old RAD advantage as we move heavy lifting to the client. For my latest project, I’m using Telerik’s KendoUI in Visual Studio 2012. To say I feel clumsy writing this much JavaScript is an understatement. It seems like the only safe way to ‘write’ this code is by copying a working snippet from someone else and pasting it into my HTML page.  For me, JavaScript has largely been for small UI tasks like client-side validation and a bit of AJAX – and often emitted by a server-side control. I find myself today lost in nests of curly braces that Ctrl+K, Ctrl+D doesn’t seem to understand that well either. IntelliSense, my old syntax saviour, doesn’t seem to have kept up with this cobweb of code either. Code completion? Not seeing it. As I fumbled about this evening, I thought about how web development rocketed forward when Microsoft introduced Visual InterDev. Its Design-Time Controls (DTCs) changed the way we created sites. All the iterations of Visual Studio have enhanced that server-side experience where you let a tool write the bulk of the code and manually finesse it from there. What happened? Why am I typing  properties and values (especially default values!) into VS 2012 to get a client-side grid on a page? Where are the drag and drop objects that traditionally provided 70 percent of the mark-up and configuration?  Did we forget how to write Property Pages where you enter a value and the correct syntax appears magically in the source code? To me, the tooling was looking the other way as the scene shifted from server-side code to nimble client-side script. It’ll have to catch up. Although JavaScript is the lingua franca of web browsers, the language is unwieldy, tough to maintain, and messy to debug. If a .NET JIT compiler can turn our VB, F#, and C# source code into an Intermediate Language that executes on a computer, I don’t see why there can’t be a client-side compiler that turns a .NET language into JavaScript that browsers can consume.

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• Elantech trackpad being identified as a logitech wheel mouse.

  - by Nathan Cox

  I recently purchased a Samsung RF510 laptop computer, which I absolutely love. However, upon installing Ubuntu 10.10 onto it I couldn't get the trackpad to function properly. It worked as a basic mouse (point and click) but had no functionality for edge scrolling or any of the multitouch settings the trackpad is capable of. After doing a lot of research I discovered the reason is a known issue where the Ubuntu kernel will improperly detect an Elantech trackpad as a logitech PS/2 wheel mouse, and as such will gain none of the functionality that seems to be coded for synaptics trackpads. The question I have is: does anyone know a way to get this working properly? This is my first time trying to run Ubuntu on a laptop (actually, it's my first laptop in the last 12 years) and I'm finding the experience to be intolerable without the basic scrolling/zooming/etc I've been used to using for as long as I can remember.

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• Windows Cloud Services Aren’t Exclusive to Microsoft

  - by Ken Cox [MVP]

  The Windows Azure brand has captured mindshare for the buzzword-du-jour, ‘cloud computing’. However, Microsoft certainly isn’t the only option for cranking up virtual machines to meet unexpected or peak demands. For example, I see that OrcsWeb has released its Windows Cloud Servers product , starting at $99.99 a month*.  Competition is a good thing - and make sure you do some cost comparisons when researching cloud resources. Some of us were unpleasantly surprised by Azure’s pricing structure...(read more)

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• A Skill Testing (Search Engine) Calculation

  - by Ken Cox [MVP]

  To claim a contest prize, I had to answer the following skill-testing question: 1000 - 50 / 2 x 10 Okay, it’s not a problem as long as you know about operator precedence. As a developer, my brain automatically supplied brackets. I was curious as to whether this exact skill-testing question is commonly-used in online contests, so I Googled the formula. To my amazement, Google returned the result of the calculation – complete with brackets: 1 000 - ((50 / 2) x 10) = 750 (Google) Bing also has a calculator...(read more)

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• Creating a SQL Azure Database Should be Easier

  - by Ken Cox [MVP]

  Every time I try to create a database + tables + data for Windows Azure SQL I get errors.  One of them is 'Filegroup reference and partitioning scheme' is not supported in this version of SQL Server.' It’s partly due to my poor memory (since I’ve succeeded before) and partly due to the failure of tools that should be helping me. For example, when I want to create a script from an existing database on my local workstation, I use SQL Server Management Studio (currently v 11.0.2100.60).  I go to Tasks > Generate Scripts which brings up the nice Generate and Publish Scripts wizard. When I go into the Advanced button, under Script for Server Version, why don’t I see SQL Azure as an option by now? The tool should be sorting this out for me, right? Maybe this is available in SQL Server Data Tools? I haven’t got into that yet. Just merge the functionality with SSMS, please. Anyway, I pick an older version of SQL for the target and still need to tweak it for Azure. For example, I take out all the “[dbo].” stuff. Why is it put there by the wizard? I also have to get rid of "ON [PRIMARY]"  to deal with the error I noted at the top. Yes, there’s information on what a table needs to look like in SQL Azure but the tools should know this so I don’t have to mess with it.

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