So I've just had the domain of my dev PC changed, and at first glance I thought that everything on my profile had come across nicely via MS's lovely transfer wizard (not roaming). My desktop was there, my backdrop was there... lovely. But then I noticed the little irritating things that hadn't come across, such as: Start Menu Quick Launch Lanugage Bar settings Email signatures Thankfully most of them can be re-done pretty quickly (for example, just copy your Signatures folder from the Microsoft\Signatures folder in your Documents and Settings profile to your new profil... [More]

In order to encrypt data, you need a key and the data itself. The problem comes when you need to securely store the key! Rather than go through a process of showing you how to retrieve secret keys from .exe files (which is no secret in itself!), I'm going to show you a quick way of using a key which you don't have to know in advance, you just use! .NET introduced the System.Security.Cryptography in 1.0, but the 2.0 edition added the DPAPI extension. Rather than waffling on, lets just jump into an example. The class we're focusing on is the ProtectedData class: using System; ... [More]

When using EPiServer, especially when using it on a local dev PC, you may get an error such as: "The trust relationship between the primary domain and the trusted domain failed" EPiServer have a post about the error here, but they are only talking about a full server install environment. If you're using it locally, then it's more likely that you're just using a domain account to log on, when in fact you should be using one of the internal EPiServer user accounts. I confused myself by creating a 'soft' account called 'admin' and then wondering why I was getting the error... I was logging in a... [More]

So the purpose of a Use Case is for an 'Actor' to successfully complete a 'Goal'. Fair enough. But... what if you have a Use Case like the following: Name: Hacker Compromises The Site Primary Actor: Hacker Success Criteria: Hacker obtains unauthorised access to the site Failure Criteria: Hacker cannot obtain access to the site Is this a valid Use Case for your system and, if so, then is a Success actually a system Failure? Is this just a logical paradox or a real problem? Would you just word it as follows instead? Name: Prevent Site Hacking Primary Actor: Hacker Success Criteria: Hacke... [More]

So it was decided that it was worth getting myself and one of the guys on my team actually certified on SharePoint - probably a good idea! Looks like it's not going to be a rubber-stamping of what we already know though - the course is one of these condensed 5-day blitzes where you eat, sleep and work the course. Yikes. It's not the stuff I normally do anyway, as it's the professional rather than developer perspective and I tend to get my mitts stuck in the API more than the other things. I think I'm going to learn lots and very fast. It's a bit daunting but it should be good though. Good fo... [More]

Yesterday and today, the project I was working on required catering for Mandarin and English. On my machine, the one I build the project on, the multi-lingual features worked fine, but after using the WDP (Web Deployment Projects) found that the site was always defaulting to English, even if the browser was configured as Chinese. I worte a test page, which too confirmed the website was picking up the correct culture, but for some reason ASP .NET wasn't changing it. After hours of torment, I found that 2 steps have to take place. One which I forgot to code (oops!) and one which sorted ... [More]

Today I was testing out the XmlSerializer to see how it dealt with variables instead of properties. I tried to read an XML file directly into code, and which was the most convenient: XML <myclass>      <Number1></Number1>      <Text1>Hello!</Text1>      <Decimal1>1.35262646464</Decimal1> </myclass> And now, lets see the 2 examples of source code Version 1: public class MyClass {       public int Number1;       public string Text1;       public decimal Decimal1; } Version 2: public class My... [More]

The XML comments in C# are very useful in commenting code for use with the Intellisense. The generated XML file can be used to assist other developers with the parameters, explanations of methods and use of classes. Also, with automated tools like NDoc and SandCastle, you are able to generate documentation for your source code. If you do not comment it in the right places, you can get some ugly red messages saying "<COMMENT MISSING>". The best way to ensure that all of your public methods, properties and classes are commented is to make Visual Studio generate the XML documentation fo... [More]

You may see an error when installing EPiServer using EPiManager 1.3.2: "This setup requires the .NET Framework version 2.0.50727..." Which is fine... except that if you ONLY have .NET 2.0 installed and not .NET 1.1, then you still get the error! It seems as if EPiServer has patched their EPiManager, but it still seems problemmatic. Easiest thing to do is probably just install the .NET 1.1 runtime. Remember to ensure the default is .NET 2.0 afterwards in IIS.

I've found a little glitch (by design?) in ADXSTUDIO 2006. The scenario is this... I want to give an 'Approvers' group access to approve across the whole site except for a 'Sensitive' folder, that can only be approved my managers. According to ADXSTUDIO, the way to do this is to explicitly GIVE permissions to the Approvers group everywhere except where I don't want them to have permissions. Yeah right. It's a big site :) You might think 'no probs, I'll just DENY them access to that one folder'. Nice, in theory... but in practive it spams out a nasty error when you try to do that. I guess it ... [More]