The status code returned from the server was: 12031

If you checked anything on your mind about this code, it may be because of StackOverflow exception rised within your code / or in .NET which is less possible.


Just to let you know as it happened to me ;).

Rad Ajax controls Q3 2010 is now live!

Just a quick post to let you know that you can download and play with the Q3 2010 version of Telerik's Asp.Net AJAX controls.

What's new:
1. RadTreeList, a control that is hybrid, combining treeview and a list view.
2. RadButton - inherits the functionality of LinkButton, Button and ImageButton and ads more such as the abillity to combine text and image, toggle modes and more. Combined with rich client side API.
3. RadCalendar now has long anticipated feature - the range selection will allow you to select date ranges.
4. Multi month view with postback enabled.


And many more.
Visit Stefan Rahnev's blogpost or the Telerik Labs for more details on the beta.

Internet Explorer 8 difference between CTRL + R / CTRL + F5 / F5 and enter in the address bar.

I see there is some difference.
We are currently having issue under IE in our site and we noticed that using any of the combinations will casue the Facebook Button to disappear.
If you click in the address bar and then click enter you will see the facebook buttons appear.

Very strange behavior.

A program in Fortran :)

I am blogging from my university :).
In case you need to write a program in Fortran to calculate the length of a line between tow points, there it is:

program otsechka
implicit none

integer::p1x, p1y, p2x, p2y
real:: resultX, resultY
real::finalResult

write(*,*)'P1 x : '
read(*,*)p1x
write(*,*)'P1 y : '
read(*,*)p1y
write(*,*)'P2 x : '
read(*,*)p2x
write(*,*)'P2 x : '
read(*,*)p2y
resultX = p2x - p1x
resultY = p2y - p1y
! ** 2 is to the power of 2.
finalResult = Sqrt((resultX ** 2) + (resultY ** 2))
write(*,*)finalResult
end

Nice, huh ;).

It's time to vote again!

It is again time to vote for your best tools in the software development.
Don't waste time, showing some love to one vendor or another will help that vendor push harder in the right direction.

So click on the image and show some love to your favorite vendor.

Being more productive with command aliases in Visual Studio 2010

We all know we are trying to cut the mouse usage to the lowest possible rate (are we getting back to DOS)?

I think it is easier to hit few keystrokes instead navigating through 4-5 levels of menus.

So here is a nice article on the Commands window usage in Visual Studio that may help you run faster through this:

Understanding Commands: Aliases

Site is recycled + ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem

Just to let you know that you may experience this issue.

If you have an unhandled exception it may be because of a job queued using ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem method.

Actually it appears that although the exception is not affecting the main thread (it was in another one) - the .NET will kill the running process (w3wp in our case).

As far as I read this behavior is implemented since .NET Framework 2.0.
It is because you may miss unhandled exceptions in a child thread (if it's in the main thread the process will be terminated in a windows application).

I imagine each request to a web server as a separate thread so I am kind of worried why unhandled exceptions aren't killing the W3WP process as well.
It only seems to be killed if you create another thread in the request thread and this another child thread exits with unhandled exception.

Will need to investigate a bit more about that.

Q2 2010 is comming!

Telerik RadControls for Asp.Net Ajax and



Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC are released.


See this post for more information on the cool new things included!


Enjoy!

Thread was being aborted. Exception on Response.Redirect()

This is actually an old issue but I try to make sure I have most of the things that stopped me at some point so I can easilly search.

So if you experience the "Thread was being aborted." exception on Response.Redirect(string Url), it is because this method internally calls Response.End().

In order to prevent it to do so, you will need to use the overloaded version that requires another boolean parameter (something like "bool endResponse", don't remember it exactly).

So the thing that should solve it is:

Response.Redirect("http://donchevp.blogspot.com", false);
This way you should avoid "Thread was being aborted.".

Hope I helped a bit ...

Go download Telerik Ultimate collection trial!

We have the Ultimate collection uploaded @ telerik.com.
You can reach it by using the green "Download"button at the top of the page.



Included in the bundle you will find:

1. RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX
2. Extensions for ASP.NET MVC
3. RadControls for Silverlight
4. RadControls for WPF
5. RadControls for WinForms
6. Telerik Reporting
7. Telerik OpenAccess ORM
8. JustCode
9. JustMock
10. WebUI Test Studio Dev Edition

Direct link to the page: http://www.telerik.com/download.aspx

Hope you like the new download page.

How does your manager make a coffee?

I had an architectural problem yesterday.
I was working on a methods and managers I won't disclose but will analogy instead.



Imagine you have a coffee manager. Let's name it CoffeeManager.
In my case not only I had coffee manager but also I had a SugarManager, a CupManager etc.

In order to take a coffee without sugar in a plastic cup I should do something like:

Sugar sugarObject = SugarManager.GetSugar(Sugar.None);
Cup plasticCup = CupManager.GetCup(Cups.PlasticCup);
Coffee shortCoffee = CoffeeManager.GetCoffee(sugarObject, plasticCup);

And this happens at the very frontend of the project (in ascx for example).
And not only it happens that way but the managers are spread in few different projects.

So in the frontend I need to call few different managers, get some results from them and pass those results to the manager that should be doing my job.

I also need to handle all the problems that may rise in the managers so I get a lot of code in the frontend just to get something that in my opinion for that particular case should be returned calling a single method and auto handled in the manager.

I think the front end shouldn't care about business operations that much, also as I said the managers were in different assemblies so I ended up adding few references to the frontend project.

I refactored the code so the CoffeeManager can do this job internally (drawback is that the matrix of all combinations of sugar and cup should be added as a methods in the CofeeManager, but I can live with that).

Open Access Exception : Please reformulate the query so that the parameter appears on the right side.

You may come up with this exception : Please reformulate the query so that the parameter appears on the right side. in Telerik Open Access

If you have something like:

query = query.Where(x => x.Positive == (positive ? 1 : -1));

The bolded text is an iif expression that the Open Access Linq driver cannot evaluate.

The solution is to use something like:

int iPositive = positive ? 1 : -1
This way the SQL will have the evaluated expression and will know how to deal with it.

NOTE: As far as I know this issue is fixed in the latest releases of Open Access ORM.

Telerik Open Access exception : The assembly 'xxx' does not have a config file with an openaccess node.

In some old versions of Telerik Open Access you may come to this exception.
I am not quite sure about the latest versions.
However, I've found a forum post that explains that this exception occurs if your project wasn't yet enabled for Open Access.
This wasn't my case so I tried some other things.
At the end, it appeared that "The assembly 'xxx' does not have a config file with an openaccess node" exception may occur if your app.config file is broken. It should be a valid XML file. In my case I have forgotten to close a <class> node with its corresponding </class> ...

Edit: As Yosif Yosifov stated, there is an easier way to check if your app.config file is fine. Simply select Telerik -> Open Access -> Configuration -> Check Settings ... dialog from Visual Studio menu.

US courts website runs on sitefinity

Just to inform you that the U.S. courts website was launched by DeepBlue. The site is using our CMS - Sitefinity.

Some more information about the project may be available soon.

Here is the site:

http://www.uscourts.gov/Home.aspx

Hopefully we will see some more .gov sites to be using our precious CMS.

Cool MCP business card builder site

I've build a simple business card for me at :
https://www.mcpvirtualbusinesscard.com/VBCServer/b087303c-09bf-4832-9269-83483d5c2d35/profile

You can do this also. It takes 2-3 minutes.

Nice productivity feature in Visual Studio 2010

I really like this multiline manipulation that comes out of the box with Visual Studio 2010:



I think it will really speed the development. Especially when refactoring old code with lots of lines that need to be manipulated in the same way.

By the way I am sure JustCode team will come out with lots of cool features based on this one ;)

Sitefinity 4.0 CTP is live!

Kind of late but - check out Sitefinity 4.0 CTP. http://www.sitefinity.com/4.0/asp-net-features.aspx
 
Have a great time playing with it!

String.Format

Although very convenient for example for making templates and then replace with some values, it may cause tricky problems.

I've reached a code where it was used to add some data to a javascript.
So javascript uses a lot fo curly braces, which are at the same time used for string format to know where to put its values.

There is a way to escape those braces, buy double them, so for example :
function {}
will become
function {{}}

Recently I had the "String was not in a correct format." exception. I tried to debug and found nothing wrong with the string and the values that will be placed.
That was because I was expecting the values to be wrong (null references, something like this) and not the string itself.

Guess what did I discovered after a few minutes of debugging?
It was the string that was corrupted. The problem was that this particullar javascript was in the .ascx file. Someone probably hit the CTRL + K + D so the source was re-formatted, addding some white spaces in between the doubled curly braces.

Be warned that string.Format is kind of fragile when it comes to files that may involve curly braces.

Nasty shock when handling WCF service exceptions ....

I just wanted to share a recent interesting experience while handling WCF service exceptions.

Here is the case.
Imagine you have to consume a WCF service. You need to handle if the service is gone and do some additional things (let's say you want to display a message).

Let's have an example. Imagine you have the following service:
http://someservice.com/Calculator
This service is used to calculate let's say the interest rate for a loan.
You want to be able to use the service and if the service is not there - you will want to store the borrower data in the db so you can re-submit it ...
What I did in order to test this scenario was to change :

http://someservice.com/Calculator
to
http://someservice.com/CalculatorUnavailable
so I can simulate that the service is gone.
In this case the .NET framework will throw System.ServiceModel.FaultException. It's OK, I handled it and pass it for testing.

After a few days we end up with the service gone again. And the bad news was that it was working on my machine. I needed to simulate it somehow and the problem was obviously some kind of restriction on the server.
Since we wanted to handle such scenarios as well, I wanted to somehow simulate it on my PC.

Finally after about half an hour of debugging I found out the reason.
It was the Server not able to find the domain name record for the service URL.
Then it was easy for me to figure out that if I change the url from :

http://someservice.com/Calculator
to
http://UnavailableSomeService.com/Calculator (note that it matters if you change the TLD (top level domain) or the path. You will have two different exceptions ;).
It appeared that in such cases the exception that .NET will throw is System.ServiceModel.EndpointNotFoundException.

I handled it as well and voilla!

Meet the first web server in the world! ... and the first release for this year ;)

I was browsing wikipedia to see some physical thinks about CERN and accidently found this image:



According to wikipedia this is the first web server, that sir Tim Berners Lee used in CERN when he invented the HTML to allow physisists to exchange scientific information.

Isn't this exciting?

From that server it started to end up here:


And this is not the end.
This is just the beginning.

How far can we go?
As I said, I think this is just the beginning.
We have the passion to achieve more.
We have the strength to achieve more.
That is why we do achieve more.

Push yourslef to the max,
don't worry about the controls, leave them to us :).