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Scott Hanselman

I'm surprised I'm just now noticing this. Jon Galloway hooked up the apparently unused System.Web.Handler.BatchHandler to an httpHandler and was able to precompile all his .ASPX pages. This could be useful during deployment to catch any goofs in ASPX code. Certainly not something you want on in production lest you be DoS'ed with compilation, but a helpful thing regardless.

To set this up at the machine level, add the following line to the <httpHandlers> section of %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\CONFIG\machine.config:

<add verb="*" path="precompile.axd" type="System.Web.Handlers.BatchHandler"/>

To set this up at the application level, add the you'll need to create an httpHandlers section like so: [ JonGalloway ]

<configuration>
  <system.web>
    <httpHandlers>
      <add verb="*" path="precompile.axd" type="System.Web.Handlers.BatchHandler"/>
    </httpHandlers>
  </system.web>
</configuration>

Now playing: Stevie Wonder - As

I've pretty much solved the comment-Spam problem (only one person has voiced their distaste so far) but a recently perusal of my logs and older posts indicated a ridiculous amount of referral spam. 

This is when someone hits a post on your site and has changed/hacked the HTTP Referrer Header to indicate where they came from. If your blog adds this referrer to the page, as most to, you've just linked to Hot Gay Sex (not that there's anything wrong with Hot Sex between consenting adults : ) ) or whatever by their actions.

The story goes when Google comes around, they see that you've linked to them, and they get Google Juice via the Page Rank System.

Not only is this potentially offensive to my readers, it also obscures the posts and comments when they are filled with referrals.

Potential Solutions:

• Stop printing out referrals on my pages.
• Personally, I like to see them, and I think they provide value to the reader so they can see other places with information of interest. It also promotes cross-linking between my peer blogs.
• Modify dasBlog to NOT add icky referrals.
• This would be idea. However, it will likely be in version 1.7 in some way, either via James Snape's whitelist solution (I think a whitelist removes the point of referrals, and I'll greatly prefer a keyword-based black list) or some other technique.
• I've avoided running a "private build" of dasBlog so far (as evidenced by my care in creating the CAPTCHA solution without recompiling) and I'd to continue as such
• Clean the .xml files occasionally with a process
• This is quick, easy, can be automated, and will work in the short term for me as I await dasBlog 1.7.

So, here was an opportunity to use the only dev stuff I have on my home machine, Visual Studio C# 2005 Express. 

Here's what I did. Use at your own risk, back up your /content directory, and know that this will only have to run on your "*.dayextra.xml" files from dasBlog. No error handling, no warrenty, but it worked for me. Enjoy.

Usage: TrackingFilter "c:\yourdasblogcontentdirectory"

File Attachment: TrackingFilter.zip (9 KB) (for VS.NET 2005, I don't know if it works in 2003)

WARNING: The words I put in the .config file are ; delimited and are unquestionably offensive. Not only do they include most of George Carlin's words but they also include "bloglines" and "artima" because they don't provide a value in my referral list.

I spend a lot of time with the XmlSerializer (I personally dig it immensely, and I think too many people complain about it, but anyway) and while I put up an article on how to debug directly into the generated assemblies, I noticed that Mathew Nolton has a GUI Front-End to Chris'sXmlSerializerPreCompiler.

The tool will check to see if a type can be serialized by the XmlSerializer and shows any compiler errors that happen behind the scenes. +1 for Useful, thanks Chris and Mathew.

A fellow emailed me wanting to screen scrape, er, ah, harvest a page that only displays the data he wants with a postback.

Remember what an HTTP GET looks like under the covers:

GET /whatever/page.aspx?param1=value&param2=value

Note that the GET includes no HTTP Body. That's important. With a POST the 'DATA' moves from the QueryString into the HTTP Body, but you can still have stuff in the QueryString.

POST /whatever/page.aspx?optionalotherparam1=value
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 25
param1=value&param2=value

Note the Content-Type header and the Content-Length, those are important.

A POST is just the verb for when you have an HTTP document. A GET implies you got nothing.

So, in C#, here's a GET:

public static string HttpGet(string URI)
{
   System.Net.WebRequest req = System.Net.WebRequest.Create(URI);
   req.Proxy =new System.Net.WebProxy(ProxyString, true); //true means no proxy
   System.Net.WebResponse resp = req.GetResponse();
   System.IO.StreamReader sr =new System.IO.StreamReader(resp.GetResponseStream());
   return sr.ReadToEnd().Trim();
}

Here's a POST:

I could and should have put in more 'using' statements, but you get the gist. And, there are other ways to have done this with the BCL, but this is one.

Now, how would you fake an HTTP PostBack? Use a tool like ieHttpHeaders to watch what a real postback looks like, and well, fake it. :) Just hope they don't require unique/encrypted ViewState (via ViewStateUserKey or EnableViewStateMac) for that page, or you're out of luck.

I've not been one to work the newsgroups, answering questions. I probably should. I'm more of a one on one person, and I tend to go the extra mile when folks (largely strangers) ask me technical questions. I've had email threads 10-deep with total strangers on technical questions, and only at the end do I say, "Um, do I know you?"

I haven't done what Scott Mitchell wisely did and setup a "Getting Help" policy, but I'm quickly getting there. I'll happily answer your question for $75 too, satisfaction guaranteed, and I'll blog the answer. I've done this hundreds of times for free. :)

Anyway, the point of this post was this: People, for crying out loud, debug a few things before you ask for help. If you don't know how to debug, learn or ask someone to teach you.

So, I present:

The Hanselman List of .NET Debugging Dos and Don'ts

Don't - Say "Hey, I got a NullReferenceException," what's the problem?
Do - Provide a Stack Trace/Dump with the line number it likely happened on.

Don't - Get deep into your complicated program, find a bug and insist it's BillGs fault.
Do - Reproduce the bug in some simple test program and tell the world. Remember, 9/10 times it's you.

Don't - Decide there's a problem if you don't know the preferred behavior.
Do - Always Assert your assumptions. If null can happen, check for it. BUT, if null must never happen it's time for a Debug.Assert

Don't - Move code around blindly, somehow fix your bug, ignore it and keep coding. Programming by Coincidence!
Do - Understand your program fully. Remember what Andy and Dave say about lucky folks who step into minefields and don't die. Just because you didn't die, doesn't mean there aren't mines!

Don't - Reformat or "pave" something because you don't know what's wrong. If you get a spot on your carpet, fix the spot. Don't lay new carpet.
Do - Know enough about your environment to know what your program's dependencies are. If your registry settings can get boogered, Debug.Assert that you are getting good values from the registry.

Don't - Get overly frustrated with Assembly loading/versioning/policy. At least the Assembly Loader follows clear, set, rules.
Do - Make a folder called C:\FusionLogs, then go to the registry in HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Fusion and make a DWORD value LogFailures=1 and string value LogPath=C:\FusionLogs. Every AppDomain that has a binding failure or weird redirect will get logged. Know: What assembly you want, what they looked for, what you got. Know where Assemblies are searched for.

Don't - Avoid debugging. Debugging in .NET is easier than ever before. Remote debugging and AttachToProcess are gifts. Don't stop at a point in the call stack if you can keep going by finding PDBs.
Do - Keep your Source and PDBs in the same location. We keep ZIPs of every build's PDBs. Just today we dug up 9-month old PDBs and source (from CVS) to debug into some confusion. Not saving those PDBs would have screwed us. Create a Symbol Server.

Don't - Limit yourself to the QuickWatch. Learn what VS.NET has to offer.
Do - Use the Immediate Window to test theories. Remember that you can perform Casts in the Watch Window. Remember that you can drag and drop variables into the Watch Window. Remember you have 4 Watch Windows, Autos, Locals, not to mention. Learn how to use Conditional Breakpoints!

Don't - not debug something just because you can't figure out how to launch the process from the VS.NET Project Properties.
Do - Debug|Processes|Attach to attach to processes that have your DLL loaded. Use ProcExp from SysInternals as a better Task Manager to see .NET processes, as well as a system-wide DLL search. Who's got you loaded?

It's 1:09am on Thursday, December 2nd 2004, and here's the view from my bedroom window. The house next door is burning and we share a wooden fence. Pretty exciting stuff! Fortunately, I'm not too worried, I'm in a family of fire-fighters.

P.S. For those of you not in the U.S., most, if not all, residential housing (especially in the Suburban Western U.S.) is made of wood and quite flammable. My wife's still not used to this fact, and her family isn't impressed that our family fights fires. :)

Here's a great little free util that Omar has found.  I used to move the plugin's manually to speed things up, but PDF Speedup makes me NOT DREAD opening a PDF anymore. BTW, does Acrobat 6 suck LOTS more than Acrobat 5? I HATE the new Find Dialog.

I have previously written about how darn slow Adobe Acrobat 6 is when launching. I don't understand why Acrobat is so darn annoying. Here are some things I don't care for:

* Don't create a “My eBooks“ folder in My Documents when I have nothing to put there.
* Don't load 500 plugins when none of them are necessary to view a PDF
* Don't place shortcuts for some lame Internet Printing thingy in my Start Menu (I loathe Start Menu Advertising)
* Do install a PDF IFilter so that indexing products like Lookout can index PDFs w/o installing it seperatley
* Don't load PDFs in IE because it is god awful slow
* Don't make copy and paste so freaking hard
* Don't ask me to install other Adobe software when I boot Acrobat
* Don't create an updater (6.0.2) that creates an additional entry in my add/remove programs

If you want to fix most of these things, PDF SpeedUp is a free application that should come bundled with Acrobat. It's a must have piece of software to make Acrobat behave (as much as you can anyway). [shahine.com/omar/]

There's a lot of info out there on how to cobble together NUnit Unit Testing of ASP.NET Pages and assorted goo. NUnitASP is a nice class library to facilitate this kind of testing, but it doesn't solve a few problems:

• Do you have/want a Web Server on your Test/Build machine?
• How do you get your Test Pages and such over to the Web Server? Just automatically copy them?
• Are your Test cases self-contained? That is, do they require external files and other stuff to be carried along with them?

I have a need to test a number of utility classes, base classes for System.Web.UI.Page and other miscellany and I'd like the tests to be entirely self contained and runnable only with NUnit as a requirement.

So, here's a small solution we use at Corillian. I use Cassini, the tiny ASP.NET Web Server that brokers HTTP Requests to System.Web.Hosting and the ASP.NET Page Renderer. You may know Cassini as the precursor to the Visual Developer Web Server from Visual Studio "Whidbey" 2005. Cassini usually comes with two parts, CassiniWebServer.exe and Cassini.dll.  However, I don't want to launch a executables, so I'll just refer to Cassini.dll as that is the main engine.

Cassini is the 'private Server webServer' in the code above. I'm using a fairly random port, but you could certainly scan for an open port if you like. Note that I'm building a /bin folder, as Cassini's own ASP.NET Hostingn AppDomain will look for DLLs to load in /bin.

Cassini starts up another AppDomain, and that AppDomain then loads Cassini.dll AGAIN, except the new AppDomain has a different search path that includes /bin, so it won't find Cassini.dll in the current directory. Usually this problem is solved by putting Cassini.dll in the GAC, but I want this test to be self-contained, and since I'll need my other DLLs in /bin anyway...

A couple of important things to note here. 

• This method is marked [TestFixtureSetup] rather than [Setup] as we want it to run only once for this whole Assembly, not once per test.
• We're copying all the DLLs in the current directory down to /bin for Cassini's use during the test, but we'll delete them in [TestFixtureTearDown] after Cassini's AppDomain.Unload.
• We build webServerUrl and start Cassini (remember, it's the "webServer" variable).
• At this point we are listing on http://localhost:8085/

Additionally, I've snuck a new method in, ExtractResource(). This takes the name of an Embedded Resource (one that is INSIDE our test assembly) and puts it into a directory. In this case, I'm using the current AppDomain's directory, but you could certainly use Path.GetTempPath() if you like.

The ExtractResource method takes a filename and directory (and could, if you like, take a namespace, although I've hardcoded mine) and pulls a file as a Stream of bytes that was embedded as a resource in our Assembly and puts it into a directory. Hence the name, ExtractResource(). There is a StringCollection called extractedFilesToCleanup that keeps track of all the files we'll want to delete at the end of these tests, in [TestFixtureTearDown].

At this point, I've got a web.config (which was important to my tests, and will be looked at by Cassini/System.Web.Hosting) and a test1.aspx and test2.aspx in my current directory. The Cassini Web Server is started up and listing on port 8085 for HttpRequests. I also turned Page Tracing on in the web.config which will allow me to make certain Assertions about what kinds of code were called by the Page and helper classes within the Cassini ASP.NET context.

I'll add a helper method to create HttpRequests and return the response as a string:

Now I can write some tests! My tests need to test things like the overridden behavior of custom BasePages (derived from System.Web.UI.Page) as well as some helper functions that require (to be TRULY tested) an HttpContext. However, I don't want the hassle of a CodeBehind or a lot of other files, and certainly not the effort of a whole separate test project, so I'll make my ASPX pages self contained using <% @Assembly %> directives. So, for example: 

A test to determine if this page executed successfully might look like:

You could easily expand your tests to include NUnitASP, or continue to use WebClient with specific HttpHeaders like accept-language or user-agent. One of our QA guys uses NUnit to automate the IE WebServer Control, the manipulates the DHTML DOM to make Assertions.

Finally, my cleanup code is simple, deleting all the files we extracted as well as toasting the /bin folder.

Now the WebServer, Test Cases and Test are nicely self-contained and can be moved to the CruiseControl.NET Continuous Integration Build Server. 

Enjoy. I did.

Here's a darned useful thing, the equivalent of a KB Serach for CSS and JavaScript bugs.

This is very useful: QuirksMode Bug Reports , "entirely dedicated to finding, mending, and publishing CSS and JavaScript browser bugs." You can search by browser or by keyword, or just go to that page to see the last seven reported bugs. [WebStandards]

It just kills me - literally tears me up inside - to watch people with both NUnitGui and Visual Studio.NET open who painfully switch back and forth, opening DLLs, attaching to processes, and generally cobbling together a sense of TDD.

Tell me you wouldn't rather right-click and say "Run Test" or "Test With...Debugger."

You may have used NUnitAddIn, which was a godsend. Today, Jamie and team launched