ASP.NET Debugging Timeout

When you debug ASP.NET applications in IIS using Debug -> Attach To Process… and you keep the w3wp.exe process hanged on a code line for too long, it is automatically recycled and you lose your debugging session. To avoid that, go to the IIS Management Console, edit the application pool properties and set Ping Enabled = false.

ASP.NET projects deployed with Web Deployment Project 2005 do not load localized resources

Scott Guthrie explains how to use VS 2005 Web Deployment Project in his blog. But if you use global resources to localize your ASP.NET application and sign and version your web deployment assembly, these localized resources will not load. If you look at the fusion log, you will find an entry like follows:

Calling assembly : Memba.WebSite.XP, Version=1.1.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=a4ae091aa8097a5a.
===
LOG: This bind starts in default load context.
LOG: Using application configuration file: C:\inetpub\wwwroot\VelodocXP\web.config.
LOG: Using host configuration file: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Aspnet.config.
LOG: Using machine configuration file from C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\config\machine.config.
LOG: Post-policy reference: Memba.WebSite.XP.resources, Version=0.0.0.0, Culture=fr, PublicKeyToken=a4ae091aa8097a5a
LOG: The same bind was seen before, and was failed with hr = 0x80131040.
ERR: Unrecoverable error occurred during pre-download check (hr = 0x80131040).

The problem comes from the fact that aspnet_merge.exe versions your satellite resource assemblies as "0.0.0.0" whatever the version number you set for your web deployment strong named assembly.

I have not found any way to version satellite assemblies according to the main assembly, but the following workaround works:

1. Create an AssemblyInfo.cs class file in your App_Code directory;
   
2. Include the typical information including versioning information;
3. Add [assembly: System.Resources.SatelliteContractVersion ("0.0.0.0")]
   

Write about Velodoc, get a free license and a chance to win $100 cash

To celebrate the new releases of Velodoc Enterprise Edition, Velodoc XP Edition and Velodoc Outlook Add-In due in September, we will reward the best articles and blog posts written about Velodoc with a $100 cash payment to a Paypal account. The contest will run for the months of September, October and November 2008 and one article or blog post will be rewarded with the $100 cash prize each month. Better, all participants who have submitted a compliant article or blog post will get a full license serial number of Memba Velodoc Outlook Add-In worth $37 for free.

How does it work?

1. Write and publish a new 'How-to' article or blog post comprising (definition of a compliant blog post):
   
   • At least 250 words giving advice, tips or a tutorial on any Velodoc product in any language that we can translate with Google translation tools,
     
   • a screenshot of Memba Velodoc,
     
   • 3 hyperlinks, respectively to www.velodoc.com, www.velodoc.net, and www.memba.com.
     
2. Submit a comment here with a link to your blog post and how to contact you if you are the winner.
   
3. All participants commit to keep the blog post published for a year. Participation is limited to one original blog post per individual.
   
4. We require at least 5 participating blog posts in a month to allocate the prize. Otherwise these blog posts will compete with the blog posts submitted on the following month. If this occurs in November, the contest will continue until we have 5 participating blog posts, so there should be a winner anyway.
   
5. Participating blog posts will be judged on (1) quality of content and (2) number of referrals sent to our web sites as reported by our traffic analysis tools.
   
6. The winning blog posts will be published here below.
   
7. At the end of the contest, full licenses of Memba Velodoc Outlook Add-In will be made available to all participants who have submitted a compliant blog post.
   
8. For any question, use our contact form.
   

Note that the process is completely transparent: all participating and winning blog posts will be available here as hyperlinks for anyone to read them.

September winner: <to be announced>

October winner: <to be announced>

November winner: <to be announced>

The Velodoc Outlook Add-In is being released

We are currently releasing the Outlook Add-In for Velodoc. We have posted a quick video tour on YouTube. This video demonstrates how to send large files to email contacts using Memba Velodoc Outlook Add-In and various file transfer server platforms including Velodoc servers, FTP servers, UNC File Shares, Microsoft BITS Servers and Amazon S3.



You can also find the high-definition version of the video tour on Silverlight Streaming Services.

Memba Velodoc Outlook Add-In is open-source and you can download the code from:

• Codeplex
• Google code
• Sourceforge.net

Error 1316 when installing Office 2007 PIA’s

If you build a setup for an Office 2007 VSTO add-in following the steps described in Deploying Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Second Edition Solutions Using Windows Installer, your setup may report that the installation of the Office 2007 PIA's have failed. Looking at the log or installing o2007PIA.msi separately, you will get "Error 1316. Setup cannot read from file <tempdir>\PIARedist.msi. Check your connection to the network, or CD-ROM drive. For other potential solutions to this problem, see SETUP.CHM".

This occurs on fresh installs of Office 2007 with Microsoft Business Contact Manager and more generally, it seems to occur on any computer which has the Office 2007 PIA's installed using another installer than o2007pia.msi, which is the one Microsoft recommends using.

There seems to be a workaround which is to rename o2007pia.msi into PIARedist.msi both in the file system where bootstrapper packages are stored and in the product.xml file as shown below:

<PackageFiles>
<PackageFile Name="PIARedist.msi"/>
<PackageFile Name="ComponentCheck.exe"/>
</PackageFiles>

...

<Command PackageFile="PIARedist.msi"
Arguments=""
EstimatedInstalledBytes="30000000"
EstimatedInstallSeconds="60">

You will need to rebuild your setup project.

Please let me know if this workaround does not work for you.

Validating email notification HTML for Outlook 2007

Velodoc issues numerous email notifications. The presentation uses the latest CSS tags and sophisticated layered HTML. Everything worked fine in Outlook 2003 which uses Internet Explorer as the HTML rendering engine. Outlook 2007 and its Word 2007 rendering engine broke many little things.

Although it is definitely a step back in terms of HTML rendering capability for emails, everything is explained in Word 2007 HTML and CSS Rendering Capabilities in Outlook 2007. The article comes with a very handy tool to validate HTML and CSS in your development environment.

I have not been able to install the tool for Visual Studio 2005 SP1 on Windows Vista Ultimate x64 because I could not instantly find the registry keys described in the setup instructions, but it works perfectly with Dreamweaver 8 provided you replace "Dreamweaver MX 2004" by "Dreamweaver 8" in the default installation path.

FileNotFoundException in Visual Studio Setup Project

The Velodoc XP setup project would consistently fail on a specific Windows Server 2003 server of ours but not on other computers of our network. The complete issue is described at http://www.codeplex.com/VelodocXP/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=1005. The error message was:

Exception occurred while initializing the installation: System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'file:///C:\WINDOWS\system32\and' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

Obviously, there is no such "C:\WINDOWS\system32\and" file in our application or on the system. MSI logs and fusion logs would not give any more information.

We have been puzzled by this issue for quite some time. We have finally removed features from our setup one by one until we have been able to identify that a specific custom action was at the source of the problem.

In the literature and samples that you will find regarding developing Visual Studio setup projects, custom action data is passed in the form /NAME = VALUE which works fine unless value contains a space.

The reference documentation at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/2w2fhwzz.aspx states that in setup custom actions, data should be passed as:

/NAME = VALUE if not a directory and value has no space
/NAME = "VALUE" if spaces are expected in a value which is not a directory
/NAME = "VALUE\" if the expected value is a directory

I wish we had not simply read how-to articles and sample code, but also the reference documentation.

Installing Visual Studio Extensions for WCF after an upgrade to .NET 3.0 Service Pack 1

Yesterday, I got stuck installing Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (WCF & WPF), November 2006 CTP after my computer had been upgraded to .NET Framework 3.0 Service Pack 1. The installation fails with a warning that a prerequisite, i.e. Microsoft .NET framework 3.0, is missing.

A quick search on the Internet gave me the following trick which works:

1. Add the following key and value to the registry aimed at luring the installer:
   [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\{15095BF3-A3D7-4DDF-B193-3A496881E003}]
   "DisplayName"="Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0"
   
2. Install vsextwfx.msi.
   
3. Remove the key above.
   

Source: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2550726&SiteID=1.
Thanks Erich.

New series of articles in relation to Velodoc XP Edition

We have released a series of articles on codeproject.com in relation to Velodoc XP Edition:

1. An information box control to display messages using Ajax,
   
2. Using Ajax to display the progress of an ASP.NET server task,
   
3. An Ajax image list control to manage lists of items displayed with icons,
   
4. MultiUpload, a smarter file upload server control using Ajax,
   
5. Professional file uploads with the MultiUpload and ImageList server controls.
   

Enjoy the reading.

Velodoc XP Edition released as open-source

Customers have been asking us about building Velodoc functionality into their own .NET applications. This is now possible with Velodoc XP Edition which has been released as an open-source project and published on:

• http://www.codeplex.com/VelodocXP
  
• http://code.google.com/p/velodocxp
  
• http://velodocxp.sourceforge.net
  

Velodoc XP Edition includes:

• ASP.NET Ajax server controls, http modules and http handlers which provide file upload and download functionality;
  
• A sample application for sending and receiving large files;
  
• A comprehensive documentation kit.
  

By releasing the core of the Velodoc platform as an open-source project, we expect to gather more customer intelligence and improve the software, so please provide feedback.