ASP.NET Resources

August 2004

Elusive View State Errors - Part II

We've done some more troubleshooting of the elusive The viewstate is invalid for this page and might be corrupted error (see part I). Browser cache didn't seem to be the primary source of trouble even though its caching level did make a difference.

8/30/2004 |

1 comment | No TrackBacks

How To Choose Translation Services

We've been involved with a translation company (no names) for about a week now, and, frankly, this has been a shocking experience. I decided to share some lessons I learned from this saga to save y'all headache should you embark on a localization campaign.

8/30/2004 |

13 comments | No TrackBacks

Book Review: Web Standards Solutions

Here goes my review of Dan Cederholm's latest book Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook (WSS). Dan is the guy behind Simple Bits—my almost daily read. His site gave me a tremendous head start when I was new to "the whole CSS thing."

8/28/2004 |

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Free Hotfix Support

While searching for Knowledge Base articles related to the mysterious view state errors we've been seeing, I found a hotfix, KB831150, The "Viewstate is invalid for this page" error message does not provide sufficient information to troubleshoot the issue." You might've noticed all hotfix downloads have disappeared from the Microsoft Support site. I've always been hesitant to call them, as KB articles suggest, until I learned that hotfix support was free.

8/26/2004 |

3 comments | No TrackBacks

Elusive View State Errors

One of the most difficult exceptions to understand is The viewstate is invalid for this page and might be corrupted. There are so many things that lead to it that it's very difficult to get to the bottom of the problem. We've been witnessing these errors for several months now, and since they occur sporadically and only on a live server we've been unable to fully resolve them. I have a guess, though, and a quick fix I've used seems to work.

8/25/2004 |

7 comments | No TrackBacks

Three Negatives Make a... What?

I don’t know if I’m on some kind of a defensive design spree or what, but I noticed another online gem last night. You can find it at Equifax, on the bottom of the user profile screen:

8/23/2004 |

1 comment | No TrackBacks

Accolades

This summer has been a very busy one at work. Insanely busy. Yet, I'm trying to keep this site going to the best of my ability and publish high-quality content. I know I've promised to run a Back To Basics Series and I will keep my promise.

8/21/2004 |

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Service Charge Is an Offering

This pearl is from the web site of Dolce Skamania Lodge...

8/21/2004 |

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This Page Should Be Banned

I'm serious, folks, this page, Create a structured page layout by using layout tables and cells, should be banned. I don't want to start another Tables vs. Semantic Markup flame. Suffice it to say: tables are an eggcellent tool, but leave tables to tabular data. Period.

8/21/2004 |

4 comments | No TrackBacks

Poll: IT Outsourcing

Outsourcing in the IT world is a very polarized issue. It's so multifaceted that you will probably hear a different opinion from each person you talk to. Nevertheless, I posted a poll on the home page with three simple options: two extremes and a 50/50 one. Please, speak your mind anonymously by voting.

8/19/2004 |

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WinXP SP2 Early Tweaks

With SP2 now installed at work we've run in a somewhat strange feature that I thought others needed to be aware of. When you view a popup in a zone other than Local Intranet you can count on additional 25 pixels (height only) or so because the window will have a status bar. You'll need to take this into account while designing pixel-perfect dialog boxes. In Local Intranet zone no status bar appears and your popups are 25 pixels shorter!

8/19/2004 |

3 comments | No TrackBacks

WinXP SP2 First Impressions

This week-end I decided to take the plunge and install XP SP2. I love installing patches. Especially on the week-ends. That's because I'm a proud geek and have nothing else to do... Nah, just kidding. I figured if there are problems with the existing pages I'd like to find out for myself beforehand. Also, SP2 is inevitable. Here's what I think so far...

8/15/2004 |

1 comment | No TrackBacks

Yes, You Can Run Mac OS X in Windows XP

Many thanks to Aleksandar Vacic and a post in his blog that led me to a Mac emulator for Windows. I’ve been looking for such an emulator for a long time now. Mainly I wanted to get my hands on Safari to test my work. After two days of tweaking I finally got Mac OS X to run in Windows XP on my Inspiron 8200. See a screenie of my desktop (99K, png).

8/15/2004 |

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Internet Explorer Wiki at Channel9

Via Scobble's blog (don't ask me what the hell I was doing there): Internet Explorer Wiki at Channel9. I didn't realize they had an IE Wiki. It raises some interesting questions and covers a range of important topics. The one I found particularly interesting is ProductFeedback about bugs in InternetExplorer.

8/13/2004 |

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Serving XML: Le Divorce

About a week ago I hooked up an HttpModule which set Content-Type to application/xhtml+xml for those user agents that “get” it. With the decent size of this site problems reared their head really fast. Having solved a number of challenges I ran into a dead-end and had to pull the plug on application/xhtml+xml.

8/9/2004 |

11 comments | 1 TrackBack

Cast Your Vote

I've built a polling control over the week-end to conduct online polls here, on this site. Feel free to head over to the home page and cast your vote. If you'd like to suggest a poll topic, please shoot me an e-mail.

8/8/2004 |

5 comments | No TrackBacks

Tell Me What I Am Downloading

I get very frustrated with sites that prompt me to follow a link just to stream down a Word document or a PDF. I'm sure you've found yourself in the same situation many many times. You see a press release or an announcement, click the link and sit there while Acrobat Reader pops up its splash screen, maxes out the CPU, brings your computer to a crawl no matter how fast and powerful it is, does a background check for updates... Oh, and if it did find updates it'll freeze your browser. Why? Because it pops up a dialog in the background, but you can't see it even if you Alt-Tab. You gotta close all browser instances to see it.

8/6/2004 |

2 comments | No TrackBacks

Stop Image Flicker With Cache-Control Extensions

Image flicker in Internet Explorer/Win causes IE to get bitchslapped quite often. To get rid of this effect Dean Edwards suggests to configure Apache to keep images cached. Otherwise you need to manually change caching preferences in IE which a lot of people don’t know how to do. Besides, when images flicker, it’s you who looks bad, not the users’ IE. Dean says he’s no server expert, and neither am I, but there’s a way to configure IIS in a similar fashion.

8/5/2004 |

71 comments | No TrackBacks

Count Your Online Visitors

How do you count people visiting my site at any given time? This question, in different variations, comes up in newsgroups quite often. There's really no canned answer. One good way of doing it is to log all sessions in a database table, and give each session a reasonable timeout. The web application will need to update the timestamp of its respective session on each page request. For example, if a visitor didn't browse from page to page for 5...10 minutes it's quite reasonable to assume he/she is gone.

8/3/2004 |

10 comments | No TrackBacks

A Better, Stronger Home Page

Ever since I launched this site its home page has been boring. It simply showed the latest articles and nothing else. This waste of space bothered me, so this past week-end I redesigned it to "aggregate" a number of things:

8/2/2004 |

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ASP.NET Meets application/xhtml+xml

There has been a backlash of articles on serving XHTML with a proper Content-Type header. Having read documentation and blog posts on this saga I decided to try this out for myself since I do my best to serve proper XHTML here.

8/1/2004 |

6 comments | No TrackBacks

Book Review: 250 HTML and Web Design Secrets

250 HTML and Web Design Secrets is the latest and greatest from Molly Holzschlag. It is a quick, easy and enjoyable read. If you're a web designer or web developer this book definitely needs to be among your references. The book is packed with tips on a wide range of subjects. Don't be ashamed of having on your desk a book that has HTML in its title. There's much more to it. If you learned HTML or CSS via View Source or feel you have gaps in your knowledge this is your book.

8/1/2004 |

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Web talk

August 2004