ASP.Net – Builtin MVC Framework

I won’t be writing anything about it, ScottGu has discussed it fully at his blogs,

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/02/12/asp-net-mvc-framework-road-map-update.aspx

Its surely some thing which I am looking forward to, as its mean a more maintainable code. I simply love this, another thing on my list of ‘check-it-out’

Open Packaging Conventions

In order to run properly every application needs data or resources, eg. a site which sends emails to its users would be saving the email templates somewhere on the hard disk. Keeping this kind of stuff in configuration file is a recommended approach but that doesn’t take off the burden and chance of error.

So, Microsoft has come up with this ‘Open Packaging Conventions,’  it stores application data and required resources in one file container using XML and Zip technology. Its an open standard and ECMA(association dedicated to the standardization of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Consumer Electronics (CE)) has approved it.

It would allow platform independent, efficient information exchange. And the best thing is that it points the files within it in such a way that if you want to change the file location, you can do it easily and make the change at just one place, even if you have used it at more than one place. This is what wikipedia says,

“An OPC-aware application will use relationships metadata rather than directory names and file names to locate individual files.”

Microsoft Office 2007 is using it, so it is here to stay. The .Net 3.5 provides namespaces to create OPC packages. Information exchange is one of the most critical topics in the IT world, so I do think that its something important to look into.  On the next weekend, I would be making a sample application and would update you about my experience.

ASP.Net – File Upload Issue

Few months back, I was in my office enjoying my green tea and reading an article about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, suddenly my mIRC window started blinking, I opened it and to my horror, it was a personal message from one of the QA guys (who was testing my application), he was asking me that ‘is there any size limit on attachments?’ As I hadn’t placed any size constraint, I replied in negative, but I started to have a feeling that a bug is just around the corner and so it happened. He went excited and informed me with great enthusiasm that when he tries to upload a 5 MB file, application shows him a ‘Page Not Found’ error. I asked him to post the bug, then closed the article on the two Hollywood stars and in order to find the reason/solution I turned to my old buddy , ‘Google.’
Within 15 minutes I realized that every second ASP.Net programmer has faced this problem and still there is no good solution to it.

The problem was that by default ASP.Net ‘FileUpload’ control allows files of size 4 MB or less, anything bigger then that size will redirect you to a DNS error. The main reason behind this constraint is to prevent denial of service attack in-case users posts files of extremely large sizes.

The solution was quite simple, in web.config’s element; you just need to set the value of ‘maxRequestLength’ to your desirable maximum file size. easy!

But, it’s not that easy, anything greater then that size will stillredirect you to DNS error page. We certainly don’t want to let our users see that page, instead we would like to show them a good error message saying something like ‘files size should be less than {0}.’ For your disappointment, I must confess that there is simply no solution to it. You just don’t have any control on the process; no implementation of IHttpHandler can help you in this regard. One of our friend’s on thislink tried to provide a solution but it just doesn’t work for about 90% of the people (including me). Whenever the file size was largeer than the maximum allowed size, Reques.Files.Count was somehow ‘0.’

Microsoft provides a little bit of help, which you may access at,
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;295626Now, that’s not all, there is something more to this problem, ASP.Net uses physical memory to upload a file and whenever ASP.Net process uses 60% of RAM, .Net services restarts. Hopefully, you can appreciate the magnitude of the problem. And to make it a bit more convoluted, IIS has its own file size limit of 4 GB.If you’ve visited the MS link, then you can see that MS knows about the DNS thing, still they are trying to become oblivious to it, so we should read between the lines, that they want us to go for a third part control. Yes, if your expected file size is small then go for this control, otherwise I would recommend you to go for a 3rd party control.

Happy coding!

FaceBook & .Net

Facebook is a phenomenally successful social networking site. Everyone seems to be either writing or want to write a facebook application. Now, that Microsoft has bought it, it is not wrong to expect that it will be supporting MS stuff by default. Here, I came across this very good article about writing Facebook smart device application using .Net

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/library/bb932386.aspx

Any Dot Net developer interested in writing FB applications, should check this out. A very good, step-by-step tutorial.

Microsoft Sharedview (Beta)

As an IT professional, every now and then, I need to give demos to clients using conference calls. Usually at these sessions, everyone has their PC open and most of the efforts are gone into making sure that people are clicking right buttons or accessing right pages. For sometime I was looking for a freeware, which can provide a good and efficient way to share my desktop with others, seems like Microsoft Sharedview is the answer.

Sharedview gives the following advantages

1. You can connect up-to 15 people – which is more than enough for me. 

2. Everyone has their own mouse pointer – with their name showing alongside it.

3. And guess what ? You need only a windows live account to use it.

4. You can choose exactly which program to share – no need to share the whole desktop.

5. You can add handouts – just perfect for online office meeting, no hassle of sharing using emails and wondering if everyone has received it or not.

6. Its light weight in comparision to some others.

This means efficient demos but also that if personal commitments coincides with professional work then you can do your work right from the home. I have started to use it in personal network and would continue for professional work too – it seems really promising but knowing softwares, there might just be one hidden problem which will ruin the fun. I would let you know if I come across one.