ASP.NET
It's been a long time in between updates for subtext, but, has it actually been worth it? Well, kinda. Compared to the 1.9.5 release this one seems a little rough around the edges.
If you're on a shared host WITHOUT full trust, beware! Things will break in multiple places, including:
DTP.aspx (The homepage) (tag "st" undefined, needed to add back 'Register TagPrefix="st" Namespace="Subtext.Web.UI.WebControls"') (My web.config merge error)
/admin/Posts/ (EnclosureMimetypes config section missing requirePermission="false" attribute)
/admin/Feedback/ ("FeedbackStatusFlag" undeclared, needed to prefix with the namespace)
Subtext.Framework.UrlManager.UrlReWriteHandlerFactory.GetHandlerForUrl(string url) also breaks...
NHibernate is a remarkable ORM, however with all the magic comes a few caveats, these being the difficulties running NHibernate apps in a shared hosting environment. I'm still convinced that it's entirely possible, so I've decided to start compiling a list of success and failures that others (and myself) have had in getting things working.
Compatible Shared Hosts
Host Name
Comment
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There are a fair few CMS solutions floating around in .NET at the moment, a good general comparison tool can be found at CmsMatrix.org.
Cuyahoga
In the past, the Cuyahoga Website Framework has looked always fairly interesting, it is also built on NHibernate which to me is a plus. Most things I've done with NHibernate have generally "just worked", maybe it's because NHibernate development is pounded with unit tests, whatever it is, it works.
I haven't had any experience developing any extensions for Cuyahoga, so I don't know exactly how extensible it is yet. In terms of usability, I did find the interface...
As far as I'm aware ASP.NET doesn't support IDataErrorInfo, I've asked about this in many places, including Tech.Ed '07 with no success. The closest things I've seen in terms of Business Object level validation is from Enterprise Library validation block (which is attribute based and can render out with custom EntLib web controls) and another example in the Futures Dynamic Data Controls using Linq (I have no idea how this magic validation magically appears).
It all just seems overly complicated, so, have a look at the IDataErrorInfo interface the methods are:
string this [ string columnName ] { get; }
string Error { get; }
Simple and...
Yes, I'm one of the crowd now, all because my old host Jumba is turning off the last of their Windows boxes, and coincidentally, the one I was hosted on. This has happened previously when they shut down some legacy Windows servers and forced everyone on it to upgrade.
Since Jumba is now no longer offering HELM windows hosting they have recommended xHostSolutions who have pretty comparative deals to what I was previously on, only better. This now gives me access to an MS Sql Server database, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to install SubText.
I still think that Single User Blog is a...
If you are only ever running one ASP.NET application on a website this is not an issue. However, if you are running a site which may have an application at the root and other separate applications running in sub or virtual directories, then Settings inheritance could be a problem.
You can read more about how config files get inherited on msdn but here's a tip for stopping settings in the root app from getting inherited. The <location> tag is the only tag I've come across which has the inheritInChildApplications attribute. So to target the main <system.web> just wrap it in the location tag as seen below.
<location path="."...
I don't know why but FreeTextBox has just never cut it for me. It's wonderful and easy to install and it comes as a nice control in a .NET assembly. But it doesn't give you the nicest HTML back, in fact I'd go as far as to say, it mutates GOOD HTML you put in there yourself, this is bad. Luckily there are some other free alternatives such as TinyMCE, which is a nice little editor. The only catch is it's pure javascript and requires a little manual intervention to work with your serverside code.
On a...
Although this is not new news (released November 2006 I think), I'd like to point out how cool having Python run ASP.NET is. I don't actually know how to program python...yet...but programming Python appears intuitive be nature. To get an HelloWorld IronPython ASP.NET application running, it took me all of about 5 minutes, 3 to download and install the add-in, 1 to open Visual Studio, then another minute to type in some stuff and run it. Sweet. At this point the intellisense has nothing of your other standard languages like C#, but I'm sure that's coming. One of the biggest issues...
Search Engine Bot Detection
So after I first noticed a large build up of strange session Urls in Google searches for my domain I've then done a little bit of research into the issue and discovered it was .NET not detecting that the search engine spider was Mozilla/5.0 compliant and inserting some rubbish session id into the url.
It's been nearly a week since my changes to correct this and there's already a small indication of the 'healing' process. The pages are not out of the index yet, (and yes I do know that I 'could' remove them manually) but there...
It has recently come to my attention that there is something drastically wrong with the way search engines have been indexing my ASP.NET 2.0 blog.
As I've started to explain previously, this is because of the way the browser detection is set up. To give a brief rundown ASP.NET 2.0 has a default browser definition which seems to assume that the default browser is fairly capable and supports common things such as javascript and cookies. A browser definition can get inherited into other definitions which can then override specific properties to update it for that specific browser or browser version.
Apparently in...
ASP.NET and Dirty Urls
There are two things that have been bothering me about pages that are getting indexed in Google from an ASP.NET application. The first is somehow there are ASP.NET Session Urls ending up in the Google index. This is bad because searchers that actually do click these links are likely to get a 500 error (internal server error) because they will be trying to access a page of an expired session.
How is Google finding all these 'bad' urls?
Well apparently there is no browser definition in ASP.NET 2.0 for the Googlebot's useragent string, so when the spider...