Community developer blogs

Simon Soanes

Recent Posts

• ASP.NET server controls not getting events from child controls?

  Posted: 04 Jul 2009 at 23:12

  My ASP.NET server/composite controls were not getting events from child controls, but only on the real pages, they worked fine on test ones. It turned out that I had a master page enabled but didn't have an ID set for it, so it was auto generating it. Just add this to your master pages code file:- protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e) { base.OnInit(e); this.ID = "SomeName"; } And child controls will start working as expected.

• Good customer service and mesh chairs

  Posted: 03 Jul 2009 at 15:59

  This is a story of how to handle a customer who could have ended up sending something back and getting expensive. So: I've been interested in getting an Aeron chair or Freedom Task Chair or similar for a while now and only been put off by the price. Eventually Amazon being the amazing pool of data it is made a suggestion of a similar one called a Cobham mesh back chair, which looked like it would fit the bill but only cost £270.

• Easy implementation of OpenID!

  Posted: 31 May 2009 at 22:31

  I even put OpenID on my own site in the latest iteration of its software as it is slowly growing in momentum, Scott Hanselman has details of how to implement OpenID support here. This works particularly well with sites like Yahoo, where you can just put in the URL and be logged in near-instantly.

• PInvoke code to change users windows password

  Posted: 30 May 2009 at 09:38

  Very quick snippet that I just made use of to allow users to remotely change passwords over the web. Just leave the domainname and username black to change the current users password. This works great from ASP.NET and requires no special permissions, unlike some solutions that use LDAP or impersonation. [DllImport("netapi32.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Unicode, CallingConvention = CallingConvention.StdCall, SetLastError = true)]

• Restricted AppDomain example

  Posted: 26 Feb 2009 at 02:03

  Just a quick example:- using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Security.Policy; using System.Security; using System.Security.Permissions; using System.Threading; using System.Reflection; using System.IO; namespace RestrictedAppDomainTest { class Program { /// <summary> /// Example program demonstrating AppDomains with restrictive security /// Note that it requires the existance of C:\windows\win.in

• Debian 5.0 Released

  Posted: 15 Feb 2009 at 15:36

  I am not much of a Linux fan and mostly run Windows even for servers, but while that is true I appreciate both a wide ecosystem of operating systems incase something bad happens to Windows or a particular component, love the vastly lower cost of purchase and like both the freedom and opportunity to change things if you need to. I have one Linux server right now for example, and with Mono it can even host the same sites as the Windows servers. My choice for Linux has been Debian since about 2001,

• Tribes 2 lives again...

  Posted: 09 Feb 2009 at 00:41

  TribesNext have released a patch to work around the shutting down of the login servers for Tribes 2 in late 2008, so it's now finally possible to play again. The patch also fixes the sierra update errors that were intentionally created and means that new accounts no longer require a CD key (Vivendi gave the game away for free to promote a sequel but stopped giving out keys and shut down the servers even for those that originally bought the game back in 2001 when it was released). Now I'm just ho

• Get certificate context information from an X509 Certificate in .NET

  Posted: 31 Jan 2009 at 12:34

  I needed to get the unmanaged container name of an X509Certificate2 in order to be able to get access to the equivalent private key for it on Windows Mobile (I also wanted to be able to use the same routine on Windows CE and Win32 so this works as-is on all platforms). No decent commentary but hopefully it will help someone else who is stuck without the container name or something. #region Structures [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential, CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)] public str

• Microsoft PKCS12 certificate to OpenSSL key conversion

  Posted: 17 Jan 2009 at 22:17

  To convert from a pkcs12 key (sometimes called a .pfx file) to an OpenSSL key without a password to protect it: openssl pkcs12 -in file.p12 -out file.pem -nodes (Handy for various open source servers that don't take pcks12 keys or use CryptoAPI on Windows, including stunnel, openvpn, hmailserver 5, webmin/apache, etc)

• Minutes long delay in building/debugging a compact framework smart device project

  Posted: 24 Dec 2008 at 21:13

  The multiple minute delay where Visual Studio freezes doing this is easy to fix and related to checking for necessary components on the target; it's actually down to the Platform Verification Task defined in the MS Build targets for the compact framework, but in .NETCF 3.5 you can just skip it by adding the following build rule (or you can set this up to apply to your entire system using the environment variables screen):- set SkipPlatformVerification=true Pre .NETCF 3.5 I think you need to

• Windows Azure

  Posted: 29 Oct 2008 at 21:54

  Microsoft just announced Windows Azure at the PDC this year, a cloud hosting system! This is cool because it has the ability to host both ASP.NET web sites (or WCF web services) and back-end compute components (UI less programs that run based on a queue system) with zero up-front infrastructure req

• New MS things

  Posted: 21 Oct 2008 at 11:22

  So I've been occupied as the schools came back over September and am just starting to catch back up, amongst the things to have snuck up on me are Silverlight and a lovely new report designer!The Silverlight 2.0 SDK tools are here. They are badly missing any mouse interactivity on the design surface

• New PXE bootloader

  Posted: 24 Aug 2008 at 22:05

  I just noticed that the PXE bootloader supplied in the syslinux package (in the gpxe folder) is now based on gPXE (link is to a video google have recorded where they show it off) which supports booting the host operating system over a really wide variety of TCP based protocols!  gPXE

• Visual Studio 2008 SP1

  Posted: 12 Aug 2008 at 10:30

  (It's very rare that I post during work hours, but my excuse is I need to pass the links around between machines and this is the easiest way) Microsoft have released Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1!  Hopefully there's many good fixes in it, I haven't had time to beta test it so am really look

• SQL Server TCP port list

  Posted: 10 Aug 2008 at 16:02

  Just a quick post with the ports for SQL Server as I keep muddling up the browser and the db engine:- The database engine is port 1433   SQL Browser is on port 1434   And finally analysis services is on port 2383

• A comprehensive Microsoft DNS Server management implementation in C#

  Posted: 09 Aug 2008 at 23:59

  Okay so to make up for not having posted a single codeblog entry in several months I have a mammoth one here that has taken over 6 hours to figure out and write. The following is a class that implements near-full support for the WMI interface to the MS DNS Server on Windows Server 2003 (also sh

• .NET Framework SP1 released (or escaped)?

  Posted: 07 Aug 2008 at 23:13

  Here I am installing SQL Server 2008 and I notice that it's installing .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. There's a total lack of announcements so I'm not sure, but given that it's bonded at the hip with Visual Studio 2008 SP1 I am expecting it to install that next (and saw it when extracting the ISO).  O

• SQL Server 2008 is out!

  Posted: 07 Aug 2008 at 20:40

  Well the subject says it all! MSDN subscribers can now download SQL Server 2008 - I'm sure an SQL Express 2008 edition will come out soon.  Interestingly there is an extra edition available on MSDN - "Web Edition", this is pure speculation but I'm guessing this is standard edition wit

• A game for your brain

  Posted: 27 Jul 2008 at 23:56

  http://fantasticcontraption.com/ is quite possibly the best free web game I've encountered. In it you get to solve complex (or seemingly simple looking) physics puzzles to move one item to another with only bars that you join together and motors (wheels in the game) that turn uncontrollably.&nb

• Houston Data Center Outage

  Posted: 02 Jun 2008 at 12:45

  My site and a bunch of hosted sites were down over the weekend due to an explosion at the datacentre where the servers are located in Houston.  This is now fixed. No e-mail was lost as the server in New York was still up, but it's still mighty annoying.