stevenmcd.net

MSDN: Understanding the ASP.Net Viewstate
The article is exceptionally well written!

More excuses

For the last two weeks I’ve been trying to get Visual Studio working correctly again without having to format my computer. After numerous re-installations I gave up and started setting up VMWare on my machine and I’ll run VS through that.

My favorite excuse for being quiet however is this. I had an awesome idea for a website. Something that currently does not exist to the best of my knowledge. Now although I am ASP.Net developer, I am a terrible designer. So I have been working as hard as I can on a design for this site that doesn’t suck. I have however now given up on this for now to do as Tyler Reed said to me, “Get it out there THEN make it look good”.

The more I think about this the bigger my ideas become. More news to follow on this soon!

The last few weeks have been incredibly hectic for me in terms of personal and professional developments. As such I haven’t bought any new music is weeks and thus haven’t needed to update my iPod’s library.

Yesterday however I got the new Nine Inch Nails album entitled “Ghosts”. Its an amazing 36 track instrumental album and its awesome! So I tried to fire up iTunes and got an unhandled win32 exception and then iTunes promptly closes itself before its even really started.

After many hours of un-installing and re-installing many different applications without success I finally realized when the last time was that I opened up iTunes successfully. It was *before* I installed Visual Studio and the .Net 3.5 framework.  Now I realise that Apple and Microsoft don’t exactly have the best working relationship but seriously guys, this just sucks.

I have made sure I have the newest and most up to date Quicktime and iTunes installations. So now I need to format my entire machine just to get iTunes working again, so I can get the NiN album onto my iPod. Hopefully once I install Visual Studio again iTunes won’t break :-/

This is an idea I have been anticipating for a while. Imagine taking a video with your cellphone and immediately uploading it to a website similar to youtube!

Liv.Tv, an introduction:
What is LIV? Here’s the introduction straight from their own website:

LIV is a service that enables the capturing and sharing of user generated videos via the mobile handset. The application is downloaded onto the handset and allows users to capture video content and upload it onto a server. Users can then view the uploaded content but cannot download the content for storage. You also have access to content via your mobile device and website which enables you to view the uploaded videos from your PC or mobile device.

Basically, if you record a video of your dog doing something stupid or funny and you want to share this video with your friends (and the rest of the world), you can simply upload the video and they can watch the video on their cellphone or computer!

As previously mentioned, I have been anticipating something like this for a while now and I’m glad to see we have it up and running here in South Africa.

It must ofcourse be mentioned that LIV is still in its BETA phase so you can except some bugs and several changes I’m sure. Unfortunately, as with all things there are restrictions. Personally I use a HTC P4350 PDA style phone that runs windows mobile so I can access the website and the application BUT I cannot view the videos since my phone cannot play .3GP video files and I cannot submit videos since my phone does not support the requirement video formats needed to upload.

What I do like about LIV so far is that they cater to almost everyone! They have the website, where you can upload and watch videos, there’s a JAVA applet to download onto your phone to do these things OR you can access the Liv.Tv/WAP site and do these things as well!

Issues I have encountered:
As previously mentioned, this is still a BETA release of the website and so these guys need our input! Here are a few things I found:

• After searching for a video and watching it, to get back to the main page you need to find a small image on the bottom left of the screen that says “* Liv” and click on that. Unfortunately I don’t feel that many non-tech savvy folks will find this. I would rather recommend linking the LIV.TV image in the banner as its big and commands your attention.
• With me personally, the quicktime plugin in the pages tends to crash me browser after watching 1 or 2 vids. This may not be a LIV.TV problem as such and might be a problem with my Quicktime installation but I feel that LIV.TV should “force” users to run the latest version of Quicktime and/or any related Quicktime plugins.
• Although LIV.TV only supports 3GP and MP4 video formats. I can understand why they did this though as all the phones on their compatibility list supports these formats but I would like to see them expand this selection later.
• Although you can create and join groups, you cannot see which videos these groups have uploaded.

This is still a BETA so these issues don’t worry me too much but they need to be seen to!

Conclusion:
I can see Liv.TV doing exceptionally in the future especially among the university students! I am however worried that inappropriate content is going to find its way onto LIV. I realise there is content like this on all video sharing websites, but it MXiT attracted the flak that it did, I have a funny feeling LIV are going to get even more trouble. All in all, awesome idea and I will definitely be watching LIV with a lot of interest! Here are some links to get you started

• Liv website: http://www.liv.tv
  
• Liv WAP: http://liv.tv/wap/
• Liv blog: http://blog.liv.tv
• Facebook FanPage: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Livtv/7224928963?ref=s

How you found any bugs and problems with LIV.TV? Post them here as comments and I will forward them onto the team at LIV.

I found the following top 10 tips on daptivate.com. This tips are indeed exceptionally important to heed when moving from a development environment to a production environment. daptivate.com is the weblog of Kyle, a developer at Telligent

His tips are as follows:

1. Generate new encryption keys

When moving an application to production for the first time it is a good idea to generate new encryption keys. This includes the machine validation key and decryption key as well as any other custom keys your application may be using. There is an article on CodeProject that talks about generating machineKeys specifically that should be helpful with this.

2. Encrypt sensitive sections of your web.config

This includes both the connection string and machine key sections. See Scott Guthrie’s post for some good references. Note that if your application runs in a clustered environment you will need to share a custom key using the RSA provider as described in an MSDN article.

3. Use trusted SQL connections

Both Barry Dorrans and Alex Chang have articles which discuss this in detail.

4. Set retail=”true” in your machine.config

This will kill three birds with one stone. It will force the ‘debug’ flag in the web.config to be false, it will disable page output tracing, and it will force the custom error page to be shown to remote users rather than the actual exception or error message. For more information you can read Scott Guthrie’s post or the MSDN reference.

5. Create a new application pool for your site

When setting up your new site for the first time do not share an existing application pool. Create a new application pool which will be used by only by the new web application.

6. Set the memory limit for your application pool

When creating the application pool, specifically set the memory limit rather than the time limit which is set by default. Asp.net has a good whitepaper which explains the value of this:

By default IIS 6.0 does not set a limit on the amount of memory that IIS is allowed to use. ASP.NET’s Cache feature relies on a limitation of memory so the Cache can proactively remove unused items from memory.

It is recommended that you configure the memory recycling feature of IIS 6.0.

7. Create and appropriately use an app_Offline.htm file

There are many benefits to using this file. It provides an easy way to take your application offline in a somewhat user friendly way (you can at least have a pretty explanation) while fixing critical issues or pushing a major update. It also forces an application restart in case you forget to do this for a deployment. Once again, ScottGu is the best source for more information on this.

8. Develop a repeatable deployment process and automate it

It is way too easy to make mistakes when deploying any type of software. This is especially the case with software that uses configuration files that may be different between the development, staging, or production environments. I would argue that the process you come up with is not nearly as important as it being easily repeatable and automated. You can fine tune the process as needed, but you don’t want a simple typo to bring a site down.

9. Build and reference release versions of all assemblies

In addition to making sure ASP.NET is not configured in debug mode, also make sure that your assemblies are not debug assemblies. There are of course exceptions if you are trying to solve a unique issue in your production environment … but in most cases you should always deploy with release builds for all assemblies.

10. Load test

This goes without saying. Inevitably, good load testing will uncover threading and memory issues not otherwise considered.

Kyle has awesome content on his blog and I think there’s something for everyone there. I have sat reading different posts for the last half an hour or so. I habe already added his blog to my Google Reader. So go check out his blog now!

Top 10 Best Practices for Production ASP.NET Applications on http://daptivate.com

As per the request of one of my readers, you can now subscribe to my feed via email. This way any new posts will be delivered straight to your inbox! Just subscribe in the box at the top of my righthand panel.

Enjoy!

This blog has been rather quiet the last week or so which is a pity but I have accomplished quite a bit in the last 2 weeks. Main reason behind me being so quiet is because I’ve been reading a book about finding and focusing on building ones strengths instead of focusing on weaknesses. exceptionally interesting stuff.

Over the next week or two I’ll once again be focusing on more .Net related subjects starting with Lamba expressions and where/how to use them.

My other excuse for being so quiet is I’ve been sucked into the world of EVE-Online. Most amazing MMORPG ever!

http://www.mywebshots.co.za has gone live and it seems to be working great! I have just installed the WordPress plugin that South African New Media Strategist Justin Hartman and http://www.codecentral.co.za/ developed for use with their new website. Its a great idea as well because I didn’t need to mess around for half an hour to get it working, 2 minutes and it was up and running!

MyWebShots is a service that you can enable on your blog, once you’ve registered FOR FREE, and whenever any reader hovers over a link on your blog it shows a screenshot of that external link. It took me less than 2minutes to setup and works really well so give it a try!

The next version of the browser we all love and cherish has been released. FireFox 3 (Beta 2) is currently available to download and testing. Features include:

• CSS improvements (http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/CSS_improvements_in_Firefox_3)
• DOM improvements (http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/DOM_improvements_in_Firefox_3)
• Javascript 1.8 support (http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/New_in_JavaScript_1.8)

You can download it at Download

Bullet for My Valentines new album is finally out and in all honesty it has felt like an eternity for this album to be released! Being the hard rock fan that I am I had to get the album and get it I did!

I’m going to get the negatives out the way first, this album is not as good as the poison. I know that Matt Tuck had some issues with his vocal cords recently and as such they can’t perform the way they used to but as my brother pointed out, its sounds like they trying to emulate Trivium. This is by no means a bad thing but I liked B4MV’s style on the previous album. This albums feels like its aimed at the younger teen crowd. This album also has heavy underlying political themes.

Onto the positives! The album starts off with “Scream Aim Fire” which I must admit is one of their best ever songs. As in traditional B4MV styles the riffs are fast and intricate and generally sound awesome. Matt’s voice isn’t as heavy as it was but it still sounds brilliant, Padge and Jay support with great backing vocals covering the heavier vocal parts. “Hearts burst into Fire” is type of track you can except throughout this album, its catchy but at the sametime seems a little poppy.

Personally the 3 best tracks on this album are Scream Aim Fire, Hearts Burst into Fire and Say Goodnight. All in all, it is a nice addition to my collection and I’m really enjoying it. Now I just need to wait a few months for the Disturbed and Metallica albums.