ASP.NET Programmer

Lost Visual Studio Project Files

Save your work, save your work, for God’s sakes man save your work. Ok I feel better after getting that off my chest.

So evidently the new Visual Studio Express 2008 is saving files in a temp directory to enable you to create quick tester projects without cluttering up your Projects directory. I don’t know about you, but personally I’d rather have the clutter than lose a project I’d been working on and off for two days. In the world I had been living in, you can compile the project — it saves — you are good to go. Well I got in my final compile then I went to find the executable. No trace of it under the local Visual Studio 2008 Projects folder within my profile. I close out of VS thinking it would be there on last opened projects when I went back in. No go. Come to find out this temp project was being stored in C:\Users{Username}\AppData\Local\Temporary Projects while I was developing it, but there is no trace of it now.

After doing some research online, it has indeed disappeared like a fart in the wind. So for your sanity as well as mine, go into Visual Studio right now and go to Tools > Options > Projects and Solutions and check that box that says Save new projects when created. No one should have to go through this headache just because Microsoft decided it would be cute not to include this by default anymore.

My only partial saving grace is last night I had done a compile and pulled out the exe file to run in a directory on the root. You’d think it would have occured to me at the time that these project files really shouldn’t be in a folder marked ‘Temporary Projects.’ Anyway with the exe in hand, I decided to look for a c# decompiler program to at least recover part of my work. I found this great free app by Redgate called .NET Reflector. I just pointed it to the exe and it kicked back the code in the disassembler. Pretty cool stuff. Now if I just had the final exe to reverse engineer. Oh did I mention you should save your work?

Tags: decompiler, visual studio

GoDaddy Error: Domain name is used. Please select a new domain name.

I just purchased a new domain. Got everything transferred over into my goDaddy account, yet when I went into the Domain Management console to attach the domain to my Linux hosting account I got the error message, “Domain name is used. Please select a new domain name.” From looking at my account, everything had transferred over correctly from the seller. Upon contacting goDaddy support I discovered that the seller needed to remove the domain from their hosting account before I could add it to my own. You’d think that once the transfer had happened, it would automatically disassociate itself from the hosting account. Not so.

[UPDATE : 5/12/09] Evidently this is more common than I thought. Completely separate from this original post, I registered a dropped domain about a month ago through GoDaddy. I just got around to building it out today. When I went to set it up in the my hosting panel again I get our familiar error “Domain name is used. Please select a new domain name.” Upon talking to my account rep, if the previous owner of the domain hosted it on GoDaddy prior to its release this error will trigger same as them transferring it directly to you. I’ve never met this guy, but he’s basically holding this domain hostage until GoDaddy convinces him to release it. How does it not get automatically released on expiration? Makes no sense.

Tags: domain name, goDaddy, hosting

Professional Free News Template on BlogOhBlog!

Doesn’t the website name BlogOhBlog! remind you of Bob Loblaw on Arrested Develoment? Oh I miss it. Look for the movie release in 2010. Anyway back to the subject at hand — WordPress Templates. ASPNETProgrammer.net uses one of blogohblog’s many stylish templates, Statement to be exact. When I was surfing around on their website this evening I spotted this cool, professional looking template called Digital Statement that reminded me of a CNN look and feel (see below). This will definitely will work for one of my future sites that’s working its way through the early stages of development in my head. The best part is that its free. If you are in need of a classy looking WordPress template, check out what BlogOhBlog! has to offer. They have both free and premium selections, and they always produce high quality work. Enjoy!

Tags: WordPress, wordpress theme

Reading Files from a Directory using C#

So I had a project which I needed to find out what files were being held in a given directory and write those back to the browser. This is very helpful in automating posting of files to a website by your users without you being involved in tedious static html updates. The key here is the System.IO .NET class. We are going to access the DirectoryInfo class so we can iterate through and pull back all file objects contained within. In the code below, the DirectoryInfo looks in the current directory as we’ve defined through Server.MapPath(“.”). We could just have easily directed this through stepping up the directory (i.e. c:\intepub\wwwroot\directoryread\filestoread\). Next, we tell it to grab all the files that end with an .aspx extension which screens out any text or pdf files we may not be interested in. In the FileInfo class, we extract the name of each file to wire up the hyperlink and print this back to the user. I’ve taken it one step further to strip out the hyphens and the .aspx file extension that we print back to the user so the file name “Reading-files-from-a-directory-using-csharp.aspx” becomes “Reading files from a directory using cSharp”. Much cleaner and user friendly. That FileInfo class has lots of cool properties including LastWriteTime, CreationTime, Length (for a full rundown on the FileInfo properties checkout Microsoft’s .NET Framework Developer Center). <%@ Import Namespace="System.IO" %> <script language="c#" runat="server"> void Page_Load(object s, EventArgs e) { DirectoryInfo di = new DirectoryInfo(Server.MapPath(".")); FileInfo[] rgFiles = di.GetFiles("*.aspx"); foreach(FileInfo fi in rgFiles) { Response.Write("<br /><a href=" + fi.Name + ">" + formatString(fi.Name) + "</a>"); } } string formatString(string url){ url = Regex.Replace(url, "-", " "); url = Regex.Replace(url, ".aspx", ""); return url; } </script> Tags: c#, fileio, system.io

Thunderbird Error: Cannot connect to SMTP Server

On my rebuilt machine, I was trying to connect up to my email account on webhost4life using Thunderbird. Great Outlook alternative that is free for those who are interested (part of the Mozilla initiative). Anyway once I set this up, mail came flowing in fine, but it wasn’t going out to save anything. I’d just get an error message saying: Cannot connect to SMTP Server. I had the reference to the SMTP format correct for webhost4life (mail.webserver.com) and the user name and password were accurate. After several turns at it from Telnet, I discovered the port was the issue. It was receiving mail fine on the default 110 port, but 25 just wasn’t wanting to send. After some tinkering, 366 seemed to cooperate so that is what it came to be set as. To update the port, simply go to Tools > Account Settings > Outgoing SMTP Server > click Edit on the server in question and update the port underneath the server name. Nothing is to say that 366 will work for you. Its best to check with your webhost.

Another hiccup I ran across. If you have several email accounts setup in Firebird and several SMTP servers to go with them, make sure that all the accounts pointing to their correct server. I was trying to send out from email address B and constantly getting ‘this user does not exist on the recipient server’ which I knew they did. It turns out it was trying to use the SMTP server from email address A thus wasn’t relaying properly. Once it was changed, all was well. To update the SMTP server, simply go under Tools > Account Settings > Highlight the email address in question and pick the correct SMTP server from the drop down. By default, this will most likely be pointing to the first SMTP server you set up.

Tags: email, outlook, SMTP, Thunderbird, webhost4life