Thursday 25 February 2010

Friday 19 February 2010

Network problems

A few notes on an issue I have been experiencing. I had the following C# code that constantly threw a timeout error on line 5:

HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("http://api-verify.recaptcha.net/verify");
request.Method = "POST";
request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";

using (Stream stream = request.GetRequestStream())
{
    using (StreamWriter streamWriter = new StreamWriter(stream, Encoding.ASCII))
    {
        streamWriter.Write(postData);
        streamWriter.Close();
    }

    stream.Close();
}

ipconfig

Running ipconfig gives you nice information like your default gateway.

tracert

Running tracert for api-verify.recaptcha.net showed a hop to the default gateway (the first entry in the list of results) and nothing but timeouts thereafter.

Default gateway

A gateway is a routing device that knows how to pass traffic between different subnets and networks. It will know some routes to given IP addresses but not the routes to every address on the Internet. A gateway will will know the addresses of other gateways it can hand the traffic off to if the required route is unknown to it. A default gateway will be on the same subnet and is the gateway to be relied on when it doesn't know how to route traffic.

In this case, wrong default gateway?

Monday 8 February 2010

Could not load file or assembly when setting up existing web application

When setting up an existing .NET application on a fresh machine you may see the following error:

"Could not load file or assembly 'Some.Assembly.Name' or one of its dependencies. Access is denied."

A potential quick solution is to go to “C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files” and modify the security settings for the folder to grant "Full control" to the 'users' group.

Not ideal but it will get the development environment up-and-running.

Wednesday 3 February 2010

Track active items in Solution Explorer

When opening a source file in Visual Studio, if you want the solution explorer to reflect the location of the file ensure the appropriate option is set:

Tools > Options > Projects & Solutions > General

Set the Track Active Items in Solution Explorer option.

Alternatively if you’ve got ReSharper use Ctrl-Shift-T.