Al’s Blog

Everytime I try and get Ayende’s NHibernate Query Analyzer to work I seem to encounter some weirdness. Here’s what I did to get it running this time.

Download the version appropriate to your version of NHibernate. For me, that was 1.2GA
Create a new app.config file, and into it place just the NHibernate configuration section and the [...]

From Wikipedia, “Kaizen is a Japanese philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement throughout all aspects of life”. After a review of our systems from a software coach in the department, I decided to instigate a weekly Kaizen session for the whole dev team. (I first heard of the term Kaizen a few years ago when [...]

Had a problem with NHibernate Lifecycle events recently where they appeared not to be firing when I was hitting ISession.Save(entity). After some investigation I finally realised that if you create a new entity, then query NHibernate it may implicitly persist the transient object during a Flush. When it does this any interceptors will be fired [...]

The system i’m working on at the moment recently went into systest and we found a couple of database errors relating which NHibernate was throwing an exception of
Unexpected row count: -1, expected 1
This wasn’t happening on the development system so we took the apparently faulty database from systest and ran it in [...]

Having upgraded the website I work on to .net 2.0, one of our console apps failed whilst talking to a webservice on the site. We’d not changed anything on either the console app, or the website other than upgrading the website to 2.0.
The error message was “global:System.Collections.IList cannot be deserialized because it does not have [...]

I’ve written a script to parse the London Underground real-time tube status page and convert it into an Xml feed. It caches the output from TfL for 1 minute. If their page structure changes i’ll endeavour to update my parser.
You can get the feed as Xml or HTML. I’ve also started the ball rolling with [...]

Spent a while trying to get sub-projects opening within Visual Studio today where the root project has SSL security setup. Every time VS tried to open the sub-projects it would error with the message “Secure channel failed”.
Figured it out eventually - you need to add a location element to the web.config for the get_aspx_ver.aspx to [...]

I’ve got my Google Maps / Beer In The Evening mashup working again. Seems I completely missed the Google Maps API V2 changes which broke the layout and the ‘link to this pub’ links. Unfortunately I still can’t get my CSS to expand the map to the available screen size so if anyone has any [...]

This is interesting, a port scanner written completely in Javascript. It creates a series of image objects and points the URL to an image file which would be found on a default installation of some web servers. Once found, the script could be modified to do something malicious to that webserver using any well known [...]

[csharp]
using System;
using System.Text;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
using System.ComponentModel;
namespace SocialAnimal.Web.UserControls
{
/// <summary>
/// If ControlToValidate has a value then DependantControl
/// must also have a value
/// </summary>
public class DependantFieldValidator : CustomValidator
{
private string _dependantControl = null;
private bool _showAlertBox = false;
[Description(@"If true, will show an alert box if the control validates false, otherwise will display an inline message"),
Category("Behavior")]
public bool ShowAlertBox
{
get { return _showAlertBox; [...]