Al Priest’s Blog

TL;DR The Asp.net session ID in the database uses the Site ID from IIS as part of a composite key. Ensure the IIS Site ID is consistent in a web farm.
The website I work on needed to use a RadCaptcha recently on a form. Although it was configured as per the Telerik article to use [...]

The site I work on fetches significant amounts of data on-demand from a remote data centre via a JSON feed. In order to provide resilience against the site being unavailable I implemented Redis on Windows as a read-through cache. (None Windows operating systems were not permitted at the time). I also implemented a refresh-ahead cache [...]

In Visual Studio, choose Tools | Macro, Macros IDE, create a new module and drop this in. I bind it to Ctrl-Alt-1 for quick access.

Sub AttachToW3WP()
Dim attached As Boolean = False
Dim proc As EnvDTE.Process

[...]

Fiddler is a Web Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP(S) traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP(S) traffic, set breakpoints, and “fiddle” with incoming or outgoing data.
Download Fiddler from http://www.fiddler2.com/, it’s freeware! It runs on Windows, but can debug traffic originating in any operating system (by making that [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]