David Truxall

Right off I just want to say it sucks when the error message is correct but you don’t understand why.

We needed to add a new payment method to a Commerce Server 2007 implementation. The Customer and Orders UI threw an error immediately when going to manage Payment methods:

The underlying table was full of data. The site has been in production for over a year, collecting credit card payments the whole time without issues. Obviously the payment methods weren’t missing.

Of course, Googling was no help whatsoever. I played with the Commerce API, wrote some code, ran SQL traces, all to no avail.

So on the a non-production version of the site (with the same problem luckily), I decided to work on the database table directly. I scripted off the original data, and truncated the table. Now the UI doesn’t throw the error. So I re-added the data manually, and again the UI is fine, no errors.

So I compared the newly entered data with the old data, and there was a difference (outside of the obvious differences like keys). There is a bit column in the table called IsDefault. In the old data, all rows except one were set to False. In the new data, all rows were set to True. To test that this was the problem, I truncated the table again, and re-inserted the original data. Then I changed the IsDefault values to True on all the rows. Bingo. The UI now works again, and I could add the new data. So apparently someone did modify the data in the past, and the error message was correct about the database being tampered with. Luckily this modification had not affected Commerce Server’s ability to process credit cards.

I think the IsDefault column refers to the language setting for the row in the table, as you can have multiple language variants for a credit card and choose which one is the default language. So for the UI to function properly, at least one row for each language needs to have IsDefault set to True.

While looking for a URL rewriting tool for a client I found a reference to a tool, clicked the link and got a 404 error.

I kept getting an error when trying to use CopySourceAsHTML in Visual Studio 2005. The error was that CopySourceAsHTML was unable to access the clipboard. Turns out the problem is when using it in a VPC, and the answer is here.

We have been using Virtual PCs to host a separate development environment. Some of the team members have been having sporadic network issues with SourceSafe on the Virtual PCs. They were unable to get all of the projects involved down to the Virtual PC without getting a “Network Not Found” error. Eventually they would get all the files, but it was clearly not the best situation.

The Virtual PC image was sysprepped before distributing it, to avoid network problems. Unfortunately, that is not completely the case. Sysprep does reset the MAC address on the Virtual PC, but it apparently happens when sysprep runs, not when the user is re-setting up the PC. After distributing the image, the subsequent users still had the same MAC address. This was causing network problems when more than one person were using the Virtual PCs at the same time. The problem manifested itself mostly with SourceSafe, especially when there was a large change and multiple users were getting all the latest files at the same time.

At least the solution was simple once we realized that the MAC address was the issue (thanks to an astute network admin who had noticed some problems with a particular MAC address on one of the switches). In the .vpc file (it’s XML), there is an entry for ethernet address. It contains the MAC address the Virtual PC uses. If you remove the data from the tag, leaving the empty tags, Virtual PC will auto-generate a new MAC address the next time it starts up. Since that change the “Network not Found” error has disappeared.

After a harried development and delivery of a good sized Software Spec document to a client before the holidays, I have tried again to load XP SP2 on my laptop (hp compaq nx5000) without success. Despite updating all the drivers and the ROM before loading SP2, I still get blue screens after the profile loads, but not every time. The plan now is to wipe it out and start from scratch.

An ASP.Net site we created is having infrequent problems with logins using forms authentication. Essentially what happens is that the user attempts to login and is successful, but then is redirected back to the login page immediately. So it looks like an infinite loop of logins. We have been able to deduce that the cookie is related to the problem. If the user deletes their cookies in IE the problem goes away. The problem is very intermittent, so it is very difficult to reproduce. It is not generating 500 errors or errors in the logs. From extensive Googling, the best I can come up with is the fact that we allowed the cookie to persist across sessions, and the problem is related to that. So I changed the createPersistentCookie parameter to false:

FormsAuthentication.SetAuthCookie(nResult.ToString, False)

Of course, solving the problem is only a wait-and-see in this case, since I can’t reproduce the problem directly. I thought our login code was pretty straightforward, letting ASP.Net do as much of the work as possible.

Imports System.Web.Security.FormsAuthentication
........
'txtEmail, txtPassword are textboxes on the form, lblMessage is a label control
Public Sub Login_Click(ByVal snd As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) _     Handles LoginButton.Click
        Dim NotRegistered As String = " is not a registered email address. “ & _                                  “Please use the Create A Profile link to register."
    Dim nResult As Integer    If Page.IsValid Then
        Dim sPassword As String 

        sPassword = HashPasswordForStoringInConfigFile(txtPassword.Text, "sha1")
        nResult = LoginResult(txtEmail.Text, sPassword) 'Validate against the database
        If nResult = -1 Then 'Not a registered user, display error message
            lblMessage.Text = txtEmail.Text & NotRegistered
        ElseIf nResult = -2 Then 'Bad password, set error message
           lblMessage.Text = "The password for " & txtEmail.Text & _                             " is incorrect"
        ElseIf nResult > 0 Then 'Registered user, nResult is their ID number
           If Request.QueryString("ReturnUrl") <> "" Then 'Redirect to requsted page
               RedirectFromLoginPage(nResult.ToString, False)
           Else 'Go to My Jobs by default
               SetAuthCookie(nResult.ToString, False)
               Response.Redirect("../MyJobs/My_Jobs.aspx")
           End If        End if
    End If
End Sub