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Request.URL Values

January 23, 2012 14:23 by ckincincy

Many times I post things on this blog that are for my benefit, more than yours Smile.  But if you’re here, then it must be benefiting you.

I always need to know what values are in each Request.Url.* property. 

Start URL:
http://localhost:52186/RequestURLValues.aspx?myvalueishere=true

Request.Url.AbsolutePath: /RequestURLValues.aspx
Request.Url.AbsoluteUri: http://localhost:52186/RequestURLValues.aspx?myvalueishere=true
Request.Url.Authority: localhost:52186
Request.Url.DnsSafeHost: localhost
Request.Url.Host: localhost
Request.Url.HostNameType: Dns
Request.Url.LocalPath: /RequestURLValues.aspx
Request.Url.OriginalString: http://localhost:52186/RequestURLValues.aspx?myvalueishere=true
Request.Url.PathAndQuery: /RequestURLValues.aspx?myvalueishere=true
Request.Url.Port: 52186
Request.Url.Query: ?myvalueishere=true
Request.Url.Scheme: http
Request.Url.UserInfo:


Categories: ASP.NET | .NET | Tech Tips
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A few random links and saved pages

March 12, 2011 22:46 by ckincincy

I have a habit of bookmarking pages as I feel that I need to go back and review the content. 

So, I’m a bit too OCD to have that many random links in my book marks and I’ve had it happen more than once where stuff I bookmarked later disappeared from the web.  Let me share them with you… and at the same time give ma  point of reference!

PC Usability Hacks

Programming Tips

Fun Tips

Hacks

Tech Links

Political/Opinion


Yet Another URL Shortener

August 15, 2010 14:34 by ckincincy

So I got board on Friday and decided to create my own URL shortening service.  Went looking for a domain and found ocdp.us.  A spin off of this domain so I went and did a quick search on Google to make sure I didn’t spell something bad. Google wondered if I meant to type octopus:

octopus

So I am aware of the sound of the domain :-). 

I went looking for an open source solution that existed and found one that best met my desires. One built by jobping.com.  It was ASP.NET MVC based, so figured it was a good way to work on MVC while giving me what I wanted.

The pre-baked solution was missing a few things that I wanted.

1. The ability to have a custom short URL.

2. The ability to see a report of short URL’s.  Basically how many clicks have happened on that URL.

So I took the jobping.com solution and made my own.

You can see my solution in action two ways.

1. Click ocdp.us/a to basically come back to this page.  This was an auto generated url.

2. Click ocdp.us/lwlfb to go to Loving With Luggage’s site on Facebook.  This is a custom URL.

At some point in the future I’ll share the code to my site, but need to make sure the unit test are written just for code completeness.


Cat and Mouse with Comments

August 6, 2010 01:25 by ckincincy

So I have re-enabled comments on this site.  It is a cat and mouse game, but this time I implemented something custom to my DotNetBlogEngine site, so the default hacks that exist for DNBE sites won’t work on mine.

I simply require that a basic math problem be answered before the post goes on.  Will be interesting to see how this works.


Website upgrade

May 2, 2010 00:26 by ckincincy

Something you probably shouldn’t notice, but this site is now running under .NET 4.0. 

If you notice anything odd, please notify me. 


Completely Remove .NET Framework

March 6, 2010 06:00 by ckincincy

Last week I came into the office to find my box was completely hosed.  I kept getting a compile error that the webengine.dll could not be found. 

I tried many different uninstalls and reinstalls of .NET but it wouldn’t fix the problem.  However I notice that even though .NET was uninstalled, it wasn’t.  I went looking for a tool to completely uninstall .NET and found this website.

After using that process to uninstall .NET and then rebooting, I reinstalled .NET and was good to go.

Was one of the most frustrating work days I have had in some time, have never been so close to being beaten by a technical problem like this.


Recent Referrers User Control

March 1, 2010 06:00 by ckincincy

In the past, Chris Blankenship had written a user control to show the recent referrers in DotNetBlogEngine.  I’ve used it on my site since then.  However in a recent upgrade of the code base it stopped working.  Having a little free time on my hand, I took the time to fix it for version 1.6. 

While doing that I wanted the ability to white list and black list certain domains.  The logic in DotNetBlogEngine to see if a referrer is spam is a little limited.  It does a simple web request on the referrer to see if it can find the host domain in the returned HTML.  This leads to a lot of good referrals being marked as spam.  Then there are some ‘good’ domains that I want hidden.

imageSo I added a white and black list to the referrer page.

The end result you see on the side bar of my site. 

If you’d like the code, you download it below.  This change does require a recompile of the business logic dll, and a schema change if you are using SQL.

Download Referrer Patch 1.1 – 31.4KB


JODOHost.com

January 2, 2010 22:53 by ckincincy

image As covered in my prior post, I recently went on an in depth search for a web host.  I ended up at JODOHost.com.

Their price was unbelievable.  For unlimited sites, 4.5 GB of space, 65GB of transfer, and much more it is only $17.50 a month.  The great thing about this is that you can have Window servers and Linux servers. 

They actually support multiple domains in a true way, all the other host had their domains as sub directories of a root domain.  That isn’t the case with JodoHost, a domain is a unique folder.

They are based out of India, and there is an honest and fair criticism from Indian tech support about it being poor.  However, overall, I have found Jodo’s support to be more than acceptable.  There has been the occasional person who was below par, but I get that with American based support companies as well.

The only thing I don’t like is that you can’t make a folder writable on your own.  You have to open a support ticket so they can change that for you.

Overall, if you are looking for an ASP.NET host, JodoHost was by far the best one I tried. 


The search for a web host

December 16, 2009 06:00 by ckincincy

I’ve been on the search for a web host.  I’ve used Jetsoftdev/Devserve hosting for many years.  It was a bit of a trade off, I’d help manage their server and get some free hosting as well.  That worked great, but I honestly just got tired of having to manage the server so much.  I went on the look out for a new webhost that was reasonably priced but loaded with features. 

Specifically I needed multiple domain support.  I want the ability to host several sites for the base price.  Then, it had to be Windows based.

The journey was an interesting one, to give the short answer.  JodoHost.com won.  Godaddy, 1and1.com, and aplus.net lost.  I’ll go over the reasons why below.

For all providers, lets assume the fact that we have three domains and one of those has to be your ‘primary’ domain.

Root: example.com
2nd Domain: example2.com
3rd Domain: example3.com

image

I started with APlus.net.

This exposed me to the first problem that many host share when it comes to hosting multiple .NET domains.  I can’t speak for non-.NET sites as I don’t currently maintain any of those.  But .NET is configured to operate within “Applications” and the problem shows up when the host is using some fancy URL Rewriting to make ‘multiple domains’ possible.  When a .NET site has to search for its root directory, it will show it as it is setup in IIS. 

The problem here is when your file structure looks like this:

web\example.com\

web\example.com\example2.com\

web\example.com\example3.com\

So the following URL’s would (or should) be valid:

http://example.com/
http://example.com/example2.com/
http://example.com/example3.com/
http://example2.com/
http://example3.com/

The problem arises though, in that http://example2.com will show up as: http://example2.com/example2.com/ 

In trying to get this issue resolved along with some email issues, I found Aplus.net’s support to really be lacking.   Slow, to no reply.

image

Next I tried 1and1.com. 

I found the exact problem as aplus.net with the multiple domains. 

So I moved on pretty quickly as I had learned my lesson

They were, however, a bit slow to refund the initial fee that I paid to setup the service.

image

Next on the list was GoDaddy.com.

During my initial tryouts of GoDaddy.com I thought I had finally found my solution.  Unfortunately, however, they turned out to have the same .NET problem with multiple sites. 

I was a bit bummed. 

Their support was two fold.  It was always available, but at times kind of slow to react.  Many times they told me to wait 24 hours for changes to take affect (server changes, not DNS changes).  Then those changes would never take affect and they would have to reschedule the batch function to run and fix the issue, which could take another 24 hours.   This is why it took me so long to realize they had the same .NET issue.

image Finally I did some more searching, and found JodoHost.com

I took a look at some of their plans, and found that their Reseller Hosting plan was perfect for me.  It was unlimited domains, 65 GB of traffic, etc.. Makes no sense to use their basic web hosting plans when their reseller hosting plans give you so much more.  If you are looking for just a basic web host, then there are cheaper options out there.  This, for me, was the best option I could find.

I’ll write a specific follow up post for JodoHost.com soon.  I want to make sure the good and the bad is not lost in such a long post.


App_offline.htm – Page Not Found - Solution

December 9, 2009 17:49 by ckincincy

Today while looking over my RSS feeds I saw a post about some changes to the DOTNETBLOGENGINE, while looking over that fellow’s blog I saw a post about App_Offline.htm – Page Not Found.  I took a brief read over the article and it reminded me of a time when I ran into this issue. 

The Problem

The problem occurs when you turn App_Offline on, Internet Explorer (and apparently Google Chrome) will show a ‘pretty’ 404 error page.  Though FireFox will show the contents of the file without issue.

Here is the contents of my App_Offline.htm file:

image

Google Chrome shows this as a result:

image

Internet Explorer will show a page similar to this:

image

But Firefox shows the page as you would expect:

image 

 

The Solution

Now I remembered the solution pretty much immediately, you have to make the size of the file hit a certain limit.  I took a look around the web and found this article which puts the size at 512k.  That page recommends fixing this with some comments in the code.

Here is what my new App_Offline.htm file looks: 

image

Now you can see that the three browsers mentioned above will display the page as you would expect:

image

image

image

A Conclusion

Now, during my time of writing this blog post I got an email from Ben.  He gives a good justification for using his HTTPModule that his post talked about.  When you use App_Offline, all files are inaccessible.  Your site is down.  Now if you have some admin pages, or if you wanted to edit his solution to white list some IP, so you can test the solution without the general public seeing it using an HTTPModule sounds like a fantastic idea.  It, however, is not something you should implement to fix the 404 Page Not Found error.