Developer Articles

I ran into an interesting problem with .Net 3.5 today, when trying to access response headers like so:

context.Response.Headers.Add("Content-Disposition", "attachment; filename=\"" + filename + "\"");

The application returns the error "This operation requires IIS integrated pipeline mode." Through some quick googling, I discovered that the problem existed in beta, and apparently wasn't corrected for the release.

Interestingly, there is a simple workaround for adding headers:

context.Response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment; filename=\"" + filename + "\"");

Why this simple change works I have yet to discover, but until Microsoft gets a patch out that corrects this behavior it'll do for me.

If your domain operates on a single dns cache hosted on one of your domain controllers, you've probably encountered a situation where changing the ip address associated with a domain does not propogate to all your internal machines. In network caching, the most obvious approach ("ipconfig /flushdns") doesn't have any effect on the actual cache, and normally only time (or a hard restart) will clear the bad ips.

I finally found the proper method of clearing this cache:

1. On your domain controller open Administrative Tools -> DNS
2. Then right click on the name associated with your domain dns server and select "Clear cache".

That's it. All client machines depending on the network cached dns will be updated immediately.

http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/13disasters.asp

Greate article for addressing scalability issues in a Microsoft environment

In a recent project, our team needed to run a nightly import service to insert a large dataset from an access .mdb file into a SQL Server database.  The obvious solution was to use SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) which I worried might turn out to be some trouble, but I was amazed to discover how simple it is to execute an SSIS Package that performs the import from within your code.

Jeff does a good job of explaining the basics here.  I would only add that you must have SSIS installed on any machine you try to run this code on or you will encounter a very unhelpful error about "CLSID {E44847F1-FD8C-4251-B5DA-B04BB22E236E}".

EDIT:

Another issue I encountered with executing SSIS packages from c# was in the connection permissions when trying to run the code on a different machine. I persistantly ran into "Login failed for user '[username]'." no matter the protection level, or imported configuration file. I finally worked around the issue by using windows auth on all sql connections.

I found a good article to create an installer for windows services with some tweaking.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/816169