Another break through

It is again a new start of life in Sydney. I have moved from London to Sydney last month with my family and getting settled in Western part of Sydney. I do enjoy the weather and life style in Sydney and plan to settle permanently here.

I am lucky to get a job in my first week and I am sure it will be too exciting as my first project will be in .NET 3.5 using TFS server for project management. It is a really a good chance for me to expose myself to new technologies. I am also exposed new domain of knowledge which I haven’t work before and I will be a part of a small smart team which will develop recruitment management system. I am already excited about the design of the product and it was superb and the product will be a small scale ERP system for the service industry.

Win 1000$ every week

This is not a scam message and everyone has the chance to win 1000$ every week by helping others to solve questions and problems. You have better chance to win these days as the site was launched on last Monday only and having fewer members. Hurry up and visit to www.bornclever.com to get registered and for more details click on FAQ link.

Don’t think that bornclever.com people pay me for promoting their site and instead the whole site was designed, developed and implemented by me for my company. It is better to mention here that the site was designed according to the strict user requirement and you can’t blame me for any usability issues. But I will be responsible for any technical issues with the hosting provider here. I am happy to see one of my developed applications is going to be used by millions of people and hope best for the client to success in their business.

MCPD - Web Developer

I have completed my MCPD Web development by passing the exam 70-551 UPGRADE: MCAD Skills to MCPD Web Developer by Using the Microsoft .NET Framework. I haven’t tried any Microsoft certifications after my MCAD which I achieved in January 2006. During the period 2006/2007 I was busy with my MBA and CIMA strategic level exams and I think it’s time to play around with technology again. I need to thank my previous office co-worker Nilmini for the support materials and the encouragement to do this exam and hope to continue the exam fever.

Web Server controls and the web project

I came across some of the web control specific features in my last project and I thought of sharing with you all.

If you want to show some password in a password TextBox you can’t simply assign
txtPassword.Text = “*****”;

You need to do replace with txtPassword.Attributes.Add("value", “*****”);

My first issue was with the password textbox and the issue was that the created user’s password is empty when the user upload profile image. When I debugged the code, I noticed that when there is a page postback occurs, the password textbox is cleared due to security reason in ASP.NET 2.0. So in this case you need to think whether the postback is really needed or you can save the password in temporary storage.

The second experience was with Html server control HtmlInputImage. When I click on the htmlinputimage control then there was automatic postback to the server and this behaviour is not observed with HtmlInputButton control. This seems to be an expected behaviour and the workaround is to define onclick client event and return false as shown below.

Pass authentication details in System.Web.Mail

I have assigned to fix the problem in sending email of asp.net 1.1 project. I haven’t involved in the development of the project but I setup the application in the live server. I developed and successfully deployed another asp.net 2.0 application with the same hosting provider. My project uses System.Net.Mail to send email works fine.

You can check ScottGu’s blog for more detail using System.Net.Mail here.

It was not easy for me to setup the email functionality in 1.1 asp.net app and I have searched a lot in the internet to pass the credential details. I ended up with a resourceful site to use System.Web.Mail which demonstrates sending username and password to the SMTP server to provide authentication.

MailMessage mail = new MailMessage();
mail.Fields.Add("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/smtpauthenticate", "1"); //basic authentication
mail.Fields.Add("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/sendusername", "my_username_here"); //set your username here
mail.Fields.Add("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/sendpassword", "super_secret"); //set your password here

Source: http://www.systemwebmail.com/faq/3.8.aspx

CIMA Strategic level Completed

I have completed my CIM A strategic level and this is my second innings of CIMA. I studied the strategic level @ Virtual in Colombo and got through two subjects in Nov 2007 and completed the Financial Strategy paper this May 2008. The TOP CIMA is remaining and I plan to complete that in 2009.
I am also working towards getting my MCPD and hope I will be able to sit for the exam this month.

Expect the unexpected

In my previous organisation we have a separate team called infrastructure team to build and deploy the products in Testing, Staging and Production environments. The development team duty is to check in the bits and releasing the product to infra team through a ticket with release notes. But in my current organisation the developer are sometimes involved in setting up the product for the client. These are mostly web applications and need to be hosted in third party environments. It means the product bits have to be moved to the server using ftp and not much access to the server environment for debugging and other information.

The latest web project had worked fine in my computer and in our testing server too but it gave some unexpected and never seen error messages when it was hosted in the real environment. The first error message was “Unable to serialize the session state. In 'StateServer' and 'SQLServer' mode, ASP.NET will serialize the session state objects, and as a result non-serializable objects or MarshalByRef objects are not permitted. The same restriction applies if similar serialization is done by the custom session state store in 'Custom' mode.” This was handled by adding the following element to web.config as there is no external session management.


After this error fixing this error I got the error message “Validation of viewstate MAC failed. If this application is hosted by a Web Farm or cluster, ensure that configuration specifies the same validationKey and validation algorithm. AutoGenerate cannot be used in a cluster.” After some time of googling, I found this page which closely matches with my scenario and the solution work for me perfectly. http://aspadvice.com/blogs/joteke/archive/2006/02/02/15011.aspx

It is better to note that the machine.config file of the server would be different than your one and also it is good practice to clean the web. config file before moving to production environment for the elements compilation, authentication, customErrors, tracing and debugging with security in mind.