Posted by: robrobertson | January 4, 2010

IIS 500 with isapi_redirect.dll (incorrect function)

Having received a most un-useful HTTP Error 500 with an error code of 2147942401 and also Incorrect function (0×80070001), we started digging around different versions and the setup of our redirect.

The short story is to check and re-check your settings again.

One missing configuration value that is stored in the registry was enough to generate this strange error. The Apache Tomcat Connector – Reference Guide contains all the necessary steps to properly setup the redirects. The basic registry values to create are: extension_uri, log_file, log_level, worker_file, and worker_mount_file.

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Posted by: robrobertson | November 4, 2009

Windows 2008 (IIS7): The installer was interrupted

When installing an MSI from a Visual Studio Web Project, a dreaded “The installer was interrupted before the Application was installed” message may appear. The Server Role, “IIS 6 Management Capability” is required for the MSI to register with the IIS 6 Metabase.

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Posted by: robrobertson | June 15, 2009

Generate Dynamic iTextSharp PDF Documents from ASP.Net

Here’s two examples to dynamically create PDF’s using iTextSharps’ HTML Parser: in the browser and also a method to write the pdf to disk.

using System;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.IO;
using System.Xml;
using iTextSharp.text;
using iTextSharp.text.html;
using iTextSharp.text.pdf;

namespace Web
{
    public partial class iTextSharpDemo : System.Web.UI.Page
    {
        protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            //Example HTML String
            string html = "<html><p align='center'>Hello World!</p><newpage />Hello 2nd Page!</html>";

            //Parse the HTML to PDF and Write PDF to disk
            WritePdf(html, @"c:\temp\share\mypdf.pdf");

            //Parse the HTML to PDF and write PDF bytes to browser via the outputstream
            MemoryStream m = CreatePdf(html);
            Response.ContentType = "application/pdf";
            Response.OutputStream.Write(m.GetBuffer(), 0, m.GetBuffer().Length);
            Response.OutputStream.Flush();
            Response.OutputStream.Close();
        }

        protected void WritePdf(string html, string destination)
        {
            MemoryStream ms = CreatePdf(html);

            FileStream fs = File.OpenWrite(destination);
            fs.Write(ms.GetBuffer(), 0, ms.GetBuffer().Length);
            fs.Close();
            ms.Close();
        }

        public static MemoryStream CreatePdf(string html)
        {
            MemoryStream m = new MemoryStream();

            try
            {
                Document document = new Document(PageSize.LETTER);
                PdfWriter.GetInstance(document, m);

                StringReader sr = new StringReader(html);
                XmlTextReader xtr = new XmlTextReader(sr);

                document.Open();

                HtmlParser.Parse(document, xtr);

                xtr.Close();
                document.Close();
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                System.Diagnostics.EventLog.WriteEntry("Application", ex.Message);
                throw ex;
            }

            return m;
        }

    }
}

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Posted by: robrobertson | March 30, 2009

Taking an ASP.Net Application Offline with an Outage Message

App_offline.htm is an easy, but not widely published, method to take your favorite ASP.Net Web Application offline and present a friendly outage message to your users. Simply create an outage message with your downtime info formatted in clear, readable html. Copy the file to the root of your website, and any requests will be redirected to this file.

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Posted by: robrobertson | November 6, 2008

iTextSharp – 401 Error when parsing images!

When using the html parser to convert a web page into PDF and also using an image tag to an IIS server that has Integrated Authentication enabled, you will receive: The remote server returned an error: (401) Unauthorized.

The easy solution is to find the GetImage(Uri url) method and add the default credentials to the WebRequest after it is created. These can be found in the itextsharp.txt.pdf.codec namespace in the following classes: BmpImage, GifImage, and PngImage.

WebRequest wr = WebRequest.Create(url);
wr.Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;
isp = wr.GetResponse().GetResponseStream();

Since iTextSharp is Open Source, it was easy to download the code, isolate the error, and quickly add a line of code for the authentication. Now, it’s time to submit the change to the iTextSharp project on SourceForge.

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Posted by: robrobertson | October 28, 2008

iTextSharp + NewPage -> “The document has no pages”

The constructor for an iTextSharp Pdf document doesn’t require the page size to be initialized and it does not default to a lovely letter sized page, therefore, attempting to add a new page to the document may result in an exception of “The document has no pages.”

When creating a document, always specify the page size such as: 

Document document = new Document(PageSize.LETTER);

 
Using the HTML parser to generate a pagebreak in the Pdf file requires the simple tag:

<newpage />

Unfortunately, the HTML pagebreak,  <p style=”page-break-before: always” />, isn’t supported, but it should be fairly easy to add this functionality to the parser if needed.

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Posted by: robrobertson | September 4, 2008

MS SQL Insert Statement Generator

Narayana Vyas Kondreddi has created a wonderful stored procedure for MS SQL Server that will easily, quickly, and accurately create your SQL insert scripts for your next migration. He has two versions (SQL 2000 and 2005) of the sp_generate_inserts stored procedure along with a host of other neat T-SQL code scripts.

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Posted by: robrobertson | September 3, 2008

MSBuild and Quotation Marks “!!”

To publish a web site using Team Build, I added this task:

 <Exec Command = “xcopy /s /y /e $(OutDir)_PublishedWebsites\webproject \\webserver\webdocs\website“/>

This returned an annoying “Invalid Number of Parameters” error.  Since my path contained a space in it, I needed to include it in quotation marks.  In order to escape the quotes, MSDN has a handy article on Escaping Special Characters in MSBuild.  Looking up an ASCII table reveals that the quotation mark is Hex 22, so our new successful task is:
 
<Exec Command=“xcopy /s /y /e %22$(OutDir)_PublishedWebsites\webproject%22 \\webserver\webdocs\website“/>
 

 

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Posted by: robrobertson | August 21, 2008

Extension Methods and Linq to SQL

Using Extension Methods with Linq to SQL is easy and handy to use!  To change the insert behavior on the Linq to SQL object without having to use a stored procedure and create a business object around the l2s object, create an Extension Method.  This example only insert users that haven’t already been added. Now, ToolUserInfo.Insert() is ready to be called.

public static void Insert(this ToolUserInfo userInfo)
{
//Create a DB Context
DataClassDataContext db = new DataClassDataContext();

// Get a list of existing tool users
var ToolUsers =
      (from u in db.R2ToolUserInfos
       select u.UserId);

if (!ToolUsers.Contains(userInfo.UserId))
{
    db.ToolUserInfos.InsertOnSubmit(userInfo);
    db.SubmitChanges();
}
}
 

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Posted by: robrobertson | August 21, 2008

ProperCase Function in .Net

There’s no need to roll your own proper case function in .Net!  The ToTitleCase Method in the TextInfo class will format your name to the customs of the current culture.  In general, only the first letter is uppercased and the remainder is lowercased.  Also, it will not format a word if all the characters are uppercased (to not interfere with abbreviations).  Our names were all captialized so I added ToLower, however that will cause any suffixes such as “III” to be formated as “Iii”.

 
public static string ProperCase(string input)
{
return Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture.TextInfo.ToTitleCase(input.ToLower());
}

 

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