I have been playing around with the ASP.NET 4.0 Chart Controls for a new web site (Bilvärdet.se – used car price statistics)

When deploying it to IIS7 on my Windows Server 2008 I ran in to a few problems:

1) I did not have .NET 4.0 Framework installed on the server

It turns out .NET 4.0 Framework is an optional update in Windows Update and for some reason that I could not figure out failed to install (error code: 80200053) Solution that worked: Manually installed it. I had to use a tool that was new to me, the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (Web PI). Seems to be a cool tool to download, install and configure all sorts of software (incl Wordpress, Dupral, Joomla) on Windows, will check this out in more detail in the future.
Don’t forget to change the Application Pool for your Web Site/Web Application in IIS Manager to use .NET Framework 4.0

2) Next problem, error message: An ASP.NET setting has been detected that does not apply in Integrated managed pipeline mode

This turned out to be a few lines of code in web.config that seems to be needed on my development machine (Windows7 and Visual Studio 2010) but causes problems on IIS7.

Just removed this section from production web.config on server and it worked:

<httpHandlers>
     <add path="ChartImg.axd" verb="GET,HEAD,POST"
     type="System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting.ChartHttpHandler,
     System.Web.DataVisualization, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,
     PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" validate="false"/>
</httpHandlers> 

Thanks to Michael Narinsky for pointing this out.

3) Image file directory problems

First error message: Invalid temp directory in chart handler configuration c:\TempImageFiles\

Solution: Changed dir in ChartImageHandler app settings in web.config

<appSettings>
     <add key="ChartImageHandler" value="storage=file;timeout=20;dir=c:\TempImageFiles\;"/>
</appSettings> 

Then this error message: The temp directory in chart handler configuration is not accessible c:\xxx\images\

Followed error message suggestion and added access rights to directory (Properties – Security tab) for user NETWORK SERVICE

4) Charts not rendering with ASP.NET Routing

I’m using ASP.NET 4.0 Routing but this seems to be something Charts are not working well with. Charts are showing up as broken links. If you are using routing, you need to make sure ChartImg.axd is ignored. Add Ignore (or IgnoreRoute) and – this took me quite some time to figure out – make sure you add these before any MapPageRoute or it will not work!

This is what I added in VB.NET, add one line per level in virtual/route folder structure – first line is for root, second line for one subdirectory level, third line for two subdirectory levels.

routes.Ignore("ChartImg.axd/{*pathInfo}")
routes.Ignore("{controller}/ChartImg.axd/{*pathInfo}")
routes.Ignore("{controller}/{action}/ChartImg.axd/{*pathInfo}")

Thanks to Simon Steele.

BTW – Another nice link about ASP.NET Chart Control

In Visual Studio 2010 (VS2010) when you create a new Web Application Project using the default Web Template “ASP.NET Web Application” it creates an Account folder with the files Login.aspx, Register.aspx and ChangePassword.aspx.
These are files/pages for ASP.NET Membership which is ASP.NET’s built-in user handling. I have never used Membership before but have been curious to, so I saw this as my cue to do so. However since I’m running MySQL as my database server I knew I had some extra installing and configuring to do.

Now several hours later I have finally figured out what I needed to do…

1) Install the latest version of MySQL Connector/NET. Visual Studio support is from version 6.3 which is currently only available in beta, current version when writing this is 6.3.2 beta.

3) Done!

I am running Windows 7 64-bit, Visual Studio 2010 and MySQL Connector/NET 6.3.2 beta, but according to this thread other people with other versions of VS seems to be having the same problem.

These are the changes that are made to web.config:

  <connectionStrings>
    <remove name="LocalMySqlServer" />
    <add name="LocalMySqlServer" connectionString="server=localhost;User Id=root;database=users;password=xxx" providerName="MySql.Data.MySqlClient" />
  </connectionStrings>

<system.web>
    <authentication mode="Forms">
      <forms loginUrl="~/Account/Login.aspx" timeout="2880" />
    </authentication>
    <membership defaultProvider="MySQLMembershipProvider">
      <providers>
      <clear />
      <remove name="MySQLMembershipProvider" />
        <add name="MySQLMembershipProvider" type="MySql.Web.Security.MySQLMembershipProvider, MySql.Web, Version=6.3.2.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=c5687fc88969c44d" applicationName="/" description="MySQL default application" connectionStringName="LocalMySqlServer" writeExceptionsToEventLog="True" autogenerateschema="True" enablePasswordRetrieval="True" enablePasswordReset="True" requiresQuestionAndAnswer="False" requiresUniqueEmail="False" passwordFormat="Clear" maxInvalidPasswordAttempts="5" minRequiredPasswordLength="6" minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters="1" passwordAttemptWindow="10" passwordStrengthRegularExpression="" />
      </providers>
    </membership>
    <profile defaultProvider="MySQLProfileProvider">
      <providers>
        <clear />
        <remove name="MySQLProfileProvider" />
        <add name="MySQLProfileProvider" type="MySql.Web.Profile.MySQLProfileProvider, MySql.Web, Version=6.3.2.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=c5687fc88969c44d" applicationName="/" description="" connectionStringName="LocalMySqlServer" writeExceptionsToEventLog="False" autogenerateschema="True" />
      </providers>
    </profile>
    <roleManager enabled="false" defaultProvider="MySQLRoleProvider">
      <providers>
        <clear />
        <remove name="MySQLRoleProvider" />
        <add name="MySQLRoleProvider" type="MySql.Web.Security.MySQLRoleProvider, MySql.Web, Version=6.3.2.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=c5687fc88969c44d" applicationName="/" description="" connectionStringName="LocalMySqlServer" writeExceptionsToEventLog="True" autogenerateschema="True" />
      </providers>
    </roleManager>
  </system.web>

I found out a funny thing today. Or maybe not so funny when I think about it…

The order page on one of my sites have not been working since early November, almost 6 months!! As I’m sure you understand it’s not a very busy site, but usually I get a few orders per month so I should have noticed this a long time ago…

The site is running on IIS/ASP.NET and MySQL server 5.0.45 using the MySQL .NET Connector and I’m using a SQL statement like this on the page:

START TRANSACTION;
INSERT INTO table1 (companyname,street,city,zip) VALUES (‘XS Tech’,'test’,'test’,'12345′);
SELECT @id:=id FROM table1 where id = last_insert_id();
INSERT INTO table2 (id,contactname) VALUES (@id,’Max”);
COMMIT;

This statement was throwing an exception error: “MySql.Data.MySqlClient.MySqlException: Parameter ‘@id’ must be defined”

Since I could not really remember – ie had not properly documented – what changes I may have done to that page six months ago, it made trouble shooting a bit harder. But to make a long story short(er) – It turns out I had upgraded the MySQL .NET Connector and this was causing the error. The site was using MySql.Data.dll version 5.2.1.0. I tried to upgrade to 6.0.3.0 to no avail. But when downgrading to 5.1.4.0 it started to work just fine again.

Finally, I  found that this was indeed a change in the .Net Connector. (I’m not sure what version number but starting from 5.2.0 would be my guess)
Starting from version 5.2.2 of the Connector you should add the Allow User Variables=True Connection String Setting in order to use User Defined Variables in your SQL statements.

Example of Connection String:

Database=testdb;Data Source=localhost;User Id=root;Password=hello;Allow User Variables=True

Mike Barnett at Microsoft Research has developed a great tool for merging multiple dll’s and/or exe’s in to one single file: ILMerge (download from here). ILMerge has been around for several years but this was the first time I tried it out.

You can either use it from a command line or automate so that it is executed every time you rebuild, as a post-build-event. You can also use it programatically but this I have not tried yet.

To use from the command line simply go to your .NET projects bin release folder and type:

“%PROGRAMFILES%\microsoft\ilmerge\ilmerge.exe” /t:exe /out:newfile.exe file1.exe file2.dll file3.dll

Newfile.exe is the filename of the single merged exe file you want created, and file1-3 are the filenames of the files you want to merge. Make sure file1 is your primary assembly. The t parameter is used to set output type: exe for Console app, winexe for Windows forms, librarys for DLL.

To automate in Visual Studio 2005, go into Project Properties (Right click your project in the Solution Explorer, Select Properties)
Select the Build Events tab and in the Post-build event command line enter:

“%PROGRAMFILES%\microsoft\ilmerge\ilmerge.exe” /t:exe /out:”$(TargetDir)newfile.exe” “$(TargetDir)file1.exe” “$(TargetDir)file2.dll” “$(TargetDir)file3.dll”

I have tried this using Windows Vista, Visual Studio 2005 and C# but I assume it will work equally well on other versions of Windows, VS and VB.NET or other .NET languages.

Thanks to these posts by Edward Tanguay and Can Erten.

On one of my web sites I noticed that IDN (Internationalized Domain Names) don’t work when I do Response.Redirect in VB.NET.

IDNs are used to allow accented and other special international characters (non-Ascii) to be used in domain names. Since Domain Name Servers (DNS) only support Ascii, any IDN is encoded in Punycode.

To encode a string as Punycode in VB.NET simply do this:

Dim strUrl As String = “http://idn-example-åäö.com”
Dim idn As System.Globalization.IdnMapping = New System.Globalization.IdnMapping
strUrl = idn.GetAscii(strUrl)