Red Shirts

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A funny comic from yesterday's paper.

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How to Get Norton Security Suite Firewall to Allow Remote Desktop Connections in Windows

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I ran into an issue recently with RDP connections being blocked by the firewall in Norton Security Suite. I checked the traffic rules under Settings > Firewall > Traffic Rules  and found that it was enabled by default (and couldn't be edited): But during further research, I found  this page  on Norton's support site which discusses the different trust levels of networks and mentions that, for the Public trust level, "This setting also blocks remote desktop connections by default.". I checked my network's trust level, and sure enough, it was set to Public (I'm not sure how/why). (Sidebar: Notice in the screenshot above that allowing Remote Desktop for Public Networks is defaulted to Allow , though that rule is not active). Here's what my network trust level looks like now after changing the setting to Private (accessible under Settings > Firewall > General Settings > Network Trust ): After changing the network trust level t...
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Resolving the "n timer(s) still in the queue" Error In Angular Unit Tests

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A few months ago one of the developers I work with ran into the below error in an Angular unit test: 1 timer(s) still in the queue The fix was to specify a particular amount of time in the tick() call as shown below: it( 'should set accountConfirmationDetails when getAccountConfirmationDetails is called' , fakeAsync(() => {          // Arrange          let  spyGetAccountConfirmationDetails = spyOn(accountService,  'getAccountConfirmationDetails' )         .and         .returnValue(Promise.resolve(AccountMockData.mockAccountConfirmationDetails));                    // Act         fixture.detectChanges();   ...
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How to Determine if a Column Exists in a DataReader

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I recently had to work on something which required me to query a database, open the results in a DataReader, and check for the existence of a particular column. While the DataReader doesn't have a method to do this, with just a few steps I was able to accomplish this task. Here's how. First, the DataReader has a method named GetSchemaTable() , which returns a DataTable consisting of information regarding the data contained in the DataReader. The first column in this DataTable is named ColumnName , and its value is (obviously) the name of the column. Knowing this, we can loop through the rows in the DataTable, checking the ColumnName column for a value that equals the name of the column we're looking for. To this end, I wrote a static method in one of my classes which takes the DataReader and the name of the column being sought: (C#) public static bool HasColumn(DbDataReader Reader, string ColumnName) {    foreach (DataRow row in Reader.GetSchemaTable().Rows)  ...
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The Cause and Solution for the "System.Runtime.Serialization.InvalidDataContractException: Type 'System.Threading.Tasks.Task`1[YourTypeHere]' cannot be serialized." Exception

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The other day I worked on some new code that ran fine locally, but when deployed to one of our internal web servers threw the following exception: "System.Runtime.Serialization.InvalidDataContractException: Type 'System.Threading.Tasks.Task`1[NameOfTheOffendingType]' cannot be serialized." This had me scratching my head -- after all, to use that old developer's saying, "it worked fine on my machine". Not only that, but the exception was occurring when I was calling a method that didn't use the type mentioned in the exception (according to the stack trace it looks like the exception was happening during one of the many calls made under the hood during the use of a proxy class method). But once I found the cause of the problem, it made total sense. In this case, I had added a new WCF service reference to the project, and the proxy class that was generated for it was including some new task-based asynchronous operations that are supported in .NET 4....
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Silent Renew and the "login_required" Error When Using oidc-client

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I recently implemented the Silent Renew functionality of oidc-client in an Angular application I work on, and was getting reports that the users' tokens were still expiring. This made no sense to me as I'd verified the code was working during development, but yesterday I found the problem and am hoping it will save someone some time. The error we were getting back was "Error from signinSilent: login_required". This indicates that the user's session is no longer active on IdentityServer and they must re-authenticate -- which, of course, is what we're trying to prevent by using Silent Renew. In our case, the problem wasn't with the Silent Renew functionality, but rather the user's session was expired. The reason why  it was expired was because, for some reason, we were setting the session length to 15 minutes instead of the default 10 hours . What was occurring was that Silent Renew was attempting to renew a token after 55 minutes (60 minutes expirat...
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