My Life and Code

I recently picked up Your Shape Fitness Evolved for Kinect on Xbox 360. There aren't currently a lot of Kinect titles, but this one is one of the best I've tried. Having used Wii Fit, Wii Fit plus, and EA Active for Wii, I can safely say this game gives me a better workout than any of them, though it isn't perfect. The game offers 3 different types of workouts: a personal trainer guided workout (of which there are several regimens to choose from), fitness games (for example, Virtual Smash, which has you punching blocks that appear in front of you), and Zen workouts (Tai Chi). After messing around a bit with the games and zen stuff, I decided to get down to it with the personal trainer workouts. I thought I was in pretty good shape. Well, at least not bad shape. I'm relatively active, and do a lot of walking, including a daily lunchtime walk that lasts about half an hour which I've been doing for almost 10 years. So I was surprised when Your Shape decided to destro...

I recently subscribed to cable television and internet service with Comcast. I don't watch a lot of TV, so haven't had cable TV in years, but with the transition to digital TV from analog, and the poor reception I get over the air, I decided it was time to get cable again. Another reason for my subscription was due to my absolute loathing of Verizon. I've had DSL with them for years, and phone service with them since 1998. The phone line has never worked well, and every time I'd call, Verizon would blame it on wiring inside the house. Whenever it would rain heavily, the phone would go out altogether, which didn't sound like an in-the-house issue to me. After the last time a technician came out and found no problem, I traced the lines from the box and found that one of them was seriously frayed. I wish their professional technician would've noticed this. I ended up making the repair myself, and I'm not a professional phone technician. If it weren't for m...

A project I was working on recently made use of several WCF services, but we were having trouble sending large amounts of data to them (specifically, large integer arrays). We spent days trying to figure out how to resolve the issue, trying every config param imaginable (maxRequestMessageSize, maxItemsInObjectGraph, etc), but to no avail. Finally, at the 11th hour, one of the developers found the problem: IIS 7 was interpreting this large message as a Denial of Service attack and returning a false error message. The solution was to add the following to the web.config files of the affected services: < system.webServer > < security > < requestFiltering > < requestLimits maxAllowedContentLength = " 2147483647 " /> </ requestFiltering > </ security > </ system.webServer > Note that the value being used in the maxAllowedContentLength attribute is the maximum integer value and was used only for testing. In ...

I spent some time today learning about the Web Deployment Tool in Visual Studio 2010 and IIS, but despite having the tool installed wasn't getting the options to export or import packages in IIS. Finally, after much web-surfing, I stumbled across this excellent post which held the answer: if you install the tool via the Web Platform Installer, it doesn't install everything. The solution: either install it from the msi package to start, or, if you already have it installed, go into Programs and Features , right-click Web Deployment Tool , and select Change . Then, install the additional components you need (in my case, I selected everything that was not already installed). Alternatively, you could download the msi, run it, and select Change from the dialog when prompted; then choose any or all additional components. Many thanks to the author of the aforementioned blog post!

One of the projects I work on involves a WCF service that is set up to run under IIS instead of the Visual Studio Development Server. This project has a couple of branches that from time to time are merged back into the trunk, which sometimes leads to the following error if the developer is prompted by Visual Studio to automatically create the virtual directory for the service to run under: Creation of the virtual directory (URL) failed with the error: The URL '(URL)' is already mapped to a different folder location. The reason this error occurs is because, based on which branch was being used when the file was committed to source control, the directory could be different. I figured this would be a pretty easy thing to fix -- just delete the virtual directory in question. But I was surprised to go into IIS Manager and find that...it wasn't there. Yet I could go to the URL in question and receive an error page that suggested that the URL was, in fact, valid. The fix was some...

I was recently testing a web service method using SOAP UI and received the following error in regard to one of the method's parameters, which happened to be a date/time value: "The string '2010-09-23 10:00:00 AM' is not a valid AllXsd value." The solution was to format the value in YYYY-MM-DDThh:min:seconds.milliseconds format. For example: 2010-09-23T10:00:00.0000 Use leading zeroes for 1-digit hours. Example: 2010-09-23T09:00:00.0000 In my environment, the milliseconds were optional.

I was recently working on a WCF project in VS2010. Originally, the service was configured to run under the development server, but was later reconfigured to run under IIS -- but once this happened, it would fail when I'd try to start it up for debugging in the IDE, giving me the following error: The page you are requesting cannot be served because of the extension configuration. If the page is a script, add a handler. If the file should be downloaded, add a MIME map. To correct this issue, follow these steps (these steps apply to Windows 7 and may differ slightly depending on which version of Windows you're using): 1. Go to Control Panel 2. Select Add/Remove Programs 3. Select Turn Windows features on or off (from the left pane if you're using the modern view) 4. Go to Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5.1 (or something similar -- may very depending on your system). Expand this node and make sure the check boxes for any WCF options are checked. Then click OK. But wait, there...