IE classes DDD feedback site as a phishing site…
Wednesday, November 26, 2008 1:00:05 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
This one made me laugh today, Chris Anderson alerted me to it but you would have thought the MS guys would have picked up on it...
Incidentally, it's the first time I've seen this message on any site...
What’s Google missing this time?
Tuesday, November 25, 2008 2:22:34 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I guess it's something to do with fair competition etc but I found this rather interesting when adding a client to Google's Business Listing the other day.
Can anyone else spot a missing payment option?
How about "Google Checkout"?
A new email domain scam to watch out for
Friday, November 07, 2008 1:48:20 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
This came through to one of our clients today, I thought I'd share it as I've not seen it before and it made me chuckle. Note the placeholder: <Online since>
Thought you might like to share it with your clients :)
The remote host closed the connection. The error code is 0x80072746
Wednesday, November 05, 2008 2:03:40 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
We've just moved a couple of our sites onto a new server and have intermittently started to receive the error "The remote host closed the connection. The error code is 0x80072746.", usually around the same time as "Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding.".
As the infrastructure hadn't changed we were able to rule out network issues, hardware issues (it was an upgrade) and nothing had changed on the code level so we put it down to the new backup routine.
On a little Googling, I found a few sites that were pointing to (among other things) the Request length and Executiuon time which got me thinking, in this particular site there is a lot of data being sent/retrieved and it could be maxing out the request. After a little more digging I found this article from Microsoft about the httpRuntime Element and I quote
This time-out applies only if the debug attribute in the compilation element is False. To help to prevent shutting down the application while you are debugging, do not set this time-out to a large value.
Although I didn't recall making any changes to the site, when updating the database configuration settings, I did change the compilation element to false. So far increasing the executionTimeout value appears to have fixed the issue.
WSDL returning a valid response but object is null
Saturday, November 01, 2008 6:28:49 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
We had an interesting problem the other day while integrating with a web service hosted on an apache server. Every time we called the WSDL methods we could see a valid request being sent and a valid response being returned (ok there were a few syntax errors but nothing that would stop it converting) but despite this every time, without fail, it would return null at code level.
The solution was actually amazingly simple. In short, since our last flurry with web services we've upgraded to Visual Studio 2008 and installed ReSharper (see below for how that's relevant). In VS2008 they've sneakily added a new menu "Add Service Reference" and although it's in the same menu location and a similar wording etc does something different. If you add your WSDL reference this way it will more than likely fail.
To add a "Web Reference" in Visual Studio 2008 follow the instructions below and hopefully you won't go down the same routes that I did trying to debug the XML...
Click the "Add Service Reference" menu option (obviously!)
The screen below should appear, instead of entering the address of the web service into the address bar, click the advanced button at the bottom (highlighted)
That'll then bring up the screen below, on which you need to click the "Add Web Reference" button at the bottom.
You should then be presented with the usual "Add Web Reference" screen (see below).
Why did I mention ReSharper? Well I've notice that as well as adding to the IDE they've also updated some of the menu items, most noticeably "Go to Definition" which is now "go to Declaration" (see below) so I figured this new menu option was thanks to them.
ReSharper: 
Without ReSharper: 
So the next time your WSDL is returning a null object even though a valid response is being retrieved, check how you added it in Visual Studio,.