But let me start from the beginning and how I stumbled upon my discovery. For work, I’m developing a discussion site that implements gamification, not unlike the sites in the Stack Exchange network. As a matter of fact we are closely following their model and implementation. Today I was working on the user profile page and wanted to see how Stack Overflow did theirs. A co-worker pointed out that their user IDs are incremental and we were curious who user ID 1 is. Lo and behold, it was Jeff Atwood. No big surprise I guess.

As I expected, the profile page is clean and concise like the rest of the site. I saw a link to his Coding Horror blog and clicked it. I’ve been there before but I don’t remember reading any of his entries. It just so happens his last blog was on parenthood and I’m at the age where my fiance and I are contemplating whether we should have children or not. So I read Jeff’s blog on parenthood and to my surprise, it was VERY entertaining. His writing style mixes in anecdotes, unexpected analogies, and a sense of humor that somehow easily comes through in the words.

I somehow found myself scrolling down the page to see what else he wrote about? Multiple video cards for Battlefield 3? OK! I have a love for both. What else is there? Being an iPhone/iPad developer is like serving the king? Hmmm, sound interesting. Gamification? Directly applies to me.

Those next 3 articles were equally well written in the same personable style. But his gamification blog is what let me to the purpose of this blog. In the gamification blog, there’s a link to another of his blog titled “How to Write Without Writing”. In it Jeff points out that developers are not the best communicators. That “communication with other human beings is not exactly what we signed up for”. No argument there. It turns out Jeff and Joel have always intended to use Stack Overflow to trick developers into writing more. The smoking barrel: “Joel and I have always positioned Stack Overflow, and all the other Stack Exchange Q&A sites, as lightweight, focused, ‘fun size’ units of writing…Yes, by God, we will trick you into becoming a better writer if that’s what it takes …”

WE’VE BEEN BAMBOOZLED! This entire time I thought I was using that wonderfully pragmatic site for my own gains. But those two were playing us all.

But seriously, going through Jeff’s blog inspired me. He’s absolutely right. We should all strive to be better writers and communicators. And most of us desperately need to start practicing more. I can personally attest to this. Just writing this blog is taking longer than I expected and I had to visit Google several times to search for the right word to convey my thoughts. I’m obviously having a hard to time gathering my thoughts and clarifying them. I can’t even do it at the pace I’m typing. How is there any hope I’m going to do it while conversing (Or is it conversating? I’m going to need a lot practice.)?

Up till now, I’ve only been writing in this blog as a way to remind myself of resolutions to technical issues. But I should strive for more. I realize I won’t always be writing content that eventually translates to 1′s and 0′s. Someday, I’ll need to actually interact with other people. *gasp*. So now is a good time as any. But now that I put my plan out there, I might have invited the curse of social reality. Only time will tell.

On a final note, I want to convey my new found respect for Jeff, Joel, and other people that carry on with their work-life balance but at the same time still care about society as a whole and take steps to try to make it better. Something we should all strive for.

Oh yeah, congratulations to Jeff on the twin girls. I’m sure you’ll really have your work cut out for you now.

Error loading RadChart image. You may also wish to check the ASP.NET Trace for further details. Display stack trace?

Clicking “OK” simply took me to a 404 page. I did notice the url of this was http://localhost:11239/reports/ChartImage.axd?UseSession=true&ChartID=139df24e-1578-44d3-988b-c66f2d7df98c_chart_ctl00$MainContent$ReportChart1&imageFormat=Png&random=0.725656411482793

Somehow MVC routing disrupted the RadChart handler. To fix this, you need to explicitly define the HttpHanderUrl property of the RadChart.

ReportChart1.HttpHandlerUrl = ResolveUrl("~/ChartImage.axd");

That should fix it!

Table Per Type inheritance

Table Per Hierarchy inheritance

The third type of inheritance is Table Per Concrete. For a description of the three, see http://blogs.msdn.com/b/adonet/archive/2007/03/15/inheritance-in-the-entity-framework.aspx

The steps are as follows:

Add the following 3 references to your project:
System.Web.Abstraction
System.Web.Mvc (be aware of what DLL version you’re adding)
System.Web.Routing

Modify the project’s web.config. The easiest way is to create a new MVC project and copy over the value from there. You need to copy over the following sections, but don’t overwrite the existing values:
Compilation
Pages
HttpHandlers (this didn’t apply for me because it wasn’t in the MVC web.config. Might be a .NET 4.0 or MVC 3 thing.)
System.WebServer
Runtime

Next modify Global.asax Application_Start method to perform the same functions as your temp MVC functions.

Then copy the web.config in the View folder of the MVC project and paste it in the View folder of your webform project. Also don’t forget to copy any scaffolding files such as _Layout.cshtml and _ViewStart.cshtml.

Finally, you need to let Visual Studio know that your project now handles MVC pages as well. This will allow you to use the IDE to create Controller, Views, and other MVC goodies. Open the temp MVC project file in notepad and look for the <ProjectTypeGuids> section. Copy that guid and add it to your webform project folder. The guid in my project is {E53F8FEA-EAE0-44A6-8774-FFD645390401}.

That’s it. Now you should be able to create MVC files just was if the webform project was an MVC project itself.

But now I need to adjust the service to allow clients of other technologies to connect to it…more specifically PHP. PHP can’t connect to a service that uses wsHttpBinding. It has to be basicHttpBinding because it conforms to a broader standard.

The first thing to do is change system.serviceModel/services/service binding attribute to “basicHttpBinding”. Then create a <basicHttpBinding> node under system.serviceModel/bindings. Because we can’t use the Message security mode with basicHttpBinding, it needs to be changed to TransportWithMessageCredential. And that’s basically it for the service.

Now just publish it, connect to it from your client and call it a day. Well it didn’t go that smoothly for me. My client app I create for the original wsHttpBinding service was griping with an error: The remote server returned an error: (504) Gateway Timeout. Update the service reference? Nope that didn’t help. Remove and create the service reference? Nope, same error. So then I tried playing with the service configuration to no avail.

Finally I decided to read the stack trace and saw “There was no endpoint listening at https://myremoteservername/service.svc that could accept the message. This is often caused by an incorrect address or SOAP action.” Weird, how did it know the name of my server? I went back to my client’s web.config and looked at the endpoint VS created with I added the service reference. Indeed the address contained the server name! I changed it to the publicly accessible domain name and it works.

For some reason, when VS references a service with basicHttpBinding, it uses the server name. But I have no idea how it got the name in the first place. When adding the reference, I entered the public (correct) .svc url.

I’ll have to check with our network guy about it but I’m happy it’s finally working.

BTW, here’s the code to read from a template, edit a field and save to a new file…or output to the browser.

string templateFile = Server.MapPath(“pdf/FSSTemplate.pdf”);
string newFile = Server.MapPath(“pdf/FSS.pdf”);

PdfReader reader = new PdfReader(templateFile);
PdfStamper stamper = new PdfStamper(reader, new FileStream(newFile, FileMode.Create));

//Use the two lines below to write the pdf to the browser
//MemoryStream ms = new System.IO.MemoryStream();
//PdfStamper stamper = new PdfStamper(reader, ms);

AcroFields fields = stamper.AcroFields;
fields.SetField(“field1″, “Hello World!”);

//Flatten and close
stamper.FormFlattening = true;
stamper.Close();

//If you’re writing to a file, you’re done here. If you want to write to the browser, use the code below.

Byte[] byteArray = ms.ToArray();
ms.Flush();
ms.Close();
Response.BufferOutput = true;
Response.Clear();
Response.ClearHeaders();
string timestamp = DateTime.Now.ToString(“MMddyyyy_HHmmss”);
Response.AddHeader(“Content-Disposition”, “attachment; filename=PDF_” + timestamp + “.pdf”);
Response.ContentType = “application/pdf”;
Response.BinaryWrite(byteArray);
Response.End();

appcmd set site /site.name:"<IISSiteName>" /+bindings.[protocol='https',bindingInformation='*:443:<hostHeaderValue>']

<IISSiteName> is the name of your site in IIS. <hostHeaderValue> is the host header you’re trying to bind to.

I found this tidbit on http://www.sslshopper.com/article-ssl-host-headers-in-iis-7.html. According to their steps, you should install the ssl on one site with the admin console first before using appcmd. I’m not sure if this is true. I assume you can use appcmd for all of them.