cmb-web.co.uk

Using Trace in ASP.NET

I was called upon by a colleague of mine to help him find the source of his error in his ASP.NET application. It looked like the application was loosing session information and he couldn’t figure out how.

The first thing I did was turn on tracing in the web.config file. This is a very useful debugging tool that, among other things, displays the contents of the server side session variables.

You can enable tracing by adding the following line into your web.config, or you can turn it on for specific pages as need.

<trace enabled="true" pageOutput="true" localOnly="true" />

There are a number of different options, and you need to look at the Microsoft documentation (or any good book) for a complete list and description.   The basics in the above line are enabled which enables or disables the tracing.  Pageoutput will append the trace information to the bottom of the page as rendered in the browser and localonly which determines whether this output is seen on local machines or remote servers too.

This can be a very useful tool for quickly diagnosing issues in live/demo sites .

Acid3

There is a standard used to test web browsers called the Acid test. The idea is it allows vendors to test their products for proper web standard support. The current Acid3 test is designed to test ‘web 2.0′ dynamic specifications.

From the point of view of web content developers, standardising browser rendering is a very important process as it makes our lives easier and means we can ensure that the most people possible have access to the web content in the way in which it is intended. If we continually have to check and change our web sites to suit a particular browser’s quirks then it increases costs and ultimately means that content is inconsistent across different platforms. The original intention of the web was that it ought to be platform independent.

In practice we test our products in Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. These being the three main browsers used. This can be demonstrated from analysis of web server logs which show that IE and Firefox have by far the largest market share.

You can test your browser using the Acid3 test which will score your browser out of 100. The Anomalous Anomaly blog tracks the scores for all the current browser releases and the public betas and builds. It makes for interesting reading, particular when products like IE5 beat the latest IE7…

Update kb948496 for Windows Server 2003

One of our live web servers was patched last night with the latest Windows Server 2003 update.  This was labelled KB948496.

 It seems, however, that this caused all our ASP based sites to stop serving pages.  While I don’t have time to look into the case in depth, uninstalling it solved the problem.

 Looks like a bad patch from Microsoft.