How to update ASP.Net Forms Based Authentication to use Claims Based Authentication

Ah, the heady days of Visual Studio 2005 and the sparkly .Net 2.0 Framework with its newly minted Generics support. Who could forget them? For many, it seems, they are not so much recent history but an ongoing job to feed and maintain. A lot, in part, is due to the updates to .Net 3.0 … Continue reading How to update ASP.Net Forms Based Authentication to use Claims Based Authentication →

Save Bytes, Your Sanity and Money

In this day of elastic on-demand compute resource it can be easy to lose focus on how best to leverage a smaller footprint when it's so easy to add capacity. Having spent many a year working on the web it's interesting to see how development frameworks and web infrastructure has matured to better support developers … Continue reading Save Bytes, Your Sanity and Money →

Easy Testing Of Your Web.Config Transformations

One of the powerful features of ASP.Net 4.0 was the introduction of web.config transformations that meant you could now do with ASP.Net out-of-the-box what you would have previously done with some form of custom XSLT transform in your build process. One thing that is not that easy is to test the outputs from the transformations. … Continue reading Easy Testing Of Your Web.Config Transformations →

Using Amazon SES for .Net Application Mail Delivery

Until March 2012 Amazon's Simple Email Service (SES) had limited support for mail being sent via existing .Net code and the IIS SMTP virtual server. Some recent changes mean this is now possible so in this post I'll quickly cover how you can configure your existing apps to utilise SES. If you don't understand why … Continue reading Using Amazon SES for .Net Application Mail Delivery →

Getting Web Deploy Working For Non-Admin Logins

There’s a lot of good information around online about how to get Web Deploy (a.k.a. msdeploy) working. What most of the information tends not to cover is how to get it functioning for non-admin users. In this post I’m going to cover the steps to go through to get a non-Admin windows user working for … Continue reading Getting Web Deploy Working For Non-Admin Logins →

Fixing Packaging Of Web Projects On Your .Net Build Server

On my current project I'm running up the build and deployment environment and hit a roadblock that took me a little while to fathom. Hopefully reading this might save you some time if you're having this issue. The Scenario 1. A build server that does not have Visual Studio installed but has an appropriate .Net … Continue reading Fixing Packaging Of Web Projects On Your .Net Build Server →

A Subtle .Net Static Reference Type Gotcha

One of the fundamental concepts that any developer has to understand when developing .Net solutions is the difference between Reference and Value types. There are a lot of technical discussions online already about the differences between the two but the key concept to pull out of the MSDN description on Reference types is: "Variables of … Continue reading A Subtle .Net Static Reference Type Gotcha →

Safely Testing .Net Code That Does Email Delivery

As a .Net developer you will most likely have come across the need to create and send an SMTP (email) message as part of a solution you've built. When under development you will have either stubbed out the mail delivery code or will have substituted a test email address for those of the final recipients in a live … Continue reading Safely Testing .Net Code That Does Email Delivery →