Tough MVC 5 OWIN External Authentication Issue

Finally managed to solve a weird issue with external Google authentication in a new MVC 5 application I am working on (CrowdBacklog). This is to help me remember what to do and hopefully help others fix their issues if they stumble upon it… The Scenario VS2013 update 2 Brand new MVC 5 project targeting .Net 4.5.1 – no old MVC4 / Web Forms crud messing things up Startup.Auth.cs has been updated with Google clientid and […] Read more »

Fixing Cross Appdomain Call Timeouts

Working with dynamically loaded assemblies in a separate AppDomain is a powerful tool for protecting your execution context and creating a pluggable arcitecture. Brad Smith has written a great post on how to set it up using a generic architecture. There is one issue with the way he set it up for a project I have been involved in which resulted in us getting the dreaded remoting exception “Object: has been disconnected or does not exist […] Read more »

6 Steps To Get Entity Framework 5 Working with MySql 5.5

After much battling with configuration and such I have finally managed to get EF5 Code First and MySql 5 working together using the Oracle/MySql .NET Connector 6.5.4 or the official Connector version 6.6.4. This configuration does not currently support Migrations. The steps are as follows: Grab EF 5 from NuGet Grab MySql.Data and MySql.Data.Entity from NuGet (6.5.4) or MySql (6.6.4) Configure a MySql Data Provider Configure a MySql Connection String Create a Custom MySql Database […] Read more »

Using MySql 5 as Membership Backend for ASP.NET 4.5 MVC 4 Application

Oracle provide MySql ASP.Net web providers through NuGet – search for MySql.Web. Using the MySql providers you can easily use MySql as your membership/profile/role backend for an ASP.Net application. But beware the MySql providers do not currently support the ASP.NET 4.5 templates since those templates use ExtendedMembershipProvider and SimpleMembershipProvider and they have an internal dependency on MS SQL Server… I am going to demonstrate using it as the membership provider for an MVC 4 application […] Read more »

Windows Phone 7 Emulator Running on Parallels

I have previously not managed to get the Windows Phone 7 emulator running on my dev install (Windows 7 on Parallels 7). After upgrading to Parallels 8, installing the latest Parallels update for Windows 8 and the Windows Phone 7.1.1 SDK update. I have managed to get it working a little more. It still takes ages to startup: 2-3 minutes of “Windows Emulator is doing a full OS boot” before the Windows Phone logo shows […] Read more »

Windows Phone 8 Emulator May Work in VMWare Fusion

So after trying to get my MacBook Pro up and running as a dev machine for Windows Phone 8, both using Parallels 8 (which is my standard VM environment) and Bootcamp, I have resorted to using a Sony Vaio instead. My current MacBook is dead-in-the water as a fully working WP8 dev machine. The final knockout blow was when I realised that the WP8 emulator requires hardware-assisted virtualisation using SLAT and that my 2009 MacBook […] Read more »

Windows Phone 8 Emulator on MacBook Pro – No SLAT

Trying desperately to try out the Windows Phone 8 emulator… I am running a mid 2009 MacBook Pro with a 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. The WP8 emulator requires Hyper-V on Windows 8 and Hyper-V requires that the processor supports virtualization through Second Level Address Translation (SLAT). Intel Core i5 &, i7 should support it so a newer MacBook Pro might work, but for me that makes it impossible to run the WP8 emulator […] Read more »

Wrestling with WIX UI and Properties

I have been trying to get a WIX installer behaving the way I want it to for a couple of days, unfortunately I am not an MSI expert and have had a hard time understanding why things done work as I want. The installer is for an upgrade of a license key and copy protection product that I have created. Using Netsparkle the product gets automatically updated when a new version is available. I also […] Read more »

Automatically Resolving Secondary Assembly References With MSBuild and TFS Build

There is a known issue/feature with MSBuild which also affects TFS build, since it uses MSBuild to compile, where secondary assembly references are not identified and added to csc and vbc tasks. The exact details are explained here, on MSDN and Stackoverflow with various workarounds and on Microsoft Connect. Visual Studio handles the issues automatically by referencing any secondary references that are required, so you don’t see the problem in Visual Studio but may get compile […] Read more »

Fixing pingchecker link locating code

I have installed the free pingback manager pingchecker since I wanted to be able to manually check and ping other blogs that I link to. Unfortunately for some reason the plugin doesn’t handle link tags with additional info/attributes like styles or a target. The problem is around line 270, the regexp which is used to find links needs to be updated to look like this: inputcontent.replace(/[^<]*(<a [^>]*href=(?:"|\')([^"\']+)(?:"|\')[^>]+>([^<]+)<\/a>)/g, function () { matches.push(Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments, 1, 4)); }); That […] Read more »