The Closers
Bosch is back from retirement and back in the mix.
How to export Excel from AJAX in .Net
In order to use the standard response.write method of exporting to excel, you need to force AJAX to make a full postback. Otherwise, parsing errors occur.
To force a postback, assign a control to a trigger and put the export logic in the control click event or in the page.ispostback portion of page_load.
Trigger syntax:
</ContentTemplate>
<Triggers>
<asp:PostBackTrigger ControlID="btnGo" />
</Triggers>
</asp:UpdatePanel>
City of Bones
Keeps you off balance throughout. One of the better in the Bosch series.
Napoleon
Penguin Lives series is somewhat like the cliff notes of biography. Some interesting theories on the birth of totalitarianism and secret police force that grew out of the French Revolution.
Authenticated users getting logged out randomly
I was having a problem on a shared server with authenticated users getting logged out every couple of minutes. Turned out to be a simple fix by configuring a static machinekey for the web.config. By default, the authentication key is autogenerated by IIS each time the asp .net process cycles, which can be often on a shared machine.
Angels Flight
Not his best effort. Bosch’s romantic problems seem bolted on.
IE6 AJAX problem
I put together a fairly simple chunk of code to display a loading image while a chart was rendering. This used an updatepanel and timer. It ran fine with IE6/7 locally and IE7 remote. But IE6 would not display the image on the remote server. Just a blank page and then the chart.
I looked at a lot of different posts and finally came to the solution. It looks like AJAX will automatically compress output. IE7 can handle this, but IE6 can not. By disabling the default compression, the image now appears in IE6 on the remote server.
<system.web.extensions>
<scripting>
<scriptResourceHandler enableCompression="false" enableCaching="true"/>
</scripting>
</system.web.extensions>
- Download this code: AJAXIE6Issue.txt
Robert E Lee
About the shortest book I have ever read on the Civil War. Doesn’t go into much detail about the campaigns, which is fine. More focused on what made Lee tick.
Inside the Crosshairs
More of an overall history of weapons development and the creation of US sniper tactics. Not much on individual soldier actions. A bit dull for such an interesting topic.
The Lincoln Lawyer
The Lawyer by Lawyer genre has gotten a bit tired, so it was interesting to see it from a non-lawyer perspective. Read pretty quick for a thick paperback.
Dak To
No holds barred account of the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Vietnam. Generals in helicopters ordering ground troops to assault fortified NVA positions pretty much captures the overall tenor of the book. The descriptions of the battle for Hill 875 are not for the squeamish.
Dak To: America’s Sky Soldiers in South Vietnam’s Central Highlands
War Underground
History of British mining activity under the trenches during WWI. Doesn’t hold back. Graphic descriptions of the results of explosions, cave-ins and decomposition. Fizzles out at the end as all mining activity was stopped by both sides in 1917.
Bowfin
Underwhelming. I was wondering why the author tiptoed around Adm. Christie’s borderline criminal conduct regarding the Mark XIV torpedo. That is, until I re-read the intro and saw it was written by Christie! A classic tale of bureaucratic arrogance and incompetence taking precedence over the lives of front line combatants.
Bowfin: The True Story of a Fabled Fleet Submarine in World War II (Classics of War)
‘is not a valid identifier’ for large dynamic sql statement
I was building a large, dynamic pivot table which was getting the above error.
The solution turned out to be simple, but a little bit irritating.
I was calling exec @sql, which resulted in the error.
Changing the above to exec(@sql) worked for sql statements greater than 500 characters.
Panzer Commander
The last 1/3 of this book is the best and most revealing about the character of the author. I wish he had provided more stories about his relationship with Rommel. His descriptions of the Russian work camps and his post war re-acclimation are excellent. I am hoping that his lectures to various war colleges and the Normandy battle tours will someday be available to the public.
Void Moon
Pretty good read. A bit over researched in some areas, but doesn’t bog down the story.
Team of Rivals
Sprawling opus that is more like four biographies. The political insight into Lincoln is great, but this book could have been a couple hundred pages shorter.
Windows Update failing with XP SP3
After installing SP3, Windows Update kept failing when trying to install an IE7 update. I found this resolution.
Open a command line.
Type “Regsvr32 Wups2.dll” and hit enter.
The .dll will register with a confirmation pop-up.
No reboot is required.
A Darkness More Than Night
Half trial, half mystery – it was a good paperback for flying.
ASP Net – Parser Error – Could not load type ‘xxx.global’
I started getting this error out of the blue and it was brutal. All dlls were compiled through VS 2008 and everything ran fine locally, but, as soon as I loaded the dll to the hosted server, the error appeared. I looked through hundreds of posts, but nothing would resolve the issue. I couldn’t even create a one page web site.
I ended up doing a fresh install on VS 2008 on a separate machine and that dll worked. I then did a XP repair on the initial machine and created a new user profile. Using the new profile, I could compile a dll that would work. When I logged into the old profile the error came back.
In this instance, something got screwed up in the initial profile that must have been causing a version conflict or some other issue. Not really sure how it happened, but I am glad it is over.