Danny-T.co.uk

Calling secure (SSL) remote service from local Flex app running in Flexbuilder

If you have your remoting service running under SSL you might find when trying to use it from FlexBuilder you get an error along the lines of:

Channel.Security.Error error Error #2048:
Security sandbox violation: file://localhost/Users/Username/Flex/Projects/MyProject/bin-debug/MyProject.swf cannot load data from https://www.mywebsite.com/remoting/weborb.aspx. url: ‘https://www.mywebsite.com/remoting/weborb.aspx’”

Firstly make sure you have a cross domain file but I’m assuming you’ve already done that much, all you need to do is add the following to allow your locally running (non-secure) site to access the secure remote site by adding this:

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<allow-access-from domain="localhost" to-ports="*" secure="false" />

How to show hidden files in finder

In Terminal type:

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

Then you’ll need to restart Finder by alt + right clicking the Finder logo and selecting relaunch. Obviously change to NO to disable again.

Adobe AIR MIME type for IIS

Another quick post for future reference, the IIS MIME type needed for Adobe AIR .air files:

extension: .air
mime-type: application/vnd.adobe.air-application-installer-package+zip

Open multiple instances of flex builder on OSX

I keep various workspaces in Flex Builder for things like client projects, tests, examples etc. Sometimes it’s a pain to have to restart FB just to check something from one workspace, so to be able to have two (or more) workspaces open at a time you can launch multiple instances of flex builder by doing the following:

cd /Applications/Eclipse [or your path to flex builder folder]
./eclipse &

The following module was built either with optimizations enabled or without debug information

Having received the following error in Visual Studio a few times I thought I’d post the solution here.

I did have debug enabled and seemingly nothing i changed would stop the error. Many of the solutions found when first searching didn’t work, what I had to do was to delete all files from the following directory:

C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\temp\Temporary ASP.NET Files

I’m Baaaaaaack!

I'm back

Jeez, that’s been a heck of a long time since I last posted… or that my site has even been visible!

Back around mid 2008 some scrawny, b*&$$d, a$$*&, s*($&£, c&(£& git hacked my wordpress site. At first I didn’t notice because all they’d done was inserted some inline css to style a few select words in my posts to look just like the rest of the text but had added in a load of links to who-knows where. Shortly after that I was duly notified by my business partner that upon looking at my site his laptop completed barfed and was seriously infected with a whole load of nastiness. Humorously I’d not noticed any of this as I’d only looked at my site recently on my mac (he has since become the original mac fanboi btw). Anyway, needless to say I immediately took the site down with the intentions of sorting it out and bringing it back. Which I’ve now done albeit an entire year after all this happened.

Anyway, quite a bit has happened since I last posted, I’ve presented at Flexcamp London, attended last years FOTB, started writing for InsideRIA and had a whole host of opinions and discoveries that you’ve all been spared for the past year (assuming there is anyone left out there!).

Well I’m not going to dwell on the past and try to regurgitate my thoughts and opinions of everything that has been missed, onwards an upwards. I hope to make blogging a fairly frequent activity again (even though twitter seems to have slowed alot of people down of late). I will be trying to keep on topic of RIAs specifically related to the Adobe and MS offerings. So that’s me back in the game.

And to the scum who hacked my site, “in the words of my generation UP YOURS!”

UP YOURS

“invalid character” and “ajaxcontroltoolkit is undefined” errors on some comptuers

This was an extremely odd error that I’m posting here for others and probably my own future reference.

We recently deployed an Intranet system that used some of the ASP.Net AJAX framework, two users were receiving a javascript error and not displaying a tabcontrol. The first js error was “invalid character at line 0″ and the second was “ajaxcontroltoolkit is undefined”. This baffled me as all the client machines were identical (in fact they were using a Citrix client so they were definitely identical).

Anyway turns out it’s something to do with the last modified date of the assembly if it’s somehow set to be in the future compared to the date of the server it is running on (possibly due to a converstion from UK to US date formats for example) you will get this error.

The solution is to simply change the last modified date of the assembly which can be done either using one of several freeware applications available or by using the very simple console application provided at Plain Old Stan’s blog. I used this and just set the date back a year and it resolved the issue.

Hopefully that’ll be of some use to someone.

Intro to NAnt tutorials

Just posting this for my own reference really, these are ages old but Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo has written a bunch of excellent articles on getting started with NAnt here.

Inversion of Control Containers Links

I’m slowly getting my head around IoC containers and want to note a few useful links for future reference. As things tend to go in my geeky exploits I read about and learn these ideas from the .net world, who often have picked things up from the Java world, I then try to find out who’s doing similar stuff in the Flex world and am generally not disappointed, which is very cool. So these links below are a mashup of various technologies but should be useful to anyone who has been hearing about
IoC and wants to learn more regardless of language/platform.

The ‘Textbook definition’ by Martin Fowler
Very useful explanation with some basic sample code (.net) by Ayende
Castle Windsor step by step basic intro (.net)
Prana – a Spring-ish IoC Container for AS3 by Christophe Herreman (via jesterxl)

This stuff doesn’t come naturally to me to say the least so if anyone else has any links they want to share feel free to post them in the comments.

Creating Roles in Windows XP

I’m trying to setup a dev environment for an Intranet application we’re working on and needed to test users for displaying role-based content (namely admin edit buttons etc). So I needed to create some test users and roles. The site will ultimately be hosted on a Windows server and the users will use their domain logins from Active Directory so I needed to replicate this.

Anyway my dev environment is Windows XP and there is no obvious way to create roles (or Groups), to access this simply click Start, Run and enter compmgmt.msc and click go to launch the Computer Management Console.

From here you can administrate users and groups under the “Local Users and Groups” folder.