jeffaBlog

Sweet! Got everything working.

As I mentioned in the last post, I dropped back to square one and rebuilt the app one piece at a time to see where the problem was.

I got the login and register pages working first, then went to the data entry page.

Once I built my Linq objects, but before I referenced them, I uploaded everything one more time. I did a diff on the old and new web.config files to see what had changed. There were only two changes: 1) added new connection string and 2) added assembly info for Linq.

A quick check that everything worked well, then I added the code-behind to use the Linq objects to write the data to the database. 

Once everything was deployed, I hit the page and... 500 Internal Server Error.

This time I thought about the new App_Code directory where the Linq objects live. Since I did a website instead of a webapp, everything has to compile on the fly when it runs the first time... hmm. Think maybe that directory needs write permissions?

Added write permissions and, hey presto! Now the Linq data entry page works!

It was literally five more minutes to get the data view page working using a Grid View that uses a Linq object as its source.

One thing I did differently this time was change the name of the Linq datasource to something other than the default.

Now I move on to making things pretty. I'll also write up a more detailed set of instructions and post them. 

I just found a really cool tool called Fiddler.

When I say I found it, what I mean is I read about it in a post on Kirk Evan's blog. He was talking about Creating Restful Services Using WCF. 

If you aren't doing web development, then just move along, there's nothing to see here.

If you ARE doing web development then you really need to see this.

When you run Fiddler on your system it sits as a proxy between your web browser and whatever web server you are connecting to. In simplest terms it lets you dig into the request and response objects to see what makes them tick. The cool part is that it goes far beyond that. It lets you change those objects on the fly to see what happens. It also lets you set break points in the process. The Fiddler website has a video that demonstrates setting a breakpoint on any CSS files that are downloaded. You ask for the webpage and it freezes at the point of pulling down the CSS file. You can inspect or modify the CSS file and then let it go on to the browser for rendering complete with any changes you made!

That's pretty cool when you are stuck on a bug and need all the info you can get. "Fiddle" around with the values and see what breaks. Or starts working.

You can also extend Fiddler using .Net. I hope someone makes a cool framework that Fiddler can use and calls it "The Roof". Then like the Ruby language using the Rails Framework is called "Ruby On Rails", we could have "Fiddler On The Roof".