Have you seen my cookie?

I received a call from one of our partners telling me they can't log into the website.

Since today is Monday, my first inclination is "forgot password."  I checked my log, and I see the user has validated.

I've been having  problems with Internet Explorer for a few months along these lines.  The use logs in, yet forms authentication doesn't recognize them.  Using any other browser avoids the problem.

I've looked and looked, but haven't been able to find a solution, until today.

The problem is that when the user logs in, the system creates a session cookie, which holds the authentication ticket.  Without said cookie, the user can't look at protected content.

I found the solution.  By adding a single line to the web.config file,  the problem goes away.

     
       

What's the point?

The view from my building at work

Got asked an interesting question.  In a GPS longitude/latitude  measurement, how much resolution does each decimal give us?


Since each line of longitude is 68.71 Miles then

• each tenth represents 6.9 miles (or 36,279 feet)
• each hundredth represents .69 miles (or 36279 feet)
• each thousandths represents 362 feet (or .07 miles)
• each then thousandth represents 36.3 feet (or .0069 miles)

Pretty URLs

At work, we are moving to SQL 2008 from SQL 2000.  As part of the move I had to test our Umbraco website against the new server.

So, I copied the contents of our website to the test server, changed the connection strings to point to the new server, and loaded the page.

When clicking on any links, I get a 404 error.

After some investigation, I learned that the issue was with IIS.  Our website uses PrettyURLs.  So if you want the trauma section you would go to www.wvstecs/trauma

The problem is that going to that location was generating a 404, not found error.

The reason is that you have to configure IIS to handle this type of request.  There are two steps.

1. Make sure that you have configured Umbraco to do the pretty URLs by modifying the umbracoUseDirectoryUrls to true in web.cofig
2. Make sure you have added the aspnet_isapi.dll handler to your website (Inetmgr - Home Directory tab, Configuration)

More informaton can be found here.

http://our.umbraco.org/wiki/install-and-setup/setting-up-umbraco-for-friendly-urls