ASP.NET 2.0 Beginners Troubleshooting Guide

Problem: I'm using ASP.NET 2.0's membership provider for forms authentication. It is working fine in VS environment with the integrated web server. But when I move it to IIS, login control fails to authenticate the same user.

Resolution : In IIS the account(ASPNET or NETWORK SERVICE) access the app_data folder. Therefore the app_data folder must have write/modify permission for this account

I will try to add some troubleshooting tips into this article time to time.

Do you believe in Unit Testing

Most of the developers don't believe in unit testing. As for my experience I don't really blame for developers. Why they are not attempting is b'cos product/project release time pressures. Many software houses have not embraced unit testing into their process therefore the time component of unit testing is not included in the estimation. But that's only an one aspect of it the other side is lack of knowledge and training on proper unit testing tools and practices. If you are planing to implement unit testing process for your team have a look the flowing tools. They are very useful to implement the unit testing process properly. One of the good book in this topic is Art Of Unit Testing by Roy Osherove".

Here is how one of Microsoft MVP's described this book

“Beautifully craft ed, detailed unit testing masterpiece.
Bravo, Bravo, Bravo!”
—Mohammad Azam, Microsoft MVP, HighOnCoding

Some of the supplementary tools are :

- NDbUnit, DbUnit
- Rhino Mocks, NMock
- Fit, WinFITRunnerLite
- TypeMock
- NUnitAsp

Enjoy and Rethink about unit testing.....

.NET Tools Portal

Sometimes it's difficult to find the correct tool at the correct time. I found this portal for .NET tools a common place to some valuable tools. It has categorized the tools nicely and easy to find. Here is the site

Maintainable Regular Expressions

We all know regular expression is a very powerful tool. But one of the difficulties we face is reading regex statements written by others. Sometimes it's almost impossible. So it's always better to document your regular expressions and make them more readable for others and make your piece of code more maintainable. Here what you can do

Regex regex = new Regex(@"
^ # anchor at the start
(?=.*\d) # must contain at least one numeric character
(?=.*[a-z]) # must contain one lowercase character
(?=.*[A-Z]) # must contain one uppercase character
.{8,10} # From 8 to 10 characters in length
\s # allows a space
$ # anchor at the end",
RegexOptions.IgnorePatternWhitespace);

You can comment your expressions using # but make sure you use the RegexOption IgnorePatternWhitespace.