WinZip Encryption for Business

Email is not the most secure method of sending sensitive data over the internet. However, there is a sensible and easy solution to this problem.


Sender
Before sending your files, use either WinZip or PKZIP to compress your files into a single small ZIP file. Next we need to right click on the file, select the option to encrypt using either 128 or 256 AES technology, and enter the shared password that you will give to the recipient. Once completed, we can send our new zip file to the relevant contacts.

Recipient
The files can be retrieved by the email recipient, by using either WinZip (10 or higher), or ZIP Reader (a product of PKWare) to extract the files. The recipient will be prompted to enter the password you supplied when you created the file.


Hope this helps you in the search for a secure way of transferring files over the Internet.

Norval

ASP.NET pop-up menus do not work in Internet Explorer 8.0

Recently I came across one of those Microsoft glitches that we jokingly categorize as "A feature not a bug." ASP.NET pop-up menus that are commonly used on most websites for the main navigation bar, does not work. When you hover over the menu, you get a white box instead of the expected sub-menu options.

There are two ways of resolving this:

1. Place a meta tag in the header of your web browser to emulate IE7: <meta equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7"/>
2. Install a patch on the webserver. This patch is available from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/962351

Hope this information helps.

Problem loading VMWare Server on Windows XP

For a few weeks now, I have been experiencing a intermittent problem connecting to my VMWare Server installation. After doing some investigation on the VMWare community forum, I was able to successfully reach my VMWare login screen.

The solution was to open the Windows Services window, and set the "VMWare VSS Writer" service to automatic startup.

Hope this helps.

Unable to acces ASP.NET website running in VMWare Server

So you have just deployed your new website for testing in a VMWare server session. However, you are not able to see the website, when you type that address in your browser. See the following troubleshooting list:

1. Check to see if the firewall in the OS of VMWare guest is blocking incoming request. To test it you could fully disabled the firewall, and if it works, configure the firewall to only allow traffic to the relevant web server port.
2. Verify that the web server was started and configured to use the correct directory for the web root directory.
3. Verify that the database connection string is correctly configured

These are a few quick items to look out for. However if you have come across other things that could cause connectivity problems, please add your comments below.

Regards,
Norval

Compiling ASP.NET Applications for Deployment

The process of compiling ASP.NET application is surprisingly simple and available free of cost to all developers. In the same windows folder that contains your asp_regsql.exe and aspnet_regiid.exe applications is a program named asp_compiler.exe. "Sounds reasonable".

So how do you compile with it?
There are several parameters and options that this executable takes to compile an application, however the most basic command to compile an website that will be deployed in the root directory of a new webserver is (I will use the command that I executed on my computer):
C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_compiler.exe -p G:\My_Workspace\tobecompiled_CBX -v / G:\My_Workspace\compiled_cbx

In this example, -p refers to the full path to the directory containing the website to be compiled, -v refers to the virtual directory (which is the root directory in this case), and the last directory path (G:\My_Workspace\compiled_cbx) is the folder to which the compiled website will be copied.

Once compiled, you can zip up this new folder and install it on the production webserver. The only requirements is to make the relevat changes in the web.config to get stuff working, for example to connect to the correct database.

Hope this article helps,

Regards

Sent using my blackberry from …

If you are a non-BES blackberry user, you have probably being annoyed by the the message ’sent using my blackberry from ’ that is automatically placed at the end of your emails.

Well I have found the solution, and its easier than you think. Use the following steps to reset the signature for each of your email accounts:
# Browse to https://bis.na.blackberry.com/html?brand=vzw. Replace vzw with your own provider. In Jamaica, I test this link by replacing ‘vzw’ with ‘cwjamaica’ and I was able to successfully login to Lime’s (formally known as Cable and Wireless Jamaica) account. I’d imagine this would work for other providers as well.
# Login with the account information you typically log into Email Settings on the handheld.
# From here, signatures can be edited, email accounts can be added, removed, etc.

I must say thanks to Aaron Brazell for providing this useful bit of information.

ASP.NET Error - Wrong number or types of arguments in call to

While setting up a new GridView inside an ASP.NET webpage, I got the following error:

ORA-06550: line 1, column 7:

PLS-00306: wrong number or types of arguments in call to ”UPDATE_SCHEDULE”

ORA-06550: line 1, column 7:

PL/SQL: Statement ignored

My GridView accesses data from an Oracle 10g Express database, through an SQLDataDource (with its Provider set to OracleClient). What was happening is that the stored procedure was expecting 4 input parameters, but my gridView had 5 columns defined with the “readonly” property set to FALSE. This meant that when the update command was executed in the GridView, it would attempt to send 5 values to the stored procedure.

So the solution to this problem was simply to set the “readonly” property for all fields that do not participate in the update procedure to TRUE. Works great now.