Cleaning up temp data in PC

My PC drains the hard drive quite often. Most of the time, it's due to temp data hidden in folders unknown to me. If you have the same problem, use the CCleaner tool. It does a good job of analyzing temporary files hidden in every corner of your PC hard drive. It's a freeware! Feel free to donate and support the effort.

Posting XML, HTML code in blogger.

I am sure, many of the bloggers would have faced the problem of posting XML/HTML code in blogspot. It ignores the XML/HTML posted without encoding.

The simplest fix is to get them encoded using the below site and post it!
http://centricle.com/tools/html-entities/

Thanks to Steve for his post.

ELMAH for live website diagnosis.

It's the Firebug of Webservers.

Some of the tricky problems with live websites are
- Unhandled server side exceptions
- Environmental issues that can't be logged at application level

Diagnosis for these would require turning off the custom errors and limiting to local server. But, this doesn't do live monitoring of errors for you to look back the errors.

ELMAH helps monitor the websites for unhandled exceptions. The best part is that, it requires only few config changes to get plugged into your website and monitor for errors.

I have been using it on IIS for live site diagnosis, which is crucial for production sites. For my ASP.NET website, i did the following to plug in the ELMAH.

1) Download ELMAH online. Just google!
2) Add the following keys to the web config file under key. If you already have httpHandlers and httpModules keys, then just add the child nodes to them.

    <httpHandlers>
      <add verb="POST,GET,HEAD" path="elmah.axd" type="Elmah.ErrorLogPageFactory, Elmah"/>
    </httpHandlers>
    <httpModules>
      <add name="ErrorMail" type="Elmah.ErrorMailModule, Elmah"/>
      <add name="ErrorLog" type="Elmah.ErrorLogModule, Elmah"/>
      <add name="ErrorFilter" type="Elmah.ErrorFilterModule, Elmah"/>
    </httpModules>

3) Copy the following ELMAH files to your website bin directory

Elmah.dll, Elmah.pdb, Elmah.xml

4) Browse the url "http://localhost/yourwebsite/elmah.axd" to see the ELMAH page. 

Snapshot below.

Tons of articles have been written about ELMAH. Few you might want to read:

ELMAH home page

Hanselman blog article

Dotnetslackers blog post

GE announces investment fund for promising new HealthIT solutions.

Image via Wikipedia

GE has announced that the company has created a $250 million fund to invest in HealthIT companies with promising solutions for reducing cost and innovation in technology.

The first recepient of the fund is ONI Medical Systems, Inc., a provider of magnetic resonance imaging services headquartered in Wilmington, Mass.

For all those with great HealthIT ideas, this is the best time to give a shot. This is a big news for to-be entrepreneurs, given that the recession is forcing investment funds to scale down to essential utilities such as green energy and stay away from new ideas.

HealthVault Apps - Troubleshooting errors.

Image via Wikipedia

After having spent time writing and troubleshooting HealthVault apps, the overall feedback is "that's easy". There were moments of troubleshooting that might take time, if you are not familiar with Digital Certificates and their usage in HealthVault client side authentication. Listed are few errors you are most likely to face the first time and right places to look for the quick fix. The errors were mostly faced while performing HealthVault authorization using the Offline Access mode.

Error 1: System.Security.Cryptography.CryptographicException: Keyset does not exist

Reason: 

You don't have the correct certificate installed on the machine that is hosting your HV app. 

[or] Your application showing up in the HV application manager doesn't match with the configuration page in HealthVault configuration site.This happens when you are importing a pfx file into the server that is hosting your HV app. If so, fix it!

More details:

Look up this URL for more detailed troubleshooting help. 

http://blogs.msdn.com/healthvaultfaq/archive/2007/12/12/troubleshooter-application-certificate-cannot-be-accessed.aspx

General troubleshooting tips:

1) Use the troubleshooter app that comes with HV SDK installation. It's a great diagnosis tool. It can be found mostly here "C:\Program Files\Microsoft HealthVault\SDK\DotNet\WebSamples\Troubleshooter" depending on your installation path.

2) If you are using SSL for your HV hosted app, remember to add the following key to your config file

Will be updating this page as i see more errors. Hopefully, i don't have to :)