Justin Cooney

Web Development Tips and Examples

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about

I am a Senior Applications Programmer / Analyst with years of experience developing enterprise solutions using the Microsoft technology stack including C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET, AJAX, IIS and SQL Server. I specialize in Web application development with a focus on building secure systems, integrating applications, and designing robust database structures.

  • HTML5 – Simple Example of Using Text and an Image with the Canvas Element

    HTML5 Canvas Element with Text and an Imported Image
    HTML5 Canvas Element with Text and an Imported Image

    As part of my ongoing investigations into HTML5 I decided to try my hand at adding some text together with an image to an HTML5 canvas element. I wanted to create a simple navigational interface as shown in the image to the left. As you can see I set the image to overlap the text and set transparent edges on the outside of the image.

    I’m not sure how useful this really is, but I can see cases where it could certainly come in handy. In general HTML5 seems like quite a powerful mark-up language when compared with HTML 4.01

    At this point I’m not worrying about adding transitional effects to handle mouse click events. I just want to get a feel for working with text and pictures in HTML5.

    The commands I used were fillText to render the text to the Canvas and drawImage to add the image.

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  • IIS6 – Change the ASP.NET Version Without Restarting the W3SVC Service Using Aspnet_regiis.exe

    Changing the ASP.NET version of a Web site in IIS6 using the IIS Manager GUI requires a restart of the W3SVC service. This means that all sites on your Web server will be affected and sessions will be lost. This isn’t really desirable behavior if you are hosting more than one site on a Web Server.

    Although one doesn’t often need to upgrade the ASP.NET version of a Web site, it’s important to know how to do so without affecting the remaining sites on the server.

    Also, when you are creating a new Web site IIS6 doesn’t allow you to select the version of ASP.NET that you want to use. This is a problem since you must first set the site up, and IIS will default behind the scenes to an ASP.NET version of its choosing (usually the lowest version of ASP.NET you have installed on the server).

    In either case of creating a brand new site, or upgrading an existing site it is important to know how to change the version of ASP.NET without needing to affect all of the sites on your Web server by restarting the W3SVC service.

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  • McAfee ePO Conflicts with IIS (and how to Resolve the Conflict)

    It appears that McAfee’s ePO system causes conflicts with Web servers when it is hosted on the same machine as for example a Web server like IIS.

    Why is this?

    I experienced this conflict on a Windows Server 2008 R2 server that was set up with  IIS 7 and McAfee’s ePO system.

    Apparently McAfee’s ePO system runs on Apache behind the scenes and requires port 443 to be available. This causes a conflict with Web servers such as IIS which also need port 443, so either one or the other breaks if they are both up and running on the same server.

    The fix for this is actually quite simple. Port 443 is not really necessary for the functioning of McAfee’s ePO system, so it can be manually commented out in the listen line of McAfee’s httpd.conf file. Although the ePO GUI does seem to provide an option to disable port 443 communications under configuration->server settings->ports, this does not actually work.

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