handling unhandled asp.net exceptions

At some point in their career everyone who creates ASP.NET applications has had issues with their site throwing exceptions that aren’t trapped.  We end up displaying a friendly error page at best, and at worst display the yellow ASP.NET error screen of death.  Generally speaking it’s best practice to configure your ASP.NET application to use friendly error pages so that your users aren’t presented with an exception and stack trace that are meaningless to them.

But how do you find out what exceptions are being thrown by users who are not you?  Over the years I’ve created many versions of the same type of code to handle these situations, so last night I created a project on codeplex that I’m calling sigh.net.  Essentially, sigh.net is a provider based unhandled exception handler for ASP.NET applications.  You can download the source at http://www.codeplex.com/sigh.

It’s extremely simple to use and doesn’t require you to change or add any code to your application.  I currently have an email provider created and am in the process of creating a SQL database provider.

Enjoy!

creating streaming tutorials with silverlight

I’ve wanted to work with Silverlight for some time now, though I’ve not had a use for the technology until recently.  I wanted to create tutorial videos for .netSavant to help people learn a bit about the product.  After a bit of searching I found a fantastic code project article written by Karl Shifflett that walks you through the entire process of not only creating a high quality screen capture tutorial, but publishing it as a streaming silverlight video.

Click Here to read the article

To date I’ve only created and published a single tutorial for .netSavant.  I’ve several more planned that will hopefully be a bit more polished as I become more comfortable talking, effectively, to no one.

http://www.dotnetsavant.com/Overview/Tutorials.aspx

Enjoy!

system.nullable vs. tryparse : revisited

As a followup to my system.nullable vs. tryparse entry, I’ve decided to publish the nullable parser code that I use in the data access system of .netSavant.

Download the C# file (in txt format)

Enjoy!