This post is to hopefully prevent anyone out there from wasting 5 hours like I did looking for an answer that finally was found buried in a newsgroup.

So I am working on a new project. Details about that to come later. And while doing so we wanted to run this project on the bleeding edge. So I built a new VM with Windows 7. I then installed VS 2010 and .NET 4 Beta 2 that was just released today. On a side note how happy I was for that. Trying to get MVC 1 not even 2, which wasn't supported for Beta 1, to work was ridiculous. Anyways so after that I wanted to install Velocity because I have read so much about it and if I only used it as a Session State provider that would be good enough. But that is where all the problems began. I tried the install after my initial build of the VM and everything went smoothly. But then I started having some windows installer problems that I really never found an answer to and I had to ultimately rebuild the VM. This is where the problems began.

So I installed all the developer tools I wanted first and then created a snapshot of my VM so in case I had problems again I didn't have to start from scratch again. Finally I wanted to install my last item, Velocity. I began the install as normal with a 64 bit version and everything seemed to be going fine. I then setup the Network Share I was going to use. After that I specified my share and clicked the Test Connection button. Nothing! I pressed again and the install crashed. But not before showing this error that I want to put here word for word so if anyone searches for it they will hopefully find this: "Failed to copy files to the specified network share. Please check network share permissions." A pretty straightforward error but what a time I had figuring this one out. They say that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Well I must be completely insane then because I tried that same process 5 maybe 10 times and watched it crash and burn everytime. So now I started looking online for solutions and finding the same thing. Make sure that you specify Everyone with Read/Write permissions on both the share and the folder. Which I did and checked every single time. But still nothing was working. Then finally I stumbled across this article: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/velocity/thread/08e03790-c573-40e3-8aa6-ae0a52a9da83 which says "The installer executes the configuration form as a system user. So in case of workgroup, we need to allow anonymous access to the share." That was it. Though I didn't do that the first time I installed for some reason this time this was all it took. So not just adding Everyone to the share and folder but also adding the Anonymous Logon with read/write on the share and folder. If you add the permissions to the folder before the share it might reflect as contributor but that works as well.

So hopefully this helps you. If anything it will be here for me if I ever run into this again though it's unlikely that I will forget this one. :)

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Boy it has been over a year since I have written on this site. I probably wouldn't even be writing this if I found someone else writing about this problem and a good solution but since I didn't find anyone I figured I would put this out for your benefit and for mine in case I run into it again.

Tonight I stumbled across the ImageMap control. I had written a custom control that inherited from IPostBackEventHandler so that I could have all of my code for an image map generated from the server side. But for some reason I was not getting asynchronous postbacks working correctly and it would only do full postbacks. (If anyone knows why I would be interested to hear.) So I started looking around and that is when I found the ImageMap control.

For those of you not familiar with the ImageMap control it is just as it sounds. It gives you a server side control for image maps. Which was perfect and it handled the ansynchronous postbacks just as I was hoping. But then when I went to attach my mouseover and mouseout events that is where I ran into problems. It seems that the control does not allow you to add attributes to the HotSpots that you define. Also if you try to add onmouseover or onmouseout then the page throws an error informing you that those attributes are not supported for the server control. So I was faced with a dilemma. The control was working perfectly for me for my postbacks but not for my rollovers. So what would I do? Sacrifice the rollovers for asynchronous postbacks or keep my rollovers and live with full page postbacks. Well we didn't get into this field for the easy road so of course I started on a path to figure out a way that I could have my cake and eat it too. Enter javascript...

Now I do not believe that this is by any means the best solution. Probably the best route would be to use something lilke reflector and grab the source for the control and then modify it to include support for HotSpot attributes but I just didn't feel like taking the time to do that. So being that I am pretty familiar with javascript I thought I would see what I could do with that. After about an hour of playing around I had exactly what I was looking for.

Here is the step by step implementation that I took to get this working for me. As with most blog posts YMMV and I give no guarantees that this will work in all browsers. But I do know that it works in IE 7 and FF 3. But once you see the code you will see that there isn't anything happening here that really would prevent it from working in other browsers. I just didn't test them.

First I added an onload event to my image. Since I knew that they fire off an onload event I figured it would be a clean way to work only on the image that I was particularly dealing with. This helps because if you are creating a user control that would allow for more than one instance of this code block you could get into problems if you tried to use a hard coded id for your image. Using this event will allow it to be dynamic. So from your control in the page or server code add the following attribute to your image:

_rating_image.Attributes.Add(

"onload" , "AttachMouseEventsToAreaTags(this);" );

Here is what my ImageMap declaration looks like:

< asp : ImageMap ID ="image_rating_enabled" runat ="server" Width ="78" Height ="20" HotSpotMode ="PostBack" OnClick ="image_rating_enabled_Click">
    < asp : RectangleHotSpot Left ="0" Top ="0" Right ="16" Bottom ="20" PostBackValue ="1" />
    < asp : RectangleHotSpot Left ="17" Top ="0" Right ="31" Bottom ="20" PostBackValue ="2" />
    < asp : RectangleHotSpot Left ="32" Top ="0" Right ="46" Bottom ="20" PostBackValue ="3" />
    < asp : RectangleHotSpot Left ="47" Top ="0" Right ="61" Bottom ="20" PostBackValue ="4" />
    < asp : RectangleHotSpot Left ="62" Top ="0" Right ="76" Bottom ="20" PostBackValue ="5" />
</ asp : ImageMap >

Next is the method that we call when the page loads. There are several things going on here. So let me start from the top down. First the declaration of the array variable. This is used to check whether or not you have already attached the events to the area tags. The reason for this is that every time you change the source of the image the onload event will fire and it will want to run this method again and reattach the events. The other option is to add a call at the bottom of this load event that removes the event from the image once it has been called once. It's 6 one way half a dozen the other so you choose. Next you see we get the image map contol reference by getting the usemap attribute of the image that was output to the page. Then we loop throug every defined area and attach the mouseover and mouseout events. AddEvent is just a custom method I either found or wrote (I can't remember) that will handle the checking of which browser so I can make the appropriate call. I am attaching generic methods that will do some checking on the event that is passed to determine which area tag I am working with.

var

_controls_loaded = new Array();
function AttachMouseEventsToAreaTags(img)
{
    if (_controls_loaded[img.id] == null )
   {
       var image_map = document.getElementById(img.getAttribute( "usemap" ).substring(1));

      for ( var i = 0; i < image_map.areas.length; i++)
      {
         AddEvent(image_map.areas[i], "mouseover" , MouseOverStar);
         AddEvent(image_map.areas[i], "mouseout" , MouseOutStar);
       }

      _controls_loaded[img.id] = true ;
    }
}

Here is the code for the generic events in case you are curious. First I get the area tag that raised the event. Then I pass the image id and then postbackvalue that I specified in my control declaration. Here is what my postback code looked like so the methods might make more sense:

                                 //this is the control id,                                                      this is the postback value from HotSpot declaration
javascript:__doPostBack('ctl00$ctl00$content_placeholder_main$image_rating_enabled','0')

function

MouseOverStar(e)
{
    var area_tag = (e.srcElement || e.target);
   ShowUserRatingImage(area_tag.parentNode.id.substring(8), parseInt(area_tag.href.substring(area_tag.href.length - 3), 10) + 1);
}

function

MouseOutStar(e)
{
    var area_tag = (e.srcElement || e.target);
   RestoreRatingImageToOriginal(area_tag.parentNode.id.substring(8));
}

That's it! Like I said there must be a more elegant way to implement a solution but I couldn't find it and I didn't feel like looking around for hours to find it when I knew I could do something with javascript. That's what I have always loved about javascript is the simplicity of the language and yet the power that it can have. I mean prior to ASP.NET and AJAX, DHTML was king. Grid controls, scrolling windows, async postbacks all of that was done wih JS and maybe some hidden iframes. But now with server controls getting to where they are today we really don't have to do as much of this low level manipulation. But if we need to we still can. This is why javascript is still one of my favoite languages to work with.

Hope this helps someone. If you have any questions drop me a note in the comments.

Time to go to bed! 

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This weblog is sponsored by SP Solutions, Inc..

So today was a fun day. You ever have one of those moments when you finally realize that you have wasted all your time on a problem that could have taken two seconds once you found the solution. Well that is how today went for me. Let me explain a little.

I set off on writing some sample component libraries for AFTER to support Firefox. Instead of trying to work with Selenium I thought I would work against FireWatir since I already use WATiR for Internet Explorer. I went and downloaded the installation instructions so I could get myself going. The first step was to install JSSH. JSSH is how FireWatir is able to communicate with the Firefox browser. I walk through all the steps listed to install the extension. Now I proceed to go and test that the install worked, since jssh doesn't show up correctly under the installed extensions. I open telnet and try to connect with no success. I now review all the steps several times to make sure that I didn't miss anything. Nope everything is good. I then check my firewall for the slight chance that it might have blocked Firefox from starting a socket server. Now mind you through this whole process I have received no error messages, no event log details, nothing. What do I do now? Where to begin debugging?

To start I want to make sure that the installation steps do work so I test on an XP machine and everything goes perfect. At this point I know it has to do with Windows Vista but I still haven't put two and two together as to where exactly my problem is coming from. I think maybe a file wasn't installed correctly so I look at my XP machine and my Vista machine and compare the directories and I see that none of the needed files are there. I then proceed to copy over my files from XP to Vista and see if that does the trick. Still nothing. At this point now I am probably two hours in and still have no clue where to begin. I am reading blogs and looking in newsgroups but no one has written about Vista and JSSH problems. Of course knowing what I know now I can see why but it surely wasn't apparent at the time.

My revelation finally comes when I see that one last file is missing and rather than just copy it over I decide I want to create it new and just copy the contents in. I right click in explorer to create a new text file and all I see is New > Folder. Now I start wondering where is everything else and at that point I realize could this be a UAC problem. I close explorer and reopen, only this time as an administrator and I create my file but then I think I should try the install again only this time launch Firefox as an administrator. I do and the install goes the same as before. But this time I also make sure to launch the cmd prompt as an administrator as well so that when I launch Firefox from it it will be in administrator mode. What do you know it works.

Update: I mentioned earlier that you had to open the cmd prompt as an administrator before launching Firefox, but that isn't necesasry. I tried tonight to do so and it does work without administrator rights.

So after three hours of searching, comparing directories, and rebuilding files my problem comes down to the fact that I didn't run as an administrator. This could have been discovered a lot easier had Windows or Firefox made some kind of mention of the fact that I was having a problem installing this extension. Other extensions have installed just fine without administrator rights but this one seems to require it. I don't know but all I do know is that everything is finally running smooth and the unit tests for FireWatir ran successfully. I hope this post will help anyone that is having the same problem I was and just can't quite put two and two together.

Now on to writing my libraries for AFTER, four hours later.

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This weblog is sponsored by SP Solutions, Inc..