Saturday, January 16, 2010

eHow Article

There is an article on eHow that mentions us as one of the options to donate to help the Haiti Erthquake Relief Effort.

Friday, January 15, 2010

We have updated our site so you can now help the Red Cross Haiti efforts by donating your unwanted gift cards: https://www.recarded.com/DonateToHaiti

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Dependency Injection (ASP.MVC and Unity) Article

I just posted an article on Code Project that goes into a bit of detail and background around how we are implementing Dependency Injection within the Recarded.com site.

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/DependencyInjectionASPMVC.aspx

We are going to turn this into a series of articles and I will be sure to cross link here whenever we get new articles submitted.

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Rackspace Cloud Strikes Again!

Well, here we are at the 11th hour. Things are going well (or so I thought), and we're entering the final end-to-end production testing phase. I browse around on http://www.recarded.com/ for a bit, noticing with satisfaction how everything loads up as expected. Let's see, now I'll add a gift card to my cart... . Perfect! The card is in the cart, and I'm ready to check out. I enter in my information, get to the Review Order page, click "Submit Order", and... BOOM!! Frowny faces and error messages all over the screen!

After much sadness and remorse, I started sifting through the application logs to see what happened. After looking through the tens of thousands of hack attempts (keep trying, guys! ;-), I found the error entry I was looking for, and I wasn't happy with the message: That assembly does not allow partially trusted callers. Curses! We've hit this problem before on the Rackspace Cloud. They operate their sites in a modified medium trust environment, which means (wait for it) that all assemblies that live on your site are automatically only partially trusted! Yay!

So what does this mean? It basically means that any assembly you attempt to reference from an assembly you've deployed to your cloud site must be marked with AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers. Unfortunately, many of the .NET libraries are not marked with this attribute. In this case, the Workflow library was unhappy with us trying to call it in a partially trusted way, so we have to revamp some of our backend processing to not use Workflow. +1 for the coolness factor of using Workflow Foundations, minus several million for finding this defect so close to launch.