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Installing VeriSign Certificates with Internet Explorer 8 (IE8)June 10th, 2010I recently had an infuriating experience with VeriSign that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, so I thought I’d try to save someone a bunch of time and frustration by putting the fix on the ‘net. When submitting a product for Windows Logo certification one is required to digitally sign and submit a file (winqual.exe) to the winqual.microsoft.com web site. In order to sign the file you first need a VeriSign organisation certificate that, presumably, is designed to verify you are from the company you purport to be from. Fair enough. The VeriSign process is relatively straight forward:
It’s in step 3 where it all went horribly wrong for me. Stupidly, I am not using IE7. After several lengthy discussions with VeriSign “chat consultants” I was told in no uncertain terms that IE7 was the only supported browser and that to get my certificate I had to “find a machine with IE7 on it”. Then I could simply export the certificate and move it later. I had used IE8 on Windows 7 x64 to make the order, and it turns out that even if you do find a IE7 machine it still won’t work because it has to be the same machine you placed the order on. I confirmed, that Firefox, Chrome and Safari also will not work. DiagnosisFaced with basically no way forward I decided to fix the problem for them. I had noticed that my IE8 was throwing script errors so I pulled up the source and noticed that VeriSign are using VBScript to write an object tag, which loads a COM dll of their making, which in turn records the public key in Windows’ certificate store. My first attempt was to take the VBScript code and make a “vbs” file out of it but that really seemed like it was a bit harder than it should have to be. The FixOn my second attempt I simply marked the VeriSign web site as “Trusted” and the “Install Certificate” button on the page worked like a charm. VeriSign FAIL! So, OK this port could have been shorter, but now you know. Make VerSign’s web site trusted before (or during) the process to get the certificate installed. Don’t bother asking VeriSign for help. They can’t. Making a web site trusted in IE8Tools –> Internet Options –> Security tab –> Trusted sites –> Sites button –> Type https://*.verisign.com and click Add Now you know.
Visual Studio 2010 web publishing issue with the .browser filesMay 14th, 2010We moved a VS 2008 web site project to VS 2010, and when we did a publish using the “Publish Web Site”, somehow all the customised Adapter classes that we implemented within the .browser files didn’t get executed. After a very thorough investigation, especially after we looked into the App_Browsers.dll assembly through a reflection tool, we found out that the publishing process altered the controltype attribute in the .browser files from this: System.Web.UI.WebControls.Menu, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a to this: System.Web.UI.WebControls.Menu, System.Web, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a It seems that App_Browser.dll file generator of VS 2010 is making a bad assumption even though the target framework is set to .Net 3.5. Because the web application is set to run on 2.0 framework, those control type is not matched. Fortunately, we’ve figured a work around which is by deleting the App_Browser.dll and the related .compiled file out of the bin directory after publishing, and copy the uncompiled .browser files back into the App_Browsers directory.
FIX: Using an embedded SurveyGizmo Survey on a page with jQuerySeptember 9th, 2009We use SurveyGizmo (www.surveygizmo.com) with many of our clients to provide author generated forms and surveys. It has lots of great features, and one terribly annoying one. The main mechanism for deploying a form or survey is to use some JavaScript automatically generated by SurveyGizmo to download and embed the form or survey in the host page AJAX-style. Super cool, I hear you say. And I agree. But… Unfortunately SurveyGizmo use a JavaScript function “$” that is an internal system function. The astute amongst you have noticed the “$” function is used by many other JS frameworks, notably jQuery, becoming increasingly popular and soon to be embedded in Visual Studio 2010 (or so I am led to believe). The upshot is that all your jQuery defined after your survey is embedded on the page will break. That’s bad. I was advised by SG support to use the jQuery.noConflict() function, which makes SG work properly (that’s good) but it also means all your jQuery now uses a function called “jQuery” in place of “$” (that’s bad… again). We devised a workaround that lets everybody play nice and it seems to work for us so far – thusly:
Basically we keep a copy of the jQuery “$” function in a variable and restore it to its original value when the SG scripts have finished. I do this rather than using “var $ = function( selector, context ) { return new jQuery.fn.init( selector, context ); }” because jQuery may change their initialisation parameters at a later date and I prefer to not have to update my code.
Apple iPhone won’t display in Vista’s Windows ExplorerMay 13th, 2009A quick post that may help a few people whose iPhone has suddenly disappeared from Windows Explorer. I use Vista Ultimate but I suggest this technique will work for XP and other Vista variants as well. Normally the iPhone appears like a camera to Windows Vista (albeit with a cute iPhone icon) which allows access to the phone’s Camera Roll. I went looking to pull the photos off my iPhone this morning only to discover that it wasn’t showing up in Windows Explorer as a device anymore. Quite certain it worked at one point but what can you do. The drivers that make the iPhone appear as a USB device are usbaapl.sys and usbaaplrc.dll. If your installing you should look for usbaapl.inf which is in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Apple\Mobile Device Support\Drivers. More about this later. Connect your iPhone by USB, then open Windows Device Manager (right-click My Computer and select Manage). You may find your iPhone under “Universal Serial Bus Controllers”, where mine was, or possibly under “Portable Devices”. At any rate if your phone can sync with iTunes it will be in there somewhere. It should be called Apple Mobile Device USB Driver or something like that. When you find it, right-click and select “Uninstall” but don’t remove the files from the PC. There’s nothing wrong with the files (probably) it’s just the device registration that has become cactus. Once uninstalled disconnect the device and reconnect again. After a minute you should see the device registered correctly, iTunes fires up and Windows Explorer shows your iPhone as a camera again. Job done. My driver files were already in Windows\System32 directory cause that’s where drivers go, but the original files that ship from Apple can usually be found at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Apple\Mobile Device Support. If you deleted the files in the uninstall step when you shouldn’t have you can likely find them there, otherwise I would re-install iTunes cause I would guess they ship with the iTunes software though I can’t confirm that.
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