Imagine that today you crashed a bicycle at about 25mph with a kind road sign stopping you from sliding too farJ Note to self: Immovable objects really hurt when you hit them!

A few hours later (avec arm in cast) imagine my one handed horror at realizing that 2003 sever needs a ctrl-alt-delete to login. Thankfully the right alt can be used and the good hand was just wide enough. So it seems MS do cater well for such niche disabilities tooJ

Luckily I just broke a wrist. How it happened? In a group ride we had to jump over a small ditch on a downhill in the Highlands. Two of us clashed bars after landing then a split second later bikes met and we were inspecting tarmac. The other guy was fine after just sliding down the pavement.

Ironically enough I gave up mountain biking for this ‘safer’ pastime.

Several companies running ASP.Net experience this problem. They have several web applications and need common authentication. Out of the box ASP.Net makes the user login in to each different application. I know of several organizations where this was a frustration to hundreds if not thousands of user.

Luckily the fix is trivial. Open up machine.config (beg, grovel, kiss the feet of your sys-admin if necessary) and make this change:


Original machine.config entry:
<MACHINEKEY validationKey="AutoGenerate,IsolateApps” validation=”SHA1″ decryptionKey=”AutoGenerate” /><machineKey validationKey=”AutoGenerate,IsolateApps” decryptionKey=”AutoGenerate” validation=”SHA1″/>
<MACHINEKEY style="mso-spacerun: yes" <SPAN validationKey="AutoGenerate,IsolateApps“><MACHINEKEY validationKey="AutoGenerate,IsolateApps” validation=”SHA1″ decryptionKey=”AutoGenerate” />
To enable sharing of cookie authentication:
<machineKey validationKey=”AutoGenerate” decryptionKey=”AutoGenerate” validation=”SHA1″/>

Totally trivial change that took under five minutes of searching documentation but I bet many organizations are struggling with separate logins even today. All the more reason to hire a Microsoft Certified .Net consultant [shameless plug!].

It is while since I wrote this code-snippet, but at the time many DataGrid experts said it could not be done. After about twenty minutes of trying to understand some DataGrid events a working solution was found:

if (this.dataGrid.EditItemIndex > -1)
{
// Update the DataGrid
this.dataGrid_UpdateCommand(
this.dataGrid,
new DataGridCommandEventArgs(
this.dataGrid.Items[this.dataGrid.EditItemIndex],
this.dataGrid,
new System.Web.UI.WebControls.CommandEventArgs(“Update”, “”)));
}

Not a pretty event call but it works. On my last ASP.Net project several pages used one Update Button to perform updates on three or more DataGrids simultaneously. If your code forces users to click several update buttons, then use of this code may just make them a little happier.