Google SiteMap Generator + Input validation failed Error

Since Google release their Google Site Map Generator I have been using it on my web server for the sites that I manage. Setting it up and getting it running was fine and I haven't had a problem, that was until this week.

This week I noticed that as I was only letting the generator update the sitemap from actual URL hits quite often a few of my sites aren't hit for a day at a time which was resulting in empty sitemaps. This then causes Google WebMaster Tools to whinge at you which isn't a good thing. So I decided to update my settings to include parsing my IIS Log Files in the hope it would use previous days ones and not generate blank files.

This is where I hit a road block. When ever I changed a setting and clicked save the generator would be really useful and tell me that "Input Validation Failed" and to basically sort myself out. I was confused to say the least as everything was fine, no field was highlighted as being erroneous so I ended up giving up and leaving it.

Today I came back to it and tried again but the same error occurred. So I started to poke around and decided to manually update the sitesetttings xml file, usually located: C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Google Sitemap Generator\sitesettings.xml. And this is when I noticed the issue that was affecting me.

Each site within your IIS setup has a node in the sitesettings xml file, here it has information about it's host name, whether it's setup for sitemaps etc. But it also contains the location of the IIS log files regardless of whether you are parsing them or not.

Now a few weeks ago I decided to move all my sites log files from the default location of C:\WINDOWS\system32\LogFiles\{site} to a more convenient location, for this example lets say E:\LogFiles\{site}, now this was all well and good for IIS etc but upon creation of sites the Google SiteMap Generator is logging these locations. So when I had moved the log files the generator was still looking at the old location, a bit of guessing / how I would do it lead me to believe that upon saying parse log files for sitemaps the generator checks to see if it can read the log files, but as they have moved it cant find them and errors.

Now all I did to fix this was manually do a find and replace on the log file locations within sitesettings.xml saved the file and restarted the generator to find it was finally happy and working OK. Hopefully Google in the next release of this generator will remove this issue / make it clearer what is wrong. Ideally upon startup or even when you choose to use log file parsing it should look at IIS to see if the path to the log files is the same as it has, if not update it before it validates. This would save heartache for a few people at least.

So I'm now happy again with the generator, the problem wasn't that hard to fix and upon spotting it made alot of sense, it just shows what a little bit of investigating can do.

Book Review: C# 2008 and 2005 Threaded Programming

So last month Packt Publishing contacted me regarding sending me a promotional copy of C# 2008 and 2005 Threaded Programming to review. This is the first time I have been asked to do a book review and decided to take them up on the offer.

Now I have been using ASP.Net for around three years now but I've never had to or decided to look into writing multi-threaded apps so the fact that this book was aimed at beginners meant that I was an ideal target audience for this book. Packt shortly sent me the book and upon first looking at it thought it looked a bit ugly! I know you can't tell a book by its cover but this cover did put me off, the green and picture didn't do it for me but alas I carried on anyway.

The book is organised into several chapters and is example driven. What I mean by this is that it doesn't give you bags of theory and then an example, it takes the approach of you following along the code examples and then it has gaps explaining bits and pieces. More on this later.

The chapters within the book are organised in a way that as you progress each chapter delves into multi threading more. First of all it explains what multi threading is, then it looks as basic thread techniques, background workers, debugging multi threaded apps, thread pools all the way up to exploring the new future of multi threaded apps and new framework extensions to help with this. On the whole the chapter organisation made a lot of sense to me and allowed you to use what you had learnt before and build upon it. The one thing that struck me was that I expected ThreadPools to be talked about way before chapter 9 but that’s a minor thing.

One of the things I especially liked about this book is that at the end of each chapter you are given a quick pop quiz on the chapters content, this for me at least provided a quick way of ensuring I had understood the chapter and if I hadn't to go back and re read it, so this was good.

As I mentioned earlier the book is based on learning using examples and less about theory. Personally I'm not a huge fan of this technique; the writer Gastón C. Hillar does try to provide examples that are practical however I find that by simply following these you don't really learn what is going on; you learn how threading roughly works and that it’s there but when you need to use it in a real life application or you need to work out why something isn't working as expected you are left without the knowledge to solve these issues.

I do realise that this book is for beginners and is meant to get developers to look into and start writing multi-threaded apps and not be a complete resource, but personally I would prefer a touch more theory. In particular locking is over looked, what setting a WinForms app to [MTAThread] really means (you can't use dialogues for example). This was probably left out to try and keep things simple for beginners but not discussing locking or exceptions could mean bad practices are picked up and carried into production code.

It is worth mentioning that his book solely focuses on WinForm apps, it doesn't look into WPF or WebForms, and this is both a blessing and a curse in my eyes. With that said WinForms is simple to learn and the examples really do cover everything you need to get them working so if you have never used WinForms don't be put off reading this book, by the end of it you will not only know more about multi-threading but also how to write simple WinForm apps.
Also the book says that you can use Visual Studio 2008 Standard edition to debug multi threaded apps, I found out that sadly this isn't the case. In order to have the threads debug window you need the Pro edition or above version of Visual Studio.

Overall I find the book alright, personally the presentation of the book, colour schemes, internal typography could do with an improvement, the headings look like they are in Impact which is wrong on so many levels, and the examples can seem slightly farfetched but the book does cover a lot. As someone new to multi-threading by the end of it I felt confident enough in what I had learnt to write a simple multi threaded WinForm app for work to perform some tests.

Scores

Presentation - 6 / 10 - Although it’s clear to read the bulk of the content, the cover and headings for me let it down.
Code Examples – 7/10 – The code examples are clearly written and cover all the detail you need I feel that they aren’t as real life as they could be which hinders taking what they are meant to show you and apply it to real life scenarios.
Quality of Content – 7/10 – Overall I felt the quality content was quite good, potentially a bit over the top in places about being a “multi threaded guru” but overall OK. One down fall was to say that Visual Studio Standard edition can be used to debug multi threaded apps when it can’t.
Overall - 6.5 / 10 In light of everything I'm not going to suggest this is a book that everyone should read / own unlike over books like the pragmatic programmer etc. However if you are looking at learning about multi-threading and want something to ease you into it then this is for you, it will cover the basics of everything you need to know and what to expect in the future.

MVC Snippets: must be a reference type in order to use it as parameter 'TModel' in the generic type or method 'System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl'

Recently I have been playing with ASP.NET MVC, in particular I have been building myself a new website. I thought it might be good to post any peculiar things / lessons I learn during this build. Tonight I stumbled across one of these lessons.

When you strongly type a view or partial view the type must be a reference type. Otherwise this means you get a HttpCompilation Error: "your data type" must be a reference type in order to use it as parameter 'TModel' in the generic type or method 'System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl'. Initially I couldn't figure out what this meant as I was passing my type through, it existed etc. However it was then I realised I had declared my type as a struct not a class.

If you are unsure of the difference between a class and a struct I recommend looking it up, the gist of it is that a class is a reference type and a struct isn't. As a struct isn't a reference type you can save memory due to it not having to allocate additional memory for referencing each object, this is great for short structures, but not for models in ASP.Net MVC

After changing my type to a class all was sorted and my view could compile again. A lesson learned, one of many I am sure ;)

Open Hack Day 2009

Well today registration for Yahoo! Open Hack Day 2009 opened, and with much excitement I signed up hoping for a place.

The previous Hack Day was really great fun even though my "hack team" failed to finish our project. This year I'm hoping to do something a lot simpler but as enjoyable.

Here's open I get a place ;)