The Art of taking a screenshot for business purposes

How many times as a programmer do you receive an screenshot and it gives you limited information? Usually taken too far out, or so zoomed up that you can't make sense of what the person is trying to convey.

I present to you the Art of taking a screenshot. It should be taught in school just like English. It is very similar:

Who: Are you logged in a someone in particular, please if you can include that in the screenshot.

What: Yes, what are you wanting to show -- if you just snap the entire screen or zoom so far in, it is going to be hard to tell. Take a picture and then mark it up in an Editor to highlight what or where the issue is.

When: Can you include the date/time of when this happened?

Where: What url were you using - you know sometimes we have a dev site, a stage site, a prod site. This all matters because the code is not always the same everywhere!

Why: Again, mark it up in an editor, maybe take multiple screenshots.

Hope that helps someone out there!

SQL Server Reporting Services Error - Report Manager Permissions

In order to access Report Manager (SSRS 2014) on my local pc for Development purposes, I would open IE 11 as Administrator and go to the URL http://my-pc-name/Reports/Pages/Folder.aspx - I could access the entire site - including the Home/Folder.apx.

Recently, IE 11 no longer allowed to be opened, it forces me to switch over to Edge, which does not work because I get the permissions error (see below). Ditto for Chrome, Firefox.

User 'BLAHBLAH\myusername' does not have required permissions. Verify that sufficient permissions have been granted and Windows User Account Control (UAC) restrictions have been addressed.

I can publish reports from Visual Studio but my problem was changing the datasource - it is located in different folder or something strange. So I really just need access to the Admin site to update that.

I think I should have researched before I lost access to figure out what the permission issue was but it was too late...I have been doing it this way of working for like 10 years!

UNTIL I thought to access the url using the DISSENTER browser made by GAB - and it WORKED. (I ran it as Administration just in case) I then was able to access the folder page and grant my local user every darn permission needed to access everything.

Hope that helps!

ASP.NET MVC Shared Authentication

Have you ever shared authentication between apps before? I have. It has been at least 12 years since I did it and moved on from life. I remember needing the Machine Key in both the web.config files of both applications and maybe a couple more changes in the configuration tags for the Form Authentication but that was it AND that was back in the .aspx days.

So I recently also needed to do this but now it was an MVC Application, I assumed it was the same idea, add the Machine key and a couple of config items and you are good to go. But that did not work. And all I could find in my research was how to shared authentication between CORE apps, we are not currently using CORE, we are using the old ASP.NET MVC.

There is NOT a lot of info out there on this specifically, like an article title "How to set up shared AUTH between two ASP.NET MVC applications in 5-minutes". It was hit and miss so that's why I am posting this. So maybe it might save someone else the headache! I spent 8 hours madly debugging code, trying differnt ideas...having no idea what was different. Maybe MVC is completely different from aspx and maybe they I don't know how the new stuff works...maybe I should not even be a Software Developer...

And then suddenly and finally I noticed a teeny tiny suggestion. Trust me, you would overlook it. You would think that's silly. I am not even going to waste 30 seconds trying it. But I had spent 6 hours already, and from my years of expericence, the tiniest config items is usually the problem.

So I am going to guess, you won't read 99% of what I am writing, I am writing it for myself because I have no where to sing my own praises that I actually solved this problem.

Here it is:

You probably have the machine key config ub both web.configs

You probably have the form tags "NAME" attbritue set for consistentcy in both web.configs

BUT do you have the targetFramework="4.8" in the httpRuntime tag? If not, you are in luck, add it. Done. Works.

httpRuntime targetFramework="4.8"

I am sure you need to put in your specific framework but give it a try. The post I had found was over 7 years old and I KNOW someone else it going to need this.

Arcgis Web Application Builder Proxy

I started on this path months ago, possibly a year ago. I needed to setup a proxy to allow access to a web maps/web map application. For months, I read every blog and every forum posting. I watched YouTube videos. But I will have to admit, the little bits and pieces were always vague and never 100% the answer for me. I think because the process of configuring json is just complicated. It is too bad arcgis makes it so complicated. If it was a just click and add setup, people would not have so many issues doing this.

I spent weeks configuring and re-configuring. Nothing worked. I thought it simply wasn't possible. I READ every instruction.

It dawned on me that I should create a vanilla Web Mapping application with nothing access. Just a map that does not access any private data only private because it is protected on arcgis. I got it working so that gave me hope. It also taught me that I had to setup the proxy url with the least amount of specific url data and put matchAll="true". This means if I am trying to access "https://YOURSITE.maps.arcgis.com/rest/content/blahblahblah", then I just want to put the beginning portion (https://YOURSITE.maps.arcgis.com/) of it and if a url 'contains' it, use the proxy to authenticate.

And another thing for services like Feature Services or Layers, I could use the ClientId/Secret to get tokens but for portal items like maps, I had to use the username/password. I found a very important tidbit. The user name is Case Sensitive, the acutal login into the arcgis web page IS NOT. I have been using lower case to log into the website and I did not realize it has Uppercase values. I confirmed this by logging the website and looking up my account information!

Make sure you watch your https or http, that also causes issues.

I should note, I registered the Web Mapping Application. I know you probably did all this already, but I have to mention it. That is where you get your clientId and clientSecret

Here are some vague instuctions: https://developers.arcgis.com/web-appbuilder/guide/getstarted.htm

Next, I downloaded the entire Web Mapping application, they are quite large and I wish I did not have to do this, and then uploaded it to my server.

Finally, I followed these instructions over and over and over and kept not getting past the login. I did what the instructions said - insert the httpProxy tag near the bottom of the config file.

(I noticed in the Developer tools that it was never hitting the Proxy for any of the calls which made me think I was missing something). If it is hitting the proxy, you will see in the tools something like this for every secure service, if not, you are missing the httpProxy rule on that particular call:

Cannot open SSRS/SSIS projects with VS2017

Close all windows and instances of ‘Microsoft Visual Studio 2017‘.

Download ‘Microsoft Reporting Services Projects‘ from the Visual Studio marketplace.

Open your solution or project.

Windows 10 - Resize multiple photos as one time

Select the photos, right-click and then select Send to - Mail Recipient, Select Resize value you want to re-size to, it will then Error out. This is not a problem. Leave the error open until you have completed the next step.

Go to the Window Search box, type %temp%, the resized photos should be there. Copy them out of this folder, once you close the error box, it will delete them.

SQL Server Management Studio: Cannot find one or more components. Please re-install the application

I un-installed VS Studio 2010 dues to storage capacity issues, after I had un-installed I could not longer use SQL Server Management Studio, the database was running fine, but I could not open SSMS. I ran the repair on the SQL Server but that did not fix the issue. I installed and repaired the suggested dependency on VS 2010 Shell (Isolated), but that still had not affect.

I decided to go down the risky road and delete the registry key. There were suggestions of deleting 13, but I only had 11 and 12. So I renamed it first 11_Delete, no change, then 12_Delete and that was the problem. Once I restarted SSMS it created the folder 12_Config again and then I deleted the folder I had renamed.

Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\SQL Server Management Studio\12.0_Config