I have been using Url re-writing on my new website www.trainingcoursebooker.com to try and make friendly, human readable urls which are good for both people and search engines. There is a very subtle problem which I finally found and more importantly found a solution to.

Everything works great in testing and in live. However my email inbox was suddenly filled with notifications of errors on the site (I’ve written code that notifies me of all errors via email so I don’t have to check event logs). The important part of the exception message is:

Message: Cannot use a leading .. to exit above the top directory.

After a google around most of the answers seemed to be in the fact I would be using some kind of ../../../ notation to reference a stylesheet or something. After going through all my code multiple times I was sure it wasn’t that. I could not reproduce the errors and was very puzzled.[more]

It then occurred to me that it might not be a user browsing the site triggering this but a search engine crawling it. Sure enough with another google around I found this great article which found out that the browsers search engine crawlers use are not recognised by ASP.net and so my application was assuming that cookies are not supported which in turn causes this problem – for the full explanation please read the original article:

http://weblogs.asp.net/dfindley/archive/2006/09/05/Problems-with-RewritePath-and-Search-Engines_2E00_.aspx

I plumbed for creating a browser file to tell my application that the search engine browsers do support cookies which has fixed the problem and I haven’t received an error notification since :D

I have managed to arrange Ian Crowther, an ex-colleague from Avanade, to come and do a brown bag session for me and my employees this Saturday 14th March at my office near Haslemere in the UK.

Ian has been working a lot with Microsoft’s MVC.net and Yahoo UI recently. He is going to give a presentation and then run a practical coding workshop on Microsoft’s MVC.net and Yahoo UI showing how to combine them to [more]produce some sexy looking websites. In the workshop we are going to attempt to re-implement a recent asp.net web forms project See The Link have been working on as an asp.net MVC.net project. I’m really excited to find out more about how this will work and what the result will be! If they are good I’m hoping to put the MVC.net version live instead of the original web forms version.

I know that it is short notice but I am opening up this event to any techies who might be interested. I have space for another 3 people so if you want to come along then ping me an email before this Friday. We will be starting at 10am on Saturday going onto whenever (hopefully be about 4-6 hours or so)!