TGF5aW5nIGJ5IHBvb2wsIGJlY29taW5nIHN1ZG9rdSBtYXN0ZXIuIEJlZW4gdG8gdm9sY2Fubywg YnJlYXRoLXRha2luZy4gVm9kYWZvbmUgc2lnbmFsIHBvb3IsIHdpbGwgcG9zdCBwaG90b3Mgc29v bg==

Laying by pool, becoming sudoku master. Been to volcano, breath-taking views. Vodafone signal poor, will post photos soon

I've just fixed several bugs in dasBlog that were preventing me from sending email via my phone (across Vodafone Live) direct to my blog. Vodafone were using non-standard casing in most of the email & attachment headers. Now I'm ready for my hols. Expect some pictures soon.

I've been getting quite a few errors from dasBlog recently with invalid viewstate. After chatting with Scott Hanselman about possible causes, we've narrowed it down to two possiblities:

1. someone is tampering with my site
2. IIS is recycling whilst a postback occurs

The IIS recylcing sounds more likely, although I'm actually hosting this site on Windows 2000 with IIS5 which I didnt think recycled ever 20 minutes like IIS6.

Anyhow to rule that out I've set a manual machineKey for my dasBlog application: here's an example:

<machineKey  
validationKey="21F090935F6E49C2C797F69BBAAD8402ABD2EE0B667A8B44EA7DD4374267A75D7
               AD972A119482D15A4127461DB1DC347C1A63AE5F1CCFAACFF1B72A7F0A281B"           
decryptionKey="ABAA84D7EC4BB56D75D217CECFFB9628809BDB8BF91CFCD64568A145BE59719F"
validation="SHA1"
decryption="AES"
/>

That way if IIS does cycle during a request we should also use the same keys instead of getting new AutoGenerated ones. The same principle applys if you are using a web farm. Different servers might serve the inital request from the postbacks.

BTW: if you need to generate those keys above, here's some code:

using System;
using System.Text;
using System.Security;
using System.Security.Cryptography;

class App {
  static void Main(string[] argv) {
    int len = 128;
    if (argv.Length > 0)
      len = int.Parse(argv[0]);
    byte[] buff = new byte[len/2];
    RNGCryptoServiceProvider rng = new 
                            RNGCryptoServiceProvider();
    rng.GetBytes(buff);
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(len);
    for (int i=0; i<buff.Length; i++)
      sb.Append(string.Format("{0:X2}", buff[i]));
    Console.WriteLine(sb);
  }
}

private AdomdConnectionException(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context) : base(info, context)
{
 this.exceptionCause = ConnectionExceptionCause.Unspecified;
 this.exceptionCause = (ConnectionExceptionCause) info.GetValue("ExceptionCauseProperty", typeof(AdomdErrorCollection));
}

Has anyone else seen this? Or have a workaround?

I've posted an article on an MSDN forum just in case someone from M$ spots it!

If you find this post via google hopefully someone has answer my questions.

1. Adding the user account to the IIS_WPG group of the server
2. Give the IIS_WPG group Read & Execute, List Folder Contents, and Read permissions to the Web site directories