All the Good Titles Were Taken - Chris Scott » C# and ASP.NET

"Cryptography.CryptographicException: Bad Data" Exception Moving from .Net 1.1 to 3.5

Chris Scott — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 20:10:19 +0000

We just finished moving a few apps from .Net Framework 1.1 to 3.5. One of the problems we ran into was this exception when using some symmetric encryption code. When we decrypted the value from the DB, this was being thrown.

From what I can tell, it looks like in 1.1 passing null data to the decryption worked (or at least silently failed) and likely returned null back (well, a blank string in our case due to type conversion). However, in 3.5 this exception gets thrown.

An easy fix but one of those little things that took a while to track down so hope this helps someone.

parsing command line parameters in c#

Chris Scott — Tue, 24 Aug 2004 23:59:36 +0000

You would think of all the nice features they have in .Net that parsing comand line parameters to a console app would be as easy as calling a property. You would be wrong. C'mon, how hard would it have been to have Environment.GetCommandLineArgsByName(string argname) ?

I don't think in zero-based arrays so I didn't want to be tied to using Environment.GetCommandLineArgs. I looked for other ways to do it and ran across a post on the NUnitAddin blog about using an XmlSerializer to parse them. Cool. Very cool. Very little code and it makes sense (even before you understand it completely).

OpenSmtp.net rocks!

Chris Scott — Mon, 28 Jun 2004 19:27:01 +0000

Big thanks to the folks that developed OpenSmtp.net and made it available under the LGPL. I just ripped out Persits AspEmail from an ASP.NET project and replaced it with OpenSmtp.net. I never liked using AspEmail in .net since it wasn't native .net and very fickle.

will I ever remember how to use dataformat strings in c#

Chris Scott — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 22:42:34 +0000

Probably not. For future reference: "0:d" for a short date. Maybe I need to print out a good reference when I find one.

php: taking a half step back?

Chris Scott — Sat, 28 Feb 2004 05:51:43 +0000

I've been doing some PHP development for a new site for my company. I can't tell you about it since it is classified "super f'ing secret"--actually it is just a cheesy parking page and I don't want any search engines spidering it until there is some real content. But, back to something resembling the title of this article. When ASP.NET first came out, I jumped on the bandwagon faster than you can say OOP. For the most part, I have no regrets. Classic ASP seems so two years ago and doing maintenance on old code usually brings a combination of laughter and crying which ends with a beer.

PHP is bringing back some of these feelings since it is a scripting language. In some ways, this is great: no compiling, no xcopy distribution (great term, I guess FTP wasn't M$-centric enough), and no IIS. However, it still *feels* like I'm taking a step back. OK, half a step since PHP is really cool in that it has some great features: templates, OO, functions out the wazoo, and the all-important recursive acronym name.