Thursday, May 23, 2013

AltGr button stops to work (fix)


From time to time my AltGr button stops to work. This is very annoying when trying to type certain special characters. There might be several reasons for this probably, but in my case the culprit is usually Remote Desktop.

If this happens and you have Remote Desktop running (in background too), simply quit Remote Desktop to get AltGr working again.

I had this problem before without running Remote Desktop, and then it was the NVIDIA control panel who had assigned AltGr+(number keys) as global shortcuts. Disable the shortcuts to get it working.

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Mix of character encoding on a web page

I recently experienced a weird error with encoding while working on an Umbraco site. The page would show some special chars correct and some not. The pattern was that chars in the template would display wrong, but chars in the (dynamic) content would display correct.

First step was to verify that everything was UTF-8; the HTML header, the template (html) files, the (html) partial files etc. Then check that all config settings were set to UTF-8; web.config and umbracoSettings.config.

Still didn't work. I also tried manually switching encoding in chrome (tools->encoding) but it still didn't work.

The fix:
I needed to add the fileEncoding attribute to the globalization tag in web.config

before:
<globalization requestEncoding="UTF-8" responseEncoding="UTF-8" />

after:

<globalization requestEncoding="UTF-8" responseEncoding="UTF-8" 
fileEncoding="UTF-8" />


Ah, well...

Monday, February 4, 2013

Getting Umbraco 6 to play nicely with Visual Studio

When developing Umbraco 6 thru Visual Studio (in my case VS2012) it (VS) was not playing nicely.

My main issue was that intellisense and even compilation didn't work for SurfaceControllers. Compilation would succeed every time not giving me errors until run-time.

The issue is that Visual Studio thought this was a Web Forms project (wich Umbraco is), but I was working with MVC. I found the solution in this blog post by Colin Angus MacKay at the bottom.

Solution:

To do this, you need to right click on the web project and click “Unload Project”, when it has unloaded, right-click again and click “Edit xxx.csproj”.
Look for the element named “ProjectTypeGuids” and add in the guid:
{E3E379DF-F4C6-4180-9B81-6769533ABE47}

Separate the GUIDs with semi-colon. Then reload the project.

The project is the main Umbraco project (in case you have more than one). You will have to re-set the project as Start-up project after this.

Update: It seems to be a little unstable, as VS suddenly reverted to old (bad) behaviour. Unloading then reloading project fixed it, but hopefully there is a better solution. Will update if I find one.

Note: Umbraco 6 already ships with MVC 4 and has built in support for Controllers (called SurfaceControllers) so the rest of Colin's blog entry is not necessary for Umbraco 6.

Update: When retrying this I found that I had to put the new GUID first in the list. The project refused to load when I put the GUID at the end.