InfoCard download issue & response caching.

I have been studying the Zermatt code samples over the weekend in order to see how I can issue a managed card to an authenticated user of my web application that uses Windows Live Id authentication service. So after a user is authenticated, there is a button to be clicked to download the infocard. When I tested this on Firefox 3.0, the download worked fine. But on IE 7, I got an error message.

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Windows Internet Explorer
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Internet Explorer cannot download signin.aspx from localhost. Internet Explorer was not able to open this Internet site. The requested site is either unavailable or cannot be found. Please try again later.
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OK
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This was happening because of the following statement in Page Load event
Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.NoCache);
was causing the download of the infocard to fail.

What does this statement do?
With this statement in the code, the response sent back to the client has "Cache-Control: no-cache" in the header.

Why should this error occur on IE, but not firefox?
IE, probably, handles "no-cache" setting without errors when the response is "text/html" encoded. In my case, I was returning a "application/x-informationcardfile" in the response and I guess IE threw up the error message since it could not find how not to cache this response.
Firefox 3.0 just ignores the cache-control HTTP header.

I replaced the offending statement with
Response.Cache.SetNoStore();
and the file download works fine on both IE & Firefox.

References:
1. File download problem with Response.Cache.SetCacheability
2. Cache directives ignored by Firefox in ASP.NET caching.

CardSpace STS error: Certificate used has a trust chain that cannot be verified

When trying to run the Simple STS sample application, I came across this message.

The certificate used has a trust chain that cannot be verified. Replace the certificate or change the certificateValidationMode. The revocation function was unable to check revocation because the revocation server was offline.


On further investigation, I realized that the revocation server was set to http://www.adatum.com in the sample certificate. I had an entry for http://www.adatum.com in the Hosts file on my dev box. But it was not configured under IE Options > Connections > LAN Settings > Advanced > Proxy Settings > Exceptions. On adding the missing entry in the Exceptions text box, the error was fixed! Here is a list of commor errors when running cardspace samples.

SSL setup issue in Zermatt Beta.

I downloaded Microsoft Zermatt Beta and was enthusiastically working to get the samples setup. When running the script SamplesPreReqSetup.bat, I got the following error in the SSL setup step.

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Code Name Zermatt\Samples\Utilities\Scripts\SetSSLCertificate.js(32, 1) (null): The system cannot find the path specified.

On having a look at the script, I found that the code was not able to find the path "/W3SVC/1" in the metabase.xml. The setup script assumes that the default web site is available at the path /W3SVC/1. On opening up metabase.xml, I found that the Default Web Site on my server was set to "/LM/W3SVC/998577302". I guess that the Default Web Site was probably deleted and reconfigured on this box. Hence, it had a different value for the Location attribute. :). As a fix for this, I have replaced the following line in SamplesPreReqCleanup.bat
cscript //nologo "%~dp0Scripts\SetSSLCertificate.js" /W3SVC/1 %localhostCERTHASH%

with the one below.
cscript //nologo "%~dp0Scripts\SetSSLCertificate.js" /W3SVC/998577302 %localhostCERTHASH%

How to fix "Theme cannot be found errors"

Wiith the following Website structure.
- Default Web Site
  - vdir1
    - App_Code
  - App_Code
  - App_Themes
    - GlobalTheme

when I queried for a page http://localhost/vdir1/Test.aspx, I got the following error message "ConfigurationErrorsException: Theme 'GlobalTheme' cannot be found in the application or global theme directories". The fix for this was simple. I had to create a sub-folder named App_Themes under vdir1 as shown below.

- Default Web Site
  - vdir1
    - App_Code
    - App_Themes
      - GlobalTheme
  - App_Code
  - App_Themes
    - GlobalTheme

Where is HttpCfg?

I downloaded a few samples for trying out Windows CardSpace. One of the setup scripts used HttpCfg to configure SSL and it failed to execute since it could not find HttpCfg. This file, if not on your system, can be installed from [Windows 2003 Setup location]\Support\Tools\SUPTOOLS.MSI. For a complete list of support tools click here.

Windows XP users can download the support tools from here
Windows 2003 users can download support tools from here

Random page selection for Load Testing

How should I design a load test for a scenario where a user can randomly hit one page from a given set of unsecure pages maintained on my web server? So at any point of time there could be 'x' no. of users, each accessing one page from the 'y' no. of pages residing on my web server. First I wrote a web test that will simulate 1 user accessing a random page. To do this, I created a table named a single column table named "Files" and populated it with the names of the aspx pages I have on the web server. Then I created a view over it with a SQL query

SELECT TOP(1) 'http://localhost/' + [dbo].[Files].[FileName] AS [PageName] FROM [dbo].[Files] ORDER BY NEWID()

Thanks to Philipe for giving this tip!

The above query will return a random page Url like http://localhost/Page1.aspx which is bound to a request in the WebTest.
Then I associated this WebTest with the LoadTest and configured the LoadTest to start with 1 user and add a new user every 1 second till a maximum count which will be equal to the number of pages on my web server. By selecting a distribution model based on the number of virtual users, I expected that the load test will result in user's getting a random unique page in each iteration. However, I was baffled to see what the load test engine was actually doing. On running the load test, the Page Results section in the Summary showed me that only one page was requested during the entire execution!!! On further investigation, I noticed that the WebLoadTestRequestMap table in the Load Test Database had only 1 RequestUri corresponding to my LoadTestRunId.

To get over this issue, I found it best to execute the above SQL statement using SqlDataReader in the WebTest code and create a WebTestRequest instance with the Url returned. With this approach, I am now able to successfully load test the scenario I had in mind. :)