I finished the encryption component for use in my backend XML processor. My requirements were to expose userdata across the URI as part of a querystring and I had to come up a way of encrypting and compressing the new string so that it would work within a HTTP Get.

A local lookup table or datastore wasn't an option. It needed to be identifying data encapsulated within the HTTP Get. It isn't necessarily sensitive or personally identifyable data, but I wanted a set of parameters to be wrapped up in a single encrypted Hash.

And, at 01:41 I got it working and still supporting my legacy calls to the web service so that they continue to work while supporting the new version of encrypted calls.

When it is all wrapped up and complete, I will post my asp.net encryption component if anyone wants to use it for thier projects. It is based on the some work I found on The Code Project (.Net Encryption Simplified) by Jeff Atwood (hey, I live nearby), Peter Bromberg, a component concept from Tim Shakarian and the rest of it came from documentation on good ol' MSDN.

Everytime I create new functionality in the asp.net framework, I am amazed at how robust the libraries are. It makes developing web applications that much more fun.

Look for the new service to be completed sometime this week

After I installed Visual Studio 2005 and started a new asp.net web project, I attempted to debug one of my projects and was presented with this message (Figure 1):

Figure 1: Unable to start program 'notepad.exe'.
The specified working directory does not exist or is not a full path.

Visual Studio then proceeded to fall out of debug mode (and even better, without recourse or even any suggestions on how to resolve this apparently very serious issue). Sigh.

After some file handle tracing using Iarsn TaskInfo 2003 I located the file handles coming out of Visual Studio 2005. Doing some additional file sniffing I came across the configuration files that were the problem.

It turned out there was a strange node in browsers.xml located at:

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\DbgClr\8.0\browsers.xml

and in ExpansionsXML.xml at:

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\1033\ExpansionsXML.xml

I edited the XML and removed the notepad.exe "browser" and changed the value of the <default> element for the Internet Explorer entry to "True".

Returning to Visual Studio 2005, I launched debug on my asp.net application and the site properly launched in debug mode. Whew!

This was also preventing me from configuring my ASP.NET Configuration under the Website dropdown.

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