It was recently brought to my attention that there is an issue with the FaceBook Like Extension that I have available for BlogEngine. Some users have reported that after they download and install the extension they get an error that says "Country[Not specified]" when posting to FaceBook. With the help of markm75 and anil21_22gupta and whoever set up the Demo site we used for troubleshooting (THANKS AGAIN!!!) we were able to determine a few things that may help you troublshoot if you ever run across this issue.

The issue happens because of a couple of things, but primarily it revolves around the Country Chooser option in your Comments Settings. If it is enabled and you do not put any text in the Excerpt field when making a post (which becomes the post's <description> tag) then FaceBook cannot determine what the "Country[Not specified]" entry is when parsing the HTML from the rendered page because by default the parser is looking for that <description> tag. If it cannot find it, the parser then parses from the body of the post and can't determine what the heck "Country[Not specified]" is.

There's two work arounds that I know of. One, the simplest, disable the Country Chooser in your Comments Settings. Or two, always make sure you put in text in the Experpt field to create the <description> tag. The reason I say one is the simplest is because I rarely use the Excerpt field and might forget to put text in it because I don't use the Country Chooser option. It's just not important to me, although it may be to others and that's why I'm offering the work arounds.

BlogEngine 2.5 has been released! Cool new multiblog feature, Razor Themes and Pages, and a host of other cool new features! And there's a cool new theme bundled with it that I created and contributed called Titanium X which is the theme you're viewing now! Go check it out!

Great work guys!!! It's so much fun working on BE!!! I've learned alot from just tinkering with it and I can't wait to learn more!

Working in a lab environment with Microsoft Dynamics GP2010 and I came across an issue when selecting the “Item” list in Inventory. I was getting the following error:

Cannot insert the value NULL into column ‘BASEUOFM’, table ‘tempdb.dbo.##xxxxxx’; column does not allow nulls. INSERT fails.

Restarting the database server didn’t resolve it because I was hoping that clearing out the temp database tables would clear it and I was going crazy trying to find the answer! With a little help from this thread what I found was empty fields in the UOMSCHDL column in the IV00101 table. The following SQL script identifies the empty fields.

select ITEMNMBR, UOMSCHDL from IV00101
order by UOMSCHDL

The following script fixes the empty fields found in the above script.

UPDATE IV00101 SET UOMSCHDL='E' WHERE ITEMNMBR = 'ITEM NUMBER WITH EMPTY UOMSCHDL FIELD'

Now I can view items without error! Not sure how the field became empty. Check Links could possibly be the culprit but I’m not sure. So if you ever come across that error maybe this will fix it! Good luck!

The other day I was looking around the new BlogEngine.net Gallery and stumbled across a nifty little extension that adds a FaceBook “Like” button to all posts and posts’ pages. This type of extension has been a much sought after request in the BE community for a while so I had to take a look and see how it works.

Wow! I was totally impressed because this little extension does exactly what I wanted it to do, plus it has the added feature of adding a Tweet button as well!!! Easy to implement and works like a champ!

Being that the code is open source and the author said that “any changes accepted” I wanted to make some layout changes to the extension because I wasn’t happy with having to modify the CSS file(s) of BE. Yes, I could have just added the author’s code to the Global.css file as he suggests for installation but that would mean that every time I updated BE I would have to manually update that CSS file. Or I could have just added it to my theme’s CSS file, but not only would I have the same problem, but I have multiple themes and I didn’t want to update them all. Plus, I think my modifications make installation easier by just dropping the extension into the extensions folder.

The extension has three options for displaying your Like Button but because the author’s code was limiting what was being viewed I added an option to adjust the height of the extension. I also changed the alignment of the Tweet and Facebook buttons (they’re side-by-side) because they weren’t aligning properly for me (the Tweet button was lower than the Facebook button). I also left the author's credits intact in the extension because he did all of the hard work and he deserves the credit! Great job Gayan!

To install the extension place it in your App_Code\Extensions folder.

FacebookLike.zip (2.01 kb)

****UPDATE**** There's an issue that you should be aware of with how FaceBook parses information from posts. Read here for more details.

My good friend Billy posted an article sometime last year that he thought would be beneficial to anyone who has ever had to work on a HP DesignJet 750c PLUS, more specifically changing the belt. Sounds simple enough but go read on, this was a real engineering marvel feat! So thanks for sharing this info Billy! I’m posting it here! More...

I have Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter installed on a HP DL-360 G5 box in a lab with the Hyper-V role installed and needed to dissolve my HP Network for an experiment. This turned into quite an ordeal as the team would not dissolve with the HP Network Configuration Utility and my frustration was reaching new heights! More...

I’m not sure if my tech notes are of any help to anyone or not, but the real reason I blog about the strange things that I experience is because once I’ve found a solution to a problem that I couldn’t find by scouring the Internet, I’ll put it here for reference and also in the hopes that someone could benefit from my frustrations. Apparently my notes are of interest to some people because my site logs show that there’s a lot of people searching for resolutions for Outlook, offline files, and thumbs.db.I hope my notes help and if they don’t at least you stopped by and for that I’m thankful. I’ll continue posting (hopefully more often) with those problems that keep an IT person up at night!

For the last several months I’ve been having an issue with DNS (Domain Name Services) that I just couldn’t figure out! It seemed like at least once a week a user would call up and say “we can’t print to the Sales printer.” And every time, after some quick troubleshooting, it would be determined that the DNS entry for the printer would be lost! It was getting to the point that as soon as someone would call with a problem with that printer, I would immediately check DNS and re-add it because it would disappear! More...

Microsoft released Internet Explorer 9 Beta today and I have to say I'm very impressed! I've been using the Platform Demos since they were released and have enjoyed watching each little step Microsoft has made to improve their browser. If you're using Windows 7 and don't like IE8, download the beta and give it a try then come back here and tell me what you think. If you're not impressed then you don't have an open mind!

Sometimes you just have too many conflicts when synchronizing your offline files in Windows 7 that you have to start over, but gone are the days of CTRL+SHIFT and clicking the Delete Files button in “Folder Options” like you did back in Windows XP to clear out the CSC (Client Side Cache) folder. Well, here’s how I’ve discovered how to clear the cache and start over. More...