[Mono-dev] Web.Config thoughts and a few quick bugs..

[Christopher Bergström]

I'm developing a web app and in the process I've noticed that we are 
implementing most of the features needed, but sometimes allowing 
configurations which don't work and don't produce an error and or are 
not compatible with other implementations.

#1 We should test for multiple web.config.  NTFS and FAT are case 
insensitive and thus don't allow for Web.Config and web.config, but EXT3 
and friends does.  Could this be as easy as looping through the 
directories, lowercasing everything and then where the count is more 
than 1 per directory give an error?

Performance impact, complexity and cross platform compatibility come to 
mind..

Or would something as simple as clearly documenting we will only support 
one way of naming the Web.Config work?

Option c: don't be a bone-head and make more than one web.config :)

#2 <httpHandlers>

<httpHandlers>
  <add verb="*" path="*.dll"
    type="System.Web.HttpForbiddenHandler"/>
</httpHandlers>

Rules I've noticed

a. Must be between <system.web>
    desired error:  Parser Error Message: Unrecognized configuration 
section httpHandlers.

b. Is case sensitive
    desired error:  Description: An error occurred during the processing 
of a configuration file required to service this request. Please review 
the specific error details below and modify your configuration file 
appropriately.

Parser Error Message: Unrecognized configuration section 
system.web/HttpHandlers.

c. <system.web> can't be between a <location> which is just a single 
page (I don't imagine that will be easy to parse for)

d. Setting certain types to Forbidden doesn't have the same effect.. I 
think our implementation makes more sense so I won't name all discovered 
differences, but .dll don't see to be protected from the bin/ directory.

#3 <sessionState>
a. Currently we throw an error if <sessionstate> can't be found, but the 
correct naming is sessionState (Fourth S needs to be Uppercase. (We have 
this backards))
b. Desired Error: Parser Error Message: Unrecognized configuration 
section system.web/sessionstate.
c. Can't seem to get cookieless sessions working. (I do know that about 
8 months ago we used to have some sort of support for this. I was 
converting an app over and the rewrite was half-way working.  In that 
the URL were being rewritten, but it's wasn't preserving between pages. 
So each page was just being rewritten with no benefit.

I'll slowly compile my list and can do bug reports in the next week or 
so if I don't see the patches in SVN or am able to do it myself

Cheers,

C.