AntiForgeryToken And MachineKey configuration - asp.net-mvc

I am trying to deploy a .NET MVC application to GoDaddy servers. I have an Html.AntiForgeryToken on one of my pages that is causing it throw an exception every time I hit it.
Validation of viewstate MAC failed. If this application is hosted by a Web Farm or cluster, ensure that <machineKey> configuration specifies the same validationKey and validation algorithm. AutoGenerate cannot be used in a cluster.
I have generated a machine key using the following URL
http://aspnetresources.com/tools/machineKey
and have set the pages viewStateEncryptionMode to "Always"
<pages viewStateEncryptionMode="Always">
I am still receiving the error however and am at a lost as to what to do next. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I finally figured it out. I did a little bit more google searching and found that if I don't clear the cache on the browser it will retain the invalid viewstate. Apparently chrome holds onto some semblance of the viewstate in each consecutive browser unless all of the chrome browser windows are closed down (I use alot of chrome browsers), even when the cache has been cleared.
I found that the code worked by trying it in Firefox and IE which was successful. I then closed down all of the chrome windows (after clearing cache) and restarted. I was then able to navigate successfully to the page with the AntiForgeryToken on it.

Related

The required anti-forgery cookie "__RequestVerificationToken" is not present only in Google Chrome

I have an existing website and suddenly some days ago I can't use Google Chrome anymore for developing. When I use a standard edit and create page, I get the above error. But i'm not getting it in Internet Explorer. I use Windows 10 (all updates installed) and VS2013 with Update 4. The project is the latest MVC version. I even checked the web.config but nothing is changed. I deleted all history, cookies, passwords etc.
Anyone any idea?
I had the same problem. For me the solution was to both clear my browser cookies and to disable Adblock. Other addons may have the same effect. I believe the problem is limited to the Visual Studio / Chrome development environment and will not occur in production regardless of whether the end user has Adblock enabled or not.
Do you have a
<httpCookies requireSSL="true" />
in your Web.config? Change that to false. Then in your transforms files (Web.Prod.config, and other environments that have SSL):
<httpCookies requireSSL="true" xdt:Transform="SetAttributes" />
I'm also having the same issue in recent weeks, but it's also extending cross-browser after originating from Chrome. What's even stranger is that it still works flawlessly with the identical project on a different machine using all browsers.
I have gone so far as to uninstall all extensions, delete all cookies / data, sign out of Chrome completely and re-install it. Problem still persists.
On deployment to Azure websites the problem isn't present on any platform. My current work-around is to Ctrl-F [ValidateAntiForgeryToken] and comment out every occurrence, and re-enable it upon deployment. Annoying, but it works.
This was happening to me in Chrome, and seemed related to using the 'remember me' checkbox on login forms, and closing then re-opening the browser. The token was present on inspecting page source, but was reported as being not present during debugging sessions in visual studio. By clearing the browser cache and not checking the 'remember me' box I did not get the problem - but I don't fully understand why!!
My steps to reproduce the bug in Chrome:
Sign in to your MVC web application, clicking on 'remember me' to make it checked
Close browser
Open browser to your current retained session
Try to sign out - error happens here.
Anyway, the following solution worked for me. Inside your MVC view form, try replacing this:
#Html.AntiForgeryToken()
with:
ViewContext.Writer.Write(Html.AntiForgeryToken().ToHtmlString());
Are you on cloud platform ? chrome emits cookies from cloud domains hence the only way to do it is to map another named domain to your cloud web site
This is probably because browsers like Chrome use the Public Suffix List(https://publicsuffix.org/list/effective_tld_names.dat) to restrict certain cookies. If the domain suffix set on the cookie is shared publicly then the browser may block such a cookie in order to prevent itself from sending "unauthorized" data to other servers running on the same domain.

ASP.NET 4.5.1 MVC 5 application not loading in browser. Failed to open http://

Problem
I am using windows authentication with MVC5 ASP.NET application. When I went to the url of the application on my intranet, I typed in (just for example), http://derp.herp.edu. As expected, it
asked me for my login credentials on the domain. I entered these.
I then get a completely blank page. No error message. Just a white screen. I then fired up the debugger in my browser and it simply states:
Failed to open http://derp.herp.edu
Details
I don't even know where to find an error for this? I have no clue to what is causing this. I've been trying to look for logs, but since I am new to IIS7.5 I am not sure I am looking at the right ones.
I just deployed the MVC5 on an IIS7.5 Windows 2008 R2 server. It is my belief that the IIS I am trying to deploy this on is on a secured VLAN.
Attempts
Launched locally on my machine IIS7.5. It works. What the heck?
Moved to wwwroot of the inetpub file to make sure file permissions are okay on server.
Associated the default web site on IIS7.5 to the domain name. I can see it on my local machine and the server in the browser.
Thus, we know the domain name works. We know that authentication is trying to work. But something is going wrong when it tries to display the MVC 5 .NET application.
I figured out the error. It was a completely silent error as the browser was just sitting there not doing anything. I started checking IIS and noticed that .NET compilation had some problems. I found the fix at ASPNET4BreakingChangesAndStuffToBeAwareOf.

ActiveX cannot screen capture a page that is hosted on the same server

I have an app that takes a screenshot of web pages and creates a resized image. The app is basically loading a web page that calls an ActiveX to load a web page using IE resources and take the screenshot. This app has been running on a Windows Server 2003 without any problems for a couple of years.
But now that I have upgraded the server to Windows Server 2008, the screenshot action is timing out. From tests I can see that it successfully takes a screenshot of any web page hosted on the Internet... except pages hosted on the same server.
Whenever it tries to capture a page loaded on a site hosted on the same server as the app, it times out. ESC is disabled and it seems that all other permissions are ok, ie: it works for remote pages but for home pages.
Any ideas as to what can be causing this and how to fix it?
After further testing I have narrowed down the reason for failure being due to the page being popluated from a MS-SQL database record on the same server as the one taking the screenshot. The same page generated on a remote server captures ok. I have further established that the error is not peculiar to the ACASystems DLL because it also affects another DLL for creating MHT files from web pages. This DLL (Chilkat.MHT) also uses IE to load and assemble the web page on the fly and then saves it as a.mht file.
So the problem is more related to IE assembling web pages from MS-SQL while running ActiveX. But to resolve this enigma?
Maybe a routing issue (DNS/hostfile..) ? Does the page loads on local session with IE ?
There is no solution for this without editing the ActiveX code. Since the DLLs in question are third party resources, such editing is not possible.
After testing 3 different ActiveX that load a web page that either take a screenshot or save as .mht, it was found that they all failed when loading a page that was querying SQL on the same server. After contacting the 3 DLL developers we were informed by all of them that their ActiveX has no impact on MS-SQL.
Unfortunately, our tests tell us otherwise. At this stage we are left guessing however this article about in-process vs out-process execution may be related.
The workaround for us to solve this problem was to assemble the page to be captured from request queries passed to the page rather than populate from SQL queries. This alternate works perfectly.

Asp.Net-MVC application dying

I have a strange issue with an Asp.NET MVC application.
Using Asp.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 on IIS 7.5 - Integrated
After building the application everything runs fine. Then after some random amount of time (or sometimes after updating a view or js file) the application dies.
Meaning, requesting the root page, I get the 403 error and requesting any other page I get a 404 error.
After a rebuild everything works fine again for a little while until it dies again.
I am seeing this on two different development machines. Also, I have another application which is very similar (MVC 3, IIS etc) on both dev machines and this one runs without problem. I have inspected the config files in detail and cannot see anything of notable difference.
Does anyone know what could cause an application to die or where to look for further information? (I can still access elmah.axd though no information is there).
There's not much to go on here, but the 403 and 404 are clues that at least ASP.NET routing is not working; 403 is coming back because the web server thinks you want to do a directory browse, 404 because your request doesn't have a valid corresponding resource.
Since you are using the new version of MVC, I would suspect the issue may lye there. When you get the error condition, can you browse to a regular .aspx page? Does it execute server side code correctly?
You have the site hosted in IIS 7.5, not just the built in Visual Studio web server, right? Is it possible to turn on monitoring/event logging to see if IIS is taking a hit?
I apologize for not having any actual answer, sounds like you have a tough issue to debug.
Good Luck!

Using WatiN through MbUnit to test ASP .Net MVC web application

I am trying to apply some WatiN UI tests to my new ASP .Net MVC application, running the WatiN tests through MbUnit, but am having some difficulties.
If I follow the instructions (exactly) on this page, then the google homepage loads, up the text is inserted, the search is done and the test passes. (no problem here).
However, when I simply change the URL of the line...
var ie = new IE(new Uri("http://www.google.co.uk"));
to the website hosted on my PC through IIS (on Win7), (e.g. to http://localhost/myapp/) the homepage of my application loads fine, but the test-runner seems to still be waiting for confirmation that the page has loaded and then the test fails due to a timeout.
Here's the failed response from within the IDE...
*** Failures ***
Exception
WatiN.Core.Exceptions.TimeoutException: Timeout while Internet Explorer state not complete
at WatiN.Core.UtilityClasses.TryFuncUntilTimeOut.ThrowTimeOutException(Exception lastException, String message)
at WatiN.Core.UtilityClasses.TryFuncUntilTimeOut.HandleTimeOut()
at WatiN.Core.UtilityClasses.TryFuncUntilTimeOut.Try[T](DoFunc`1 func)
at WatiN.Core.WaitForCompleteBase.WaitUntil(DoFunc`1 waitWhile, BuildTimeOutExceptionMessage exceptionMessage)
at WatiN.Core.Native.InternetExplorer.WaitForComplete.WaitWhileIEReadyStateNotComplete(IWebBrowser2 ie)
at WatiN.Core.Native.InternetExplorer.IEWaitForComplete.DoWait()
at WatiN.Core.DomContainer.WaitForComplete(IWait waitForComplete)
at WatiN.Core.IE.WaitForComplete(Int32 waitForCompleteTimeOut)
at WatiN.Core.DomContainer.WaitForComplete()
at WatiN.Core.Browser.GoTo(Uri url)
at WatiN.Core.IE.FinishInitialization(Uri uri)
at WatiN.Core.IE.CreateNewIEAndGoToUri(Uri uri, IDialogHandler logonDialogHandler, Boolean createInNewProcess)
at WatiN.Core.IE..ctor(Uri uri)
at FppRendersUI.Test.Program.DoSomething() in C:\Dev\MyCode.Test\Program.cs:line 18
Anybody else get this, or is it just me?
There should be no significant differences testing a website on locahost.
Two possible causes:
If your webpage contains any significant AJAX then it's possible that the page never appears to be fully loaded so WatiN just keeps waiting.
I have fixed one or two bugs in WatiN now and then related to detecting that a page has been fully loaded. You might try grabbing the WatiN trunk source and building a fresh copy of the latest code.
If none of that helps, WatiN also has "NoWait" variants of several actions like clicking. You can also override what it means to WatiN to wait for a page to be complete by registering a WaitForComplete handler.
I've had this happen to me when I had a reference to a resource that didn't load.
Do have a reference to a JS, CSS, or image file that doesn't exist?
If you look at the HTTP traffic with Fiddler do you see any connections timing out?
Make sure the program is running as an administrator. On Win7 it will load the page but Watin can't access the DOM unless Visual Studio or Gallio Icarus are started with administrator privileges.

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