Tech Wave

So, I am currently working as an intern for UCN through my school. Just before my boss went to present the work that my team has been doing on our project our virtual box hosting the site went down. When I came in to work my two full time team members were hard at work trying to get a new virtual box up an running before the presentation. At this time they had just about everything set up except for the AJAX tools that the site relyed on.

The first problem is that the ajax tools (the scriptmanager, updatepanel and so on) were not working correctly. We eventually got that fixed, but the real puzzler was the AJAX Control Toolkit’s Tab control was not rendering the tabs correctly. there were no onclick events firing on the java script and the tabs headers were not displaying at all. This was also a big problem because half of our pages on the site use this one control, and there was really no obvoius reason that it should be mis-behaving at this point.

Eventually I went looking at the css after compairing the generated html of a working site and the non-working one and found them the same. What I found was this error message for some of the dynamically generated css.

That was the error that was happening. Apparently the server time was way off. We looked at the time and it was set to 6 months in the past. This created errors with the cacheing that the tab controls were using for it’s generated CSS code. It appears that the client was telling the server what time it thought it was and asking for the generated css, but the server was throwing it away as soon as it created it because the date asked for was too far in the future.

So, if you are putting up a new server, make sure the time is set correctly otherwise you will have problems with ASP.Net’s Caching, AJAX, and tab controls.