Had a bit of a problem that was quite easily solved today. I was trying to substitute a curency pound symbol for a euro symbol in a web application, so I decided to make it configurable in the web.config file.
When I added it in however, I kept getting an error saying:

There is an invalid character in the given encoding

If I took out the line, or replaced it with another string, it worked fine. Turned out it was the encoding set in the top of the web config file. I changed to to read:

xml version =”1.0″ encoding=”windows-1252″

And it started to work fine. Not sure what that encoding refers to, but ill find out. I know I should really get the currency symbol from the local of the machine, but I don’t know how!

I’ve been setting up a Windows 2003 fax server client over the weekend, and kept getting a very strange error reported when I sent a fax using an application I had written.

If a sent a fax using the Windows fax console it would go through fine, but whenever I used my application the job would drop into the outbox, but straight away got deleted. I got an error 32079 in the Application log of the server, that told me

An error occurred while preparing to send the fax. The service will not attempt to resend the fax. Please close other applications before resending.

I hunted the net and couldn’t find anything useful on this error, apart from make sure you have setup your dialing rules (witch I had). I then noticed that the jobs I had submitted had there phone number in a different format than the ones sent via the Fax Console.

It turned out that it was because I was appending the country code to the start of the job, that is why it was kicking it out. As soon as I removed this from the config file and it no longer started the fax number with the country code, it worked fine.

I am very confused by this, as the last one I setup seamed to need the country code (+44 for England) otherwise it refused to work. So, i’m still not to sure what the problem actually is but at least its working. The only difference between the servers is one’s in England, and the new one is in the Republic of Ireland. Not sure what difference that would make.