The Morning Brew

Software

• jQuery 1.8.2 Released - The jQuery Team announce the release of jQuery 1.8.2, a bugfix and performance regression fix release. As usual the files are available from the jQuery site, and should be making their way to the various content delivery networks.
• IE 9.0.10 Available via Windows Update - The Internet Explorer Team have released a high importance security patch for Internet Explorer 9 to address recently reported security issues. Additionally there is an update for Internet Explorer 10 to address a Adobe Flash issue.

Information

• New TaskCreationOptions and TaskContinuationOptions in .NET 4.5 - Stephen Toub discusses soem new options introduced to help further control the creation and continuation of tasks in .NET 4.5, taking a look at the use of DenyChildAttach, HideScheduler, and LazyCancellation.
• await is not ALWAYS your friend - (Looks like the author has removed this post on MSDN, but it can be found here - thanks to @westleyl for letting me know) Julien Dollon discusses how, as with all things, you should use async/await in a responsible fashion to avoid harming your applications performance.
• Adding NuGet Support to F# Interactive in VS2012 - Daniel Mohl follows up the technique for getting NuGet support in Visual Studio 2010’s F# Interactive window with a look at achieving the same in Visual Studio 2012
• The F# 3.0 Freebase Type Provider Sample - Integrating Internet-Scale Data Sources into a Strongly Typed Language - Don Syme highlights a new F# 3.0 Sample Pack Sample which implements a Freebase Type provider in F#, and highlights an academic research paper which discusses the background on working with this entity graph model.
• An Introduction To F# Type Providers - F# tutorial - Keith Battocchi discusses the new Type Provider feature in F# 3.0, looking at what they are, and how they are implemented and used.
• ASP.NET 4.5 ScriptManager Improvements in WebForms - Pranav Rastogi discusses some of the key improvements to the Script Manager in .NET 4.5 WebForms, looking at the improved jQuery support, Remapping of Framework scripts, and script manager registration.
• .Net CLR Injection : Modify IL Codes on Run-time - Jerry Wang takes a look at manipulating .NET IL at runtime to provide injection capabilities
• IlPad - icemanind shares a neat looking utility for taking C# and compiling it to IL, providing a useful reference for dynamic compiling (and decompiling to IL), and also a way of learning more about the IL that underpins language constructs.

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It’s been quite a while since the last ‘Afternoon Tea’ post, and there have been quite a lot of significant announcements in the past few weeks, coupled with my being busy at work which has resulted in me building up quite a backlog of links which I really wanted to include in a Morning Brew. This post is my attempt to ‘clear the decks’ and get caught up again, and also provides the perfect excuse to do a link roundup of DDD South West which I had the pleasure of presenting at at the end of last month.

Software

• Introducing jQuery++ - Justin B Meyer and the folsk over at Bitovi announce the release of jQuery++, a collection of DOM helpers which complement and extend jQuery
• Bundler.NET - Bundler.NET brings the CSS and JavaScript minification and combining features of .NET 4.5 to earlier versions of .NET. The installation is simple via a NuGet package and the API reflects the .NET 4.5 implementation.
• bddify is moved to GitHub and is renamed to TestStack.BDDfy - Mehdi Khalili gives an update on TestStack.BDDfy, the project formerly known as bddify, discussing the name change, and change to the projects hosting, along with looking at the structure of the NuGet packages which amke up TestStack.BDDfy.
• #mvvmlight V4 for Windows 8 RP is available - Laurent Bugnion announces the release of version 4 of his MVVMLight framework for Windows 8 Release Preview
• Get latest CSS 3 support in Visual Studio 2010 - Mads Kristensen discusses how you can get the latest version of the CSS3 support into your Visual Studio 2010 installation providing a link to the schema files required and giving instructions on getting it setup and installed in Visual Studio 2010
• Tree Surgeon - Alive and Kicking or Dead and Buried? - Bil Simser gives an update on an old tool that I used to make considerable use of in the past. Tree Surgeon was a tool to create a standardized format of Development Source Tree structure. In this post Bil discusses how the landscape of .NET development has changed in the 4 years since its last release with improvements in T4 Templating and NuGet, and questions if there is a future for the project.
• Introducing RabbitBus - Derek Greer introduces RabbitBus, a .NET client API implementation for working with RabbitMQ, aiming to provide constructs which are not provided in the standard RabbitMQ .NET client. The library is open source with code available on GitHub, and the installation is available in NuGet package format.

Information

• Performance consideration for Async/Await and MarshalByRefObject - Stephen Toub discusses in detail the story behind the performance improvements in the Release Candidate implementation of StreamReader.ReadLineAsync over that of the beta release.
• Using Nightly ASP.NET Web Stack NuGet Packages with VS 2012 RC & ASP.NET MVC, Web API, and Web Pages RC NuGet Packages - Henrik F Nielsen discusses how you can use the latest nightly builds of the ASP.NET Web Stack, made available as NuGet packages, with the Visual Studio 2012 RC release, and also provides details of the offical packages for the RC release.
• AspectMap - Part 2 - An Exception Handling Helper - Chris Surfleet continues his discussions of his AspectMap AOP framework which builds upon StructureMap. In this post Chris takes a look at building a generic exception handler which can be applied to your code.
• 5 things you should know about developing Windows 8 Apps with HTML5] - Martin Beeby highlights 5 key concepts which you should explore when implementing your Windows 8 Metro Style applications in JavaScript and HTML5
• My Take on Unit Testing Private Methods - Peter Provost discusses the common questions which surround unit testing of private methods, and discusses how just because a class or method is public it isn’t automatically part of your official public API.
• Setup Improvements for Visual Studio - David Guyer of the Visual Studio Team discusses the significant improvements made to the setup experience and performance in the latest Visual Studio 2012 Release
• Getting Started on Line-of-Business HTML5 App - Part 6 Selecting HTML with JQuery, Part 7 Local Storage, Part 8 Building a Better Form, Part 9 Show-Hide Wizard Using jQuery & Part 10 Validate, Validate, Validate - Bruce Kyle continues his series looking at using HTML5 and JavaScript to construct a Line of Business application, looking at using jQuery to work with HTML, exploring the use of Local Storage, and examining how you can use HTML5 to create better user input forms and validate the input.
• Writing a WCF 4.5 WebSocket Service - Peter Vogel has been exploring the use of Web Sockets in WCF 4.5 in a series of articles for Visual Studio Magazine. In this latest part he discusses the opening and handling of WebSocket connections
• Extending your ASP.NET Web API responses with useful metadata &Control the execution order of your filters in ASP.NET Web API - Filip W continues his series looking at the use of WebAPI with a look adding additional metadata such as the number of results found and the number returned, and look at how you can add in the ability to control the order of filters being applied to requests.
• Analyzing some "˜Big" Data Using C#, Azure And Apache Hadoop - Analyzing Stack Overflow Data Dumps - Anoop Madhusudanan takes a look at some of the concepts of ‘Big Data’ analysis on the Azure platform making use of MapReduce via Apache Hadoop, digging into a set of data from StackOverflow in this CodeProject article.
• Make Web Development Easier with IIS Express - Tim Corey gives a nice introduction into working with the IIS Express Web Server for your development web server needs, looking a the different ways it can be used and configured.
• Anders Hejlsberg Is Right: You Cannot Maintain Large Programs In JavaScript - In a recent Channel 9 discussion Anders Hejlsberg suggested that maintaining large programs in JavaScript was very difficult. In this short post Derek Bailey shares his thoughts. Be sure to have a read of the comments on this one for some further discussion.

DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper South-West 4.0

• DDD Southwest - Dan Maharry provides a nice overview of the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper South West Conference from the end of last month. Dan also shares a collection of write ups of the sessions he attended (including mine on WebSockets and SignalR)
  • Session Notes 1 : Performance & Scalability
  • Session Notes 2 : Web Sockets & SignalR
  • Session Notes 3 : Defensive Programming 101
  • Session Notes 4 : Redis Is the New Black
• DDDSouthWest 4.0 26th May 2012 - Async 20/20 presentation - Liam Westley shares the audio recording along side the slides from his 20/20 lunch time presentation at DDD SW looking at Async in .NET 4.5
• My impressions of dddsw 4, DDDSW 4 - StyleCop: Breaking down the barriers to entry & Feedback from StyleCop presentation at DDDSW - Gary Ewan Park shares his experiences of DDD South west, along with the details of his presentation on StyleCop, and the feedback received.
• My DDDSW AppHarbor 20/20 talk - Phil Jones shares the slides from his hastily compiled but well received 20/20 presentation on the use of AppHarbor for hosting your .NET applications.
• Is your code solid &< Is-your-code-SOLID - GitHub - Nathan Gloyn shares the slides and code from his DDD SW session on the application of the SOLID Principles of object oriented programming.
• NuGet-PackageNPublish - Joel Hammond-Turner shares the code for the NuGet Package and Publish tooling that he presented in his DDD SW session on NuGet in the enterprise,
• Developer Developer Developer South West 2012 - Jackie Pollock shares her experiences as an attendee at DDDSW, giving a summary of each of the talks she attended.
• Agenda - The DDDSW agenda has been updated with links to the various slides and downloads for many of the sessions presented.

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PDC

• ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta Released - Phil Haack shares the news of the ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta release, announced as part of the PDC keynote. This beta release includes support for Visual Studio 2008 SP1, but not for VS2010 beta 2 due to that being on a different schedule
• Windows Identity Foundation RTM! - ‘vibro’ highlights the PDC announcement of the GA / RTM release of Windows Identity Framework, Microsoft’s latest incarnation of identity products formerly know as Geneva.
• Announcing the Identity Developer Training Course on Channel9 - Vibro also highlights the Identity Developer Training Course, a self learning set of content available on the Channel 9 site covering the use of identity in a number of scenarios such as Web, Web services, Azure
• Microsoft Codename Dallas : Introducing "Dallas" - Moe Khosravy shares the announcement of the new Microsoft project codenamed ‘Dalas’ which brings hih quality information conent services to the Azure offering via a clean API. Moe also shares A Quick Overview of Dallas for Developers.
• Developing and Managing Services with Windows Server AppFabric - Cliff Simpkins talks about the Windows Server AppFabric Beta 1 release which is designed to make it easier to build and scale out applications built on IIS. Key components of this technology are the Velocity Cache, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, ADO.NET Data Services all of which enable SOA style applications to be built on the framework
• Announcing Microsoft Sync Framework Power Pack For SQL Azure CTP - Maheshwar Jayaraman highlights the release of the Microsoft Sync Framework Power Pack For SQL Azure CTP which contains the Azure Data Sync tool which lets you synchronise data between your own SQL instances and Azure, the SqlAzureSyncProvider which eables synchronisation of existing data providers and adds in a number of SQL Azure metadata APIs, and a SQL Azure Offline Visual Studio plugin which enables you to build offline synchronisation routines with Azure
• Azure - from July CTP to November 2009 PDC Release - Mike Kelly takes a look at the changes from the July CTP release of the Azure SDK through to the release for PDC 2009, highlighting the large key changes
• Windows Azure case studies launched at PDC 2009 - Hanu Kommalapati highlights a number of Azure case studies showing the use of various Azure features in real world situations. Hanu also shares some of the details of the pricing of Windows Azure supported OS image types
• Breaking Down ‘Data Silos’ - The Open Data Protocol (OData) - Mike Flasko of the ADO.NET Data Services Team talks about the new OData protocol for data sharing which aims to make interoperability between data sources much eaier
• Introducing the Microsoft Open Data Protocol Visualizer - Noam Ben-Ami & Fabian Winternitz of teh ADO.NET Data Services Team share the release and show the Microsoft Open Data Protocol Visualizer a tool to help work with Open Data Protocol data from inside Visual Studio
• PDC09 Demo App: Tailspin Travel (Visual Studio 2010) - Dr. "Z" highlights the availability of the full source of the TailSpin sample application being shown at PDC on CodePlex. This app, build in VS2010 Ultimate and requiring the new Azure AppFabric installed shows off a number of the new features being discussed this PDC
• PDC 2009 Day 1: Future Directions for C# and Visual Basic - Sasha Goldshtein talks about some of the interesting stuff revealed at PDC about the two main .NET languages and also some interesting news about the respective compilers for each language

Software

• Vim Emulator Editor For Beta2 Released - Jared Parsons updates his VIM emulator for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, bringing some traditional VIM Editor goodness to the Visual Studio IDE
• SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 is finally here! - Eric Kraus highlights the release of SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 which will expire on 31 October 2010 and is available now to MSDN subscribers. Eric also links to a number of resources with help for getting installed and running
• Announcing: IIS SEO Toolkit v1.0 release - CarlosAg highlights the release of the IIS Search Engine Optimisation Toolkit 1.0 RTM release. This release builds on the sucess of the Beta 1 and Beta 2 releases adding a number of bug fixes and new features while retaining backward compatibility with the betas
• Deep Tracing of Internet Explorer - John Resig highlights a useful tool for anyone battling performance issues in JavaScript in Internet Explorer versions 6-8. dynaTrace Ajax looks like a really useful tool at a good price (free)
• Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx) released on DevLabs - Matthew Podwysocki highlights the release of the Reactive Extensions for .Net which was release on DevLabs today. This release covers .NET 4 beta 2, .NET 3.5 SP1 and Silverlight 3 giving lots of opportunities to play with this stuff.

Information

• Getting Started with Entity Framework 4 - Simple Model First Example - Eric Nelson follows up from his TechEd presentation with a series of blog posts looking at the content he delivered there. This first part looks at implementing the Entity Framework from the model, using a empty model, building entities and pushing them back to the database
• Security Tools : How to Configure WPL v1.0 SRE - RV takes a look at the Web Protection Library released last week showing how you go about setting it up and configuring it to protect your sites from a variety of attacks
• TempData Improvements - Jacques Eloff talks about the improvements made to TempData in the ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta release
• Pass Number 1: ActiveRecordEngine for ASP.NET - Rob Conery continues the discussion about a standard interface implementation for Active record allowing active record implementations from your ORM of choice to be plugged in.
• ASP.NET MVC from Basics to Tips and Tricks - Michael Johnson shares his notes from his presentation to the Fort Smith .NET User Group on ASP.NET MVC basics and tricks and tips, bringing together a lot of the standard advice with simple small code samples to illustrate
• How We Do Things - The Team Room - Scott C Reynolds continues his series looking at how his team do development with this post looking at how they organise their team room discussing layout, white boards, hardware, etc

Community

• NotAtPDC - For those of us not at PDC this year, the .NET community has created the NotAtPDC events, a string of virtual events from well known speakers who are not at PDC either. There is a health list of sessions scheduled over the next few days, so check it out

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One of my longest standing pet hates with desktop software developed in .NET relates to the almost inevitable security exception that will occur if you attempt to run it from a network share. Its always one of the first things I notice about software, as I often download and unzip software onto my desktop (which on my work machine is located on a network share) and then attempt to run it in place. Many large and quite impressive pieces of software that get distributed as .ZIP files rather than installers suffer this plight, and a lot of them don’t handle the exception well (One that springs to mind was the much heralded release of NDepend 2.0).

The good news is that this anguish may well be about to come to an end, as Brad Abrams requests feedback about the .NET teams possible plan to make network shares trusted. As he mentions, there really is no good reason not to trust a network share for running managed .NET code - there is no such protection for unmanaged code, and there is little or no way a normal user would be aware of which is .a NET EXE and which is unmanaged EXE.

To answer Brad’s Questions:

A) Have you ever run into this limitation (a security exception when running a .NET application from a network file share)?

I frequently experience these issues - I tend to use this problem (and if its been worked round in the application) as a yard stick as to how well written the application is.

B) How often do you use network file shares for deploying applications (managed or otherwise)?

Most of my development is web based, however for utilities written for in house use we tend to distribute them on a network share - being able to run these in place would be a great help, as updating them would be easier.

C) If you think we should make this change, when would be a good time? Is it something we should do sooner in a service pack of the .NET Framework or later in a full release of the framework. Note, we are DONE with .NET Framework 3.5, so there is zero chance it is getting in that release.

From my point of view a patch as soon as possible, and have it included in the next release of the framework - Since this is a relaxation of the current restriction, I can’t see that it would cause any more problems in terms of support of existing application, as a reduction of the support incidents caused by this issue would reduce.

D) Can you ask your local network admin what they think of this issue? Would they be in favor of this sort of change? If so, when?

This change should simplify deployment - allowing Managed EXE to run from shares should mean that local disks can be more locked down as there would be no need to copy programs locally to run them.

All in all, I’m very much in favour of this change - It will level the playing field, give a more consistent user experience, and reduce the problems people have with winforms applications.

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Image Credit: kevinzim on Flickr

One of my basic assumptions about the .NET framework was proved incorrect last week. Up until then, I had believed that when you are using the built in framework classes for exposing web services you were always safe when it came to the output being valid XML. Sadly that turns out to be untrue, and to make matters worse, .NET will happily output XML over a web service even its own .NET web service clients can’t read.

There are certain characters that are forbidden from being in XML as per the official specification. These characters are the low ascii characters such as NULL, EOF etc. Its important to note that this is not a case of unescaped/unencoded versions of this character being disallowed, the encoded characters are also disallowed.

The problem with this isn’t that the .NET framework doesn’t understand these rules - it manages just fine when it comes to acting as a client to a web service serving these characters in content, throwing nice exceptions explaining that these characters are invalid. Additionally, the XML Text Reader has a property ‘Normalization’ which causes the XML reader to be more liberal and ignore invalid characters - but this option is not used within the automatically generated Web Service Client.

This problem isn’t limited to just the web services, standard XML serialisation also experiences the same problems. Here are bits of code that illustrate the problem:

[WebMethod()]

public string InvalidCharacter()
{
   return "" + (char)4;
}

public class MyClass
{
   public string Test = "" + (char)0;
   public static void Main()
{
     MyClass c = new MyClass();
     System.Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializer xs = new System.Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializer(typeof(MyClass));
     System.Text.StringBuilder sb = new System.Text.StringBuilder();
     System.IO.StringWriter sw = new System.IO.StringWriter(sb);
     xs.Serialize(sw, c);
     Console.WriteLine(sb.ToString());
    
     System.IO.StringReader sr = new System.IO.StringReader(sb.ToString());
     try
     {
         c = (MyClass)xs.Deserialize(sr);
     }
     catch (System.Exception ex)
     {
         Console.WriteLine(ex.ToString());
}
}
}

The little console application gives output like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
<MyClass xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
   <Test>&#x0;</Test>
</MyClass>

System.InvalidOperationException: There is an error in XML document (3, 12).
System.Xml.XmlException: '.', hexadecimal value 0x00, is an invalid character.
Line 3, position 12.

Unfortunately I haven’t yet found a fix for this - my only solution is to work around the problem by ensuring that these invalid characters can’t get into the system in the first place or clean the text on the get of each property of the serialized objects.

Things like this really worry me - our frameworks shouldn’t be outputting things that they can’t read - let alone outputting things that completely contravene the specifications. As always, any suggestions on an alternative solution to this problem are welcome.

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OK, the time has come to unveil my Hack for Yahoo Hack Day.  Face Ball is the ‘Crazy new game at Flickr HQ‘, and images have been popping up all over flickr as other join in.  Well now, you too can join in the fun, and just like Thom Shannon, make your own Face Ball images without risk of injury or special equipment.

Flickr Face Ball is a .NET 2 Windows Forms application that allows you to select images from you Flickr photo stream by tagging them as ‘ToFaceBall’, and add one of three different face ball images to the original photo, uploading the results to your Flickr account.

So, how do you get involved in this craze:

1. Ensure you are running Windows with the .NET 2 framework - sorry Mac guys - this one probably isn’t for you.
2. Download the Zip File
3. Tag a few suitable images on your Flickr photo stream with the tag ‘ToFaceBall’
4. Extract the .zip and run FlickrFaceBall.exe
5. Enter your Flickr user account name into the box provided and click ‘Fetch From Flickr’
6. Wait patiently while it loads the images.
7. Choose an Image from the thumbnail strip at the bottom of the screen, choose a ball from the pallet on the left, and click on the image to position it.
   
8. When you have achieved the look you want, click save, enter a title and description, followed by Authenticate.
9. When prompted in your browser, please allow the application to upload the images.
10. Finally, click upload, and (hopefully) your creation will be be uploaded to your flickr stream.
     

Credits:

FlickrFaceBall uses the Flickr.NET API Implementation - I have only good things to say about this library - it just works

Thom Shannon for providing the inspiration for the Hack, and also providing the PSD of face ball images.

Finally, to the original source of the Face Ball images - photo1 and photo2

Please Note: This program is hack quality code - It’s not been tested much, and if it breaks your computer, flickr account, or anything else, its your own responsibility.

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One of my pet hates about the default ApplicationSettings within the .NET framework is the inability to work with multiple values for the same key in the config file (app.config or web.Config)

<appSettings>
   <add key="key" value="value1" />
   <add key="key" value="value2" />
   <add key="key" value="value3" />
</appSettings>

The built in support suggests that it would be possible to call the System.Configuration.ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings.GetValues("key") method to return a string[] containing all the values for the specified key. Unfortunately, the built in support only returns the last value defined (in my example above, “value3″)

Thankfully there are a number of very easy to use replacements for the standard support, and a variation on the solution proposed in Diego Mijelshon’s article How to make AppSettings work with multiple values for a key is one of the first things that I add into any application which will make use of AppSettings.

Code Project has a number of good articles about extending the default AppSettings support, two others which caught my eye are:

• Enhanced AppSettings Configuration Handler
• Custom AppSettings

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Setting the scene

Web Services are very simple to consume using .NET code, and its all to easy to forget what is actually going on when you add that Web Reference to your project in Visual Studio. Once you’ve entered the URL for you web service and clicked the Add Reference button, Visual Studio requests the service description WSDL file, and code generates classes to represent the data and the web service methods. I found delving into this generated code taught me quite a lot about the way XML serialization and web services actually work.

Behind the scenes the web service proxy uses classes in the System.Web.Services.Protocols namespace to actually perform the calls to the service, and these calls end up as System.Net.WebRequests containing the correctly encoded data that makes up the message.

Problems with Web Requests

Quite a lot of the problems with web services I encounter during deployment are actually problems with the System.Net.WebRequest. The most common cause of problems seems to be problems where web access is provided via some form of HTTP Proxy Server, and this typically results in an exception of the form:
[WebException: The underlying connection was closed: Unable to connect to the remote server.]

If you have access to the machine running your application its a very good idea to check if the machine can make a request to your Web Service endpoint using a web browser. This also allows you to check the settings to see if web traffic is passing through a proxy - failing this, check with the people responsible for the network.

If you find that there is a proxy involved, there are a couple of strategies available to resolve the problem.

• Make Changes in machine.config to affect all applications
  machine.Config is one of the .NET framework’s main configuration files, and can be found in the framework directory. Settings in the defaultProxy section with that attribute usesystemdefault="false"allow system wide setting of a default proxy server overriding an OS setting:<configuration>
    <system.net>
        <defaultProxy>
            <proxy
                 usesystemdefault = "false"
                    proxyaddress="http://proxyserver:port"
                    bypassonlocal="false"
                />
            </defaultProxy>
        </system.net>
    </configuration>
• Configuration change for your application only
  If you don’t control the machine your application is running on then its unlikely you will be able to make changes to machine.config, but thankfully the above section will also work in your web.config or app.confg files
• Programmatic Solution
  You can set the proxy settings in code:

  using System.Net;

MyWebService ws= new MyWebService();
WebProxy proxyObject = new WebProxy("http://proxyservername:port", true);
MyWebService.Proxy = proxyObject;
MyWebService.MyWebMethod();

All of the above methods apply to Web Service classes and also the WebRequest Classes

But what if there isn’t a proxy?

I discovered this week that the proxy problem is not the only cause of a web application which calls a web service throwing the exception:
[WebException: The underlying connection was closed: Unable to connect to the remote server.]

The next step I took in investigating this problem was to create two very simple test applications - one ASP.NET based like the code I was having problems with, and another a simple console application I could run as Administrator on the machine in question.

Test.aspx

<%@Page language="c#"%>
<%
System.Net.WebRequest r = System.Net.WebRequest.Create("http://av.com");
string resp = new System.IO.StreamReader(r.GetResponse()
                   .GetResponseStream()).ReadToEnd();
Response.Write("Response:");
Response.Write(resp);
%>

test.cs

using System;
using System.Net;
using System.IO;

public class Test
{
   public static void Main()
   {
      WebRequest r = WebRequest.Create("http://av.com");
      string resp = new StreamReader(r.GetResponse().GetResponseStream()).ReadToEnd();
      Console.WriteLine("Response:");
      Console.WriteLine(resp);
   }
}

Both of these make WebRequests to the Altavista search engine, and therefore tested requests out onto the Internet, returning the HTML from the Altavista homepage. As expected the ASP.NET based version gave the same exception as before, however the console application revealed not one, but two exceptions:

Unhandled Exception: System.TypeInitializationException: The type initializer for "System.Net.Sockets.Socket" threw an exception.

---> System.Net.Sockets.SocketException: An operation on a socket could not be performed because the system lacked sufficient buffer space or because a queue was full
  at System.Net.Sockets.Socket.InitializeSockets()
  at System.Net.Sockets.Socket..cctor()

Which is followed by a more standard looking timeout exception

[WebException: The operation has timed-out. ]

Changing the test code to request a page from the local IIS server to no effect confirmed that it was unlikely that this was an HTTP proxy problem.

Quite a lot of searching the web, lead me towards an Microsoft Bulletin Bulletin
BUG: You receive a “The operation has timed-out” error message when you access a Web service or when you use the IPAddress class which sounded somewhat familiar, and suggested that the problem might be caused by have more than 50 protocol bindings . Running the enum.exe utliity linked in the MS article revealed that this machine had over 100 bindings. Performing the same check on a number of other machines revealed that a more typical value was about 20, so something was not quite right with this machine. Removing some unneeded protocols from the networking setup resolved the issue, with both console application and ASP.NET test page returned the expected HTML, and most importantly the failing web service calls in the web application now works.

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