Ken Robertson's Blog

Yet another odd .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0 quirk

qgyen — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 06:31:00 GMT

Tonight, we discovered a slight issue when using FeedBurner's click tracking along with Community Server v2.1. After digging into it, I quickly saw the issue, but then as I went a little deeper, realized it was more deceiving than I'd thought.

There seems to be a slight difference in the Uri class between .NET v1.1 and .NET v2.0. One new property in 2.0 is the "OriginalString", which gives you the original value that was used to construct the Uri.

FeedBurner's click tracking works by using URLs like this: http://feeds.qgyen.net/~r/krobertson/~3/http%3A%2F%2Fqgyen.net%2Farchive%2F2006%2F07%2F11%2FSome-changes-around-here.aspx

The part that gets screwed up is the "%3A%2F%2F", which when url decoded is "://". In .NET 2.0, the Uri class will collapse this to ":/", which is not the valid url.

To illustrate the issue with a simple, three line code sample, open up both Visual Studio 2003 and Visual Studio 2005, create a console application in both, and paste the following code. Set breakpoint, and you'll see the difference:

      string orig = @"http://feeds.qgyen.net/~r/krobertson/~3/http%3A%2F%2Fqgyen.net%2Farchive%2F2006%2F07%2F11%2FSome-changes-around-here.aspx";
      Uri uri = new Uri(orig);
      string back = uri.ToString();

When you run this code, you'll find the the value of back is as follows:

.NET 1.1 = "http://feeds.qgyen.net/~r/krobertson/~3/http://qgyen.net/archive/2006/07/11/Some-changes-around-here.aspx"

.NET 2.0 = "http://feeds.qgyen.net/~r/krobertson/~3/http:/qgyen.net/archive/2006/07/11/Some-changes-around-here.aspx"

One of these is not like the other. So, is this expected behavior? Common sense tells me no, which leads me to think this is a bug in the .NET 2.0 framework.

So basically, as the code is now, it'll work under ASP.NET v1.1, but not ASP.NET 2.0. The fix for ASP.NET 2.0 uses a property that isn't in ASP.NET 1.1, the code isn't providerized, and using reflection to handle it could break medium trust compatibility. Ahh, the joys of version incompatibilities.

Cross-posted from qgyen.net.

Tablet PC + 12.1" + SXGA+ (like Toshiba M200)

qgyen — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 01:05:00 GMT

Anyone have the Toshiba M200 tablet or one like it with a 12.1" screen and SXGA+ resolution? Trying to decide whether or not it would be too small of a screen. I want to have at least SXGA+ resolution, and would like to get a tablet, but 12.1" seems a little small.

I am mainly looking at getting the Toshiba M400 one the SXGA+ option is available again, but the M200 is about the same size and only came in SXGA+.

Any feedback? Too small? Look ok? Would definitely be doing a lot of development on it, so feedback on how Visual Studio is on it would be great.

Recommendations for MCAD certification

qgyen — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 17:09:00 GMT

I'm starting to look into getting my MCAD this year, but don't really know which programs are the best. For starters, I am still torn between doing like a week long seminar and doing it at home at my own pace. The seminars cost more and would require more time off work, however it is gets it all taken care of. While the study-at-home programs code less and I could do them in my free time, they also take a lot longer. I have looked around some and there are dozens of different training courses and at-home study guide, and all of them say they are the best.

So if you have any recommendations for training programs that offer courses in or around Sacramento, CA or the Bay Area, please let me know. Also, if you know of any good at-home study programs, then please let me know about those as well.

Finally, anyone know when the programs will be updated for .NET 2.0? I have heard “early 2006,” but that is kind of general. I will probably wait and take the certification for 2.0, since it would be more relevant moving ahead.

Media Center getting a little confused?

qgyen — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 03:40:00 GMT

Windows Media Center seems to get a little confused about what it has scheduled to be recorded sometimes. Take for instance this little snapshot from tonight. Not at the top that it is setup to record every time "Law & Order" is on, yet over the next couple of days, it lists "Late Night with Conan O'Brien". MCE has done this in the past too, and I have to cancel the series for Law & Order, then set it up again, but inevitably, it does it again. It has done this with other shows too. Like mistakenly recording "Starting Over" when I have it setup to record "Stargate SG-1".

Anyone else experienced this? Any sort of solution? This and a couple other nuances about MCE are starting to get to me and I'd like to get them resolved so I can get back to happy TV viewing.

Why not...

qgyen — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 05:42:00 GMT

While we're at it, lets bring back Cobol and Pascal! Why not!?!

Continual movement is the way of the tech industry. Out with the old, in with the new. You must keep up, not begging for the old technologies to be around past their time.

(Note: I know Cobol isn't dead, but the people who use it are getting older/fewer and the job opportunities aren't the same as in the newer markets.)

Blog has moved!

qgyen — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 07:04:00 GMT

I'm permanently moving my blog to its new home, on my website. I've finally gotten around to updating my site to Community Server v1.0 (was on RC3... took me a while to do it, been busy) and will be continuing my blogging there. This time, posting more actively.

So feel free to venture on over to http://www.qgyen.net/blog/ or subscribe to my RSS feed at http://www.qgyen.net/blog/rss.aspx.

nGallery to CS::Gallery conversion tool released!

qgyen — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 06:59:00 GMT

To download the tool, you can get it from: http://www.qgyen.net/builds/GalleryConverter.zip

Simply download the tool and extract it. To run it, use the GalleryConverter.exe. The source is also included with the tool.

Use the following steps below to use the converter:

Edit the GalleryConverter.exe.config and set the SiteSqlServer and SiteSqlServerOwner settings. This file is actually exactly the same as the web.config that ships with CS. The converter uses the regular CS data providers, so it needs the connection string in relatively the same place.
Run it. It will connect, get a list of your Application Names. Select one, and then log into the site.
You must have your entire nGallery application local to your computer (or run the program on your server). If you are using a web host, you’ll need to download your site.
Select which gallery you want to import your nGallery data into.
Select the location of your nGallery installation.
If you want to use file system storage, click the checkbox and chose the location to store your pictures. Normally, this would be the web/photos/storage location, or whatever you picked in your communityserver.config.
Click “Go!”

If you are using a webhost, you can easily use the tool so long as you can connect directly to your SQL Server over the internet. Also, if you want to use file system storage, simply select a folder on your computer and then FTP it up to your webhost after doing the conversion.

For more discussion on using the conversion tool, please see http://www.communityserver.org/forums/475487/ShowPost.aspx

Embedding assemblies?

qgyen — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 20:47:00 GMT

Is there any way to embed an assembly at all?

Working on a project and we want to embed one of our assemblies inside the application, but don't want to have to use reflection to load it from the resource file. It would be nice if I could use it as I normally would when coding, and then when building, have it place it inside the current assembly and not link to the external assembly.

Tried searching the Visual Studio help to see if it was possible, searched Google and the ASP.NET Forums, but haven't found anything. Is this possible, or is it just wishful thinking?

Community Server v1.0!

qgyen — Sat, 19 Feb 2005 18:30:00 GMT

As you may have heard from either Scott, Rob, or the Community Server message boards, Community Server v1.0 is out! It is truly a great honor to have been able to work on it. The team of people working on it are absolutely awesome and it is great to be able to bounce ideas back and forth off of them. Definitely looking forward to continuing to come up with new ideas to add to it to make it even better.

Also, I’m glad to welcome Alex Lowe to the Telligent team. He will be Project Manager on the www.asp.net website project, so if you have any ideas on what you’d like to see there, go and drop him a line.

FTP server and Windows 2003 firewall

qgyen — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 22:57:00 GMT

Does anyone know how to setup the firewall on Windows Server 2003 (Administrative Tool | Routing and Remote Access) to allow an FTP server to be run on a port other than 21 and to still support passive FTP?

I can't use active FTP, since at home I am behind a cable router. Using passive FTP only works as long as I have the FTP server running on port 21. If I change the server to run on another port and allow that port through on the firewall, I can connect, but no passive transfer work. The default "FTP Server" entry in the firewall services list is fixed to port 21. So it seems it knows when to open ports for an FTP server, but I cannot find a way to get it to do that if the FTP server is on another port.

Anyone know how to change this?

Final spyware solution

qgyen — Fri, 14 Jan 2005 09:38:00 GMT

Last night, had the unpleasant pleasure of contracting some pretty nasty spyware. Even through I've run numerous spyware removal tools, I still notice a few things here and there. I'm kind of a software purist... never believe anything is completely gone unless you format and reinstall. The problem with that is it is a major pain.

Finally think I've figured out how to keep my setup fully clean without the hassle of reinstalling. Use Norton Ghost to create an image of my hard drive after a fresh install with all my applications. Anytime I manage to catch something or screw something up, simply restore the image and I am back to where I was in no time.

I have two hard drives, a 36gb and a 200gb that I use for movies/mp3s/archived data/virtual machines. Cleaned that drive up, since I had a lot of old crap. Use it to store my Ghost images and also going to have my Favorites and My Documents redirected to it. The idea is all programs on the main drive, all data on the second drive. That way at any point, I can restore the image and be right back where I was. I typically don't install many new programs, but if I do, I can easily do a differential image or simply take a new snapshot.

After farting around for a while, I managed to get a BartPE bootable Windows XP image together with Ghost and everything I need. I couldn't use the Ghost Boot Wizard, since my system has no floppy drive and I don't have a USB floppy (who uses floppies?). And it doesn't support burning them to CD. Also, my Dell system uses Serial ATA drives, so I'd need those drives. Used my Dell XP CD to generate the BartPE image, copied over the drivers it missed, and tested it out with Virtual PC. Once I got it to boot in Virtual PC, burned it to disk, rebooted, and quick-and-easy Ghost imaging.

So... kind of an unproductive day after dealing with spyware, dealing with issues from the Community Server 1.0beta3 release, cleaning out my system, and setting up Ghost. But... should be top of my game again soon. Just need to find the time to reformat this weekend.

Getting the run around

qgyen — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 06:10:00 GMT

One funny thing is that while Telligent is still a rather small company, we already have 3 Scotts. Yesterday, I needed to update one of our components and the latest version wasn't in Vault. So I IM Scott1. Scott1 says to talk to Scott2, since he had the latest version. So I email Scott2, and Scott2 says he doesn't have it, Scott3 does. So I IM Scott3, and Scott3 says yeah, he has it, he'd emailed it to Scott1 a couple of days ago. So he just forwards it to me and all is well.

If a 4th Scott joins us, I think some action will have to be taken. He won't be able to go by Scott, we should make him go by Bob or John, or something.

Not making a habit of this...

qgyen — Fri, 31 Dec 2004 12:18:00 GMT

Not going to let myself make a habit of staying up until 4am working. Especially since last night, I stayed up until about 3am working.

Up working so late because I really wanted to work on improving the way metadata (EXIF data) is stored in Community Server :: Gallery. One user on communityserver.org had suggested that we add an option to order pictures based on the EXIF picture date value. This was definitely a great idea, since even though I haven't used CS on a live site, I certainly have noticed the issue with sorting by upload date and upload a bunch of your digital photos.

I want everything ordered by dates, since I have my misc folders that randomly get new stuff, and I want the most recent ones up on top. But for my digital photos, I want those in the order I took them. To do that, I basically have to upload them in reverse of the order that I took them. Not very logical.

I don't want to override the post date with the picture date, since I want to use the "top 5 most recent pictures" module and if I did that, if I uploaded a pic that was taken a year ago of my cousin Bob, then it wouldn't show up, even though I just uploaded it. And I need to be able to query the EXIF date in the database to handle the paging right, but it is stored in a serialized string with all the other EXIF data.

Solution? Branch the metadata off into a separate table just for metadata. But I wanted to take it further than that. I want to be able to format fields like date/times to the user's selected format... but I don't want to have to parse it from a string to a DateTime. If I put a DateTime into the DB, I want a DateTime back. Same for string, int, float, double, whatever. Also, looking out to expanding CS even further, there might be a use sometime for this kind of thing.

At first, I was thinking about converting everything to a byte array and store it that way. However, we can't use a BinaryFormatter since it won't work under medium trust (one of our goals is to work in medium trust). Then was trying to convert them using uglier methods, which didn't work. Finally I woke up and released I could use a string and store the original type as well. Convert everything to a string (DateTimes go to 2004-12-31 04:12:31), store the type (System.DateTime), and then use Convert.ChangeType() to get the original object back. Yay. Also serialize everything into an XML string so all the types are sent to the DB at once.

Next... work on reading the EXIF tags raw. Using System.Drawing can to get the properties can be a huge drain, especially with some of the bulk upload tools we're working on (this thing will knock everyone's socks off... its cool... like, why didn't I think of that before cool).

Any way to check image type and get dimensions without System.Drawing?

qgyen — Wed, 29 Dec 2004 06:38:00 GMT

Anyone know of any way to test the image type and get the width/height without using the System.Drawing namespace? I'm working on a small app that processes a lot of pictures at once and could get multiple users using it at the same time. When I use it without doing its image calculations, it only takes max 10% of the CPU. However, when I have it get the width/height (which I need for it to work properly) using a bitmap, it gets up to around 80% CPU usage. Big jump!

I'd found this java class that tests an image's type and gets the width/height by looking at its data raw, but alas, it is in Java, and converting it to .NET is too much of a pain (was trying it for a while... down to 29 errors that I know of). When screwing around with some of the raw data, I can find the width/height in the file, but the offset it sometimes different, since it seems to depend on the size of a header that is before it.

Somebody somewhere in .NET Land must of thought of doing something like this before?

RepeaterPlusNone v1.0 -- Repeater + NoneTemplate

qgyen — Tue, 21 Dec 2004 19:57:00 GMT

Nearly a month and a half ago, I'd posted about writing up a Repeater control that allows for a <NoneTemplate> that would be used when its datasource is empty. I had a couple of people ask me for the source, and I'd meant to release it, but kept forgetting as things kept coming up (work, holidays, DevConnections). So finally today I sat down, did a quick build, wrote a short sample, and zipped it up.

I've coined it RepeaterPlusNone. We've put it to use quite well in Community Server and it works great. So... check it out.