May 2003 - Posts

• Backups and Decompiling

  Pascal is in need of heLP after a terrible crash at the worst of time: no recent backups and was asking about decompilers. My suggestion is to grab the most recent version of Lutz Roeder's Reflector.  The decompiler works very well, plus it produces VB.NET versions of the code :)  It almost goes with out saying, but Lutz Roeder is the smartest person ever. While I'm it with backups, I think going RAID 1 in all development workstations is a TREEEmendous investment.  A 60GB hd runs, what, seventy bucks now a days?  A cheap-o IDE RAID card costs another forty dollars.  You are looking at tops two hundred dollars to get a pretty darn good way to keep up and running.  Funny RAID story.  The guy who taught our A+ training also owned a hardware store.  Some guy came in with his server hoping to recover it.  Both of his harddrives (in RAID 1) died within minutes of each other.  My buddy took a look at the model numbers, and they must have came down the line one after another.  The moral of the story, if you are running RAID 1 make sure your harddrives are coming from different batches (making sure they are still the model number and capacity of course).  If two drives are doing identical operations and came down the same line from the same factory, chances are they've got the same life span too... Posted May 27 2003, 12:59 PM by Phil Scott with 3 comment(s)

• Web Matrix and Theming

  In case you missed it, Nikhil has posted a screenshot of the new Web Matrix.  Looks pretty cool, but I'm wondering about the theming comment.  Now, is web matrix simply taking advantage of the built in windows theme, or are they doing something magical to give their app a new theme.  My guess is the old watercolor theme from some of the Whistler builds makes a comeback in Longhorn.  If you are curious, you can download a hacked together theme from TweakXP.  Note, the copy from TweakXP isn't for the weak of heart.  It involves replacing your uxtheme.dll in recover mode with a version hacked out to enable custom themes... Posted May 23 2003, 02:35 PM by Phil Scott with 2 comment(s)

• vLane and MSDN

  I was also curious about vLane.com. I get a lot of students in my classes where purchasing VS.NET along with all the server software just gets to be astronomical cost wise for them, so I've been pointing them to vLane.  Anyways, I did a little search on Google Groups and ran across this from Andy Boyd, Program Manager for MSDN Subscription Downloads: No, they get around it by playing games with the details of our licensing agreement.  I can't say more on this right now, except to note that this is something that we're currently looking into [rest snipped] Hmmmm.  They look legit, for now.  I'm not sure what this will mean for people who have purchased from them in the past, and whether or not it would be wise to purchase from them in the present.  If you are curious, the company offering it for $895 on eBay is also vLane... Posted May 21 2003, 08:06 PM by Phil Scott with 2 comment(s)

• Ramblings

  I installed ASP.NET on our production server to get our website running against 1.1.  No problems with the main app, the problem is with *my* weird site that I had setup to play with in class to demonstrate XSS attacks.  I went to show how easy it is to send things like session data and the such, and the stupid ValidateRequest blocked my attempt.  Argh :) This week I'm teaching a three day ADO.NET course.  Pretty good material, but probably should be 5 days based on the amount of practices and labs in the class.  The gotcha is that some people had to cancel at the last minute, leaving me with only one student for three days!  We already had his book and confirmed him, so the class must go on.  Luckily, I've had the guy in class before and he's a fun guy, so the week shouldn't be too bad.  Plus, I'm running the class off of VS.NET 2003 and seeing how things go.  In a couple of weeks I'm teaching course 1017 for a branch of the military.  Course 1017 is "Mastering InterDev 6."  It is a terrible course.  Half of the book uses DTC, DHTML Page Scriplets, and VBScript on the client.  Now the good thing about this class is that we do spend a good portion talking about writing COM DLLs and using COM+.  But DTC and DHTML Page Scriptlets?  Is there even an upgrade path for these things?  I'm afraid I might get tried for treason though for teaching these guys ASP full knowing ASP.NET is out there... Posted May 17 2003, 09:45 PM by Phil Scott with no comments

• Software Legends

  I've been reading a little of the TechEd propaganda about the "Software Legends" that will be giving presentations this afternoon.  That combined with the hours spent playing NBA Street Vol.2 recently has got my mind acting silly.  You see, in NBA Street you unlock "Street Legends" as you progress through the games, along with throwback jerseys.  So now I'm wondering if they'll be giving out throwback geek shirts at the contest.  You know, like MS Bob or Win95 t-shirts.  Heck, maybe even go old school and get a MS-DOS mesh hat.  Heck, I already have a G. Andrew Duthie playing card, so I guess anything is possible.  Personally, not going to TechEd.  Even with all the discounts that seem to get thrown my way for being an MCSD and an MCT (and even more if I work the thing), I still can't afford it and my work isn't going to pay it.  It appears raises have been halted, which is a big kick in the pants because last year I also got the shaft but was told that I'd get my pay up to speed once the economy has gotten better.  Anyway, I'm not one to complain about that kinda stuff (let's be honest, I get paid to learn cool stuff and show it to people), but maybe I can leverage the crap I've been given in exchange for a trip to the PDC.  If by any chance someone who's in charge of finding presenters reads this, and needs someone with a good sense of humor and good knowledge of .NET to lighten things up in exchange for a free trip and tickets in, I'm all ears :)  Posted May 17 2003, 09:32 PM by Phil Scott with 1 comment(s)

• C#ase Sensitive

  I've been doing a lot of training for companies moving to VB.Net and one of the big reasons that keeps coming up in why they aren't moving to C# is the case sensitivity of C#.  And the only answer I have to why C# is case sensitive is that C/C++ and Java are case sensitive, and C# is designed to be a language comfortable to those developers. But then the question is: Who in their right mind would ever leverage the ability to have a function named SquareRoot and another one named squareRoot in the same namespace?  Imagine a dialog between two developers, Steve and I'm Too Damn Smart for My Own Good Steve: Hey, I'm having trouble running the InsertCustomer function.  I thought it was supposed to throw an exception when you send in a null value. I'm Too Damn Smart for My Own Good (ITDSFMOG): Are you calling it with an uppercase or lowercase I? Steve: Ummm, I guess uppercase. ITDSFMOG: That one doesn't throw exceptions.  Use the lower case version. Steve: Hold on, ITDSFMOG, I'm going to set you on fire. ITDSFMOG: Behold the power of C#!  Let's see those stupid VB programmers call this function.  ARGGghhhhh I'm on fire and it really burns!  I regret nothinggg.... I can think of three reasons in my head why anyone would ever care about case sensitivity.  One would be if this was 1968 and we could only use on character per variable name, so now you can use A-Z along with a-z.  Hooray!  The other reason would be to make the job of the compiler writer a little easier.  And the other one would be for NotePad developers who might do something like this: int MyVar; myVar = 59; Meh, that may be gross but I sure do hate having to remember to capitalize keywords. Can appeasing the notepad developers be that important to keep case sensitivity? Posted May 15 2003, 05:10 PM by Phil Scott with 10 comment(s)

• Holy Crip! Passport is crappled!

  http://securityfocus.com/archive/75/320768/2003-05-05/2003-05-11/0 I almost fail to believe this would work it is so amazing simple.  Just tried it on a new hotmail account, but no e-mail was sent to me.  Probably only a matter of time before I'm arrested for hax0ring passport now... Update: http://www.microsoft.com/security/passport_issue.asp Posted May 08 2003, 10:19 AM by Phil Scott with 5 comment(s)