June 2004 - Posts
Paul Allen at it again with http://www.flipstartpc.com
Would be interested in the pricing - would be very cool for on the road travel where the laptop is just a pain or taking my work from desktop to desktop without a 16' Sony Vaio which really is my desktop machine now anyway. My PocketPC is not being quite feature rich to be useful for anything more than contacts and calandering.
Looks good.Now, does the price also look as good?
Steven.
Whatever happened to the days when we got weird and wonderful error messages? When i moved to the current application i am working on (port from ASP/VB6 to .Net) there was actually an error message saying "You cannot possibly be this old" when someone entered a data of birth making them over 100 years old. As it is a government training system for schoolleavers and adults getting into work, you may argue someone over 100 is probably too old (although i'm sure we all had that kid in the class who was repeating the year for the 6th time due to never attending). Anyone know of a blogger over 100??
Anyway, where did this all come from? Well, logging into my machine this morning i got this extremely specific warning:
Does it mean it was running for 809 minutes? "This program cannot possibly run for more than 808 minutes".
Is it a new kind of key activation? Aha, maybe my 808 minute trial period has run out?
So now rather than setting my date back in normal days when my activation runs out (of course i have never done that!), I need to use fractions of time, specifically "13.466666666666666666666666666667" hours.
Any ideas on what the 808 might stand for?? There was a techno group called "808 State" years ago - maybe they bought Sophos?
Steven
PS. the most likely reason is that one of the network drives it checks was offline and so it just kind of hung... but interesting way of telling me!
Whilst reading through some blogs and articles (been busy, so basically catching up), i have been surprised by the number of people seemingly condeming MS for the increasing timescale of the beta and RTM releases of Whidbey as well as the Yukon release dates.
My view on this has always been, let get it right (or as right as is possible) first time rather repeated releases and upgrades. There has been enough criticism in the past of rushed releases that require multiple patches. Whilst I remember being pleased with the XSL working draft version release with IE5 a few years ago, I also remember a lot of people saying it just caused confusion and so on.Some reading leads me to believe that others just want VS2005 out ASAP. I have even seen some posts where people are planning production systems on the beta releases!
Any general opinions on this?
Steven
So I'm working on an application that is going to be used be Internet users as well as External users, with the app itself written in .Net and running on Win 2003 and above (hopefully with Win 2K support also).
The interesting part is combining the security mechanisms that come with IIS and .Net. In the case where there is a pretty significant Active Directory in-house, with Groups and Roles and so on, you probably want to use that and so you'd likely go with Integrated Auth. When coming some outside the firewall you don't have this option and so you would go for forms auth (or even basic auth). In my situation, i want those users who are staff to be authenticated against the AD and for those who are not, to be authenticated against a custom SQL Server database we have.
Now, IIS/.Net doesn't allow you to use both at the same time, but doesn't offer much in between. I have read Paul Wilson's article over at MSDN and although this was a nice article with a solution, it against points towards only one security solution, which is forms.
The problem i have with this is that i cannot then easily use my AD to find the groups a user is in or protect my resources without the user being prompted for a username/password - because i am in forms auth world! To get round this i would have to programatically check whether the forms user has access to that resource (and so on).
I would prefer if you could use both. So if you are Windows authed, then when you request DisplayDoc.aspx file which reads a resource which has NTFS privilages set on it, you are denied (where appropriate). If you are forms authed, then this will have to be done programatically using some security rules which is fine. Without NTLM support in this way it makes it very difficult to use the cool impersonation features of IIS/.Net along with your AD implementation.
It's not often that I use SQL Server Windows Auth mode (mainly as it kills the connection pooling features), but in these cases where I would, then it would be tricky in this situation.
One "quick-fix" way around this which I believe would work would be to redirect to a NTLM protected web page (say by reading that this was a previously NTLM authed user from the forms cookie data section) when requesting a restricted resource and as you logged on once you should still have those privilages and so impersonation at that level would work fine. It's not something I like the sound of but it would work. I'd be interested in other people's experience of this, if you've tried.
A single identity por favor.
Steven.
As part of my day job as well as my own venture, i am doing a fair amount of work researching modelling techniques. I've used UML etc for a number of years, but the position i am in just now is the architecting of an existing system (moving from VB6 to .Net) as well as architecting my own software suite. This puts a new light on things as I need to know the whole end-to-end process a lot better.
The current part i am finding most tricky/interesting is modelling user interfaces. Now, when i say that i don't mean graphically (hell i shouldn't be allowed to dress myself never mind put colors on stuff) - no i mean the flow, controls, navigation, screens, dynamic content and so on. The things that you know can be defined for a UI without actually designing the thing.
Now, this is something i thought about when i worked at IBM Global Services a few year ago when working on a presentation layer architecture, using Xml, Xslt and so on - how to abstract the UI enough from the end users so that i could get down to what they wanted it to do, rather than just look like. It turned out there was nothing obvious to help and so i wrote my own ideas and developed a failrly simple solution (treating controls as objects, javascript methods as business rules, pages as screens and so on).
Doesn't look like much has moved on since. Having read "User experience storyboards: Building better UIs with RUP, UML, and use cases" by Jim Heumann at IBM Rational and then "UML Activity Diagrams:Detailing User Interface Navigation" by Ben Lieberman at Blueprint Technologies as well as some other pieces, i am still trying to figure out what is best.
You see, one sees Activity Diagrams as best, the other preferring Sequence and Communication diagrams. I can see benefits from both, but I don't want to create diagrams for the sake of diagrams, so i'd be interested in how other people see this. You could possibly argue that the activity diagrams would be useful for mapping out the general navigation around the site on a per use case basis, with the sequence diagrams looking specifically at each possible action in detail.
I still find it strange that they do not have a front end UML notation - if you know of some specs out there, please let me know as i'd be interested in looking at them.
This should be an interesting journey for me as i'm going from interviews with director level business folks (for my own venture) to business details for my day job's system (which has a significant number of transations per week) to the detailed technical stuff and everything along the way. And what's great is that .Net is going to be at the centre of both :) Look out for more each week.
steven
In follow up to yesterday's blog, someone contacted me from Adobe offering help and advice. You gotta wonder whether it would be worth them having "Adobe blogs" so they can follow their customers views and opinions!
What is seems is that the Windows 2000 box i had didn't have the latest version of the MSI installer and during the installation process, the installer i was using tried to contact the Adobe site for an update (i remember a a "win" directory in the adobe.com URL it was requesting). Seems this server was down ("Failed to connect to server" error in event log) and as this now seems to be up, there is no longer a problem and it installed first time :)
The key point from this however, is not the technology. It is that i was able to give and get feedback very easily to/from someone whose product i was installing - i would even have been happy to tell them the URL of the server giving me the problem - constant alerts for them. It gives the company good PR and they even get a (free) extra line of people watching for problems that may occur.
steven
While downloading the latest Adobe reader i ran into a slight problem. We are behind a proxy and the new installation tool that Adobe uses doesn't *seem* to work that way. I'm guessing because the installation tool downloads from the browser and then runs separately and tries to connect to from web address endpoint, doesn't use my browser proxy settings and so can't authenticate and get out.
So, being the nice guy that I am i figured i'd tell Adobe. What i wanted to do was send them a simple email saying "Do you know your new installation program fails behind a proxy."
After looking about the ironically titled "contact us" page for at least a minute (which really is longer than "contacting us" should ever take...) i saw something saying "Try our automated e-mail response system". Here i was presented with (small text to save space):
Customer service form
*Required fields
*First name
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Address 2
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Select one... --U.S.-- AL AR AK AZ CA CO CT DC DE FL GA DE HI IA ID IL IN KS KY LA MA MD ME MI MN MO MS MT NC ND NE NH NJ NM NV NY OH OK OR PA RI SC SD TN TX UT VA VT WA WI WV WY --Canada-- AB BC MB NB NF NS NT ON QC PE PQ SK --------- Other State/Province
*ZIP / postal code
*Country or region
Select a country or region...United StatesCanadaAsia/PacificEuropeLatin AmericaOther
*E-mail address
Adobe ID
What's this?
*Your question, comment, or suggestion
Please fill out only one of these categories:
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Select product version... 1.x 2.x 3.x 4.x 5.x 6.x 7.x 8.x 9.x 10.x CS Help me find this.
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Now for a company who make excellent user friendly document software, this is probaly as off putting as i can imagine a form could get. The point is really that companies should think more about how to encourage user feedback about their products rather than hindering the process. Oh, and it doesn't always have to be technical - it can be the obvious stuff too! It's one thing to break your software - and another to stop people telling you about it. The Microsoft feedback site is a bit better, but i still think they could benefit from a "just tell us" link which has a email address, a subject and a textbox. A newletter from Steve Ballmer last year discussed how the Visual Studio product had been dramatically improved from user feedback during the development process. I have even been involved in feedback myself at Microsoft. Some feedback must be better than none at all?!
So i won't be telling them. If you know the email address, please do.
Steven.
This may appear obvious to some of you and not so to others.
For all you aspiring technical entrepreneurs out there if i were ever to give some advice from my experiences trying to build a few different types of online businesses over the last 7 years it would be this. Make sure the first thing you do is step away from the laptop and get a very simple A4 list of the problems your customers are facing. This is admittedly been the hardest thing for me to do when compared to keeping up with the latest and greatest technologies that will make my products fly.
For each component or feature you decide to implement, have a *real* problem that is satisfies - this is what they will pay for.
It's been hard coming from a technical background and not drawing use cases as my first step. Long before you get to use cases there is a whole bunch of things you need to do.
I not "get" how this works and so I am starting back at stage 1 just now (well 4 weeks into it), and although i have much of the technology actually developed (which some of you may have seen), I am actually agoing to go through the entire process, business plan and all, from the start and see what comes out at the other end.
I will scribble down what happens over the coming weeks and months and hopefully some of it will be useful to any of you folks looking to develop a product that will sell to someone other than us technophobes. Some may be obvious and other points not so. Let me know how i come across!
To end on a technical note - if you don't have Enterprise Architect, make sure you have a look now!
Steven.
Working on a project where we are all working in different places and online at different times and so on.
We are not working on an Open Source project (don't get me started) and most online source control sites seem to be only for OS projects.
Equally, I seem unable to find something that you can install as a peer based cource control system on Windows (I'd rather avoid the 8000 things you have to set up before you can use such things on Linux, after having such fun installing Mono).
So, i'm looking for ideas and pointers. I'd rather not have to develop anything myself, or extend SourceSafe and so on.
Either it is online always and is web based (or at least http/web service accessible) or it is peer based.
Steven
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