Archives
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My First (And Last) Experience With ComponentOne
I'm going to take off my component vendor hat for a minute, and talk about my experience as a customer of ComponentOne. I'm going to try to be objective about this here, and over on my corporate blog, I'll talk about how that experience will alter the way my own company does business.
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Provider Model Test Post
This is a post testing the new provider model usage in VisualBlogger 2004. I've abstracted the system out, using a modified version of ScottW's .Text object model, so that I can map internal Entry objects into external objects as necessary. This particular test is using the primary DotText95BlogProvider, which uses the http://weblogs.asp.net/yourblog/services/aspnetweblog.asmx web service entry point. This one is still live in all distros, and has more functionality than the SimpleBlogService. It will be superceded by the dottextapi.asmx web service in .Text 0.96, but for now this works well.
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Imagine Cup Competition Today @ ASU
Just wanted to give a shoutout to Andy Lim at ASU. He's putting together the Microsoft Imagine Cup competition for Arizona State University, which I have the pleasure of judging in about 5 hours. I'm looking forward to seeing what the students come up with. I'll be gone the rest of the day, but when I get back, I'll blog about the experience, what I saw, who won, etc. Andy's worked hard to put it together. Good luck today guys!
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Screenshots and Update for VB2004
Made some major headway in the past 24 hours, so I thought I'd show off where we're at so far. As soon as Jamie Cansdale gets back from his week-long ski trip (lucky bastard), I can wrap up the VS.NET integration code. Just so you know, VisualBlogger 2004 will operate in two modes: Standalone and IDE Integrated. You'll be able to use this program just like Microsoft Word if you want, or you can dock it in the same place as the Output window in VS.NET, and blog from the dev environment. You could even use it as a real simple HTML editor if you want. We don't have any table support yet (don't know if we ever will) but you could always add those in manually.
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VisualBlogger CategoryPost Test #9
The WinForms adventure continues. The CheckedListBox control has been giving me all sorts of problems. For one thing, if you put one in a TabControlPage, and then switch pages, it doesn't hold its state. It took me a little bit of experimentation, but I came up with the following code to help out:
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And tonight on the Countdown...
"Never mess with techies, because they know more ways of messing with you than you know of messing with them"
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Real Nasty Virus Alert
I was just notified by MailStreet, my Hosted Exchange provider, that there is a horrible new virus going around. I haven't heard of a virus this bad before. It brought down an entire Exchange 2003 server cluster this morning, and 50 other servers in their datacenter. I'll let the Washington Post fill you in on the details:
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Walking the Call Stack
Does anyone know how to walk the call stack on a calling assembly? I blogged earlier about a new limit I was writing for XHEO|Licensing. Basically I want to limit an assembly's use at runtime, but I don't know what that assembly is going to be at compile time. I have written some code that loads up all the running assemblies into an array, and walks the array to see if the assembly is loaded. That is not the optimal way however, because someone could just reference and load the required caller, then execute my assembly separately, because the licensed caller is loaded into the AppDomain.
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Just When I Thought I Had Mastered DTC...
...it kicked my butt again. Last week, we migrated to new servers. Well, MSDTC reared it's ugly head again. I spent 6 hours tonight tryint to track down why the DTC transaction keeps dropping the connection. The answer? I still had the old server VPNed into the network. Disconnected the old server from the network, and BAM, my SQL transactions are working again. The problem? Damned if I know. DTC wasted ANOTHER 6 hours of my life... <sigh> :(
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Useless Error Message of the Month
"An unknown error has occurred while processing the request. The transaction has already been implicitly or explicitly committed or aborted."
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The REAL reason for Whidbey/Yukon delays
It's funny to me how something can get twisted and turned around without the proper facts in place. I've seen quotes from Tom Rizzo up the yang about the Whidbey/Yukon delay, but I never really heard a decent explanation until I cracked open this week's edition of CRN magazine. Page 8 says:
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Passport Is Down
While far from a comprehensive study, I just tested computers on 3 different networks, and none can currently access the Passport service. Attempting to access http://messenger.msn.com returns a "Server is too busy" page. Any corroboration?
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Typed DataSet Goodness
I was working on VisualBlogger once again, and I was really getting frustrated with using app.config to store blog configurations. Using a ConfigSections wrapper was kind of overkill, and so was having the app dependent on an Access database. Andy Smith turned me onto the idea of using a Typed DataSet... something that I had never done before. I had no idea how cool these things are. I just built an XML file with the desired elements, loaded them up into a DataSet, spit out the schema XSD file using the DataSet.WriteXmlSchema method. Using the VS.NET Schema editor, I was able to change the data types, set constraints, and even create automatically incrementing primary keys. From there, I generated a DataSet using the Schema | Generate Dataset option, and voila! Now I have a simple method for accessing typed data, without having to use a database.
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Shared Hosting Best Practices from Microsoft
Like, Oh My God. I have been waiting for this document from Microsoft for AGES! There is soooooooo much good information in here about configuration, security, and coding best practices if you manage your own web servers. And best of all, it doesn't make any assumptions about your level of knowledge. It's straighforward, not heavy on jargon, has lots of cross-references, and is a real gem. Congratulations to whatever team at Microsoft put this together... it should set the standard for documentation from here on out. I'll wait patiently for this kind of quality docs from any MS team that puts this much effort into their docs. Hey, if you guys put this into some kind of reference manual, I'd buy it in a stone cold second.
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VisualBlogger 2004 Teaser Shots
I've been working non-stop on VisualBlogger 2004, my new blogging add-in for VS.NET. I got the really nasty code out of the way today, and there isn't much left to do. I wanted to tell you a bit about her, but she's very independent right now, so I'll let her do it instead. Hope you like.
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Elaborating on an Earlier Post
I wanted to take a second and defend my earlier post about WindowsForms. Had quite a few people point out how obviously stupid I was for not looking deeper into the system. So, I thought I would take a few minutes and point out what my specific beefs are, coming from the ASP.NET world. Just because I am normally a WebForms developer does not make my arguments any less valid, nor does it mean that this is my first time building a WinForms app. This is my first super-complicated WinForms, and I don't like the hoops that I had to jump through to make it work.
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Wouldn't it be great....
If there was a way to use TSQL syntax to query against a loaded DataSet? Something like:
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WinForms Development Rant
So I'm working on StudioBlogger today, and I have to say that as a WebForms guy, I'm really frustrated at the WinForms architecture. It's extremely obvious that this whole WindowsForms thing was not throught out as well as the ASP.NET side was, and the two teams definitely did not talk to each other. I'm trying to cycle through a CheckedListBox to populate another CheckedListBox with the categories from the selected blogs, and there are like 9 different properties for accessing selected items. None of these properties have any examples whatsoever in the MSDN documentation, and information on the web is scarce at best. Even with all these MSDN developers blogging on this site, real-life WinForms scenarios are not being addressed. They're too busy writing YAGA (Yet Another Generics Article) to pay attention to the basic everyday stuff that app devs need to be able to do. What's the deal?
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Common Sense, Free Speech, and Blogging
Brian Desmond posts about a student at his school that was is now involved in quite a controversy because of her comments in her weblog. The Chicago Sun-Times picked up the story. Microsoft's Mac blogger redux. Just another instance in how free speech does not negate the freedom (and responsibility) to practice common sense.
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ASP.NET Roadshow In Phoenix!
WOO HOO! Brian Goldfarb tells us that he got the ASP.NET Roadshow extended to 6 new cities, including Phoenix. They say the dates are TBD, I just hope that it's not during the MVP Summit. That would really suck. At any rate, Rob Howard's giving this presentation, and it should be a blast.... Rob's a great guy.
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OT: Cool Moon Shot
I try not to post off-topic here, but my friend recently took a really cool picture of the moon.
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'Test Post' Origins and a Status Update
Yesterday I posted a test from a new tool I was working on. Well, over on my corporate blog, I let the cat out of the bag, along with some details on why I've been AWOL lately. If you were curious as to what my 'Test Post' yesterday was all about, head on over for more info.
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Security, Service Packs, and Simplification
Wednesday, I sat down with Ryan Nariane of InternetNews.com and we had a lengthy discussion about security. He caught wind of PatchDayReview.com from Robert Scoble, and wanted to get the skinny on how it came about. It was my first real big interview, and I had a blast. It's a great shot in the arm for PatchDayReview, as we're working on some new technologies to help increase patch awareness. Towards the bottom, I gave a little hint on some of the stuff we're working on. Go check it out!
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Test Post
This is a test post from a new blogging tool I'm writing. What is it? I'll give you a hint. It's called
BlogStudio(name already taken). You figure out what it is from there. -
Working with .Text Web Services
Did you know that you have web service access to your blog? You can find it at http://weblogs.asp.net/yourblog/services/simpleblogservice.asmx. I've been experimenting with it for my new BlogStudio tool, and I wanted to inform you of a couple things you'll need to know to get it working.
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Happy Patch Day!
For those of you that don't know, every 2nd Tuesday of the month is Microsoft Patch Day. While this may sound fun at first, it is definitely not a holiday for network admins. There is a simple website that I put together to keep you notified about those patches. Sort of a poor-man's KBAlertz. It's called PatchDayReview.com, and it's where I give you all the patches, without the jargon. I try to keep the categories pretty consistent, and each one has it's own RSS feed. If you hate keeping up with patches, point your aggregator here, and let me do the work for you.
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NEWS ALERT: Eolas Patent Invalidated
The US Patent and Trademark office has filed an initial ruling claiming that the Eolas browser patent is invalid, according to News.com. This move means, if upheld, that Microsoft will not have to make any changes to Internet Explorer.
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Getting an Assembly's Public Key the Programmatic way
I have been struggling with the dumbest problem all day. I have been working with extending the XHEO|Licensing system with a new licensing limit for a new product that I'm working on. Basically, it limits the assembly to be used only by a specific calling assembly. Anyways, I was looking for a way to get the public key and public key token of an assembly programmatically, and after some hunting through the System.Reflection namespace, I found it. It really sucks though, because I went through the MSDN docs for the AssemblyName.GetPublicKeyToken, and it had an example of almost exactly what I needed The problem is, it didn't work
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.NET App in CRN Magazine
I'm flipping through this weeks issue of CRN Magazine, and I see the first mention of a .NET application. The only problem is, it's in the “Hacker Tracker” callout of the Security section. It seems that DotNetNuke had 2 vulnerabilities that allowed hackers to access files located outside teh web directory, as well as an XSS attack could allow user data to be stolen. It was skocking to me to even see a .NET community app mentioned in this mag, but here it is. Hopefully the DNN team got the problem solved. Hopefully I'll see some better .NET news in there in the future.
