Thursday, January 12, 2006

I went around and around (and dragged poor Sushil Chordia and blogless Leonid Tsybert along for the ride) with an access permission problem that my ASPNET account was having when trying to do SqlDependency.Start. All of the correct permissions (listed below) had been applied to the account, which could be verified with sp_helprotect,NULL,ASPNET

Finally, I just gave up and removed the ASPNET account from SQL Server in its entirety and recreated it with the necessary permissions and everything worked just fine.

Though I'm very frustrated not to have figured out what was causing the problem, I'm satisfied in knowing that there is a solution (remove & recreate.)

Here, as listed in Sushil's fantastic blog post from late September, which listed all of the RTM changes for Query Notification, is how to set up the perms.Note that this is for IIS5 whereas in IIS6 you would use the NT Authority\NetworkService account.

All of this is run against the database that you want the perms for, not in Master.

sp_grantlogin 'myMachineName\ASPNET'     --this gives the ASPNET account login access to SQL Server
sp_grantdbaccess 'MyMachineName\ASPNET', ASPNET   --this gives the login access to the database with the "nickname" ASPNET

GRANT CREATE PROCEDURE to ASPNET
GRANT CREATE QUEUE to ASPNET
GRANT CREATE SERVICE to ASPNET
GRANT REFERENCES on CONTRACT::[http://schemas.microsoft.com/SQL/Notifications/PostQueryNotification] to ASPNET  --note that the schema is case sensitive!
GRANT VIEW DEFINITION to ASPNET

The above are to call Start(), to do the actual notifications, you need:

EXEC sp_addrole 'sql_dependency_subscriber'
GRANT SUBSCRIBE QUERY NOTIFICATIONS TO ASPNET
GRANT RECEIVE ON QueryNotificationErrorsQueue TO ASPNET
GRANT REFERENCES on CONTRACT::[http://schemas.microsoft.com/SQL/Notifications/PostQueryNotification] to ASPNET
EXEC sp_addrolemember 'sql_dependency_subscriber', 'ASPNET’
GRANT SELECT TO ASPNET



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Thursday, January 12, 2006 4:29:39 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 
 Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Dwight Asset Management is in search of an Excel/VBA Macro programmer to work on a contract basis for a few weeks with our firm. 

The position will require the contract programmer to be in the office.  It is a position requiring approximately 80-120 hours of work, hopefully to occur within the next six weeks.  Resumes and contact information may be e-mailed directly to me at this address.  Pay rate is competative and is commesurate with experience.

Thank you very much!

Sara Lynn
Tech Department
Dwight Asset Management Company
slynn@dwight.com
(802) 383-4088



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Wednesday, January 11, 2006 10:50:41 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 

At the Vermont.NET meeting (our Visual Studio Community Launch) Laura covered some of the most interesting of the UI basics that are new in ASP.NET 2.0. There were a lot of attendees to this meeting that are brand new to ASP.NET 2.0 and want to learn more. A really good starting point is the www.asp.net website. On there you can find a Guided Tour of Visual Web Developer 2005 Express, which is basically the web development only portion of Visual Studio - and therefore a fantastic place to get started with ASP.NET 2.0. Also, the ASP.NET Developer Center is a great launching pad, to find video training, the quickstarts, even a link to getting a free 3 hour training CD from AppDev.

There are amazing resources on the web.

There are also plenty of ASP.NET 2.0 books coming out that are great for beginners.

Bipin Joshi's Developer's Guide to ASP.NET 2.0 is aimed at ASP.NET 1.x developers moving to ASP.NET 2.0, but covers everything, not just "what's new".

From Wrox: Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 from Dave Sussman and a crew of excellent writers.

The ASP.NET v2 The Beta Version, which we raffled off when Rob Howard was at the group in November and also at Monday's meeting, is pretty close to being current with the release version.

Professional ASP.NET 2.0 another WROX book by my buddies Bill Evjen, Farhan Muhammed and more!

Pro ASP.NET 2.0 from O'Reilly.

Murach has an ASP.NET 2.0 Upgraders Guide. One for C# and one for VB.

O'Reilly has ASP.NET 2.0 A Developer's Notebook is another "what's new in 2.0" book that has  50 hands on projects. They have a few other asp.net 2 books as well.

Laura also posted resources from her session here.

This is just a VERY SHORT list to get you started in case you don't know where to turn next. There are so many online resources. In addition to the official microsoft ones above, there are many community sites like www.ASPAlliance.com and www.ASPAdvice.com. There are forums galore and of course blogs blogs blogs.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006 10:48:16 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 
 Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Qvault is actively recruiting highly effective technology oriented individuals with strong programming and system/network administration skills.  If you thrive on innovation and delight in a diverse range of responsibilities, if you embrace new challenges and seek to enhance your expertise, if you’re looking to join a vibrate team of result oriented professionals where you can make a direct impact then Qvault may be the place for you.

Highly desirable skills and demonstrated experience include:

  • Object-Oriented Programming, fluency in C# or C++
  • SQL Fundamentals (Queries, Transactions, Schema Design)
  • ASP.NET
  • ADO.NET
  • Web Services (XML, SOAP)
  • System Administration (Windows 200x Server, IIS 5/6)
  • MS SQL Server Administration
  • Networking and Security Fundamentals

Please send your application to hr@qvault.com.

About Qvault  Qvault, Inc., a privately held corporation; develops, hosts and supports web based business intelligence, collaboration and document/content management solutions for professional organizations throughout North America.  Qvault's main offices are located in the heart of the village of Essex Junction, Vermont.



Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org
Tuesday, January 10, 2006 12:53:41 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 

Wow! We had 41 people at our meeting last night. That's a lot for our small group. As Dave reports, the room was jam packed.

Laura did a great job with the presentation on ASP.NET 2.0. Boy, it was some styling powerpoint Microsoft gave the community launch team to use!! What was great about her talk was that she didn't dwell on the slides and went right into gobs of demos. She showed the group master pages, profiling, declarative data binding and the controls that make membership really easy to do. There are a lot of people who this is all brand new to (I would say 80% of the attendees probably hadn't seen any of this stuff yet). I learned a bunch too as I have focused on the framework stuff and not as much on the "look, ma! No code!" tools.

One thing that makes me extra proud of our little community is the fact that we far exceed the average percentage of women attendees. 25% of our group last night was women.

In addition, I believe from a show of hands (and new faces) that there were 10 people there who had never been to a VTdotNET meeting before. It's great to have some kind of lure to get them there. Most often, once they attend a meeting and realize how much the group has to offer and what a tight (yet welcoming) community it is, they continue to attend meetings.

We still have to figure out how we are going to burn 200 DVDs to distribute. But since we are doing part 2 of the launch next month as a joint meeting with the VTSQL group,and giving away another 5 VS2005 Pro/SQL Server 2005 licenses, I expect most of those people to return and hopefully we will have it solved.

Lori McKinney from the Huntsville Alabama group spent her christmas vacation burning 700 dvds for her group. I won't be doing this, that's for sure. I just don't have the time. We are trying to find a local company with one of those machines that you can load a stack of dvds into and let it just spit out copies.



Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org
Tuesday, January 10, 2006 12:02:27 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 

There are a bunch of MSDN Launch event VS2005/SQL Server 2005 "kits" for sale on ebay. I think because these are NFR's, some people are selling them as "bonus". Like "Backpack + FREE visual studio 2005" or "mini flash light with FREE visual studio 2005".

Funny that bidding starts at something like $10. I guess the market is flooded with these.

We gave away 5 of the launch kits last  night at the Vermont.NET launch event. But knowing who got them, I do not expect to see any of them for sale on Ebay!

It would kill me to see things that I raffled off at Vermont.NET on ebay - books, software, etc. I would hope that someone who wants or needs these things wins them or could just say "hey I don't need it, draw another raffle ticket".



Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org
Tuesday, January 10, 2006 10:23:36 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 
Vermont Technical College is looking to add to our rapidly expanding Williston campus. Immediate needs include an instructor to teach System Administration. The course provides the student with enough theory to understand how operating systems work and to interpret the output of various management tools. It also covers practical issues in system administration including process, memory, and file system monitoring and performance tuning. Some topics in computer security are also discussed. The course consists of 3 hours of lecture and 3 hours of lab per week. Please contact:
 
Michael Marceau
Co-chair, ECET Department
Vermont Technical College
Randolph Center, VT 05061
ph: (802) 728-1307
fax: (802) 728-1390
Tuesday, January 10, 2006 8:03:05 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 
 Monday, January 09, 2006

I'm off to Burlington for the January VTdotNET meeting where we are having our INETA Community Launch event. Laura Blood has been working hard on her ASP.NET 2.0 session. I have bags and bags of books and swag and of course we are raffling off 5 licenses to VS2005 Pro/SQL Server 2005 Standard/BizTalk 2006. That's 5 sets! We have a huge # of RSVPs for our little group - 35 and counting. Thom Robbins, our D.E. has offered to cover the pizza. I'm going to stop at Staples on the way and pick up raffle tickets - I'm sick of trying to deal with  how to raffle off stuff!!

It should be great fun!



Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org
Monday, January 09, 2006 4:11:14 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 

My computers have been behaving very badly (to the tune of "now I have to rebuild my server") and now my new printer is joining in as well. It made an executive decision when it ran out of legal sized paper and just continued the print job on letter. How do you punish hardware anyway? Go to bed early? No phone for a week?



Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org
Monday, January 09, 2006 2:30:06 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 
 Sunday, January 08, 2006

By process of (hours of) elimination I have solved a problem that was driving me batty today!

I have a WSE 3.0 enabled client app that calls a WSE enabled web service.

After creating a UsernameToken, the client application was setting the credentials on the web service proxy using the generic overload:

proxy.SetClientCredential(Of UsernameToken) (myUT)

As I built the tests up one by one everything was working swimmingly... until I added in the SecureConversation into the client and service policies. (establishSecurityContext="true").

Then I was getting a 401 Access denied whenever I tried to hit the web service. I could see through the status of the tracing that I was not even touching the web server on these calls.

Setting the SecureConversation to false let everything work again.

I spent quite a lot of time experimenting and scrutinizing my settings, configs, etc.

I even loaded up the sample application for Secure Conversation which worked perfectly fine.

Both web services were in IIS and I compared everything. config files, policy files, IIS properties and security, folder security.

Combing through these, I tested every little thing that was different - folder access permissions and more. I explored differences in code such as setting the soapversion explicitly on the proxy. Nothing made a difference.

But finally, I came upon the nominal difference that was causing the problem (though I have no explanation for it).

It was the use of generics in setting the ClientCredential on the proxy.

When I used the non-generic method, as the sample uses:

proxy.SetClientCredential(myUT)

instead of

proxy.SetClientCredential(Of UsernameToken) (myUT)

suddenly I was getting a response from the server. It was still an error, but I knew I was finally getting through to the server.

The new error was my method of doing authorization on the token. This new token was "just a securityContextToken" and not a UsernameToken.

In my web service, I had cobbled together some old WSE 2.0 authorization code with some WSE 3.0 code which looked like this

dim tok as UsernameToken=RequestSoapContext.Current.IdentityToken

if tok.Principal.IsInRole(....blah blah blah

When attaching the credentials using the generic method, IdentityToken was returned as a UsernameToken, but now it is not. It has a base of UsernameToken, but it doesn't cast (I tried) to UsernameToken.

I can get the principal directly from IdentityToken anyway, so I just modified that code

dim tok as SecurityToken = RequestSoapContext.Current.IdentityToken
if tok.Principal.IsInRole(....blah blah blah

This cost me many many hours. At least now there will be something for Google to find!!



Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org
WSE
Sunday, January 08, 2006 9:37:27 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 
 Friday, January 06, 2006

I am sending files to a web service in a vs2005 app using, of course, WSE 3.0. The only way I knew to prove to myself that it was really going up their using MTOM was to use Simon Fell's TCP Trace program that I wrote about in this past post.

Here is with the MTOM "Client On" setting. Note the MIMEBoundary data and xop. That's how the binary data gets sent with MTOM.

and here it is with the check mark off in the wse 3.0 settings. Note the lack of the MIMEBoundary info. If you saw the entire, contents of this, you would see the streamed data included - the array of base 64 bytes.

WSE
Friday, January 06, 2006 3:13:38 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 
 Thursday, January 05, 2006

How do we keep at this when computers like to make you feel like an idiot or "looks like Julie is having a crappy day week ..."  Read more here...

[A DevLife post]



Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org
Thursday, January 05, 2006 12:53:54 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 

As our HMO plan with MVP went up over $100 this year ( 17 %), Rich and I finally caved in and signed up for a Health Savings Account plan. It is high deductible and we spent a long time trying to weigh the worst case scenarios against the best case scenarios. Check back with me in a year and I'll let you know how it pans out!



Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org
Thursday, January 05, 2006 12:29:17 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 
 Wednesday, January 04, 2006
I am not much of a math geek anymore, but I have a pal who I know would be very interested in this (if he doesn't know already!)

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org
Wednesday, January 04, 2006 10:16:46 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 

Because I didn't realize there was something really cool about this! I finally just happened upon it accidentally. One one of the times I rebooted, I noticed the pretty little icons for cds, thumb drives and more below the toshiba logo at startup. Pressing the left and right arrow keys highlighted the icons and voila I was able to boot from my selected device - CD.

Yah , I know - RTFM. I don't happen to have it. But now that I knew what I was looking for, I was easily able to find it online.

From the manual,

"You can also manually choose the boot-up sequence by sliding the power switch, then quickly pressing the right or left arrow keys."

Very cool feature!



Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org
Wednesday, January 04, 2006 9:58:04 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 
www.SystemNetMail.com. Great resource from Dave Wanta. I just went right there when I was having some trouble with this class (which has been moved from system.web to system.net and given some shiny new buttons) and found the answer lickety split. Thanks Dave!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org
Wednesday, January 04, 2006 4:43:50 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 

My old HP Laserjet 4si had buttons on it that allowed you to control a lot of it's settings. The new fangled printers do this through html based application that you install on your computer and it is driven by java. I didn't mind that it was Java but it was definitely the source of many problems

After installing this for our new Laserjet 1320, I was having a number of odd problems on my computer. Lots of hanging, for example, when attempting to open an Word doc attached to an email. As soon as I killed the javaw.exe process, word opened right up.

It was also creating problems with some old foxpro 16bit software with the same symptoms. I would attempt to start up that software and it would do nothing, until I went into the task manager and ended the javaw.exe process again.

It was also a bit of a memory hog.

I finally uninstalled the HP toolbox software and hopefully I can do what I need through the WinXP drivers, although the toolbox does control a lot more stuff.

So far, things have been much better.

There is one other problem that is not HPs, but the fault of our Canon LiDe35 scanner who's CanoScan software is incompatible with this printer (and according to tech support, others as well.) I am no longer able to use my scanner as a copier with output to the printer and have to scan to pdf's then print the pdfs. Uggh. Canon said they are revising their software.



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Wednesday, January 04, 2006 3:40:12 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 
When you live by rss feeds, you miss stuff like this beautiful redesign of Michele's blog!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org
Wednesday, January 04, 2006 2:32:08 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 
aha!! I was wondering... (and feeling a little ashamed that I didn't realize...)

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org
Wednesday, January 04, 2006 11:57:14 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 
 Tuesday, January 03, 2006

 

Micky Gousset points out that Billy Hollis is done with floppies. So much for his Christmas present. :-) Coasters, anyone?



Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org
Tuesday, January 03, 2006 10:31:49 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  |