There was a time when indies felt a need to pretend they were a big company. That's changed a lot. [Read more...]

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I'm pretty slow on the uptake sometimes. Leon Bambrick's TimeSnapper app was the top pick of the Larkware 2005 Developer Tool contest. I knew then that I needed to look at this program, but it unfortunately was on a long list of things I needed to do. Over the last few weeks, however, it bubbled up to the top, as I have been thinking about the crazy way I work when I'm in front of the computer. With little patience at my disposal and always so much to do, I can't even wait 5 seconds for something to load up on my computer, and will go do something else to fill the void. Check email (which of course could steer me on a whole new course at the flip of a switch), newsgroups, the news, my blog reader, my own blog stats, another client project that I had a thought about. Anything and everything. And it's got me a little worried.

So I decided I would try TimeSnapper to really see if it's true. How long do I stay focused on any one project over the course of the day. And the answer is scary, but I will keep that to myself.

The program is surprisingly lightweight, taking advantage of our massive hard drives rather than memory. Not only can I gather evidence of my terrible habits (which can someday be used to cure me of them?), I can also go back and figure out when I stopped working on something billable even if I forgot to log out of my timeclock application.

Not only that, but in it's simplicity, as one user testimonial says "it just works". Thanks Leon. I'm not really sure if this is going to be a healthy mirror to hold up to myself, but hopefully it will have good effects!!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Have you gone out of your way to avoid .NET namespaces that just sound too scary? [Read more...]

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Although my own recent DLL hell with VS2005 is in design time, I have learned quite a good lesson about dynamically loading assemblies and the dll hell you can introduce in that way.

I have an application that makes heavy use of Reflection.Assembly.LoadFrom where I pass in the path of a DLL to be loaded. The DLLs are randomly added to the application as we create them.

What I learned was from this post of Suzanne Cooke's about the difference between Load and LoadFrom. Load will load assemblies that are in the GAC (and a few other .NET locales) and is a big help in avoiding dll hell because the GAC does a good job of versioning. LoadFrom will load from a  file that you explicitly tell it to and cares not about versioning. There are a lot more pointers to be aware of here. Check out her post on choosing a binding context (Load and LoadFrom are binding contexts) as well as her related post about switching your code from using LoadFrom to using Load. Suzanne writes the kind of posts that cant' be read lightly and I can't really absorb their lessons unless it's something that I need to know. And I needed to know this today!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

One of the pain in the rear parts of doing a lot of travel is doing a lot of travel coordination. It actually is quite time consuming to find the right flights at good times, with short layovers and not overly expensive rates. Then there's finding hotels, dealing with the usual variety of room rates and lastly coordinating anything else that might be involved. Even when you have a travel agent helping you, there are still a lot of decisions to make. I think for every event I go to, I probably spend at least a few hours on this.

Even with my little overnight trip to do an INETA gig at TechValley .NET in Albany next week, I spent time figuring out where to stay (finally settled on a hotel in Saratoga Springs with the benefit of meeting up with a friend), if I should take a train (turns out it would be a lot more hours than driving and still include driving) or even rent a car (though I discovered the only option there was to drive 30 miles north to Burlington to get a car before heading south to Albany). So in the long run, I  have a simple plan - hop in my car and drive to Albany. But given the options, the budget and my own schedule, it was not a "no-brainer" and I infectiously put way too much thought into it.

When Kate and I sent to South Africa, we spent hours and hours on i.m. trying to find flights that we could meet up on that would be amenably priced for Microsoft and would get all of the mileage credits to our own frequent flier accounts. Then we had to go back and forth with Microsoft's travel coordinator over a series of about 20 emails. I bet we each spent at least 4 hours doing that. This, of course, does not include planning our outings.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Pretty impressive stuff!

Though I have never asked or answered a question on EE, it has been the source of solutions to many technical problems I have encountered over the years.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

D'Arcy Lussier writes:

Flash back a few years to when .NET was an emerging technology. Microsoft put their marketing muscle behind the promotion and creation of user group communities: groups of geeks getting together to talk about CLR goodness. Their plan worked to perfection, and user groups sprung up all over the world! An organization (which I'm a membership manager for), INETA - The International .NET Association, was created and helped bolster the user groups by providing guidance, speakers, and support.

I see it very differently.

Flash back a few years to when .NET was an emerging technology. INETA - The International .NET Association, was created by a handful of user group leaders (led by Bill Evjen) in an effort to bolster the user groups by providing guidance, speakers, and support. When INETA (with help from Microsoft's Eric Ewing) demonstrated to Microsoft how important the user group community was, Microsoft put their marketing muscle behind the promotion and creation of user group communities: groups of geeks getting together to talk about CLR goodness.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

How rare is it for clients to ask for access to archived data? Would you believe the only two requests I have had in 8 years came on the same day? [Read more...]

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

The January CTP of WinFX (which includes WCF) is available on MSDN online. Note some good advice on installation from Charles Petzold.

WCF and it's pal Windows Workflow Foundation were anointed with GoLive licenses. The runtimes associated with these can be downloaded here.

WCF gets a home on the web at www.windowscommunication.net.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I am ready to give up.

We have our 5 dvds worth of content to share with our user group members but have still, after two months of begging favors, not found a way to get the copies made efficiently.

I know Lori Mckinney burned all 700+ dvds herself on two normal home dvd burners.

First we have to get someone to pay for 250 blank dvds. Then we have to find a way to copy that many.

I can't find anyone to do it for us for free or cheaply. The best offer I had was still going to cost us $750.

How have you solved this dilemma?

Update: Here is how we are doing it! Our D.E., Thom Robbins, hooked us up with 250 blank DVDs and I have now gotten a number of user group members who have committed to burning anywhere from 4 to 10 sets. So I will burn about 10 sets myself and then mail those with a bunch of blanks to these people who will bring their burned sets to the next meeting! Yay!!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I gave in and finally used on of my Support Incidents for a remote server debugging problem that was mystifying me and many others. Here is my experience (so far). [Read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I was pushing a new WSE 3.0 web service to a test web server. Whenever I tried to authenticate I was getting "Security Token could not be retrieved" from the server.

WSE590: Failed to resolve the following Key Info .....

I knew the sample x509 server certificate was installed. I knew I had assigned read permissions to Network Service with the Certificate tool that comes with WSE.

It took me quite a while before I realized I had installed the certificate that came with WSE2 which is different than the certificates I had created with the WSE3 Setup in the Samples.

The data that made me finally realize it was that in the error message, it referred to the SHA-1 key identifier that the client had sent to the server to look for. But that was not the id of the server certificate.

So I uninstalled the wrong certificate and installed the correct one.

Now, as a test, I did not give permission to the Network Service account to access the certificate.

The message was very different:

WSE600: Unable to unwrap a symmetric key using the private key of an X.509 certificate. Please check if the account 'NT AUTHORITY\NETOWRK SERVICE' has permissions to read the private key of certificate with subject name 'CN=WSE2QuickStatServer' and the thumbprint.....

Now how specific is that? So I am now more confident that "security token could not be retrieved" is literally about FINDING the token, not using it, which can save me a lot of time if I make that mistake again!

Another thing that messed me up was that I had originally installed the certificate into the Current User's store but I wanted it in Local Machine. You need to export and import certificates to make them work properly. But I didn't know this and just dragged and dropped it to the Local Computer's Personal Store instead. That was a no-no. The documentation (see the note in "How to: Make X.509 Certificates Accessible to WSE") explains that when you do this, even if you use the certificate tool (or other means) to apply the ASPNET or NETWORK SERVICE perms, it won't work. That is because the file associated to the certificate (and it is the file that is getting the permissions) does not get moved along with the certificate.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

You have a little piece of scotch tape on your finger but don't realize it.

Your finger is a little swollen from being scratched.

Lucky for me I a) noticed that little piece of tape that day and b) can use my other index finger until my right one is better.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I have a VS2005 app that has assemblies with inherited forms and classes and there is something not quite right in my references that makes these particular assemblies very unstable.

This is a project that is being ported from VS2003.

When trying to load the form up in the designer, I frequently get "Could not load file or assembly" with a reference to a class file that has nothing to do with UI. And then I cannot access the design surface.

The referenced assembly is also referenced in the class from which the winform inherits. Sometimes I change the references (in both assemblies) to point to the compiled dll and then it's working. Then somehow it breaks again. Sometimes, then pointing them both to the project, rather than the dll might fix this but maybe not. And I might battle it for a while then just have to walk away from the computer with my hands up in the air.

It's very frustrating. Sometimes I can get away without having to have access to the design surface for whatever it is that I am doing. But I sure wish I could figure out what the heck the problem is, why it prevents me from loading up my winform and solve it once and for all.

Update: Today, this particular one was solved finally by referencing the DLL and not the project of the class that the form was inheriting from. If I had the time to try to figure out WHY, I would, but I know have to get back to working on this project.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I finally figured out how to access the overrides in Visual Basic 2005 - a method that is different than in VB in 2003 or in C# in 2005. [Read more...]

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

WSE 2.0's messaging API gave us the ability to host web services outside of IIS. Though it was very cool, I didn't dig that too much because you had to give up all of the other WSE goodness that only worked in ASMX - including security.

In WSE 3.0, they changed this so that you could build ASMX web services, do all of the great security stuff and then host it outside of IIS - for me this meant TCP, though there are other transports you can use as well.

Now that I am using WSE3 to secure my web services that are currently being used (while we await WCF ), I am trying to do so with WCF in mind. It is no secret that WSE 3.0 is going to be wire level compatible with WCF as this is was of it's major design goals.

As I dig further into this, I learn that this is only true for HTTP but not the TCP hosted services. However, it is possible to write your own transport channel in Indigo specifically for this purpose and this is something that Yasser Shohoud and Kenny Wolf did at PDC (here's the code for that). Luckily for me, I have the DVD because that was not a session I attended. I also missed Mark Fussell's talk on moving messages between WSE 3 and Indigo since I had remembered it as a 10:15 session when it was in fact an 8:30 am talk (and had a leisurely breakfast instead - oops!). (Again, thank goodness for the DVDs)

At ASP Connections in April, I will be doing a talk about using WSE 3.0 so that the messages produced by WSE 3.0 today to secure your web services,  will still be valid when communicating with apps that use WCF.  So as I prepare for this, I will probably be sharing tidbits here and there.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

This got me once again. It's really hard to remember!

When you do declarative programming in Visual Basic and you use attributes that have properties, you need to set the values on those properties. VB does this in a funny way.

Here is a C# attribute for BP (Basic Profile) Conformance in a Web Service:

[WebServicesBinding(ConformsTo = WsiProfiles.BasicProfile1_1)]

Setting the value of the ConformsTo property is a normal looking equals (=) operator.

But with VB, look at how we set the property

<WebServicesBinding(ConformsTo: = WsiProfiles.BasicProfile1_1)>

We put a colon in front of the equals sign.

This is not new to VB2005, but attributes are something I so rarely use (but will be using more and more as I do more WCF programming) that I forget from one year to the next.

I have never been able to find an explanation of why this is and only know it because I get a compiler error when I forget it ("named argument expected") and I have to see another example of it's use somewhere before I realize it. Intellisense doesn't give me a helping hand with it (as far as I have seen in vs2003 or vs2005). So, perhaps by writing this blog post, I can commit this to memory finally!

 

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I was a little taken aback to see this Feb 2006 cover of ASPNET Pro Magazine

 

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Scott Mitchell and Scott Guthrie are both writing about one of my pet VS2005 technologies, Debugger Visualizers. Check out their posts which have lots of web programming visualizers in them.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Don Smith, Mark Fussell, Ron Jacobs and Dwayne Wright are doing webcasts on securing web services with wse 3.0.

The first, Securing Web Services with X.509 Certificates in WSE 3.0, is already on line.

They will be doing one on Kerberos this coming Wednesday, Jan 18th, and then another with UsernameTokens on Wed Jan 25th.

Stay tuned here.

 

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org