Our NetFlix facility is 100 miles away in White River Junction Vermont. It takes one day for mail to get there. We can't figure out why the website says that movies are "received" by them 6 days - 4 business days - after we mailed them back.

I don't think we are uber-renters, destined for the list that we've been reading about lately. But it's pretty annoying and of course not very easy to complain to anyone. The only types of problems they seem to let you report are if you are missing a sleeve or scratched DVD. Otherwise you get in a hopeless loop searching for a way to contact them.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Here is a project that I am now publishing through clickonce.

I just opened the project up in VS2005 and saw all of these warnings. Sheesh, here we go again...

(Note: I got an email from Patrick Darragh who is a Program Manager on the VB Team and has a lot to do with ClickOnce. Patrick tells me that "those warnings are controlled by the ‘Verify files uploaded to the server’ property on the Publish Options dialog off the Publish tab.  If you uncheck this property, the warning should go away.")

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I couldn't resist buying my honey a big ol' bag of M&Ms for Valentines Day because I knew I had M&M wrapping paper at home. Heh heh.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Would you like to work out of a newly renovated office with awesome views, great
co-workers and the best coffee machine in Burlington, VT? Do you have solid web
development chops, good customer service and interpersonal skills, the ability to
work under deadlines, and a good sense of humor? This job may be for you…

Union Street Media, a leading Vermont web design and development company, is seeking to add
a new Web Developer to our team. Since 1999, we have developed database-driven web sites
focusing on visual appeal, usability, and search engine prominence. The company serves over
250 clients in three primary business areas: real estate, e-commerce, and content-driven sites.
USM is a young, aggressive company requiring its employees to wear many hats. As a member
of our development staff, the person who fills this role will be responsible for helping in the
development and support of our clients’ web sites. The role requires timeliness in project
delivery, attention to detail, and a high degree of professionalism. We’re looking for a
hard working team player who enjoys working on the web. Those who don’t play well
with others need not apply.

Previous experience at a web development or marketing firm is preferred, but not required.

The position comes with a host of benefits including health insurance contribution, a gym
membership, dog-friendly atmosphere, and access to our stash of ski vouchers.

Functions/Responsibilities:
• Strong people skills and team mentality
• Work with all members of the USM team to develop web sites for clients
• Build sites using USM's CMS; design custom templates for various modules.
• Thorough understanding of HTML, CSS, Photoshop, Web Standards, usability
• Working knowledge of PHP, MySQL
• Keeping skill set up to date with current design and technologies
• Help with support tickets, spam filtering, DNS changes, setting up FTP and email accounts

Compensation:
Commensurate with experience

Schedule:
This full-time position in our Burlington, Vermont office is open immediately.

To Apply:
Email resumé, cover letter, and three references to jobs@unionstreetmedia.com .
No phone calls please.
Union Street Media is an equal opportunity employer.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I'm looking at a VS2005 ad in CoDe Magazine - part of the "spot the difference" campaign. The before picture has people meeting around a table with an obvious work load ahead. The after picture shows them after they have launched their product. But there is something bugging me about the after picture. The gold master framed dvd on the wall is dated October 7, 2005. So they shipped their product based on VS2005 Beta 2? Eek!

okay back to work...

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I have really been trying to force ClickOnce to let me publish ONLY the changed files, but according to this forum post by David Guyer, I should probably just give up.

Here are my issues.

1) Moving the new deployment folder and manifest to the production server takes way too long.
  1a) part of the reason for this is that I have 3rd party dlls that I have as INCLUDED rather than Pre-Requisites. Even with all of my security, I'm a little nervous about controlling the deployment of 3rd party licensed tools and this feels safer. So with some Infragistics, Janus and XCeed components, this adds 4.5 MB to my deployment files. This is one place I will have to focus on paring it down. However, with the rate at which infragistics updates its components, this provides another excuse for leaving it in the Includes.

2) Even though all of the documentation promises that the client ONLY pulls down the new files from the server, the update dialog says that all 6MB are being downloaded and looking in the GAC I see all of the files in the latest folder, not just the new ones. This is acceptable wrt speed on the intranet, but what about our dialup users out there on the web. I'm not the only one who is questioning this.

UPDATE
I have been keeping at it and learned a little more about #2. Yes, I have to publish the entire app over again, but if I do it right, the files that are not new will not get downloaded. The way to acheive this is to make a copy of the previous deployment folder, which will mean all of the previous files will match up with the hash that the client machine has for them. Then use the MAGE tool to create the manifest. (See this msdn doc and look for the "next steps" section re: updating.) Then the client machine won't bother pulling those down again and instead, grab them from the last folder. Or something like that. Either way, the client will still say "downloading xxxMB" where xxx is the size of the complete app, but it is only downloading new stuff from the web server and kind of "cross-loading" so to speak from a sibling folder already on the client.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

My mom is at Westminster this year again because Bumper was competing in this, the biggest dog show in the U.S. I think Bumper is the third one of my parent's dogs that has gone to Westminster. Oddly, the man judging the Newfoundlands picked one of his own dogs (a dog he had bred) as Best in Breed. It's astonishing that there isn't a rule about something like that, but boy are there a LOT of politics in the dog world.

In 1999, Annie (who is now 9 years old) won an Award of Merit at Westminster, which was a big big deal.

Here's a picture of Bumper and a link to the BlueHeavenNewfoundlands website.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Vermont.NET turned FOUR at our meeting last night and we had a joint meeting with the Vermont SQL Group which is a spin off of VTdotNET. This was the 2nd of our two launch events (the first was related to INETA and the 2nd to PASS) so we had 5 more VS2005/SQL Server2005 licence packs to give away.

So, I counted 46 at the meeting. That is our 3rd largest meeting ever.

1) Ken Getz (INETA): 50
2) Keith Pleas/Thom Robbins/ INETA 100th Speaker event and MSDN film crew: 50
3) Laura Blood/Roman Rehak/SQL2005 Launch: 46
4) Rocky Lhotka (INETA): 40
5) Laura Blood/VS2005 Launch: 40

Laura and Roman did an awesome job. Laura presented the slides that MSDN created for these events. That was some chore because each slide was jam packed with information, so she pointed out highlights. Then Roman did the demos and he used a lot of his own (from his job as SQL Server guru extraordinaire) and also a few from some other sources that he acknowledged.

The most interesting thing to me was my new persective on Service Broker. I have only really looked at it from what it provides for Query Notification and didn't really "get" it's real purpose. Now I realize that the reason for this is because I am a) not a DBA with the problems that it solves and b) not doing big time enterprise work. I understood the queues and the services but was missing the big picture. But I finally got it and it's really easy -  by sending processing chores off to the service broker, you can distribute your processes (much more easily than the previously available methods). Some examples: Scenario A is where you send a process such as executing a particular query off (asynchronously) to a service broker on a different box. Scenario B is where you queue up requests to be processed over night. It was a real "AHA!" moment.

He also did a great xml data type demo where he showed the difference between finding a needle in a haystack of xml formatted data stored in a (???) varchar field and finding that same needled with the data stored in an xml data field. The xquery/xpath was much more efficient, cutting a 40 second search down to a few hundred millseconds. Then by applying some of the indexing you can do with the xml data type, it got down even more.

There were many other great demos - CLR in SQL Server, and a B.I. demo - something I have never looked at or considered before - from Integration Services. Very cool, very impressive.

Thanks to Laura and Roman for a great meeting.

A few other highlights: cake for our 4th anniversary and goodies from local MSDN DCC Susan Wisowaty. Susan lives in Burlington, but is the DCC for New York and New Jersey.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Pablo Cibraro (who should be an MVP) is, in my opinion, one of the most knowledgable WSE guys around. He is up there with Michele and Softwaremaker (who have both moved on to be WCF gurus, of course). But besides having a wealth of practical knowledge, he spends an inordinate amount of time sharing it in the WSE newsgroups, answering myriad questions and following up on many of them.

He has answered questions for me too.

But today, he really impressed me even more. I was runing up against a problem that I could not figure out or find the answer to anywhere. In fact, I found two other questions on the web with the same problem but no answers.

The more I dug into the problem the more I learned and I finally was able to google the right keywords. And where did I find the solution to my problem? In Pablo's blog (see below). He does not post very often, but boy am I glad he wrote about this. I had even been fiddling in the right section of my web.config file, but just wasn't tweaking quite the correct thing.

So thanks Pablo!

And for google's sake, the problem was some encryption being done in a request for a securityContextToken in WSE3.0. On Windows 2000 machines, it was encrypting the requested key with RSA15, but WIndows XP clients were encrypting with OAEP and the win2003 server was expecting OAEP.

Windows 2000 does not have the ability to wrap with OAEP. So I had to force all clients to wrap security tokens with RSA15 (Win2000 will do it by default, but XP won't) and then force the server to use RSA15 also.

But I couldn't figure out how. Pablo's post on using the web.config in WSE 3.0 to override the default encryption led me to my solution. He also followed up with a reply in the newsgroup as I was typing this very post.

The error

An unsupported signature or encryption algorithm was used --->
System.Exception: WSE3002: The receiver is expecting the key wrapping algorithm to be http://www.w3.org/2001/04/xmlenc#rsa-oaep-mgf1p, but the incoming message used http://www.w3.org/2001/04/xmlenc#rsa-1_5. You can change the key wrapping algorithm through configuring security token manager.

The solution in both web.config of the service and app.config of the client (inside of the security tags of the microsoft.web.services3 tags):

<binarySecurityTokenManager>
    <add
valueType="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-x509-token-profile-1.0#X509v3">
     <keyAlgorithm name="RSA15" />
    </add>
   </binarySecurityTokenManager>

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

How cool is this? Here is a college kid at Champlain College in Burlington who started an Ipod accessory company and is making it big! (And he's probably all of 19 years old, now.)

Mophie is a developer of innovative, value-added solutions for the digital lifestyle accessory market The Company was founded in March of 2005 by an 18 year-old optimist with a head full of ideas and a renegade marketing consultant with an arm full of tattoos. Our goal was to create a funky product development firm built around good people and great ideas.

The products start with a base case to put your ipod in and then is extended by a variety of forms that the base case fits into.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

This spring I will be heading out to speak at the fourth Deeper in .NET event that is hosted by the Wisconsin.NET user group. This is Scott Isaac's first time coordinating it, as former group leader Brian Tinkler has gone to work for Microsoft.

This will be a one day event with 5 talks. Michele Leroux Bustamante will be (very appropriately) doing a session on WCF. Scott Hanselman, Rob Howard and Jason Beres (returning for his 4th year!) are also on the roster.

I'll be doing a talk on ADO.NET 2.0 integration with SQL Server 2005. I could easily spend at least 1/2 of the entire day talking about that, but I will limit myself to my 90 minute slot.

An added benefit of going to Wisconsin is that I am going to spend a few extra days there visiting with a friend who I haven't seen in too many years.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I'm sure all of the big cities in the Northeast that are getting seriously dumped on today would gladly send their snow here if they could. And we would be happy to have it. Once again, the big dump has missed us completely. Countless ski resorts will suffer greatly this season which will also have a big negative impact on Vermont's economy.

It's not even snowing here. And this picture from Charles' window in Manhattan just makes my wanna cry. It reminds me of a magical moonlit night out in Prospect Park (Brooklyn) after a huge snow storm nearly 15 years ago. I went out there with my dog and there were hundreds of people out there walking and even cross country skiing. Of course, normally, going to a NYC park at night is unheard of.

This is what many of us live for here in Vermont. But alas, there are only about 3 inches of snow in my front yard and no base underneath. It is so bad that we can't even use our "rock skis" in the woods. Just a pair of regular hiking boots will suffice.

Well, good day to continue getting through my myriad commitments that keep me in front of the computer.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Here's a cool trick you can do using the new IE Developer Toolbar if you want to find out meta data about a Virtual Earth (Windows Live Local) map. [Read more...]

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I replaced one of my 512MB modules with a 1GB module in October. Time to get the old one off my desk.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=6848791085&rd=1&sspagename=STRK%3AMESE%3AIT&rd=1

 

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Thom Robbins is presenting a 1/2 day seminar on Programming Virtual Earth on March 1st  in Boston and it will also be accessible over Live Meeting.

At the end of the session, Thom will announce how you can participate in the a Virtual Earth Mashup and even win an XBOX 360.

Thom will also have help from the ViaVirtualEarth's  Neil Roodyn and maybe even me.

For information on go to the registration page for the virtual event.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Why on earth do I find myself reading whitepapers on the NASA or ACM websites? (read more ...)

[A DevLife post]

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Next Mondays VTdotNET meeting marks our 4th anniversary. I think after 4 years, I'm allowed to say that I'm very proud of this! VTdotNEt has created a real community out of the many .NET developers in Northwest Vermont. That was my ultimate goal. We also have a bevy of highly skilled .NET developers in the area, many of whom are already deploying .NET 2.0 applications. We have brought amazing speakers here month after month and definitely put the .NET developer community on the map.

I think everyone in the whole group should give themselves a pat on the back.

Mondays' meeting is the part 2 of the VS/SQL 2005 launch, and a joint meeting with the VTSQL.org group. Since INETA and PASS were both creating these user group events, we got to do two between our two groups. So we have another 5 sets of VS2005 Pro/SQL Server 2005 Standard licenses to raffle off, certification test vouchers and some other swag. Laura Blood and Roman Rehak will be presenting. Rumor has it that Roman is going to be the demo god for the night.

Competitive Computing, who is hosting the meeting, is also providing the group with pizza and soda for the evening.

And, we will, of course, have birthday cake.

Thanks to everyone who has helped make this group be a great success!! That includes not only our members, but INETA, Thom Robbins, Joe Stagner, Russ Fustino (who encouraged me to start the group) and the many sponsors who have helped us with pizza, books and other awesome swag over the years.

Here's to many more!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I decided this needed it's very own post as it is buried in another one.

I was way too eager to finally get .NET 2.0 onto my web server and missed a step and did not recognize the red flags going up trying to tell me that I missed this step.

If you are putting .NET 2.0 onto a web server already running 1.1, you need to create a separate application pool and set the app pool for .NET 1.1 apps to one of them and .NET 2.0 apps to the other one.

Most likely, if you are not creating any new 1.1 apps, you should attach the 1.1 apps to the new app pool and if you use a default app pool, let the .NET 2.0 apps own that.

Each application pool owns a different process. So I had the 1.1 and 2.0 apps running in the same process and they were really tangling with each other. I was getting Server Unavailable errors and even had a bizarre effect on a web service*.

In case you haven't dealt explicity with application pools yet, that is a separate section in IIS. You have Application Pools Websites and Web Service Extensions. You can easily create a new application pool.

Then, in the properties of each web site you want to change, the application pool option is a drop down at the bottom of the first tab (Directory).

*That was a doozy. It was a 1.1 service that returns a DataSet comprised of 8 tables. Before returning the ds, I use XCeed stream compression to compress the stream. On the client end, I decompress and then read the stream into a new dataset. Suddenly the resulting dataset had taken two columns from the first table and created new tables out of each one. Once I figured out what was happening, I had no clue how to deal with it other than remove the compression and just return the datatable. In the end, the problem disappeared when I sorted out the App Pools!!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I had an email today from someone asking this question. They have a web service and a client app that use WSE2 to encrypt, sign and otherwise secure their data.

However, they were able to open up the asmx file, the operation and look at raw xml data in a web browser over the web. No authentication, no encryption, no signing. I could see it, too!

What a nightmare after all of the work to secure this data.

The reason for this problem was another case of debugging tools getting deployed to the production web server. Something I tend to rant about occasionally.

In order to browse from their development machine to the web service on a remote web server, they had added

<webServices>
 <protocols>
   <add name="HttpGet" />
   <add name="HttpPost" />
 </protocols>
</webServices>

and left them in the web.config when it was deployed to the server.

I was able to guess this pretty quickly since I once learned this the hard way, too. Sadly most of our best lessons are the ones that leave bruises. 

For some more web.config tricks to hide your web service from public view as well as the wsdl, see this msdn doc on configuring web services for deployment.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org