Changing File Upload Limits in Community Server 2.0

I wanted to see how much effort it would take to replace this RSS feed with a CS 2.0 blog. It’s currently being generated by an old ASP application that I customized with a colleague of mine. But I kept getting errors when I tried to upload MP3 files above a certain size. A bit of googling revealed this MSDN entry and the attribute “maxRequestLength”.

Browster

I came across a story about this nifty little plug-in just this morning in MIT Technology Review.  While the story was about companies trying to change the way people browse the web, Browster was the technology that interested me the most.  You install a plug-in that lets you hover over a link to preview its contents instead of having to click the link.  If

you want to change the way you browse the web, definitely give this a try.  It could be a long while before you ever have to use the “Back” button again.

Windows Vista: The Incredible Shrinking OS

According to this article, Windows Vista is losing yet another feature.  Reading further, PC-to-PC Sync doesn’t sound like much of a feature, since it only works between machines running Vista that have the same user account.  But add it to the removal of WinFS, Monad scripting shell, and other bits, and the remainder is an OS that requires more hardware resources (for a prettier GUI, whoopee!) without any discernable improvement in areas like performance or functionality.

Since Vista will probably be behind what Apple users now get with Mac OS X Tiger (not to mention Leopard when that finally comes out), perhaps Microsoft should quit kidding themselves.  A Windows XP Service Pack 3 release this year might help make up for Vista being so late.  Then they can target the Leopard feature-set so that they’re actually releasing something competitive in 2008.

RSS Publishing

It shouldn’t be a big deal at all with apps like Community Server 2.0 or WordPress available, but budget and/or personnel constraints often conspire against us using either one. So lately, we’ve spent more time (and money, but salaries apparently don’t count) putting together custom applications to generate RSS feeds.

I always check to see if a solution to my problem already exists before building my own, so when it came time to develop the MethResources.gov RSS feed, I simply reused the example from this article by Scott Mitchell. Behind the ONDCP podcast (I did the database work, a colleague did the rest) is a classic ASP application with the most basic admin functionality.

To cut down on this sort of one-off RSS app building, I’ve been hunting around for any bits of code or fully-formed toolkits that could be reused easily. The latest interesting bit of code I came across is the ASP.NET 2.0 RSS Toolkit. It’s from a Microsoft employee, and most comments I’ve read on it have been positive. Of course, when I tried to get the samples to work, I had all kinds of problems. The solution was to create a new website project (with location = “File System”) , browse to the samples directory of the toolkit, and open the existing website. Once I did this, and added RssToolkit.dll to the GAC, all six scenarios worked perfectly.  The two examples I tried from Scott Guthrie’s blog entry on the toolkit worked also.

The only things I haven’t found in this toolkit so far are support for enclosures and an easy way to syndicate a database.

Dad wants an MP3 player, but not an iPod :-(

Since I own 2 iPods (the 2GB nano that came with my new Passat, and a 20GB I bought myself), I hope to dissuade him from a non-Apple music player purchase.

He wants something to use during his workouts, and he wants a radio tuner.  He’s put off by the cost Apple’s music player offerings.  I haven’t looked at the Apple Store website in awhile, so I completely missed the re-pricing of the iPod shuffle.  The 512MB one is just $69, while the 1GB is $99.  While this doesn’t solve his desire for a radio tuner, it should meet his price.

Looking around for competitors to the iPod shuffle, I came across Dell’s DJ Ditty. It’s small and light, and manages to integrate an FM tuner.  It’s $84, $15 more than the iPod shuffle of the same capacity (512MB).  You’d also have to use MusicMatch Jukebox instead of iTunes.

Searching through PC Magazine revealed another option: the Samsung Yepp YP-T5. It’s an old review, but this player includes a screen, an FM tuner, and voice recording for under $60.  The catch: it only has 256MB of space for music.  Samsung has similarly sized (i.e. larger) offerings to the iPod shuffle that cost around $100.  None of the ones I’ve seen offers more capacity than the 1GB shuffle, and some offer less capacity at a higher price.

I’ll keep hoping he goes with an iPod instead of something else.  So far I’m underwhelmed by the iPod’s competition.

ASP.NET Calendar Customization

My latest assignment is to help redesign this website into a true blog for the office of the drug czar. We’re using Community Server 2.0, and one of our requirements is to customize the calendar. Since the CS 2.0 calendar is a wrapper around the stock .NET framework one, I put together a Word document to explain the customization process to the graphic designers who are actually responsible for the look-and-feel of the calendar. My hope is that they’ll understand it well enough to reduce my workload when it comes time to implement this.

The document applies pretty well to calendar customization in general for ASP.NET 1.1 projects.

I created an RTF version and an HTML version of the content as well.

A general theory of design

“Design consists of creating things for clients who may not know what they want, until they see what you’ve done, then they know exactly what they want, but it’s not what you did.” – Brian Sooy Read Mr. Sooy’s entire blog post.  I’m not a designer, but having spent most of the past 10 years working with them to build database-driven websites and applications, I definitely agree with him.  My most recent project (an extranet for the nation’s AMBER Alert coordinators) didn’t launch until 6 months after its originally scheduled launch date in large part because of the client’s uncertainty over what they wanted.

Community Server 2.0 Patching

Telligent sent out an e-mail last Friday afternoon about a critical security patch. These were the patch instructions:

Directions for installing the patch:
These are the contents of the readme.txt file:
Steps for installing the Community Server 2.0 SP1 Patch.

1. Make a copy of the CommunityServer.Components.dll found in the bin folder of your web site. 2. Replace the existing CommunityServer.Components.dll with the new one you just downloaded and unzipped.

If you have questions or problems, please email support@telligent.com

We have also included the updated source files. If you have modified any of the code in the Community Server Components project you will need to apply these fixes and redeploy your assemblies.

I wish the readme file had said exactly where the updated source files go. I don't like the idea of having to hunt around files to replace when the patch has to do with security. So here's what the readme file should include:
ComponentsHttpModuleCSHttpModule.cs

ComponentsComponentsHtmlScrubber.cs

ComponentsComponentsTransforms.cs

Telligent has an announcements blog with a post about this security patch.

Paging in Microsoft SQL Server stored procedures

Today I found out that an old boss of mine at Ciena Corporation has a blog (thanks to Plaxo).   I learned a lot about  ASP.NET, C#, and Plumtree through the work he assigned to me.  From looking at the posts he’s got in there so far, if you’re looking to overclock a PC or find out more about Vista, it’s worth checking out. An older post of his has a good example of how to implement paging in a SQL Server stored procedure.

IntelliSense for SQL Query Analyzer

Red Gate Software is giving away a tool called SQL Prompt until September 1, 2006.  If you work with SQL Server at all, definitely visit Red Gate and grab this.

Amazon "1-Click" Patent Challenge

According to this article, Amazon’s patent is being reviewed because it looks like the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office granted a similar one 18 months before Amazon’s filing.  It will be interesting to see what fallout there would be from a decision invalidating Amazon’s patent.

That aside, this brief story does a nice job of pointing out how profoundly broken the patent system is.  The prior patent wasn’t found by a USPTO employee, but an actor from New Zealand who was angry about a slow book delivery and wanted to get back at Amazon.  If Amazon hadn’t made one of their customers upset, who knows if this would have ever been found.  The patent review will probably revisit these requirements:

  • is 1-click new
  • is 1-click useful
  • is 1-click nonobvious
At the time Amazon got the patent, I felt it clearly failed the nonobvious requirement.  The existence of an 18-month-old patent on the same idea only confirms that.

Stored Procedures vs. Ad-hoc SQL

I saw this insightful article on the subject in a “most popular articles” list. The author, Douglas Reilly, acknowledges at the beginning of the article that he uses stored procedures virtually all the time, but still does a great job of describing the pros and cons of each approach.

The most useful thing the article taught me was that as of version 7, SQL Server keeps execution plans for all statements, not just stored procedures. This reduces the advantage of stored procedures for basic CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations substantially. I’ve certainly touted the superior performance argument in comparing stored procedures to ad-hoc SQL before, so I’m glad I learned the real deal now. That said, I still hold a bias in favor of stored procedures. Once upon a time, I worked for Sybase Professional Services as a DBA, and they were definitely pro-stored procedure. Nearly every shop I’ve worked in since then has been similarly inclined. Anytime an employer has used ad-hoc SQL, it’s been absolute murder to maintain. In my experience, the maintenance advantage of stored procedures over ad-hoc SQL is substantial, not slight (as Reilly concludes).

One issue the article doesn’t bring up that might be interesting is source code control for stored procedures and other database elements (views, user-defined functions, etc). While SQL Server does have backup and restore, it’s not nearly as granular or convenient as the check-in/check-out model of today’s source code control systems. On my projects, I tend to generate a script with just the stored procedures in it and store that in SourceSafe. I’d certainly like a better solution, but haven’t found one yet. I’m curious to see what SQL Server 2005 is like, since it will allow you to write stored procedures in C# or VB.NET.

Apple's business model beating Microsoft's

So says Walt Mossberg, the man with the job I envy most in technology.

I agree with what he says for the most part on the advantages of the end-to-end model versus the component model. One thing I would say that’s slightly different is that Apple is winning not merely because of the tight linkages, but because of the quality of the end product, and their huge market share.

Having lost what Mossberg describes as “the first war” in the personal computing space, Apple took a look at the MP3 player market and delivered a product significantly ahead of the competition in quality and ease of use. Even when connected to a PC (as I did with my first iPod), using MusicMatch for the music software, I liked the experience better than other players I’d considered. Once iTunes came to the PC, it made things even easier.

Part of what helped Apple get its current marketshare in the digital music market is their refusal to inflict the subscription model on their customers. They understood that people want to own music instead of renting it and delivered just that. Between that, their great per-track price point, and the minimum necessary DRM, there are plenty of reasons to choose Apple over the competition.

Removing time from a datetime field in SQL

I’ve got a small project at work that required me to use the date, but not the time in a datetime field for retrieval of certain rows from a table in SQL Server 2000. A bit of Googling revealed a document titled “Remove seconds from datetime SQL”. The title isn’t quite right, as the author’s query removes hours and minutes too, but the result turned out to be just what I wanted.

The query: SELECT Cast(Convert(varchar, GetDate(),105) as datetime) I ended up using code 101 instead of 105 to get my query working, but that was it.

ASP.NET Configuration File Handling

One of things I like the least about working with multiple development, QA, and production environments is messing around with configuration files to make sure the different versions point at the right databases.  Add the use of the Enterprise Library, and there are even more files to manage.

In my last year at Ciena, I worked in a group where they’d put together some code that detected what environment it was in (development, QA, or production) and retrieved the correct settings from web.config.  It was similar to the solution Mike Gunderloy describes in this article on ASP.NET 2.0 productivity.

When I was poking around for more information on config file handling, I came across another article that references Gunderloy’s that talks about a file attribute for the appSettings tag.  I hadn’t come across the existence of that attribute anywhere else before.  I’ll definitely use this on my next project.

Finally, this article provides another option for dealing with configuration files in multiple environments.  The code and examples are well-explained.  My group at Lockheed Martin should integrate something like this into the custom library we’ve been building.

Downside of Certification

According to this eWeek article pay premiums for skills that don’t have a certification grew three times faster than pay premiums for certified skills.

I never really bothered with certifications for any of my skills because I was usually too busy working to set aside the time to study for and pass the exams.  I was more motivated to do that for things like grad school.  I always felt that experience was more valuable than a certification, but the counter-argument of “if you have the experience, certification should be no problem” is still a reasonable one.

Still, I hope the pay premium changes mean employers are choosing experience in favor of those who’ve passed an exam but have little or no hands-on experience.

Amazon.com and A9.com switch to Microsoft Search

I hadn’t noticed this until yesterday, but Google is no longer the guts of A9 & Amazon search. According to this article, A9’s contract with Google expired and they decided to go with Microsoft for the replacement.

I tried “v for vendetta” as a search in both A9.com and Google to see how the results differed (if at all). In my case, the top 6 links from A9 were to the V for Vendetta website by Warner Brothers (hits 1-2), its IMDB entry (hits 3-4), its Wikipedia entry, and its Rotten Tomatoes review. Google gave me the same hits, in almost the same order. The only difference was that the top result returned showtimes for the movie close to my zip code. A9 actually provides that info too, you just have to check the “Movies” option.

It looks like Microsoft’s search has actually improved somewhat since I last tried it. I’ll be curious to see what moves Google and Yahoo make to try and stay top two in market share.

Update:

When I talked to my friend Sandro about the switch and told him what search term I used, he suggested I use a tougher search term to test the relevance of lower-level results. We compared the results of searching for his name “Sandro Fouche” between Google and Live.com. With Google, I had to go to the 50th result to find the first irrelevant result. With Live.com, I got an irrelevant result as early as the 10th result.

Mac OS X gets its first virus

According to this article in MIT Technology Review, the Apple operating system got it’s very first virus this year.  I suppose the “virus-free” label wasn’t going to last forever, but we should still be extremely impressed that it took about five years for a serious vulnerability to be found.

Even with the latest vulnerability announced, I’ve still found the Mac mini I bought last year to be incredibly stable and easy to use when compared to any of the Windows machines I currently use.  The only fallout from this announcement I see is that anti-virus software makers will be able to sell more to Mac users.

.NET Social Security Number Validation

Writing code for work on a Sunday is certainly not my idea of a good time. Especially when our approaching deadline is inspiring panic and all manner of apocalyptic pronouncements about bits of code that aren’t working.

The latest panic compelled me to do a bit of research (i.e. Googling) to find out what constituted a valid Social Security number. Google kindly coughed up this Wikipedia entry. A quick scan through the article yielded this page from the Social Security Administration. Titled Social Security Number Allocations, it lists the valid code ranges for all 50 states, DC, and U.S. territories.

The regular expression you get from Microsoft’s web user control for SSN validation is relatively simple: d{3}-d{2}-d{4}. One of the developers changed things to use this: ^(?!000)([0-6]d{2}|7([0-6]d|7[012]))([ -]?)(?!00)dd3(?!0000)d{4}$

Sure, it’s gold plating. But it works. It would be more trouble to take out than it was worth anyway.

Ether Beta Test

Awhile back, I read a blog entry (probably from Robert Scoble) about a venture called Ether. If memory serves about how he described their goal, they’re trying to be the eBay of services. I figured I’d sign up and see if they’d add me to their beta test list. Today I got their e-mail saying I’d been added.

Here’s the business card I generated after signing up:

Scott Lawrence (IT Advisor)
1-888-MY-ETHER ext. 01568799
A lot of family and friends call me for advice on computer-related things. It seems to come with the territory when you've got a degree in computer science. If I make a little pocket change from this during the beta test, I'll consider the experiment a success.

I’ll post more as the beta test proceeds.