jostein.kjønigsen.net

Stories tagged with stuff you want.

Database logging: A tiny experiment with IIS7-extensibility

Having recently upgraded to Windows Server 2008 to be able to fool around with IIS7, my main argument was the improved extensibility and ability to inject .NET-code into the IIS-pipeline. Today I gave it a try.

Objective? Get IIS7 to log all requests to a database of my choice. While the regular log-files can provide all the info I need, searching them manually for specific information is just hopeless. Setting up a SSIS-job to import the logs would probably also work, but it would involve external agents polling information, not IIS pushing it.

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Pitfalls when programming MOSS 2007

Programming MOSS can be painful and tedious. It really can.

I'm not talking about the feature-files, element-files or all those other manifest-files you need to make and maintain. I'm not talking about the endless directory-structures which you have to set up exactly correct.

I am talking about the pitfalls when working with Sharepoint programatically.

CAML-queries

We have CAML and God knows writing CAML makes one long for any other way to process data, including using VBScript to iterate multi-dimensional arrays.

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MSDN and accessability

Being a MCT pretty much involves staying up to date. Depending on how much stuff you otherwise have to do at work, this can easily turn into a big pile of TODO which because of dependencies and hiarchy just snow-balls itself into a huge mess.

Given Microsoft's release of Windows Vista with .NET 3.0 and all that involves, the upcoming release of .NET 3.0 with actual 3.0 languages (.NET 3.5), a flourishing set of Visual Studio and SQL Server add-ons, AJAX components and other handy libraries, you can pretty much say my snowball has been heading towards avalanche-dimensions.

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Today I singlehandedly made James Brown spin in his grave

Right. True Story.

I was discussing some server-side aspects of designing web-pages with some guy. He evidently wanted to add and change a few things on one of his sites, and naturally I came up with a two-statement SQL-fix.

Unaffected by my wisdom, the guy really didn't seem to listen, so on the fly I paraphrased James Brown's Sex machine, in full caps, to get the point across.

GOTTA HAVE THE SQL
SUGAR YOUR BONE
GET IT TOGETHER
RIGHT ON, RIGHT ON

The guy still didn't seem to listen, but that is sort-of besides the point.

Checking out Lightbox 2.0

Recently I've rewritten more or less the entire code-base for one of my other sites. In the end I decided to switch to a much more simplified data-model, and this made the code a lot easier to work with. That, combined with a major increase in traffic lately, have given me much incentive to fool around and improve on the site itself.

So after checking out the HOWTOs and such, I decided I should try Lightbox out.

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The Windows Vista licensing: A code perspective

Recently there's been lots of bad noise about how Microsoft has decided to license Windows Vista. Most of the complaints that has been adressed so far has been from a user's point- of view and how the new licensing is unnecessarily restrictive. Considering how most of this is self-evident, I'm not going to dive deeper into that.

Instead, I will be looking at this question from a code-perspective and how this probably will affect the actual codebase of Windows Vista itself and why I think Microsoft has made a really bad decision.

A little about me

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Simple C# RSS-publishing library

Having posted nothing useful in a while I decided I might as well publish my simple RSS-components library. Basicly it implements what's needed to publish a RSS-feed on a website. A valid RSS-feed, as opposed to lots of the other feeds out there.

Usage is simple:

  • Instanciate a RssFeed object with your own site-specific data.
  • Instanciate a RssItem object with specific post-data and add to the Items collection of the RssFeed object. Repeat as needed.
  • Return the output from the ToString() method on the RssFeed class to the client.
  • Done.

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Cleaning up some filthy code

Yesterday I installed Microsoft Visual Sourcesafe 2005 just so I could organize my code a little better. It may be the crappiest, most primitive sourcecontrol you can find on this planet, but it does work neatly with Visual Studio. Plus I don't need all that fancy functionality for my needs.

So far my code has been all over the place, and I hoenstly don't know where the code for all my projects happen to be. So after installing Visual Sourcesafe, I went trough my code and built up a solid set of strictly seperated, 100% reusable libraries.

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C# 3.0

Unless you are working with the .NET Framwork and C# development, that headline probably makes no sense to you, and you should just avoid further reading right away.

If you however happen to be a C# developer, the new language features of C# 3.0, might be of interest to you. Currently there are numerous extensions to the current version of the language.

I'm not 100% happy about every single one of these changes, but the worst case scenario is that I simply choose to ignore them, and don't employ them in my code.

Anyway, developer.com has a lengthy article about the new features of C# 3.0 and practical examples of what the code will look like. A interesting read.

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Microsoft .NET and that damn security

With the introduction of .NET 2.0 Microsoft introduced quite a few neat security related features, giving you the ability to micromanage security at code- & assembly-level using something called Code Access Security.

In short it allows you to restrict the access the code is given to the system, independent of how priviledged the actual user running the code is.

It also allows to define what rights can be granted based on the origin of the code. Now this makes sense. Random code run directly from the Internet can make sense, as long as access is severely restricted, while applications installed and run locally probably will need more access and can be trusted access to more parts of the system.

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Thanks to

Various reasons

Misc stuff