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Showing posts from December, 2004

Holiday Greetings:

I recently received the below Holiday Greeting from a compatriot, and decided to post it. No explanation should be needed: Dear XXX: With the holidays fast approaching and EULAs pretty much a fact of life, please accept -- with no obligation, implied or implicit, on behalf of the wisher or wishee -- my best wishes for an environmentally-conscious, socially-responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice, practiced within the traditions and/or within the religious or secular belief(s) of your choice and with respect for the traditions and/or religious or secular beliefs of others or for their choice to not practice traditions and/or religious or secular beliefs at all; and for a fiscally-successful, personally-fulfilling, medically-uncomplicated recognition of the onset of what is generally accepted as the new Gregorian calendar year, but with due respect for calendars of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America gre

ASP.NET v1.1 Member Management Component Prototype

Checkitout: http://www.asp.net/MemberRoles/memberroles.htm

Server 2003 SP1 Release Candidate available NOW!

Here it is! http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ae20c29d-5c71-49ce-9091-3aedc9e5979f&DisplayLang=en

Need to Get A HEAD?

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This nice little piece was recently posted by David Kline on his blog: Have you ever wanted to know what type of file was being pointed to by a given url before clicking the link?  Maybe you are writing an application that needs to filter out certain types of links.  A web crawler is a good example of an application which needs to do such link filtering (skip links to graphics, audio, zip files, etc). In order to check the type of data pointed to by a url, you are going to need to issue a request to the server.  Normally, this involves receiving the entire page or file at that location.  This can be a time consuming proposition, especially over slow network connections, and defeats the purpose of allowing your application to filter out undesired links. The solution is to issue a request to the server, asking only for the HTTP headers.  This "HEAD" request is small, fast (does not transfer file contents) and provides you with exactly the data your application needs.  While

Web Services Enhancements 2.0 SP2 (WSE 2.0 SP2) Released today

This release fixes some top customer issues and provide a new security token, KerberosToken2, which supports impersonation, windows constrained delegation.  The new token also works well with the web farm scenario. Download WSE2 SP2 from http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices/building/wse/default.aspx

IsNumeric in C#? Not!

Recently we had another "go around" at the office regarding IsNumeric in C#. We had a forum discussion on this at eggheadcafe.com some time ago, I suggested to use the Microsoft.VisualBasic.Information.IsNumeric method, which can certainly be called from C# or any other .NET language. Two other developers, both of whom I highly respect, have gone quite a bit deeper into this; J. Ambrose Little here and Justin Rogers here . Only Rogers actually made reference to the fact that the VisualBasic method does a significant amount of type-checking under the hood; type-checking that was not included in either of their test suites. The bottom line is this: If I put "$1,079.51" into Ambrose's VisualBasic method, it returns true, because that string, indeed, "IS" numeric. Other methods tried will either incorrectly return false, or will actually hang and not return at all. According to the Microsoft definition of "Numeric", depending on the CultureInfo,