Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

The incompetent with nothing to do can still make a mess of it.    - Laurence J. Peter Well this one is a hoot. Enabled HTTP compression in IIS 6.0, and suddenly Classic ASP pages (yes, we still have a few) that required Integrated Authentication just wouldn’t work. With Anonymous Authentication unchecked, and Integrated checked, and ACL’s on the folder permitting only Adminstrators, you would get a Windows Login prompt as expected but when you would provide credentials, it never went through. As luck would have it, we duplicated the pages on another site where compression was turned off, and those worked fine. On a hunch, I disabled compression on the includes folder, and that fixed it! Seems for some reason that Classic ASP include files don’t like HTTP compression at all. And a thanks to Rick Strahl for reminding me that you need HTTP KeepAlives turned on to use Windows Auth with classic ASP. Compression will reduce our bandwidth to around 25% of what it has be...

I’ve noticed this new “Groups” thing in the latest version of Windows Live Messenger, and it seems that the kind folks at Microsoft have really  started to “get it” about what “Social” is. If you enable the “What’s new” display at the bottom of the Live Messenger window, you will see people in your “group” (that you have started) who have joined other people’s networks. If you click on the links, you can view information about that user and their network, and you can invite them to join (or, ask to join).  It’s not that intuitive at first, but if you play around with it using people that you know, you’ll start seeing new Contacts in your contacts list – most likely people you didn’t know were using Messenger, and / or you probably never thought to invite. I’ve already made a few new friends with this – people I always wanted to be able to have on Messenger, but I either never thought of it, or I didn’t know how to invite them. When “Groups” first was started, I started a...

“Being an expert means having credibility. It doesn’t matter how much you know if people don’t trust your answers.” – Brent Ozar Silverlight 3 was first announced at the IBC 2008 show in Amsterdam on September 12, 2008. It was unveiled at MIX09 in Las Vegas on March 18, 2009. A beta version was made available for download the same day. Silverlight 3 includes an increased number of controls - including but not limited to DataGrid , TreeView , various layout panels, DataForm for forms-driven applications and DataPager for viewing paginated data . Some of these controls are from the Silverlight Toolkit . In addition, Silverlight 3 includes a navigation framework to let Silverlight applications use the hyperlinked navigation model as well as enabling deep-linking (linking directly to specific pages) within Silverlight applications. On the media front, Silverlight 3 supports AAC audio decoding as well as hardware-accelerated H.264 video decoding . The native multimedia pipeline i...

I walked into the office this morning and was called “downstairs”. The official line was “Due to the economic downturn, blah blah”… You get the idea. I know better. I was working on a project that was grossly underbid as a fixed-price deal by a company - designated  “architect”  -- which consequently forced a few of us  developers into an impossible position, under extreme time pressure, on a new technology that nobody in the office had ever used before. The schedule was virtually impossible to meet. Anyone with an above room temperature IQ could easily see this, and I had been vocal about it from the beginning, so what happened to me was no surprise.  Management was in a state of denial.  One developer who was brought on decided to quit in the very beginning. Then, they scrambled to bring on two other developers from another office and another project.  The client was not very helpful, although they could not be blamed, really. This particular  proje...

You talk to God, you're religious. God talks to you, you're psychotic.   - Doris Egan Catchy title, eh? I’m asking it because I think it’s a legitimate question. I’ve been working with ASP.NET MVC for a couple of reasons: 1) Peer pressure: Developers who I know and respect have been telling me its “very cool” and beats “classic” ASP.NET WebForms by a mile. Some of these people are pretty smart. Some of them are a lot smarter than I am. 2) I have no choice. The current project I’m working on for my “day job” uses ASP.NET MVC along with other “very cool” things like StructureMap, Castle.Validator and a few other alt.net type goodies. (Side note: alt.net may not be so cool . I tried to sign in at their site with my OpenID and it wouldn’t accept it. I got some bullshit about not having a valid email address… Folks, that’s the FIRST TIME I’ve ever been denied an OpenID login!) Correction: a commenter below  correctly stated that I needed to enable my email on my OpenId profil...

Don't you wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence? There's one marked 'Brightness,' but it doesn't work.   - Gallagher Wisdom. The “Wisdom of the Ages” -- wisdom  is an ideal that has been celebrated since antiquity as the knowledge needed to live a good life. What this means exactly depends on the various wisdom schools and traditions claiming to help foster wisdom. In general, these schools have emphasized various combinations of the following: knowledge, understanding, experience, discretion, and intuitive understanding, along with a capacity to apply these qualities well towards finding solutions to problems. These concepts, as one might guess,  apply equally  well to software developers. For a software developer, however,  wisdom is a much narrower concept that comes from learning from one’s mistakes, from studying what others have done, from learning accepted and proven patterns of good software design. And above all, from being wil...