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...

  I stumbled across this fix via a web search in the Live Messenger Blog about a different error code. It worked for me on Windows Vista. 1.) Close Messenger. Go into Task Manager and ensure that the “msnmsgr.exe” process is not there. If it is, kill the process. 2.) Navigate to C:\Users\<YourUserName>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live Contacts and delete the entire contents of the folder. 3.) Restart Windows Live Messenger. Voila! There is another issue I found where the standalone installer for Messenger fails with a message like “could not open key…”. One fix for this is to navigate to the C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Messenger folder and DELETE the msnmsgr.exe executable if it is there. ReallyReallyDumb Exception Messages Department   I think it was Donn Felker who first tweeted about this, but I didn’t believe it until I got one myself:   Go Figure!

Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's St. Matthew's Passion on a ukulele.   - Bagdikian's Observation This is an issue I've come up against enough times to feel the need to gripe about it. You get the Windows Live installer to install the "new" Windows Live family of products (Messenger, Live Writer, Mail, Photo Gallery, etc.) and it fails. That's after you wait for everything to download (because the web installer is just a wrapper over what it downloads after you select which programs you want). So then you use the "Try Again" button which downloads a 135 MB WLSETUP_ALL.EXE installer. Boy, I sure hope you’ve got a high speed connection. So you run that and once again, after you've waited for it to go all the way through to the end, only then does it proceed to "roll back" everything - which takes almost as long as the supposed installation did! Now you’ve gone thro...

“Artificial Intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.” -- Unknown ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate 2 is out; it has no major identifiable changes in  features or in Visual Studio 2008 tooling from RC1.  That’s a good thing – it means it’s pretty much “baked”. There are changes to the installer in that it doesn't ship the System.Web.Routing.dll and System.Web.Abstractions.dll assemblies now since they are a part of  .NET 3.5 SP1. Consequently, set-up requires  .NET 3.5 SP1 to be installed. There is also a "server-only" install mode to install the MVC Framework. This is useful for hosted installations which install the MVC Framework on servers that do not have Visual Studio 2008 installed. There are also some deployment techniques that do not require the MVC assemblies in the GAC, making it easier to deploy an MVC application to a remote machine. Phil Haack has a good post on the release . You can download the installer here . Be sure to uninstall...

Some interesting observations I read recently from a Flash blogger: Flash was not intended for RIA applications. ActionScript was created for animated vector graphics; queuing messages on a single thread. It was hijacked to support Flex with complex content; but the threading model didn’t change. But Silverlight was built from the start for fully fledged applications. I’m looking forward to the MVP Summit and MIX to see what’s coming in Silverlight 3. Currently, I’m developing real – world application with Silverlight. I’m putting together pieces and utility classes that I expect to be able to use going forward. For me, the clear winner is having a feature – complete subset of the .NET Framework to code with, being able to share my creations in both Silverlight and the full .NET Framework, and not having to deal with the intricacies of the ActionScript learning curve to get what I want. I’ve been coding C# since 2001 and at this late stage of the game I feel prett...