Rick Strahl's Web Log

Weblog Posts in April 2007

Adobe Flex to go Open Source
April 30, 2007 @ 12:06 pm

Apparently Microsoft's entry into the RIA space with Silverlight is spurring Adobe to keep its lead in this space by going open source with Adobe Flex. For those of you that don't know, Flex is a pretty good Flash hosted application framework that is squarely geared at the application development...

14 comments

How many ways to do a String Replace?
April 30, 2007 @ 1:58 am

You ever pull this stunt? You're in the middle of working and you realize that you need a string function. .NET makes string manipulation fairly easy but it can often be frustrating to find just the right function. The issue is that .NET string functions are scattered over several different objects....

15 comments

Blocking IIS IP Addresses with ASP.NET
April 28, 2007 @ 7:37 pm

Over the last few months I've had increasing SPAM traffic coming to my site, usually from a few select IP address groups. Most of this site spamming crap that I actually catch tries to simply POST to every possible URL on the site apparently that contains a FORM tag, spewing forth a plethora of...

18 comments

A Setup Dialog you don't want to see
April 24, 2007 @ 3:01 am

Here's what greeted me today after attempting to install Orcas Beta 1 on my machine: <sigh> I was expecting this to happen. Most likely the issue here is that I had the preview release installed on this box as well and there are likely some left over items that are causing the...

7 comments

Great WPF Book
April 22, 2007 @ 12:50 pm

As I've mentioned off and on I've been boning up on WPF for about a month now. I'd though I'd pass on my thoughs on the book I've enjoyed reading and working through: Windows Presentation Foundation Unleashed (WPF) (Unleashed)by Adam Nathanpublished Dec. 2006Read more... This book rocks -...

4 comments

Overthinking AutoResetEvent in an HttpHandler
April 20, 2007 @ 5:32 am

I'm an idiot! I spend almost the entire screwing around with some multi-threading code that was locking up on occasion. As everyone knows debugging multi-threaded code - running inside of ASP.NET no less - is no trivial matter to work with and debug. So I'm rebuilding the Web Connection ISAPI...

4 comments

DoubleSpeak and Alternate Reality
April 19, 2007 @ 9:53 pm

From Reuters: Bush told an Ohio audience a premature U.S. withdrawal from Iraq could lead to chaos and death Eh, what exactly does the man call what's going on there now? Peace and happiness in the pursuit of the American, s'cuse me, Iraqian Dream? As a country Americans deserve everything we get...

13 comments

C# HRESULT comparison
April 18, 2007 @ 10:31 pm

I just had a little brain freeze dealing with HRESULT error from a COMException. When dealing with COM objects you still need to deal with the unfortunate COM idiosyncrasies like HRESULT values which get returned from just about every COM call. COMException exposes this HRESULT as an int value. Now...

5 comments

WebRequest and SSL Connection Problems
April 17, 2007 @ 1:16 am

Ever run into a problem with WebRequest or a Web Service Proxy on an SSL request where the first request works just fine but the second one fails? Run again and it works again and then fails again? It's a common problem that occurs when the Keep-Alives aren't handled the way the client requests on the server.

4 comments

Beyond HTML: Rich Internet Applications
April 15, 2007 @ 4:58 am

Rich Internet Applications (RIA) is a term used to describe non HTML based, low impact Internet applications. RIA’s typically run in the browser (although they don’t have to) and get their data from the Web server over HTTP. One of the big selling points of RIA’s is that they provide many of the...

21 comments

HttpWebRequest and Ignoring SSL Certificate Errors
April 12, 2007 @ 5:14 am

Man I can't believe this. I'm still mucking around with OFX servers and it drives me absolutely crazy how some these servers are just so unbelievably misconfigured. I've recently hit three different 3 major brokerages which fail HTTP validation with bad or corrupt certificates at least according to...

10 comments

Cleaning up a Win32 Application to work under Vista
April 11, 2007 @ 7:13 pm

So for the last few days I've been going through the final steps of updating Help Builder to properly run under Windows Vista without any file permissions, registry or other sort of elevation requirements. In theory the application should run fine after installation without any sort of crutch like...

8 comments

Help Builder 4.40 Preview Update Posted
April 09, 2007 @ 6:18 am

I've posted a preview update of Help Builder 4.40 for existing customers of Help Builder (or those trying the demo). I typically don't do this sort of thing for Help Builder, however, this update has a number of fairly major internal re-organizations that deal with Vista compatibility as well as a...

2 comments

Generics in CodeDom vs. Generics with Reflection
April 06, 2007 @ 2:46 pm

In Help Builder's documentation imports from .NET code I have to manage two sets of interfaces: One that imports data using Reflection which is the more thourough mechanism that goes out, parses types and pulls in XML documentation. Getting Generics to work right in that code took a while to get...

2 comments

Dynamically hooking up HttpModules
April 06, 2007 @ 1:09 am

Ran into an interesting question on the ASP.NET newsgroup today regarding a problem I've run into a few times myself. The issue revolves around virtual directory folder inheritance and web.config settings getting inherited from a root Web site. Anyway - one issue that has come up a few times is...

4 comments

Expression Web and Blend scheduled for MSDN
April 04, 2007 @ 3:55 pm

Since I was one of the people bitching about Microsoft not releasing Expression Web a while back I am glad to see that Microsoft has decided to now offer these product on MSDN. Kudos for listening to the community on this issue. I've been using Expression Web for quite a while for my non coding...

2 comments

A dynamic class loading HttpHandlerFactory
April 02, 2007 @ 3:13 pm

Here are a couple of examples of how you can route custom script map extensions to your custom HttpHandlers.

4 comments