There are many, many examples of Stripe integration on the web, including videos. Here's the problem with every single other example: they HARD CODE values for processing payments. 😩

So, I will walk through my server side implementation of a Stripe Checkout session using ASP.NET Core Minimal API. This approach leverages the simplicity and performance of minimal APIs while integrating with the Stripe.NET nuget package for payment processing. I'll cover setting up the project, configuring CORS, and implementing the Stripe Checkout session.

TL;DR: The secret sauce is model binding in the API call, you must build up the dynamic cart contents from your front end. I have implemented front ends in both Vue.js and simple vanilla JavaScript with html. I will leave that part up to you, dear reader.

Prerequisites ​

• dotnet 8 SDK or later
• Stripe account with API keys
• Front-end application

Setting up the project ​

Create a new ASP.NET Core Minimal API project using the following command:

dotnet new web -n StripeCheckoutSession
cd StripeCheckoutSession

Add the Stripe.NET NuGet package to the project:

dotnet add package Stripe.net

Configure local.settings.json ​

Create a local.settings.json file in the root of your project to store your Stripe API key:

{
  "Stripe": {
    "SecretKey": "sk_test_51"
  }
}

Implementing the Stripe Checkout session ​

Add the following code to the Program.cs file:

using Stripe;
using Stripe.Checkout;

var builder = WebApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

// Add CORS services to the DI container.
builder.Services.AddCors(options =>
{
  options.AddPolicy("AllowSpecificOrigin", builder =>
  {
    builder.WithOrigins("http://localhost:4000", "http://127.0.0.1:4000", "https://yourfrontend.com")
      .AllowAnyHeader()
      .AllowAnyMethod();
  });
});

// Add Application Insights telemetry
builder.Services.AddApplicationInsightsTelemetry();

var app = builder.Build();

app.UseCors("AllowSpecificOrigin");

StripeConfiguration.ApiKey = builder.Configuration["StripeApiKey"];

app.MapPost("/api/CreateCheckoutSession", async (List<SessionLineItemOptions> lineItems) =>
{
    var options = new SessionCreateOptions
    {
        PaymentMethodTypes = new List<string>
        {
            "cashapp",
            "card",
        },
        LineItems = lineItems,
        Mode = "payment",
        SuccessUrl = "https://example.com/success",
        CancelUrl = "https://example.com/cancel",
    };

    var service = new SessionService();
    Session session = await service.CreateAsync(options);

    return Results.Ok(session);
});

app.Run();

The key here is the MapPost method, which accepts a list of SessionLineItemOptions as a parameter. This allows you to pass dynamically sized cart contents from the front end to the API. (not just a single T-shirt) ​

Front-end implementation test ​

Pop this into a .http file in Visual Studio Code and run it with the REST Client extension:

### Create Checkout Session
POST https://localhost:8080/api/CreateCheckoutSession
Content-Type: application/json

[
  {
    "Price": "price_1ofMany",
    "Quantity": 1
  }
]

You can specify lots of other properties if you would like to get more specific, but building items in the dashboard handles a lot of this for you. The above is the minimal implementation to get you started. It will work for that T-shirt if you set it up correctly in the Stripe dashboard. Building the front-end will likely change every two weeks anyways (at least it often feels that way).

Explanation ​

• CORS Configuration: We configure CORS to allow requests from specific origins. This is crucial for enabling cross-origin requests from your frontend application.
• Stripe Configuration: We set the Stripe API key from the configuration file.
• Stripe Checkout Session: We define an endpoint /api/CreateCheckoutSession that accepts a list of SessionLineItemOptions. This endpoint creates a Stripe Checkout session and returns the session details.
• REST Client Test: We test the endpoint using a REST client to create a checkout session with a single item. This could be expanded to handle multiple items with different quantities in a cart.

Conclusion ​

In this article, we implemented a Stripe Checkout session in an ASP.NET Core Minimal API project. We configured CORS, set up the Stripe API key, created a Stripe Checkout session endpoint, and end to end tested using a simple REST Client Test. This approach allows you to build a dynamic cart on the front end and pass the cart contents to the API for processing payments. I hope this helps you integrate Stripe Checkout in your ASP.NET Core Minimal API project. Happy coding! 🚀

I mean really, everything is light and possibility before it's observed. That's why you should have written your tests first. But I digress.

I wrote this silly dad joke to test out the new post script. I'm happy to report that it works as expected. The dad jokes will continue until morale improves.

const
  light = 'attracts bugs',
  dark = 'repels bugs',
  mode = 'dark';

I recently deployed a Single Page Application (SPA) to GitHub Pages. Everything was working great until I tried to refresh the page. When I did that, I got a 404 error. This is because GitHub Pages doesn't support SPA routing out of the box. This is how I fixed it.

I simply added an echo statement to the command that builds the SPA for those of us who like to see what's going on during the build process. ​

The meat of the addition is the cp command, but there's no visual feedback that it's working. I added the echo statement to let me know that the cp command is running.

"build": "vue-tsc --noEmit && vite build --mode production && echo 'copying index.html to 404.html in ./dist' && cp ./dist/index.html ./dist/404.html",

This is the command that builds my SPA using Vite. The cp command copies the index.html file to 404.html. This way, when a 404 error occurs, the SPA will still load.

This was a difficult one to figure out. I hope this helps someone else.

So, most of the install instructions are correct, but there are a few extra steps I had to figure out. I will go through the steps to install Discourse on Mac OS.

Prerequisites ​

You need to have the following installed:

• Homebrew
• Redis
• PostgreSQL
• Ruby
• Bundler
• Node.js
• Yarn
• Mailhog
• Sidekiq
• ImageMagick

This last one is not mentioned in the install instructions, but it is required. When running the ember app, it will fail if ImageMagick is not installed.

brew install imagemagick

Install Discourse ​

1. Clone the Discourse repository
2. Install the dependencies
3. Create the database
4. Start the server

For number 4, I have added a dev script that uses concurrently to run both the rails server and the ember server. This is not required, but it is convenient.

# package.json
"scripts": {
  "dev": "concurrently \"bin/ember-cli server --environment=development\" \"RAILS_ENV=development bin/rails server\"",
  ...
}

Conclusion ​

For me, this is the way. I got Discourse running on my Mac OS, and it only took a couple of shots of espresso and some shipleys donuts. I hope this helps you get your Discourse instance up and running. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on Mastodon.

Here's the command to run the dev script:

yarn dev

I still prefer to run mailhog and sidekiq in separate terminal windows. There's just too much log noise with more than what was added to the dev script IMO.

Be it known to all ye hearty souls, scallywags, and pillow-fort enthusiasts! Whereas the sun doth rise and set upon the softest of cushions, and the moon doth cast its silvery glow upon our fleece blankets, we, the merry band of Snugglers, do hereby declare this land, this haven of coziness, as the sovereign nation of Snugland!

Article I: The Right to Cuddle ​

Every snug-loving soul shall have the inalienable right to snuggle, cuddle, and nestle within the borders of Snugland. No cold feet or chilly shoulders shall go unattended!

Article II: The Pillow Code ​

The Pillow Code shall be our sacred law. It states: “Thou shalt fluff thy pillows, plump thy cushions, and arrange thy throws with care.” Any violation of the Pillow Code shall be met with a stern look and a gentle reminder to maintain fluffiness.

Article III: The Fuzzy Border Dispute ​

Our borders shall be marked by a fuzzy line of marshmallow clouds and feathered quilts. Any attempt to cross said border without proper snuggle credentials shall be met with a tickle fight.

Article IV: The Snuggle Tax ​

All citizens of Snugland shall pay their dues in marshmallows, hot cocoa, and bedtime stories. Failure to comply shall result in banishment to the Land of Uncomfortable Chairs.

Article V: The National Anthem ​

Our anthem shall be a lullaby sung by a thousand plush teddy bears. It goes like this:

🎶 Snugland, Snugland, where dreams are spun, Under the quilted moon and the fleecey sun. We wrap ourselves in warmth and glee, Forever snug, in sweet serenity. 🎶

Article VI: The Snuggle Council ​

A council of wise grandmas, fluffy kittens, and retired pirates shall govern Snugland. Their decisions shall be binding, as long as they’re made from rocking chairs.

Article VII: The Snug-o-meter ​

We shall measure our prosperity not in gold doubloons, but in snuggles per square inch. The higher the snug-o-meter reading, the happier our land. In witness whereof, we raise our mugs of cocoa, our fuzzy socks, and our hearts full of warmth. Let it be known across the seven seas: Snugland is here to stay! By the power vested in us by the Great Blanket Fort in the Sky, we hereby declare Snugland an independent micro-nation. May our nights be cozy, our mornings lazy, and our dreams as soft as freshly laundered pajamas. Long live Snugland! 🌟🛌🌙

Signed - The Dread Pirate JoJo, Queen of the Seven Snuggles Sea ​

(Original by blue_fenix with the help of copilot)

I've been looking for a way to update my skills in web development recently while searching for a new job. I've been working in the IT industry for over 20 years now, mostly in the .NET sphere. I noticed that I was turning down a few really interesting opportunities because of my lack of accomplishments with specific modern front end frameworks, including React.js and Angular. I have a few projects that I've worked on in the past that I could use to demonstrate my skills, but I wanted to do something more.

I wanted to build something from scratch, and I wanted to do it in a way that I could share with others. I also wanted to do it in a way that I could use to demonstrate my skills to potential employers.

So I decided to build a local development instance of Mastodon; a free, open-source social network. I've been using Mastodon for a few months now, and I really like it. It currently feels like 2008-2010 Twitter, when it was still fun and interesting.

And not run by Elon Musk.

It was not an easy task, but I learned a lot along the way. I'm going to share my journey with you, and hopefully you'll find it useful.

Base Environment : OS X ​

I decided to use my MacBook instead of my Windows box or the Ubuntu Linux that I installed on a Mac Mini. I might change my mind later. I'm not sure yet. This was more of a proof of concept: can I even get all of the moving parts to work together? I'm not sure if I'll actually use this instance for anything other than testing and development.

Guest Environment : VirtualBox ​

I'm using VirtualBox as the virtualization provider for Vagrant with the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS box, which is a 64-bit version of Bionic Beaver.

Host Environment : Vagrant ​

I wanted to build this on my Mac, but I also wanted to be able to easily destroy and rebuild the environment if I needed to. So I decided to use Vagrant.

Vagrant is a tool for building and managing virtual machine environments in a single workflow. It allows you to define a virtual machine configuration in a single file, and then spin up the virtual machine with a single command.

I used homebrew to install it:

    brew cask install vagrant

I then created a new directory for my project, and created a new Vagrantfile in it:

    mkdir vagrant
    cd vagrant
    vagrant init

I then edited the Vagrantfile to use the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS box:

    Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
        config.vm.box = "ubuntu/bionic64"
    end

I customized the Vagrantfile a little more using the Vagrantfile for Mastodon as a reference.

I started the virtual machine:

    vagrant up

I then SSH'd into it:

    vagrant ssh

Installing Mastodon from Source ​

I decided to install Mastodon from source, instead of using the Docker image. I wanted to learn more about the underlying technologies, and I wanted to be able to customize the installation. Also, I wanted to be able to use the latest version of Mastodon, instead of the version that was available in the Docker image. To accomplish this, I needed to install Ruby, Rails, and PostgreSQL.

I started with the Mastodon Installation Guide. It took me a few tries to get it right, but I was able to get it working in the end.

Probably the most difficult challenge was getting certbot to issue a certificate for my domain. I was able to get it working, but I had to use the --manual option, and I had to manually create the DNS records for the challenge. I'm not sure if there is a better way to do this, but it worked for me. I found a pretty decent guide at esc.sh that got me most of the way there. (see above)

webpacker woes ​

Well now I have a working Mastodon instance, but webpacker is refusing to spin up, claiming that a service is already running on the port provided in the config file. This is my first time even looking at webpacker, having most of my experience in ASP.NET MVC. So I looked at the config/webpacker.yml file, and I noticed that the port was set to 3035. I looked at the nginx config file, and I noticed that the port was set to 3000. These aren't the same ports, what gives? This is usually the part of a blog post where I would say something like "I spent hours trying to figure this out, but I finally figured it out." And I did. But I'm not going to bore you with how. This is already one of the longest blog posts I've ever written.

I tried several different approaches and ended up having to restart the webpacker service a few times. Eventually it started working. I didn't take note of what was the winning magic incantation, but after a couple of restarts I have a working mastodon instance.

Conclusion ​

I don't fully understand how all of the pieces fit together yet, but I'm getting there. I'm going to continue to work on this project, and I'll update if I come across anything interesting.

It felt good to hack on something that gave me that feeling of accomplishment that I used to get when I was a young developer. If you've read this far, you're a champ. Thanks fam.

Following this guide got me back working in ruby without the friction.

First, I created a list here with jekyll and copied that list into a DbContext class that I wanted that seed data added to. As I was typing the first model data, copilot guessed what I wanted was from the pasted list so it was a bunch of TAB/ENTER and that boilerplate code was done without me having to fill in the blanks myself.

dotnet ef migrations add SeedCategoryData

and

dotnet ef database update

picked all of this up and created the seed data in the database. This is barely scratching the surface of how this thing could be useful. That's pretty cool.

I'm trying to get jekyll to build on my MacBook, with macOS Monterey v12.6.2 and it's hanging up on racc. ​

I'm in the middle of trying to fix this on my MacBook Pro, and this answer on dicuss.rubyonrails.org that points to this advice to downgrade xcode to less than 14 looks promising. Both of these links should be boosted, here's my small contribution.

Well, it ended out being a little more in depth than this advice for me. But it did lead me to attempt to gem install racc which told me that I'm missing ruby-devel or some such package.

So I dropped down to brew install ruby-devel but the cask doesn't exist. Brew helpfully suggested brew install ruby-build which...complained about the missing xcode-select tools. Now I'm running xcode-select --install to get those command line tools back after installing xcode 13.4.1.

Xcode takes forever to install, I currently have about 9 minutes left for the command line tools.

...ok it's done, and I still can't build racc. Curses. osx used to be a great environment for hacking ruby. But I'm not getting paid for this so I guess it's back to Windows I go for now. I mean, I can post this content but I can't really preview it before I publish it on Monterey. Oh well.

PostXING.MetaWeblogProxy

It's great to start a new journey and I'm so excited for what this new job has in store for me. They trusted me from the get-go by giving me a laptop and two monitors. ngl I felt a bit nervous at first - this is my first job change for 21 years - but as soon as I got a whiteboard session and saw some of the code I will be hacking, it quickly turned to excitement.

I'm ready to get to work and show them what I'm made of. ✈️

In the process I upgraded to bootstrap 4 and the latest fontawesome. It's fun to keep my web properties up to date and it helps with potential clients in the future. Expertise > time.

I'm still working on copy, but I've relaunched bluefenix.net. It will be linked to this blog right here...I'm putting the finishing touches on my business for Computer Science consulting.

Wish me luck. ​

• ruby-dev
• gcc
• libffi-dev
• make

That got the gems building, but it kept giving me an error after build:

checking for gzdopen() in -lz... no
zlib is missing; necessary for building libxml2

well shit.

 sudo apt install zlib
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package zlib

According to this I then ran:

sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev

And boom.

- Marcus Aurelius ​

babun is a cygwin based shell with a bunch of defaults added that aren't included with the portablegit install that comes with github for windows. Some of those defaults that I wanted to include, indeed what pushed me to try babun, are zsh and oh-my-zsh. (I was tryna figure out a way to include it in the portablegit, but ran into some roadblocks, such as no autoconf)

Setting up a custom shell in g4w is pretty straightforward, just open up options... and add the following to the Custom selection for Default Shell:

C:\Users\<username>\.babun\babun.bat

That's it!

I also added powerlevel9k and zsh-syntax-highlighing, using the Inconsolata for Powerline font

I was attempting to finally add an archive page to my jekyll site here on github-pages...I got the page in place and updated all of the dependencies, including a new Ruby environment to match what's on github's servers.

After I updated, I started getting the above error. It's hard to search for. At the time that I did, there was only 1 semi-relevant post I could find. The above error didn't make a lot of sense to me because I (obviously) don't dig into this every day. It does however give a couple of clues...there is a post that is handing what looks like an Array to a variable that expects a string. And it was a post from 2010. Only one, out of the 400+ posts that are currently here. It was in my title which had to be changed from this:

title: [[deactivatedstyle]]

to this:

title: '\[deactivatedstyle\]'

Because I have changed content storage systems so many times over the years, this became a problem (along with images...gotta be real careful where those go) of front matter/ruby not treating everything after title: as an actual string, which is not a problem for the sql sproc parameters that used to hold that field.

Windows updates seem to be happening at least once a week these days. Most of the time, the updates require a reboot to finish. I just happen to be running Debian linux on the same machine, which uses grub 2 to load each OS installed on the system. The default OS loaded is the first one in the list, in my case Debian. So, if I have to reboot my Windows install and walk away from my computer, I return to a Debian login screen. Well, this was true up until now.

I started with the suggestion to edit the grub file here

However, this didn't work for me...instead of Vista as indicated in the link above, I have Windows 7 installed so the entry in grub is Windows 7 (loader) on dev/sda1 so I tried this as a replacement:

GRUB_DEFAULT="Windows 7 (loader) on dev/sda1"

(I use vi to edit files on linux:)

$ vi /etc/default/grub

After rebooting the system, without changing the grub menu position, I was presented with the Debian login screen again.

Well shit.

So I decided to use the zero-based index of the OS this time...because the default is 0, with Windows being the third entry in the grub loader, I changed the default to 2:

GRUB_DEFAULT=2

After a sudo update-grub, and another sudo reboot, without touching the grub menu, I sat back and watched as Windows was loaded by default from grub.

Success!

I had recently updated Ruby to version 2.3, which updated rake to verison 11 when I did a gem update.

Since I use albacore to build some of my projects, I need this to work. So first, I reverted Ruby back to version 2.1. Then I did a gem uninstall rake and was met with this:

$ gem uninstall rake

Select gem to uninstall:
 1. rake-10.4.2
 2. rake-11.1.2
 3. All versions
> 2
Successfully uninstalled rake-11.1.2

This was the secret to getting the above error message to clear, and get albacore working again on my windows install.

Hopefully this is fixed in the near future, but until then I thought I would share this workaround.

hth

Of course the first place I looked was StackOverflow which led me to this explanation with some ruby code:

def angle_between_points(p0, p1, p2)
  a = (p1[0]-p0[0])**2 + (p1[1]-p0[1])**2
  b = (p1[0]-p2[0])**2 + (p1[1]-p2[1])**2
  c = (p2[0]-p0[0])**2 + (p2[1]-p0[1])**2
  Math.acos( (a+b-c) / Math.sqrt(4*a*b) ) * 180/Math::PI
end

For my purposes, I simply created the three arrays and passed them to the method after a call to puts:

p0 = [2005000,992453]
p1 = [1895297,949433]
p2 = [1920079,884362]

puts angle_between_points p0, p1, p2

Now, I can adjust the numbers in the .rb file and call it at the command line:

chris@IO  ~/Documents/code
$ ruby angle_between_points.rb
90.56350243137959

it means forever and that's a mighty long time. ​

simpler is better. ​

I also added a default Rakefile from here

this makes it easier to start posts.

Next I think I will be adding an archive page.

-c

The first thing I tried was just running the installer with wine at the terminal.

chris@Callisto:~/Downloads$ wine 1Password-4.6.0.604.exe
wine: Bad EXE format for Z:\home\chris\Downloads\1Password-4.6.0.604.exe.

Well crap. what does that mean? Could the 1Password installer be 32bit, while my system is 64? Bingo. You won't find that info on the official AgileBits walkthrough.

So instead of using the terminal, I turned to PlayOnLinux, which gives more options for installation.

I don't know if this was a requirement, but I chose wine version 1.4.1 in PlayOnLinux, also the 32 bit installation. Browsed the 1Password.4.6.0.604.exe file and ran the installer like normal. It even accepted my license key.

Now I have a working 1Password installation on my Debian Linux machine ​

hth

But jekyll plays to my geek tendencies. Markdown makes authoring posts fairly easy and eliminates the need for a blog posting tool - which is how I spent a lot of my spare time about a decade ago.

I imported the WordPress content using a tool called wpXml2Jekyll. It was very straightforward, I like that. Bonus: despite being a "windows" application, it works on OS X using Mono. Simply add mono to the beginning of the command:

mono wpXml2Jekyll.exe [wordpress export file] [output directory]

I think I still have to go thru some posts for some broken images, transfer some over etc. fairly simple transition tho.

In the past, I have toyed with the idea of moving to rails, enough to get some prototype code running. I feel that the framework has matured quite a bit and it seems like a logical tool to use for rapid, maintainable web development. The last push to go ahead and put some real work into this idea has come with the most recent updates to asp.net. I really like the idea of being able to hack asp.net sites on OS X, and I will see if a transition within .net is doable or desirable in the future. For now tho, if I have to learn a whole new paradigm I might as well learn a new framework while I'm at it. Routing is one area that seems more powerful in rails - mvc routing is very similar and probably as powerful. For now, I want to see how those dirty rails hippies live.

In my quest to learn rails, I needed a dual-boot environment to run alongside windows. I chose debian linux because it seems like it has access to most of the stuff that I need. Debian's installer was pretty impressive. It has a setup.exe that runs from within windows. At first I burned the CD incorrectly (just copied the iso) but after getting that sorted debian installed, put a grub loader in the mbr, and boom I was ready to roll.

After double checking that the dual-boot installed properly, I needed a few tools.

I started with Chromium for the default browser, and then found dropbox and keepass2 and installed those for some xplat love.

• Atom editor
• git
• sudo
• rvm
• bundler

apt-get is the package manager on debian. Atom has a .deb package available for download. I got it installed with dpkg.

dpkg -i atom-amd64.deb

ah, but that didn't install all the way. Looking at the logs told me that it was missing git. okay. here is where I started to run into permission problems, so I tried running sudo only to find it not installed by default. 😦

it did have su, so I ran under su:

apt-get install sudo

now I have sudo, but I'm not listed as a sudoer. So, still under su:

visudo

and add the appropriate permissions.

now, I can install git.

sudo apt-get install git

git is there. but atom still fails to install. apt-get to the rescue again:

sudo apt-get -f install

and that solved it for me.

Next, I needed rvm so I installed it using curl (also not available by default). rvm is very helpful in its messages, so after getting everything sorted there, and restarting the terminal, I could now install and execute bundler. I had to do a couple of extra steps to get postgresql installed locally, adding myself as a user with createdb access. But it worked. In one day.

I now have windows 7, 10, OS X, and Debian linux installed and I use all of them for development. ​

I forgot.

I forgot all the hours I spent taking this blog from aspnetweblogs, to a personal instal of .Text, to an updated version of SubText, thru a few upgrades of same, on to this very Wordpress that you are reading now. I forgot abt using this blog as a test platform for my (now defunct) winforms project called postxing, meant for cross-posting blog posts that receive more traffic on a more publicized feed for geeky content.

Most importantly, I forgot that I do this for me, not for any "readers". It's easy to get caught up in what other, more read bloggers write and emulate what you think "works". Nah fuck that. This thing is for me, not you. If you get something out of it, great. If not, great. But it's not for you. It's for me.

And I remember now.

rakefile.rb:

DIR = File.dirname(__FILE__)
desc "Starts Visual Studio with the project solution."
task :vs do
 sln = "#{DIR}/src/project.sln".gsub! '/','\\'
 system( "start #{sln}" )
end

That’s it! From a cmd shell type “rake vs” and Visual Studio will start with the specified solution file.

Probably the best part of Tx Off Road Ranch is the playground. You can tell someone has been out there quite a bit to make some fun sandstone obstacles. Plus, earlier in the day it wasn't that hot. (I ended up getting so overheated that I quite literally almost passed out. So I burnt out early.)

Other than that, the park doesn't have that much to offer. They seem to have 2 trail levels there: 2 wheel drive easy and fucking impossible. It's the sandstone I think. On the only extreme trail they have there, all of the boulders look nice and stable, but try crawling up them and they shoot out from under your tires. No bueno.

After trying a couple of the harder trails we went back for lunch and bullshittin. I helped someone get their JKU back in 2H, having recently replaced my transfer case shifter cable with an Advanced Adapters cable shifter upgrade because of the same flimsy plastic clip issue they suffered. Since I'd just done the upgrade I had become quite familiar with the mechanics of how the stock system comes and why it's a dumb design. I'm sure you could get away with buying the cheap plastic clips and replacing them for a while. The second one that broke on me caused me to go ahead and get the upgrade, personally.

Right before lunch, but after we got back from the trails to the camping area, I let Ethan sorry, Chris Jr. drive the Jeep for the first time. I was fairly nervous but I didn't freak out, mainly because we would be going at very slow speeds in a vehicle that I have been building up for the past year and a half to be safe even in extreme conditions. I jacked the driver's seat up as far as it would go, pulled it really far forward and told him, "Turn the ignition, and put her in Drive."

Young Christopher did very well for his first try! Hell, he did better than a lot of people I took my driving test with so many years ago in Alief. I had to first explain very explicitly how to operate the pedals, and I guided him around the camp area for a couple of laps. He was outstanding at taking direction and focused very hard on doing exactly what I was telling him to do. He even got kudos from Brian. I appreciated that, like a lot.

Very proud dad, very hot day.

I will let them explain that. I guess the basic idea is to simplify the way git flow encourages you to organize branches.

I'm glad that I know how to install git flow and I like the structure that it enables, but simpler is better.

Every time github for windows updates, I lose git-flow. The portable git that is extracted with the install doesn't include getopt.exe, which is needed to install and use git-flow on windows.

start with the git-flow repository ​

clone the git-flow repository

when you cd to contrib and run msysgit-install.cmd from the cmd line, it says

MsysGit installation directory not found. Try to give the directory name on the command line: msysgit-install "C:\Program Files (x86)\Git"

So now you have to find the install directory and try to add that to the msysgit-install cmd line. This time, in my case it was

> msysgit-install "C:\Users\Chris\AppData\Local\GitHub\PortableGit_015aa71ef18c047ce8509ffb2f9e4bb0e3e73f13"
> Installing gitflow into "C:\Users\Chris\AppData\Local\GitHub\PortableGit_015aa71ef18c047ce8509ffb2f9e4bb0e3e73f13"...

But wait there's more! ​

Now it tells us that getopt.exe is not found. Go to the git-flow repository page for manual install instructions which pretty much outlines the same steps I'm typing right now, so...moving right along

follow the links to getopt.exe and libintl3 and copy them to your portablegit bin directory. now when you run msysgit-install with the directory parameter, git flow installs. w00t!

First, I cloned the gitflow repository (using github for windows) then opened the shell there. The readme says there is a cmd script in the contrib folder called msysgit-install.cmd so I tried to use this but the script told me it couldn’t find getopt:

boo.

Fortunately, I have the other install of msysgit on my machine so I copied getopt.exe from C:Program FilesGitbin to that fancy path in the image above, along with some supporting dlls

After doing this, running msysgit-install.cmd copied over the necessary files, and I was able to cd to a repository with only master and develop branches and run git flow init.

Next step: a feature request to the github for windows team to ask for maybe including at least getopt if not git-flow in the next release?

It inspired me. I think it's beautiful. So I made a transparency of it to cut my own stencils.

This is my first piece. I'm using Joe's art as a guideline. I think I may switch up the words a bit since my living room has no upstairs. 😃 (not pictured: it says "the people upstairs are crazy")

I hope that my reproduction honors the original work, and conveys the respect of the student to a very talented mentor. I will post more pics of my progress soon.

I managed to get git flow working with msysGit, but needed some hacks on my setup. First, I copied all the git* files to libexecgit-core. Then replaced shFlags like snaewe mentioned, but <install_dir> for me was also libexecgit-core.

Git flow complained about getopt. I got it from cygwin (package utils_linux*) and copied the getopt.exe to the bin folder. Also had to copy 4 more files from cygwin to the bin folder (cyggcc_s-1.dll, cygiconv-2.dll, cygintl-8.dll and cygwin1.dll).

Like I said in the beginning, this is a hacky solution but it did work for me.

I simply followed what they said and have gotten this working on a few windows 7 machines. I even took it a step further and created a couple of zip files of the dlls and scripts required: bin.zip and git-core.zip

To install these for mSysGit:

1. copy bin.zip to C:Program FilesGit
2. unzip bin.zip
3. copy git-core.zip to C:Program FilesGitlibexec
4. unzip git-core.zip

[it’s important that they are unzipped from the correct place, but you knew that :)]

and that’s all there is to it. you should now be able to go to a git repository on windows with mSysGit, type git flow init, and be presented with the git flow setup prompts.

enjoy!

Let's start with the test:

[Fact]
public void changes_password() {
  //arrange
  var controller = ObjectFactory.GetInstance<AccountController>();
  controller.ControllerContext = new TestControllerContext();
  //act
  var result = controller.ChangePassword("password", "p455w0rd", "p455w0rd");
  //assert
  var viewResult = Assert.IsType<RedirectToRouteResult>(result);
  }

notice line 5. why are we setting a custom ControllerContext here? ControllerContext tells the current controller about things like HttpContext, which will be unavailable during tests (whoops!) This is needed because somewhere in the Action code, I am making a call into User.Identity.Name, which is supplied by HttpContext at runtime. Again, since this isn't available during testing, I have to tell the controller how to find the fake httpcontext used then.

For this project, I'm using simple hand-rolled stubs. Here is the code for TestControllerContext:

public class TestControllerContext : ControllerContext {
  public override System.Web.HttpContextBase HttpContext {
    get {
      return new TestHttpContext();
    }
    set {
      base.HttpContext = value;
    }
  }
}

instead of returning the runtime HttpContext (which doesn't exist, remember) I'm supplying another hand-rolled stub. Here is that code:

public class TestHttpContext : HttpContextBase {
  public override System.Security.Principal.IPrincipal User {
    get {
      return new TestPrincipal();
    }
    set {
      base.User = value;
    }
  }
}

again, same principal 😃 because I'm concerned about calling into User for the Identity.Name property, I return another stub that implements IPrincipal. Here is that code:

public class TestPrincipal : IPrincipal{
  public IIdentity Identity {
    get { return new GenericIdentity("you@me.com"); }
  }
  public bool IsInRole(string role) {
    throw new NotImplementedException();
  }
}

now, when the controller code that was calling User.Identity.Name is tested, it will return the name you@me.com. Line 11 of the test code above asserts the test passes because if an error occurred, I would redisplay the form with errors shown using the View() method. A redirect says that the change password op worked:

if (MembershipService.ChangePassword(User.Identity.Name, currentPassword, newPassword))
  return RedirectToAction("ChangePasswordSuccess");

hth.

I just guessed on the colors since I had to translate from mac colors to windows, but the result is pretty effective for me. enjoy!

update: I changed the colors to use the actual rgb values from textmate.

<system.data>
  <DbProviderFactories>
      <remove invariant="System.Data.SQLite"/>
      <add name="SQLite Data Provider"
        invariant="System.Data.SQLite"
        description=".Net Framework Data Provider for SQLite"
        type="System.Data.SQLite.SQLiteFactory, System.Data.SQLite" />
  </DbProviderFactories>
</system.data>

this happened to me using subsonic on an x64 machine. adding the x64 binary to /bin and adding the above to my web.config got me sorted.

Thank you for that!

Although the message at the end of git status says use git checkout -- <file>, that's not it.

"If you prefer to resolve the conflict using their copy, you need to get the version of the file from the branch you were trying to merge in:

git checkout otherbranch somefile.dll"

sweet.

To use StructureMap from xunit tests, I created a base class for any fact class that wanted to use ObjectFactory. In the base class ctor, I call the bootstrapper's ConfigureStructureMap method.

At first I just had a bunch of

x.ForRequestedType<IXYZ>().TheDefaultIsConcreteType<TestXYZ>();

because I had only a handful of stubs and I didn't quite grasp how to scan like the default scanner, only adding "Test" to the beginning of the class name.

Then I found the secret sauce over here, via a method called FindPluginType.

Here is my bootstrapper code for my xunit test project:

public class TestScanner : ITypeScanner{
  public void Process(Type type, PluginGraph graph) {
    if(type.Name.StartsWith("Test")){
      var pluginType = FindPluginType(type);
      if(pluginType == null)
        return;

      graph.AddType(pluginType, type);
    }				
  }

  static Type FindPluginType(Type concreteType) {
    var interfaceName = "I" + concreteType.Name.Replace("Test", "");
    return concreteType.GetInterfaces().Where(t => string.Equals(t.Name, interfaceName, StringComparison.Ordinal)).FirstOrDefault();
  }
}

public static class Bootstrapper {
  public static void ConfigureStructureMap() {
    ObjectFactory.Initialize(x =>
      {
        x.Scan(s =>
          {
            s.TheCallingAssembly();
            s.WithDefaultConventions();
            s.With<TestScanner>();
          });
        });
      }
}

What results is essentially the DefaultConventionScanner, only it's looking for TestXYZ as the concrete implementation of IXYZ.

Killer.

I've been catching up on Deran's posts about his wife's portfolio site. I'm quite enjoying the explanation of his thought process while building out the application. That is all.

above was lifted from a forum post. buried in there is the command line to bypass KMS and use the proper MAK instead. It worked!

In the process of figuring this out, MSFT had me download a video explaining how to setup a KMS, one of the requirements is that you need 5 servers to contact KMS before it will work. That's fucking retarded. If I'm paying for a product, I expect that I'm paying for ease of use. Making your paying customers bend over backwards to use the product you are selling is unsustainable, bad business. You can do better than that, Microsoft.

--
-Christopher | bluefenix.net

I haven't been to Austin, tx in a while and was craving my favorite
brakfast taco from Juan in a Million, the Don Juan Especial.

This taco was the subject of an episode of man vs. food, where the
host described how it is prepared, so I figured I'd give it a shot.

This is what I came up with.

Recipe transcribed from man vs. food:

1 Idaho potato, boiled & cubed
"dash" of salt, paprika, black pepper
2 strips of bacon, chopped
2 fresh eggs

Bring ingredients together in a frying pan on medium high heat, mix
together & cook for 5-10 minutes, scoop onto tortilla, top with cheese.

Enjoy!
--
-Christopher | bluefenix.net

Ink by Rob of Nice Guyz.
Arigato gozai mashta! XD

--
-Christopher | bluefenix.net

Ink by Rob of Nice Guyz.

--
-Christopher | bluefenix.net

--
-Christopher | bluefenix.net

From Brooklyn.

--
-Christopher | bluefenix.net

She's a hottie, ain't she? XD

--
-Christopher | bluefenix.net

--
-Christopher | bluefenix.net

--
-Christopher | bluefenix.net

--
-Christopher | bluefenix.net

Breakfast taco Nirvana from Juan in a million, Austin, TX

--
-Christopher | bluefenix.net

Hehe jingle this! Ethan just turned 7, and he's missing a bottom tooth!

--
-Christopher | bluefenix.net

Originally uploaded by blue_fenix

I ran into Andre 3000 last time I went to NYC. Really down to earth dude. ​

-Christopher | bluefenix.net

Godspeed buddy. XD

But lately I've been reading up on jQuery. And I have experienced a profound moment of clarity. Using css selectors to manipulate the DOM is such a simple idea it qualifies as genius in my eyes. Using this along with asp.net mvc is simply a joy. There is no spoon.

Spoon boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth. Neo: What truth? Spoon boy: There is no spoon. Neo: There is no spoon? Spoon boy: Then you'll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.

[Wed Feb 20 14:00:15 2008] [error] [client 192.168.xxx] (20014)Error string not specified yet: Expected format '3' of repository; found format '5'   
[Wed Feb 20 14:00:15 2008] [error] [client 192.168.xxx] Could not fetch resource information.  [500, #0]    
[Wed Feb 20 14:00:15 2008] [error] [client 192.168.xxx] Could not open the requested SVN filesystem  [500, #165005]

and then found where the subversion modules lived in httpd.conf:

LoadModule dav_svn_module modules/mod_dav_svn.so   
LoadModule authz_svn_module modules/mod_authz_svn.so

stopped apache, copied the two .so files from subversionbin to apache2modules and restarted Apache.

then holla'd w00t! XD

Step1: install tortoisesvn.

Step2: open file dialog in vs.net (2008 at least)

Step3: XD

update: looks like the tortoisesvn team brought back those nifty icon overlays in vista while I wasn't paying attention 😉 Incedentally, there is an option to turn the icon overlays off in the open/save dialogs.

After a little bit of webernettin', I found a post by Ward Bekker that describes how to handle the button click event of a DataGridViewButtonColumn. Sweet. We'll get back to that code in a second.

I want to have a special button that will display a rectangle of the selected color, so I created a class that derives from DataGridViewButtonCell. I want to be able to set the Color of the rectangle, and of course we have to paint the rectangle so we'll add a Color property of type Color (imagine that:) and override the Paint method.

public ColorPickerCell : DataGridViewButtonCell{
  const float phi = 1.618f;
  private Color colorValue;
  public Color Color {
    get { return colorValue; }
    set {  
      colorValue = value; 
      this.Value = value.ToArgb().ToString();
    }
  }

  protected override void Paint(Graphics graphics, 
    Rectangle clipBounds,
    Rectangle cellBounds, 
    int rowIndex, 
    DataGridViewElementStates cellState,
    object value, 
    object formattedValue, 
    string errorText, 
    DataGridViewCellStyle cellStyle, 
    DataGridViewAdvancedBorderStyle advancedBorderStyle, 
    DataGridViewPaintParts paintParts){
      //CDF: draw the button
      base.Paint(graphics, clipBounds, cellBounds, rowIndex, cellState, value,     formattedValue, errorText, cellStyle, advancedBorderStyle, paintParts);
      //CDF: draw a purty rectangle over the button
      using(Pen darkPen = new Pen(SystemColors.ControlDark){
        Rectangle rc = new Rectangle(cellBounds.X + 8, cellBounds.Y + 3, 
        cellBounds.Width - (int)(cellBounds.Width * phi / 8), 
        cellBounds.Height - (int)(cellBounds.Height * phi / 4));

        graphics.FillRectangle(new SolidBrush(Color.FromArgb(int.Parse(formattedValue.ToString()))), rc);
        graphics.DrawRectangle(darkPen, rc);
      }
    }
  }

I also derived a class from DataGridViewButtonColumn (ColorPickerColumn), but I didn't really override anything. Anyway, now that we've got a button that will display a colored rectangle, we can add a ColorPickerColumn to a DataGridView on a Form. The next step is to handle the CellContentClick event as Ward indicated.

private void dataGridView1_CellContentClick(object sender, DataGridViewCellEventArgs e) {
  //CDF: make sure we're on the right column. I used the name for this test.
  if(dataGridView1.Columns[e.ColumnIndex].Name == "ColorColumn"){
    ColorDialog dlg = new ColorDialog();
    ColorPickerCell currentCell = dataGridView1[e.ColumnIndex, e.RowIndex] as ColorPickerCell;

    if(dlg.ShowDialog() == DialogResult.OK){
      if(currentCell != null){
        currentCell.Color = dlg.Color;
        this.Invalidate();
      }
    }
  }

Seems to do exactly what I want for now. Nice XD

It looks pretty neat. I really dig the "type inside the preview" Web Layout. That's just sweet. The plugin support looks promising...I've already started coding up a CodeHTMLer plugin for syntax highlighting ala PostXING, now if I can get one going that will allow me to post the same content to more than one blog I'll be in business. I've been on a little hacking-hiatus on PostXING for the past few months to spend the summertime with my son Ethan, so what a great way to stretch my geek muscle all over again at the end of summer!

Last night I got an impromtu text message saying that Ghostface Killah was playing at Warehouse live downtown. As a Wu-Tang fan, I decided to go out and see what he was all about. Pretty good show, I really dug the ODB medley they did in honor of Ol' Dirty. 

[ Currently Playing : Smiley faces - Gnarls Barkley - (3:05) ]

What's the behavior? While operating under a custom ApplicationContext, what would be my Main form is closed by the user. Since the application context is not associated with that form, I decide to call "Application.Exit()" in an override of OnClosing. My Main form closes, but any hidden forms stick around, thus leaving the application running until you open up task manager (or something similar) and manually kill the process.

Why does it happen? WinForms 2.0 introduced an overload to Application.Exit that accepts a CancelEventArgs parameter. This is what is called by Application.Exit(). If even one of your open forms doesn't think it needs to close itself for whatever reason and sets its CancelEventArgs to true, Application.Exit stops processing and returns control to the application.

Why did I call it a "regression"? This behavior has changed between .net 1.1 and 2.0. In 1.1, if I call Application.Exit, by golly the application exits! I understand the reasoning behind the change. I just wish that there was some indication to it other than Reflector. A comment for intellisense perhaps? Something.

Will it matter to most WinForm projects? Probably not. If you use the default application context (by calling Application.Run(new MainForm()), which is what VS.NET spits out for you from the template) you do not have the same problem. Closing the main form exits the application as expected. If you're using a custom ApplicationContext, tho, watch out.

Close enough. This should be fun.

After having to rollback to a system restore checkpoint.

Way to go, guys.

My high school principal died on Monday.

This is surreal. It feels like it was just last week that I was skipping class and getting a pep talk from Mr. Holmquist in North House. Worst of all, I went to school with his daughters. Amber was in my graduating class, but she was real into sports (and I wasn't). We had a couple of classes together but I was closer to her sister Kendra, a fellow thespian.

This is so confusing...I've been in the Holmquist house a couple of times, and now...we'll miss you, Mr. Holmquist. Alief is a sad town today.

In the unlikely event that either of my readers finds out any information about the funeral, please let me know. My cell is (281) 684-5688. Alternatively, if I find out anything I will post here.

update: I got this from a friend in the district:

The Holmquist family has made the following arrangements:

Viewing services will be at Forest Park on Westheimer at Dairy Ashford on Thursday evening from 6-8 p.m.  The memorial service will be held Friday morning at 11:00 a.m. at Memoria Drive United Methodist Church on Memorial Drive between Wilcrest and the Beltway.

Respectfully,

Paula Smith

However, thanks to Keyvan (che khabbar!), I was able to export the 1.1 content using an HttpHandler I hacked up for exporting CS 1.1 content to BlogML and import into a new, multi-blog install of 2.0. The first thing I did was nuke both the sample weblog and the sample weblog group. Then I created a new group and weblog and used the application key assigned to the new blog to import my posts. Here is the code I used to import a blogML file into a fresh copy of Community Server 2.0

<%@ Page Language = "VB" %>
<%@ Import Namespace = "System.Collections" %>
<%@ Import Namespace = "System.IO" %>
<%@ Import Namespace = "BlogML" %>
<%@ Import Namespace = "BlogML.Xml" %>
<%@ Import Namespace = "CommunityServer" %>
<%@ Import Namespace = "CommunityServer.Components" %>
<%@ Import Namespace = "CommunityServer.Blogs" %>

<script runat="server">
'Community Server 2.0 BlogML converter Beta
'Copyright Keyvan Nayyeri (www.nayyeri.net) - 2006
'BlogML Writer and Reader classes are provided by BlogML project (www.blogml.com)


Public Class Reader

  Private _ApplicationKey As String
  Private _Blog As CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.Weblog
  Private _SitePath As String
  Private _BlogCommentCount As Integer
  Private _BlogTrackBackCount As Integer

  Sub New(ByVal ApplicationKey As String, ByVal SitePath As String)
    Me._ApplicationKey = ApplicationKey
    Me._SitePath = SitePath


    Dim objCSWeblogs As CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.Weblogs
    Me._Blog = objCSWeblogs.GetWeblog(Me._ApplicationKey)
  End Sub

  Public Sub LoadBlog(ByVal XML As String)
    Dim Blog As New BlogMLBlog
    Try
      Blog = BlogMLSerializer.Deserialize(New StringReader(XML))
    Catch ex As Exception
      Throw New Exception("Couldn't load your BlogML file. Maybe it is wellformedness")
    End

    Try
      Dim Categories As Hashtable
      Categories = ReadCategories(Blog)

      LoadPosts(Blog, Categories)

      UpdateStats(Blog)
    End Sub

    Private Function ReadCategories(ByVal Blog As BlogMLBlog) As Hashtable
      Dim CategoriesHash As New Hashtable
      For Each Category As BlogMLCategory In Blog.Categories
        Dim NewCategory As New PostCategory With  NewCategory
          .DateCreated = Category.DateCreated
          .Description = Category.Description
          .IsEnabled = Category.Approved
          .Name = Category.Title
          .ParentID = 0
          .SectionID = Me._Blog.SectionID

        Dim objCSCats As PostCategories

        Try
          objCSCats.CreateCategory(NewCategory)
        Catch ex As Exception
          Throw New ArgumentException("Error when tried to add categories to database")
        End

        Try
          CategoriesHash.Add(Category.ID, Category.Title)
        End

        With Next Return CategoriesHash
        End Function

        Private Sub LoadPosts(ByVal Blog As BlogMLBlog, ByVal CategoryHash As Hashtable)
            Dim LastPostAuthor As String
            Dim LastPostAuthorID As Integer
            Dim LastPostDate As Date
            Dim LastPostName As String
            Dim LastPostSubject As String




            For Each Post As BlogMLPost In Blog.Posts
                Dim NewPost As New CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.WeblogPost
                Dim objCSPosts As CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.WeblogPosts

                With NewPost
                    .PostID = Post.ID
                    .Body = Post.Content.UncodedText
                    .BlogPostType = CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.BlogPostType.Post
                    .Subject = Post.Title
                    .ThreadDate = Post.DateCreated
                    .UserTime = Post.DateCreated
                    .PostDate = Post.DateCreated
                    .UserTime = Post.DateCreated
                    .SectionID = Me._Blog.SectionID
                    .SetExtendedAttribute("EverPublished", CType(Post.Approved, Boolean))
                    .IndexInThread = True
                    .IsApproved = True
                    .IsAggregated = True
                    .IsLocked = False
                    .PostConfig = CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.BlogPostConfig.IsAggregated

                End With
                'Add categories
                If Post.Categories.Count > 0 Then
                    Dim NewPostCats(Post.Categories.Count) As String
                    For i As Integer = 0 To Post.Categories.Count - 1
                        NewPostCats(i) = CategoryHash(Post.Categories(i).Ref)
                    Next
                    NewPost.Categories = NewPostCats
                End If

                'Add attachments
                'TO DO: Check to add attachments with checking the source code when RTM version has been released.
                'Currently we can't load post attachments

                objCSPosts.Add(NewPost)

                'Temporary saving stats
                LastPostAuthor = NewPost.Username
                LastPostAuthorID = NewPost.AuthorID
                LastPostDate = NewPost.PostDate
                LastPostName = NewPost.Name
                LastPostSubject = NewPost.Subject

                LoadComments(NewPost, Post)
                LoadTrackBacks(NewPost, Post)
            Next

            'Update blog stats
            Me._Blog.MostRecentPostAuthor = LastPostAuthor
            Me._Blog.MostRecentPostAuthorID = LastPostAuthorID
            Me._Blog.MostRecentPostDate = LastPostDate
            Me._Blog.MostRecentPostName = LastPostName
            Me._Blog.MostRecentPostSubject = LastPostSubject
        End Sub
        Private Sub LoadComments(ByVal NewPost As Post, ByVal Post As BlogMLPost)
            If Post.Comments.Count > 0 Then
                For Each Comment As BlogMLComment In Post.Comments
                    Dim NewComment As New CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.WeblogPost
                    Dim objCSComments As CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.WeblogPosts

                    With NewComment
                        .Body = Comment.Content.UncodedText
                        .BlogPostType = Blogs.Components.BlogPostType.Comment
                        .Subject = Comment.Title
                        .ThreadDate = Comment.DateCreated
                        .UserTime = Comment.DateCreated
                        .PostDate = Comment.DateCreated
                        .UserTime = Comment.DateCreated
                        .SectionID = Me._Blog.SectionID
                        .SetExtendedAttribute("EverPublished", True)
                        .SetExtendedAttribute("TitleUrl", Comment.UserUrl)
                        .SetExtendedAttribute("SubmittedUserName", Comment.UserName)
                        .IsApproved = CType(Comment.Approved, Boolean)
                        .ParentID = NewPost.PostID
                        .ThreadID = NewPost.ThreadID

                    End With

                    objCSComments.Add(NewComment)

                    'Update blog counter
                    Me._BlogCommentCount += 1
                Next
            End If
        End Sub

        Private Sub LoadTrackBacks(ByVal NewPost As Post, ByVal Post As BlogMLPost)
            If Post.Trackbacks.Count > 0 Then
                For Each TrackBack As BlogMLTrackback In Post.Trackbacks
                    Dim NewTrackBack As New Blogs.Components.WeblogPost
                    Dim objCSTrackBacks As Blogs.Components.WeblogPosts

                    With NewTrackBack
                        .Body = TrackBack.Title
                        .BlogPostType = Blogs.Components.BlogPostType.Trackback
                        .Subject = TrackBack.Title
                        .ThreadDate = TrackBack.DateCreated
                        .UserTime = TrackBack.DateCreated
                        .PostDate = TrackBack.DateCreated
                        .UserTime = TrackBack.DateCreated
                        .SectionID = Me._Blog.SectionID
                        .SetExtendedAttribute("EverPublished", True)
                        .SetExtendedAttribute("TitleUrl", TrackBack.Url)
                        .SetExtendedAttribute("trackbackName", "TrackBack")
                        .IsApproved = CType(TrackBack.Approved, Boolean)
                        .ParentID = NewPost.PostID
                        .ThreadID = NewPost.ThreadID

                    End With

                    objCSTrackBacks.Add(NewTrackBack)

                    'Update blog counter
                    Me._BlogTrackBackCount += 1
                Next
            End If
        End Sub
        Private Sub UpdateStats(ByVal Blog As BlogMLBlog)
            Me._Blog.PostCount += Blog.Posts.Count
            Me._Blog.CommentCount = Me._BlogCommentCount
            Me._Blog.TrackbackCount = Me._BlogTrackBackCount
        End Sub

    End Class

    Sub Page_Load(sender as Object, e as EventArgs)
    	Dim Path as String = "d:tmpBlogMLBlogML.xml"
    	Dim reader as New Reader("chris", Request.PhysicalApplicationPath)

    	If File.Exists(Path) Then
    		Dim sr as New StreamReader(File.Open(Path, FileMode.Open))
    		Dim xml as string = sr.ReadToEnd

    		reader.LoadBlog(xml)

    		Response.Write("Content moved successfully!")
    	Else
    		Response.Write("Uh-oh. Something crapped.")
    	End If

    End Sub

</script>
<html>
    <head>
    </head>
    <body>
        <form runat="server">
            <!-- Insert content here -->
        </form>
    </body>
</html>

I hacked up this file in WebMatrix and slapped it into the webroot of my new CommunityServer install. This way I was able to copy the content to a local install before pushing the final product out into the wild, and I didn't have to recompile any of CS to get it working. Merci, Keyvan!

How do you say goodbye? One hand squeeze at a time.

[Via Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger]

So what do you do when a blogger you read comes up on hard times and posts his phone number to his blog? Call him, of course. The problem is that Robert is suffering through an extremely personal trial, and right as he said "hello" I started thinking of how I would feel if I were in his shoes. Probably did more harm than good, but my thoughts and prayers are still with you and yours, Robert.

I'm about to start cracking on this issue, but I'd love to get a little feedback on it before I put it into code. If either of you have an extra minute, shoot to the url above and leave a comment. I normally don't solicit feedback like this, but I kind of feel like I'm missing something. Although I could just be thinking about it too much. Either way, help a code munkey out if ya can :)

[ Currently Playing : This Could Be Love - Alkaline Trio - Good Mourning (3:47) ]

Paul Welter

Be aware the GetTempFileName() actually creates a zero byte file in the temp folder. Your code will leave the temp file behind in the temp folder. If you use that a lot, you will end up with a lot of files in the temp folder.

string GetTempFileName(){
	string filename = Path.GetTempFileName();

	File.Delete(filename);

	return Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(filename);
}

Okay y'all...rip it to shreds 😃 If I've missed something else obvious, call me out. Or, if you have a preferred method of generating temporary file names, show the way.

using System.IO;

string GetTempFileName(){
	return Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(Path.GetTempFileName());
}

As the name implies, this will return the temporary name of a file without the extension, so it's up to you to add whatever filetype you may be trying to create. For example, let's say I wanted to generate a .gif:

string GetTempGifFileName(){
	return string.Format("{0}.{1}", GetTempFileName(), "gif");
}

I had overlooked this little piece of functionality because the component that I was using generated filenames with GUIDs, so I never really worried about it. Way to make my life easier, .netfx 😃

[ Currently Playing : Mississippi Queen - Ozzy Osbourne - Under Cover (4:11) ]

The coin flips...

and...

Heads it is. 

[ Currently Playing : imagine - John Lennon - (3:04) ]

Using Yield in Practice
The moral of the story is STOP thinking so hard about it, just use "yield return" the next piece of data in the list.  When using the yield statment GetEnumerator's job is to answer foreach's question - "what's my next item please".  Walk all the items in your collection and yield return what you want.  Don't worry about remembering where you were - that's all part of the generated statemachine goo - it will stop and start the function you write as it pleases in it's MoveNext implementation or whatever (cause we dont really care - we're not suppposed to be thinking, remember?) .  =)

[Via jfo's coding]

I'll admit, I haven't thought a whole lot about yield because, well, I couldn't find anything that described what it did in terms I could understand. I just kept thinking "oh, cool, another new feature in .net 2.0 that I'll get to learn by the time 3.0 comes out" and moved on to the next task.

Thinking about it as kind of a "macro" (similar to what a using(){} block does) lets it gel a little better.

if ( DesignMode ) return;

or, its equally useful counterpart

if(!DesignMode){
	doStuff();
}

Now, the "out of the ordinary" thing I was doing was...hooking up an instance EventHandler using a static property that exposes a Form derived class in an OnLoad override. What? I know, not the clearest situation, and probably one that could use a boatload of refactoring, but it works. In short, if you are having designer problems in Visual Studio 2005, it may be worth it to sit back for a bit and think about what introduced the designer error. Prime candidates are constructors and OnLoad overrides that use static methods for functionality. This code didn't allow me to view the designer of a different form:

public override void OnLoad(EventArgs e){
	AppManager.ConcreteEditorForm.NewPostCreated += new EventHandler(HandleNewPost);
}

while this one would:

public override void OnLoad(EventArgs e){
	if( DesignMode ) return;
	AppManager...
}

I used some code that I found at the FurryGoat experience, modified it a little bit, and it seems that it's at least useful in detecting if an SSID ends with something...for example, my WiFi at work has an SSID of VelocityDatabank, so I created a rule to look for an SSID/IP Address that EndsWith Databank. This code definitely needs improvement, but I have found it very useful, and now I don't have to have different network segments specified at each of the different WiFi spots I connect to.

Since there has been so much interest in the SecurePasswordTextBox control (see my previous post http://weblogs.asp.net/pglavich/archive/2006/02/26/439077.aspx and http://weblogs.asp.net/pglavich/archive/2006/03/12/440052.aspx ), I thought I would take the time to iron out the bugs. When I first released it, I performed minimal testing (i.e. about 15 minutes worth) and just thought if anybody else is interested, then I might put some real effort in.

Well since then it was featured in an MSDN webcast by Dan Sellers of Microsoft and I have received almost 300 downloads in a short span of time. So just as a quick courtesy note, it has now been updated to V1.1 and works (AFAIK) 100%. Previous versions didn't handle certain situations property where text in the middle was selected and you typed a character, it would simply append the char and not do a replacement (thanks Nick :-) )

All is now well. Go grab it from herehttp://www.theglavs.com/DownloadItem.aspx?FileID=46

For those unaware, its a Windows Forms TextBox control that uses the .Net V2 SecureString class to store its contents. Basically, you now have a UI control that allows directly entry into this secure string class and makes it useable from a windows UI perspective. (See my previous post for a full explanation.)

[ Currently Playing : Have You Heard? - ZZ Top - Tres Hombres (3:12) ]

I don't use them very much, so when I do need to, it's nice to know that regexlib is sitting there, waiting for me to come to it with my regex needs. In particular, there is an online Regular Expression Tester that has helped me to look smarter than I actually am on more than one occasion. Sure, I could use a desktop tool for my regex needs (and sometimes I do), but regexlib has the added bonus of having a collection of user-contributed regular expressions that are super useful when looking for ideas on how to implement a certain regex.

And let's not forget the Cheat Sheet ... regexlib is just chock full of regex goodness.

[ Currently Playing : The First Drop - Rise Against - (2:39) ]

Reflector says it does exactly what I was looking for in a previous post.

Technorati Tags:  Windows Forms  BackgroundWorker 

Blogger uses Atom feeds located at http://blogdomain/atom.xml The fact that the skins provided don't reflect this is the pain point...you'd see a link if you view sourced it:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Blue Phoenix" href="atom.xml" />

Also, get rid of that captcha (I hate those!) use ReverseDoS instead: http://angrypets.com/tools/rdos

Blogging is cool and rss feeds make it even better for the reader/user; but only if blog hosts provide a mechanism for the blogger to have an RSS feed on their site which most do.

The only exception I have found so far is blogs hosted by Blogger.com. Now I don't know if it is a setting that individual bloggers need to set but not one of the blogs on Blogger.com that I like seem to have an RSS feed.

What is up with that silliness?

Now playing: New Phunk Theory - La Neblina Del Verano

---

This weblog is sponsored by WinExtra.

For the adventurous among you, we've decided to release beta 1 of PostXING available for download at ProjectDistributor!

There are a few known issues, but as far as I know there aren't any showstopper bugs. I've been running the development build for quite some time now, and for PostXING v1.1 users, I think this release is a big step up in terms of usability. Since the only working provider at this time is the MetaBlogProvider, the functionality remains basically the same, i.e. you can manage a MetaWeblog enabled weblog using PostXING from your desktop.

If you find any issues, bugs, or you just think something could be done better, head on over to the Gemini issue tracker. To add an issue, click the All Issues link and then Create Issue at the top of the page. If you don't want to get that involved, you can always use the contact form over at PostXING.net to at least get your issue addressed...or you could just let it ride and hope I run into it myself 😃

If you're feeling really adventurous and want to hack on PostXING, you can do so by using TortoiseSVN and pointing to http://postxing.net:8080/PostXING. All main development is done on the trunk by version. If you don't like how something works, send me a diff. I think I've been pretty receptive to criticism and feature requests (even tho we can't put them all in at once), so the very least that will happen is that you will be able to use a program that you feel works better. Thanks, and enjoy!

[ Currently Playing : Jesus Just Left Chicago - ZZ Top - Tres Hombres (3:31) ]

update: nope.

update2: almost: I get a reference to the source, but it's based with the skin's control directory.

update3: BAM! gotta put http:// at the beginning. sweet, I missed that one.

[ Currently Playing : Sheik - ZZ Top - Tres Hombres (4:04) ]

This is the end result after setting up SubText and importing my old blog (now moved to here). I had created a blogML exporter for cs11 and ran into some initial problems because the version of BlogML I had used was a smidge older (v0.9) and therefore had a different schema. Kinda makes me wish there were a way to clear out all the content and start over like subv2 allows me to.

So why didn't I go with subv2? (Sorry, Darren) The admin interface and WebParts' silly requirement of IE. I basically live in FireFox and although it's been quite some time since I've posted thru the web interface of .text/CS::Blogs, I do need to go in from time to time and make some changes. Plus, since subtext was forked off of .text, I'm already pretty familiar with the interface (and some of the code when necessary). Subv2 is a real nice exploration of all the fun new doohickeys in .net 2.0, and with Darren at the helm you know it's high-quality stuff, but I need something that works for me in the environment I choose to work with. Either way, I've got an install of Subv2 behind the firewall so I could just make that one public and import my shiny new blogML file if need be: I'm keeping a definite eye on it, that's for sure.

[ Currently Playing : Move Me on Down the Line - ZZ Top - Tres Hombres (2:30) ]

MetaPinger is a PostXING plugin that notifies a number of services that keep track of
weblogs and publish them. By pinging, you let the services know that your blog has been updated ,
they crawl your blog, publishing your site contents, thus increasing your blog's popularity.

Setup
Extract the ZIP archive into the "plugins" subdirectory of PostXING's install directory

Configuration
You will need to configure MetaPinger plugin to notify ping services.
Enter blog name.
Enter blog url.
Add ping service urls ( one per line )

Usage
To ping press the "Ping" button.

Download MetaPinger plugin

 

MetaPinger has been tested with the following ping services:
http://1470.net/api/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/

 

Technorati Tags:  PostXING  Tagging  Utility  Software  Blogware  Plugin 

[ Currently Playing : Beef (Feat. Mobb Deep) - The Notorious B.I.G - (4:57) ]

Someone has actually built a plugin for PostXING! Ladies and gentlemen, Allow me to introduce the TechnoratiTagger plugin for PostXING! Unfortunately, I'm not 100% sure who wrote it (well, it's not obvious from the site). The good news is...it works! :) It even works with the spankin new, begging to be released v2 beta I have on my machine, and it works well!

Technorati Tags:  PostXING  Technorati Tags  Plugins 

One or more errors encountered while loading the designer. The errors are listed below. Some errors can be fixed by rebuilding your project, while others may require code changes. TypeLoad failure. Unable to load one or more of the requested types. Retrieve the LoaderExceptions property for more information.

at System.Reflection.Module.GetTypesInternal(StackCrawlMark& stackMark)
at System.Reflection.Assembly.GetTypes()
at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Design.AssemblyObsoleteEventArgs..ctor(Assembly assembly)
at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Design.VSDynamicTypeService.ReloadAssemblyIfChanged(String codeBase)
at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Design.VSDynamicTypeService.CreateDynamicAssembly(String codeBase)
at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Design.VSTypeResolutionService.AssemblyEntry.get_Assembly()
at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Design.VSTypeResolutionService.AssemblyEntry.Search(String fullName, String typeName, Boolean ignoreTypeCase, Assembly& assembly, String description)
at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Design.VSTypeResolutionService.SearchProjectEntries(AssemblyName assemblyName, String typeName, Boolean ignoreTypeCase, Assembly& assembly)
at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Design.VSTypeResolutionService.GetType(String typeName, Boolean throwOnError, Boolean ignoreCase, ReferenceType refType)
at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Design.Serialization.CodeDom.AggregateTypeResolutionService.GetType(String name, Boolean throwOnError, Boolean ignoreCase)
at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Design.Serialization.CodeDom.AggregateTypeResolutionService.GetType(String name, Boolean throwOnError)
at System.ComponentModel.Design.Serialization.CodeDomSerializerBase.GetType(ITypeResolutionService trs, String name, Dictionary`2 names)
at System.ComponentModel.Design.Serialization.CodeDomSerializerBase.FillStatementTable(IDesignerSerializationManager manager, IDictionary table, Dictionary`2 names, CodeStatementCollection statements, String className)
at System.ComponentModel.Design.Serialization.TypeCodeDomSerializer.Deserialize(IDesignerSerializationManager manager, CodeTypeDeclaration declaration)
at System.ComponentModel.Design.Serialization.CodeDomDesignerLoader.PerformLoad(IDesignerSerializationManager manager)
at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Design.Serialization.CodeDom.VSCodeDomDesignerLoader.PerformLoad(IDesignerSerializationManager serializationManager)
at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Design.Serialization.CodeDom.VSCodeDomDesignerLoader.DeferredLoadHandler.Microsoft.VisualStudio.TextManager.Interop.IVsTextBufferDataEvents.OnLoadCompleted(Int32 fReload)

You can't really tell from this pic, but the image of Wally takes up nearly the entire back of the shirt...

But even this looks phenomenal on yours truly 😛

[ Currently Playing : Last Call - Kanye West - (12:41) ]

Thankfully, I'm not the only person who has had this idea. To that end, this blog post was instrumental in outlining the steps to take to get subversion up and running on a windows box. The only issue that I had which was rather annoying was I kept getting an error stating that svn was "unable to open an ra_local session to URL" when trying to import code on the host. So, I did things the painfully slow way of adding files/folders from a client machine that already had the code on it. The good news is that PostXING now has its own subversion repository: svn://postxing.net/PostXING read access is still there for all, but now I can specify who can and cannot commit changes. So nice.

static bool isRunningBgWorker = false;
static object lockObj = new object();

...

if (!isRunningBgWorker) {
	this.backgroundWorker1.RunWorkerAsync();
}

I check to see if it's running before even setting it off to do the work.

private void backgroundWorker1_DoWork(object sender, DoWorkEventArgs e) {
	lock (lockObj) {
		isRunningBgWorker = true;
	}

The first thing that happens when the DoWork eventhandler is called and

private void backgroundWorker1_RunWorkerCompleted(object sender, RunWorkerCompletedEventArgs e) {
...

	lock (lockObj) {
		isRunningBgWorker = false;
	}
}

the last thing when the work is completed: controlled access to the isRunningBgWorker member. Hope this helps somebody else out there who is having trouble with the BackgroundWorker component.

This is in the year 2004BB (Before Beard)

[ Currently Playing : Just A Memory Featuring The C - The Notorious B.I.G - (4:30) ]

//CF: thanks, rssbandit :)
public bool PreFilterMessage(ref Message m) {
  ...
}

The code then looks for the WM_KEYDOWN or WM_SYSKEYDOWN messages and handles things according to whatever rules you put in there. To get it hooked up, I simply overrode OnActivate and OnDeactivate and added Application.Add/RemoveMessageFilter(this);

I figured if I already posted the problem, I might as well post a solution as well. This was really helpful to the flat spot that was forming on my forehead, so thanks again RssBandit.

This was the first thing that I requested from gmail, and they've taken it up a notch - instead of only deleting messages, it notifies you if there are messages in a current "conversation" that have already been deleted:

  32 deleted messages in this conversation. View messages or delete forever.

Nice.

Anyone have any suggestions? I've used (and liked) gemini, but delusions of granduer aside the 10 user limit gives me pause. I want PostXING to remain free, so any supporting items like this need to be free as well.

*yes, most of my notes do look like this.

[ Currently Playing : Motel of the white locust - Glassjaw - Everything you ever wanted to know about silence (8:41) ]

[ Currently Playing : Audioslave / Out Of Exile - Audioslave - Out Of Exile (4:53) ]

I was also awarded the (unofficial) ReverseDoS MVP award for my unending quest to tell anyone who is fed up with comment spam about it. If you're running an asp.net blogging engine (really, anything that could generate spam from automated bots that runs asp.net) you owe it to yourself to check this component out.

Since installing and configuring it correctly, I have gotten exactly 1 (one) comment spam, and it was a manual entry. None that are automated, tho. Nice :)

[ Currently Playing : demon days - Gorillaz - (4:28) ]

First, it's a wizard-style dialog, so you expect the next/back buttons to work like it would in say an installer (well, I would anyways). Instead, you've got to specify at least a host, "page", and port, click on a special linkbutton (not next), click back to specify now the rest of the properties (including re-typing what you've already typed) and then you can go to select which blog you want to use.

I don't have an answer for this yet, but I'm working on it.

According to some forum posts, I'm not the only person having problems here. My problem was that no computers that didn't already have an earlier version of Konfabulator would actually install off of this file. So I looked thru a few more forum posts and found a url to 3.0.1 (http://us.dl1.yimg.com/download.yahoo.com/dl/widgets/us/yahoowidgets3x77.exe) and was then able to guess for the 3.0.2 version (http://us.dl1.yimg.com/download.yahoo.com/dl/widgets/us/yahoowidgets3x79.exe) these are the files that the web installer are supposed to download, but don't.

Hopefully me posting this won't tip off the developers and make them choose a different naming scheme. Better yet, why not just let end users download the installer instead of having to go thru the web installer.

Dare has put up a couple of tutorials on how to setup Metablog support for w.bloggar and BlogJet. Since I "borrowed" ideas from both of these fine applications, the setup for w.bloggar is nearly identical to what you need to do in PostXING v2. Sorry for those v1 folks, I don't think it'll work in that version. Maybe I can put out a patch so that v1 will work too.

I'd also like to thank Dare for being so helpful in the beta stage. He personally replied to my questions and gave insight on a couple of things that were very helpful (like the BOM thing, which may or may not be a fluke in the beta version of spaces)

So the settings goop in VS 2005 is pretty neat, but there's a limited subset
(it seems) that you can specify as types in the designer. I wanted to use a
Domain Object, tho - so, no designer love for me. I ended up making a simple
string setting just to see what code it generated for UserScopedSetting
properties. I ended up with this:

[global::System.Configuration.UserScopedSetting]
public ConfigItem Disconnected {
	get {
		if (this["Disconnected"] == null) {
			ConfigItem item = new ConfigItem();
			item.IPAddress = "127.0.0.1";
			item.Condition = ConditionKind.Equals;
			item.DisplayText = "disconnected.";
			item.Icon = IconKind.Disconnected;
			this["Disconnected"] = item;
		}
		return (ConfigItem)this["Disconnected"];
	}
	set {
		this["Disconnected"] = value;
	}
}

I found that a suitable default value was needed to start off with in
settings, so I did something similar for a Home, Work, Unknown, and Other
network. This way I can persist the Settings using the Settings API instead of
something home cooked (although I'm not sure if you would have to to avoid
version conflicts...) UserScopedSettings look to me a lot like IsolatedStorage,
that is the version and the product name help determine where settings should
go. If you wanted to use the same settings across different versions, I guess
you would have to copy the user.config file from one version location to the
next.

Next I wanted to see what the designer had to offer. The table layout panel
was real nice. It took care of all of my layout issues with respect to space. To
get what I wanted done, I first created a dummy Collection that inherits from
System.ComponentModel.BindingList<>:

internal class ConfigItemList : BindingList<ConfigItem> {}

This is how I was able to add it as an Object datasource to the Data Sources
window:

From there, you can change the type of control you would like to output. I
simply Dock.Fill 'ed the TableLayoutPanel and added the correct amount of rows.
To get the labels to line up with the controls, I set all of their AnchorStyles
to Top | Left (that's Top AND Left). When each usercontrol is loaded up, I
manually bind to the information. When the Save button is clicked, all of the
info gets put back into the Settings object from the controls and
Settings.Default.Save() is called. This automatically saves the changed data to
a safe location under Documents And Settings (specifically Local
SettingsApplication DataCompanyNameFileName+ a bunch of other
stuffProductVersion).

Now, for the main reason I created this thing: I host a few external
sites at work, and I can't see them without an entry in my hosts file
(%windir%system32driversetchosts) for each one. At home (or anywhere else)
however, I need to be able to rely on DNS to be able to get me to those sites,
so I created 2 extra hosts files, hosts.work and hosts.home. hosts.home pretty
much just has the single entry:

127.0.0.1    localhost

whereas hosts.work contains definitions to the internal network address of
the servers involved. I created 2 batch files that copy over the hosts file
depending on where I am. The one to switch to work has the following
command:

copy /Y %windir%system32driversetchosts.work
%windir%system32driversetchosts

and the one for home simply replaces hosts.home into the hosts file the same
way. So the command to execute for work is the fully qualified path to the bat
file. Everything else has the fully qualified path to the switch to home batch
script. So now, I just have this small utility run on startup and stay in the
tray, and whenever the network is changed, I am automatically configured to go
with this utility.

[ Currently Playing : Quarantined - At the Drive-In -
Relationship of Command (5:24) ]

System.Net.NetworkInformation.NetworkChange.NetworkAddressChanged += 
new System.Net.NetworkInformation.NetworkAddressChangedEventHandler
(NetworkChange_NetworkAddressChanged);

I have a laptop that everyday switches between my wireless home network and my wired work domain. I was looking for a way to add scripting abilities to the interface itself (i.e. when a network connects, run some script) when I stumbled upon this jem.

So, I now have a little winforms app that sits in my tray (yet another one) and doesn't do anything but run a script (that in turn modifies my hosts file) and change its tray icon when I'm connected to different networks.

Here's what connected at home looks like: 

It began as a quick'n'dirty POC, and I started to make it more generalized by extracting the common elements to an object model and persisting/loading. Then I stopped myself. I'll just let this one remain quick'n'dirty for now. Why? Because it works. And it saves me from having to remember to execute those batch scripts every time I come home and logon or go to work and logon.

nice.

[ Currently Playing : Precious - Depeche Mode ]

Hey man. Glad to know you're listening. I really think that PostXING could rock with a little more TLC. You're doing great.

A few comments on your comments:

1. I don't think you understand my request. Assume for a second that I know that I want to open post ID 117, I should be able to "Open 117" instead of "open, browse, wait, wait, 117, OK". I know this can be done with MWAPI 'cause I wrote one. metaWeblog.getPost takes postid, username and password, right?

2. For categories, I want to be able to select the category(s) for the post quickly and without waiting for stuff. So cache them, let me reload the cache, and enabled me to select them with the keyboard without a lot of fuss. BlogJet is pretty good on this front.

3. I understand your choice here, but I think you would be better to choose the standard keystroke used by Outlook, FrontPage, BlogJet, etc: Ctrl+M and Ctrl+Shift+M. Not the best keystrokes in the world, but they are what people are used to.

4. Make all the keystrokes configurable! :) That solves many/all of my issues., eh?

5. What I'm saying is that after using Ctrl+K (which I realize is a MSHTML command), and the focus returns back to the app, the input focus should stay where it was. I suspect you have something going on in Form_Activate that sets the focus somewhere. Try it, you'll see what I mean.

6. Ctrl+Enter should be Post & Publish. Personally I don't think Post (w/o Publish) has any value at all. If I can save locally, I don't need to post without publishing.

Thanks! Keep up the good work!

We sure like lists, eh? :) Here's mine in response again:

1. This can be done, absolutely. (meaning I understand now ;) Maybe a command that just loads a post into the editing surface?
2. This is something I've actually had on the plate for a long time that will probably never make it into v1 of PostXING. Since I'm working on v2, tho, it can definitely make it into that code. This will also improve the offline story (currently falls back to an empty textbox where each category gets its own line.)
3. Sounds good, definitely will look into this one too.
4. Wow, that sounds like a lot to do...how many keystrokes should be supported, how could I map them to logical commands, should it be per-user? Lots of questions on that one, I had never thought of doing something like this before.
5. I actually got a tip from Dmitry (creator of BlogJet) on how to deal with this issue. Apparently, mshtml has a focus issue that needs to be explicitly handled.
6. Consider it done.

Thanks again, Peter. Sorry it took so long for me to reply, but my CommunityServer install is not sending me emails when I get comments :(

This is a sad day in Texas.

I was sad to hear that fellow ASP Insider and ASP.NET MVP Jim Ross died peacefully yesterday from his cancer.

He told us all about his illness earlier in the year, then carried on posting answers as if nothing had happened. His last post on the email lists I frequent was just 10 days ago.

Funeral information:

The funeral will be Monday at 2 pm at Tyler Memorial, 12053 Hwy 64W, Tyler, TX 75704; 903-597-1396. Visitation is Sunday, 6-8pm

It is with heavy heart that I inform you that my beloved husband, Jim, died today around 4:30pm. When he awoke this morning, he was too weak to get out of his recliner. I called the hospice nurse and she came right over. She made arrangements for Jim to be transported to Hospice Home Place. I called Ron Dart and he was here with me when the ambulance came at 10:30am to transport Jim. Jim was able to talk with both Ron and me. He said he was ready and he hoped his time would be short. God answered his prayer. Jim took a turn for the worse in the ambulance and never regained consciousness. I was alone with Jim, holding his hand, when he died...it was very peaceful. Praise God.

Via James Shaw at CoverYourASP.NET

NEW: FTP Settings page now is labeled as such. This was confusing in the new user wizard.

FIX: Plugin ToolStripButtons now actually do something.

These are a couple of the things that I've fixed this morning based on some really great feedback from a few really brave souls. The most work it looks like is still going to be the options story. I knew this was going to be the case when I announced the alpha, so thanks everyone for your input!

It's lite on content at the moment, (and also may not work everywhere for the next couple of days thanks to DNS) but hopefully this will let me address number 7 via the forums and number 8 via the gallery.

6 is done - actually using the default browser for the view blog function. I think I'm doing pretty well for number 5, and number 4 should probably be implemented in a couple of more places. Number 1 is a big duh and should have been done since day one. 2 sounds like an interesting problem and will require a little more thought (although initially I'm thinking something like the auto-saved draft feature in gmail)

PostXING v1 is far from polished. It works well enough for my needs and I made it available for download in the hopes that it would be useful to someone else, nothing more. But I do want to make it a better application, and that's where you, dear reader, can help me out a little bit. I've decided to release an early alpha of PostXING v2 in the hopes that doing so will help it suck less than v1.

What's in it for you? Well, the same thing that's in it for me: if you catch some nasty behavior that I've missed then PostXING becomes a better product for everyone who uses it (all two dozen of ya)

If you're interested, contact me with the subject "PostXING alpha request" and I'll send you a zipfile with the new bits. The program requires v2 of the .NET framework.

Thank you.

Since announcing that we've started the beta of our implementation of the MetaWeblog API for MSN Spaces, I've received a bunch of positive responses from a couple of blogging tool developers. So far it looks like there'll be at least six blogging tools users will be able to use to manage the blog on their space after we launch the API.

[Via Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life]

Add at least one more - PostXING v2 will work with MSN Spaces via the MetaWeblog API. I don't think that it will work well with previous versions because I had to change some code in xml-rpc.net to handle the BOM as I noted earlier. If the xml-rpc.net library was updated for v1, I'm sure it would work there as well.

I decided today to try out PostXING as an alternative to BlogJet. So far my reaction is mixed.

Pros

• Seems to have good WYSIWYG support
• I like having the standard HTML heading tags available in the toolbar.
• I can easily insert a horizontal rule in my post
• I love the fact that it has the CodeHTMLer syntax hilighting engine in it, but it doesn't feel quite as smooth to me as BlogJet does.
• I'm very glad that it supports uploading images via FTP in the same way that BlogJet does. This is a must have in my book.
• As with BlogJet, I can't open an arbitrary post by ID. I have to find it in the historical list of posts, which sucks when the post is from a year ago.

Cons

• I have to click a button and wait for a popup to set the post's categories
• I can't use TAB to navigate the UI which means I have to use the mouse (a serious usability error as far as I'm concerned). And I don't know if I agree with the idea that TAB causes BLOCKQUOTE in the resulting HTML.
• I can't find keystrokes for many of the standard formatting things like ordered and unordered lists, styles, etc.
• Sometimes after using CTRL+K to format some text as a link (good), the input focus leaves the text editor and goes up to Title field (bad).
• I can't figure out how to post with a keystroke. It should be CTRL+Enter (like Outlook and BlogJet) but it isn't.

This will be my first post with it, we'll see if it is also my last. If the author can fix a few of those cons, I would be considering switching. For now though, I'm not so sure.

This seems like such a simple problem... I can't believe how poor all the choices really are.

[Via Geek Noise]

I'll try to address these as best I can, starting with the last Pro...

• This is a drawback of the MetaWeblog API, which is why you see the same behavior across both BlogJet and PostXING. The only way to really get around this is to use a different API to access your blog, like perhaps the webservice API in CS. Hopefully when CS v2 drops I'll be able to code up a plugin/provider that allows native access to the webservice api instead of having to use mwb all the time.
• In v2, the popup is replaced with a "Container Bar", but it's still the same concept. How would you rather see the category feature implemented? Perhaps as a dropdown next to the title kind of like w.bloggar?
• PostXING does capture the tab key in the editor surface to create a blockquote: I did this to be able to format quotes quickly. Maybe it was a wrong decision, but this is the first time that I've ever heard anything bad (if a Con is bad) about it. I could for sure make this configurable, but what should the default behavior be? Insert 4 spaces, or be able to tab around the rest of the application? I guess at the time that I implemented the tab capture, I figured the editor experience was the main focus of PostXING.
• You can't find these keystrokes because they don't exist. What should they be?
• This is 100% mshtml code (especially the ctrl+k part). I don't know how to address this but like all of the other points I'm open to suggestion.
• Again, there is no keystroke for this. Sorry. :( I will for sure add ctrl+Enter support, but which button should this be associated with? Post or Post & Publish?

 It looks like there are a lot of people that got this error when going from beta2 -> RC1, but this was on the RTM version. The thing that's tricky is that now the designer is so nice for us, it adds default values to public properties. Well, since the code that was being called was basically a wrapper for mshtml, I guess you could say COM was involved (like a third cousin). In order to find this bug (in my code, but my code generated by VS2005.) I had to fire up another devenv.exe instance and set it to attach to the first devenv's process for debugging. I don't know the exact workaround for this yet...maybe making the particular property that was causing trouble readonly w/ an accompanying SetProperty(value) method that would still let the underlying value be set. See the problem is that VS regenerates all that goodness for me, so whenever a change is made and saved in the designer I would be facing the same problem, have to hunt down one line of code, and start over again. Boo.

Is there a way to turn off the designer's new behavior?

Here's the source: ToolStripColorButton.cs (login is guest/guest).

I've been working recently to bring PostXING v2 to .net v2. Part of this process has shown me that Divelements' SandBar menu system (the last freeware version) doesn't like to be in a nested UserControl after a recompile. Throws all kinds of errors that are obfuscated and painted directly on the control in the designer. Unfortunately, I can't try a newer version of SandBar because they discontinued the freeware versions that they used to have. Shame, it's a really good library.

So anyways, I find myself needing a similar experience to the ColorMenu that I extended that comes as an example with the trial download. Now that we have a first-class menu system in System.Windows.Forms, I decided to see if I could create something that kept the simplicity of the ColorMenu. The ToolStripColorButton simply has a subclass called ColorPanel that inherits Form. When you click on the button, the form is shown. When a user selects a color, a changed event is thrown and you can do what you want with the resulting color by handling this event:

private void btnFontColor_Changed(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
	this.DesignEditor.TextFormatting.ForeColor = this.btnFontColor.Color;
}

A couple of points that could be extended: The gradient background looks all wrong with the default XP themes. I wonder if there's a way to query what the start/finish colors are for the current theme w/o going into unmanaged code? Heck, even with unmanaged code (via P/Invoke) would be fine. This same problem shows up for the GradientPanel I recently posted. Something to look into, anyways. There's also the extension point of adding the actual color as the image instead of using a stock icon or something similar. The code to do it is basically in the CodeProject article linked above, I was just happy with the icons for my current purposes.

[ Currently Playing : Drive Slow (Feat. Paul Wall & - Kanye West - Late Registration (4:32) ]

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I've always wanted to try this product to see how it fares anyways...let's see if this pans out.

I was playing my guitar, trying to soothe the pain that the Astros getting swept in the World Series ignited, when I came across a chord pattern that sounded familiar: Am, G, [whatever's between G and F], F, E. To check if I was right, I looked it up:  Led Zeppelin – ( BABE IM GONNA LEAVE YOU TAB )

This is going to take a while to master, but it's definitely going to be a fun ride.

Fan-freakin-tastic. w00t!

It happened to me in Redmond at Microsoft Campus (of all places!) and it's a known bug that a lot of others have run into apparently. Some folks have noted that it happens with the Beta 2 build, but the link above claims that it is gone from later builds. Sorry, wrong answer, kimo-sabe. Even on the RC build, this showed up.

It has to do with how Visual Studio handles USER SETTINGS. Thanks to a comment in ScottH's blog, I found a command line switch (devenv /resetuserdata) that brought up a user settings dialog asking me to set a profile when I started Visual Studio again. Instead of my usual C# profile, I decided to go with the General profile to mimic VS2003's settings. And whaddaya know? I can actually edit source files (for now). This does not bode well for Visual Studio as a development environment. Things should work by default, right? I can envision answering many questions about this in forums which I am subscribed to.

Goodbye, past coupla days. I'll miss ya.

 Now that I have actually used XSL in a project I've come to this conclusion: XSL is the Devil.

Go Check it Out. It's an interesting approach to wrapping [insert buzzword] functionality in an asp.net control. If you haven't read the first and second articles, you may want to read those first. The only drawback to this approach for me is the apparent lack of a commercial use license for the google maps api (somebody please prove me wrong on this).

[ Currently Playing : Drive Slow (Feat. Paul Wall & - Kanye West - Late Registration (4:32) ]

Just been shown something Microsoft are working on called "Spang" it's UNREAL.

When "Spang" comes out you'll all be so much happier, wish I could share but it's all NDA.

[Via Plip's Weblog]

What is Spang? It's going to revolutionize development as we know it. Keep a lookout for Spang.

This thing hasn't even reached feature parity with v1, but if you both see this post in ye olde aggregator, I've at least made some functionality progress.

edit: Houston, we have liftoff. 😄

[[photo lost 😦

My little phone wasn't able to get the entire line of vehicles, but it was at least 6 deep for every pump. The parts of the Houston metro area that are closer to the coast have been issued a mandatory evacuation, with a voluntary evac for everyone else. They say it's going to be nasty. We'll just have to see I guess.

[ Currently Playing : Emotion Sickness - Silverchair - The Best of: Volume 1 (6:01) ]

P.S. Thanks to all those who wished me well on my previous post. I really do appreciate that (molto gratzi:)

So now you know why my rss feed won't work this weekend. Don't you just feel all squishy inside now? As for me, I'm heading to the hill country for the weekend. Just in case, feel me?

[ Currently Playing : Caress Me Down - Sublime - Stand By Your Van - Live (4:22) ]

I was even able to get a resounding "Arr Matey!" out of Ethan

When we were at the beach, we did what everyone should do at the beach every once in a while. We buried each other. We probably should have gone from biggest to smallest, but we started with Ethan.

I intended to stay only one night, but circumstances dictated that I stay until Monday morning. At least I got to get a good glimpse of the only state capital bigger than the federal government's building!

Eric is my friend Peyman's roommate in Austin. He's a stand-up guy. Trust me on this.

[ Currently Playing : All You Need - Sublime - Stand By Your Van - Live (2:44) ]

I had been working hard on v2 of PostXING, but somehow development has stagnated on my end quite a bit. I brought it about 90% of the way towards the direction I was hoping to go. I even got an offer of help from a fellow Houstonian, but it seems I've dropped the ball. My bad.

Fortunately, as I said I've completed most of the grunt work, now it's just a matter of gluing everything together and creating a different provider than the Metablog API. It was still evolving when I last hacked on it, so I may only be 85% done, but at any rate, if I can get that fire going back under my ass I should be done in no time. I hope 😄

Since nobody but me is clamoring for v2, I can at least take my time and do things the way I want them. It's nice to be able to work on a software project without any stinkin time constraints. Another pitfall is that the latest v1 rev works well enough that I haven't felt the need to develop v2. I just want to. I want to make PostXING a better program. We'll see how it goes.

After a little searching I found someone with a similar problem, and Alex Lowe pointed them here: http://communityserver.org/forums/491886/ShowPost.aspx#491913

And it worked. Yay.

[ Currently Playing : Seed - Korn - Follow the leader (5:54) ]

Message: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. at CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.Weblog.EnableNewComments(WeblogPost post, User user) at CommunityServer.Blogs.Controls.CommentForm.btnSubmit_Click(Object sender, EventArgs e) at System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button.OnClick(EventArgs e) at System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button.System.Web.UI.IPostBackEventHandler.RaisePostBackEvent(String eventArgument) at System.Web.UI.Page.RaisePostBackEvent(IPostBackEventHandler sourceControl, String eventArgument) at System.Web.UI.Page.RaisePostBackEvent(NameValueCollection postData) at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain()

User Agent / IP Address
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR / 70.120.179.36

Path
/blog/blogs/comments.aspx?App=blog&PostID=1320 as HTTP POST

Referrer:
/blog/comments/1320.aspx

no wonder I haven't gotten any comments lately. That's gotta be annoying for both of you.

The UI took care of it pretty well, since I have my opml separated by category I could zip thru most posts and decide whether or not I wanted to keep it around in the aggregate view. It got me thinking about how this would scale for a web app, tho. I don't remember how Bloglines handles this (don't you just get what's available at the time if there are unread feeds available?) but it seems like an interesting problem: how do you keep a rich experience in a web app without sacrificing performance or content that I may want to read (mark all read is not always optimal for me (I always feel like I'm missing something golden (I did subscribe to the feed, after all)))?

I can't really offer anything original per se, but here's the icon I use in ObjectDock for RssBandit:

[photo lost 😦]

Okay, so I just slapped an eye patch on an existing image I found somewhere on the net...isn't that what the current icon is, too? 😃

Anybody else find that MS has so much crap going on that it's hard keep tabs on a single, solid, resources to use to keep up to speed on things? (And don't even send me to msdn.microsoft.com - that thing is 1) schizophrenic (is it a developer resource, or a place to buy subscriptions and stuff?) and 2) complete sensory overload. )

[Via AngryPets.com :: Blog]

It is pretty worthless unless you are looking for controls - even then, the contol gallery has broken images and dead links everywhere.

I've found that unlike the asp.net community, it's pretty much yo-yo (you're on your own) when it comes to winforms development. (and I complained loudly about it when I embarked on my first winforms project)

CodeProject has a lot of interesting tidbits, but I've yet to find a complete solution in any of the articles there. Bits and pieces, yes...

Another good resource is the dotnet-winforms list on discuss.develop.com. There are at least one or two winforms PMs that hang out there.

Lastly, get Chris Sells's book "Windows Forms Programming in C#" (or VB.NET, whatever.) That book has basic examples of almost everything you would want to achieve in a normal winforms project. Anything else is up to google skillz.

Check out this code project article with code for a Google Maps .NET control. very cool and handy stuff. and there are some demos here.

[Via Tiernans Comms Closet]

I read thru that, and it seems very useful to be able to manipulate things in codebehind like that. Once the lat/lon overlays are included, I may even check it out.

In other mapping news, I was contacted recently by the mappoint webservice team b/c I haven't made any requests to the webservice for a while. I told them that the current webservice doesn't buy me a whole lot in terms of functionality from the current solution that I use that simply has a mapserver control on my webserver and asked if virtual earth may be rolled into the webservice (since virtual earth currently only has licensing for non-commercial apps). They didn't tell me one way or the other, but my mappoint account was reinstated. Could this mean virtual earth goodness on the horizon? I hope so.

A few weeks ago I wanted to release an update to my own blogging engine and, because there was a minor data change I thought that it would be nice to export the data before running the update, change the files and then re-import it afterwards.  As I looked into this more I decided that I really should do it in a standards-compliant manner (if possible) and so then set out to: A) talk to people about it, B) rtfm some of the existing formats and C) write down my requirements.

[Via MarkItUp - Thinking Products]

Very seldom does someone come along who has simple ideas that can work coupled with what it takes to make those ideas reality. Darren is one of those people.

BlogML may not be the best thing since sliced bread, but it's an idea that is brilliant in its simplicity. Why should a task - importing and exporting blog content - be shoehorned into a spec that was never meant to do this in the first place? Isn't that the reason that atom was designed itself? To rehash the failures and stick with the successes of past specifications dealing with blogging? So is BlogML IMHO to import/export of blog content.

Keep up the good work, Darren. Although we live on opposite sides of the globe, you are always welcome to ping me with these crazy ideas of yours, if for nothing else than to talk them out.

So we got a Dell Precision 380 workstation with a SATA drive that had Windows XP installed on it. Since the Dell didn't come with a floppy drive, I couldn't very well just create a boot diskette. That would be useless. So based on the fact that there is a spec called "El Torito", I looked up an article online about Linux Bootdisks. It looked pretty good, but there was one glaring omission: the author mentions that you need to load any initial ramdisk via LILO, but doesn't explain how to setup LILO correctly for a floppy image. I decided to go back to it if necessary and went to redhat.com to see if there was any insight there.

I ended up finding a section of documentation that outlines how to create an Installation Boot CD-ROM, but I had already installed it! I later found that if at the bootloader screen of the install CD I typed the command:

vmlinuz root=/dev/hdb2

It would in fact load the installation off of the second (IDE) harddrive (thanks, btw, linux for making me use a modified kernel to support SATA drives. That's top-notch, guys.)

So I figured that the secret to the sauce was probably in the isolinux.cfg file that configures all the commands visible at the boot loader screen. First I tried something like this: 

default linux
label linux
	kernel vmlinuz
	append root=/dev/hdb2 initrd=initrd.img

but that didn't work, it still brings up the install screen. So I figured why not try the simplest possible solution using the config file, and this is what I came up with:

default vmlinuz root=/dev/hdb2

Guess what? I now have a Redhat Linux 9 install that will boot from a CD and I didn't have to mess with a bootmanager or touch the MBR in any way. I don't have to wait those pesky 10 seconds for either grub or the windows NT bootloader to select which install to start - I just pop in a CD if I want linux, and open it if I want WinXP.

I gotta say, I miss him a lot. Having him around every day and then all of a sudden not having him any more is a real shock to the system. I've also gotta say that I feel really blessed to have been able to spend that time with Ethan, and do fun Father/Son stuff. By far the most fun that I had was when I took him to the beach for the first time ever.

I tought Ethan the basics of doing a jig after you throw down a football. Ethan taught me that you need a bucket of water to wash each hand when they get sandy at the beach: Ethan072405.MPG

call them "labels" or "tags" but give me a way to categorize my thoughts. Please.

Thanks, Atom 1.0 

[ Currently Playing : A Message - Coldplay - X&Y (04:45) ]

So what's the answer? Sorry, I don't have that. I know that it would have been nice when developing PostXING to have an api that gives you more control or gives better querying ability, and I also know that none of the APIs that Darren talks about are it. For all of the metablog api's shortcomings, I find it at least decent enough to not have made a post using the web interface of my blogs since writing PostXING. I agree with Darren that the atom api does not seem complete. No categories? That's weird. If you're worried about being different from rss in some small way (and come on, that's what it's about in the first place, innit?) call them "labels" or "tags" but give me a way to categorize my thoughts. Please.

One person whose thoughts I'd like to hear on the idea of a better blogging api is ScottW who has written a few external apis for different evolutions of the popular aspnetweblog software that we all know and love and call CS::Blogs these days.

A better blogging API

I'll also do some searching over the next week or so to see what others have been discussing around this topic as it is obviously something which must have come up a lot.  Maybe we have to wait until industry heavyweights start to build blogging products into their core platforms before clear spec's start to emerge around what is needed from an API that would allow for the programmatic disovery and interaction with blogs. 

And then, who knows how long it will take for the current blog engines to implement that?

Applesause tastes goood.

[ Currently Playing : Audioslave / Number 1 Zero - Audioslave - Out Of Exile (05:01) ]

Ethan went to go play with his friend Emma today. Emma's older sister gave Ethan 11¢.

That's right, the older sister. That boy Ethan...😄

[ Currently Playing : Audioslave / Yesterday To Tomorrow - Audioslave - Out Of Exile (04:36) ]

[ Currently Playing : Night Bird Flying - Jimi Hendrix - Experience Hendrix (3:50) ]

[ Currently Playing : Suite-Pee - System of a Down - System of a Down (2:32) ]

I've needed this a couple of times, what better way to find it? ;)

I only decided to start shopping around when I learned that when I turn 25 (a key age for single males in America for car insurance) that I would only get about $300 off of my current rate a year. All I gotta say - "That's so condescending!"

[ Currently Playing : Let You Down - Three Days Grace - Three Days Grace (3:45) ]

11. If The Phone Don't Ring, You'll Know It's Me.

10. How Can I Miss You If You Won't Go Away

9. I Liked You Better Before I Got to Know You So Well.

8. I'm Still Missing You Baby, But My Aim's Gettin' Better.

7. I'll Marry You Tomorrow But Let's Honeymoon Tonight.

6. I'm So Miserable Without You, It's Like You're Still Here.

5. If I Had Shot You When I first Wanted To, I'd Be Out Of Prison By Now.

4. My Wife Ran Off With My Best Friend And I Sure Do Miss Him.

3. She Got The Ring And I Got The Finger.

2. You're The Reason Our Kids Are So Ugly.

1. How Can I Kiss Those Lips at Night When They've Been Chewin' My Ass All
Day Long?

[ Currently Playing : New Song - Sublime - 40 Oz. to Freedom (3:14) ]

Well, the "document" tabs only render at the top, and I need tabs at the bottom to keep the interface at least a little similar to what it always has been. Plus, with the interface that I have in PostXING, I just like the way the tabs look at the bottom better. So I have two choices: keep the interface that is already in place (using the older (free) version of Magic) or have tabs at the top, right? Nope.

I found a way to use the docking windows (that show their tabs at the bottom) to get the effect that I wanted.

First, I created a usercontrol and added four docking windows (with tabs). Then I expanded the dock control that holds the windows to be the same width as the usercontrol and anchored to top | left | right. After that, I basically disabled all docking, closing, and extra actions. At a pinch of graphics, and this is what I get:

Nice, huh? Well, I thought it was anyways 😃

The new section in the default web.config is now named memberrolesprototype so if you want to upgrade and not have to pull your hair out, keep this in mind.

update:

	<memberrolesprototype>
		<ReverseDOS>
			<settings enabled="true" debugEnabled="false" debugKey="oink=225678" hideExceptions="true" />

[ Currently Playing : The World Has Turned and Left - Weezer - Weezer (Blue Album) (4:18) ]

...to having something that actually works 😃 Do you think I'm going a little nuts with the logo?

What they don't know is that I have comment moderation turned on, so no comments make it thru without my say so. I wonder how many layers of defense will be required before I no longer have to worry about comment spam?

[ Currently Playing : Square One - Coldplay - (4:47) ]

WordPress also supports the metablog API - hopefully subText will retain that feature of dotText so there will be at least a few blogging engines (I know of) that you can set up for a personal blog and post to with PostXING.

update: It seems it was a fluke on my end, but I have an older version of dasBlog. It sure looks from Jeff's post that it works with whatever version he's running...

[ Currently Playing : White Shadows - Coldplay - (5:28) ]

Back already? Great! Seriously, ever since installing ReverseDOS, I have yet to see one auto-generated comment, when I used to get about 50 a day. Worse on weekends. Here are a couple of lines that I added to the ruleset:

<add type="post" pattern="poker" action="403" />
<add type="post" pattern="blackjack" action="403" />

Simple, right? It's usually the dead simple ideas that are the most elegant solutions in the end. Thanks, Mike.

[ Currently Playing : Star Spangled Banner - Jimi Hendrix - (3:47) ]

After a couple of questions, it turns out that all of the users were set up as sysadmins in the CS permission set, so anyone making a request to the metablog api would get a list of all the blogs available. Since PostXING ignorantly just uses BlogInfo[0] from the metablog_getUsersBlogs() method, everybody was trying to post to the first blog returned in the list.

So if you are running a multiple blog setup and wish to use the metablog api, make sure that your permissions are set so that when a user makes a request into his/her blog, theirs is the only blog they get back.

Thanks, Jeff.

[ Currently Playing : Voodoo Child (Slight Return) - Jimi Hendrix - (5:12) ]

That's it. This was purely so I didn't forget the url. Nothing technical to see here.

Blog/Authentication:

• UserName
• Password
• BlogID/BlogName

Post/Entry:

• DateCreated/Date
• Description/Body
• Title
• string[] Categories (nice!)
• PostID

Non-Conformities (for Posts):

• Metablog API
• Enclosure (although this is not used by CS::Blogs or .Text)
• link
• permalink
• Source (name and url, was supported by .Text, not so sure about CS::Blogs)
• userid
• BlogService.asmx
• Excerpt
• Name (I guess this is for url rewriting)
• Enable Comments
• Enable Trackbacks
• Moderate Comments
• Enable Ratings
• Syndicate
• Syndicate Excerpt (I guess you have to define an excerpt for this to work?)
• Syndicate Root (for communities?)
• DisplayOnHome (again, communities?)
• IsArticle (I really dig this one. I've wanted to be able to edit articles from the desktop for a long time.)

I've also been looking at ATOM a little bit - there doesn't seem to be any mention of categories in atom, which kinda sucks considering categories are a nice way to filter content.

All of the apis, including atom, have one other thing in common: getting general blog information is usually a two-step process. As an end user, I must supply a username, a password, and a url (although the atom api lets you enter a homepage url with a <link/> element that points to the service url (v1.0 of CS::Blogs asks for a blogname, too. Maybe this says that you should only work with one blog at a time?)). Then I get a list of blogs that I can edit with the credentials supplied. Then I can create, update, or delete a post. I can also get a list of recent entries (and articles in the case of the BlogService.asmx).

With atom, on blogger at least, you are required to use https:// as the uri scheme. Not a big deal, this just means that the common denominator for a blog has to have a couple of booleans: UseSSL and SupportsCategories, because those two are what separates atom and the apis of CS::Blogs from a coding standpoint. Since I'm going to be using libraries to handle the xml transfers (xml-rpc, soap, or rest) I could care less what the xml looks like.

Speaking of libraries, the code that I have for handling the metaweblog api also includes support for the old blogger xml-rpc api (thanks, dasBlog!), so I'll probably include support for posting to that api as well in the new version of PostXING.

I followed the steps outlined for setup, but it didn't quite work the way it was outlined at first - I got the dreaded "yellow screen of death". This was due to the entries that I had made in the web.config. So I looked at the entries that were already in there, and I noticed that some <section/> nodes were added to the <system.web/> node. Moving the default configuration from looking like this:

<!-- copy and paste the following code -->
<configSections>
   <sectionGroup name="AngryPets" >
      <section name="ReverseDOS" type="AngryPets.Web.Frameworks.ReverseDOS.FilterConfigHandler, AngryPets.Web.Frameworks.ReverseDOS" />
   </sectionGroup>
</configSections>

Instead, mine now looks like this:

<sectionGroup name="system.web">
	<section name="membership" type="Microsoft.ScalableHosting.Configuration.MembershipConfigHandler, MemberRole, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b7c773fb104e7562"/>
	<section name="roleManager" type="Microsoft.ScalableHosting.Configuration.RolesConfigHandler, MemberRole, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b7c773fb104e7562"/>
	<section name="profile" type="Microsoft.ScalableHosting.Configuration.ProfileConfigHandler, MemberRole, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b7c773fb104e7562"/>
	<section name="anonymousIdentification" type="Microsoft.ScalableHosting.Configuration.AnonymousIdConfigHandler, MemberRole, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b7c773fb104e7562"/>
	<section name="ReverseDOS" type="AngryPets.Web.Frameworks.ReverseDOS.FilterConfigHandler, AngryPets.Web.Frameworks.ReverseDOS" />
</sectionGroup>

And I of course moved the ReverseDOS node to be under system.web. We'll see how this pans out, but I thought I would put it out there just in case someone else was having issues with it.

[ Currently Playing : Stinkfist - Tool - Aenima (5:10) ]

Anyways, glad to see you "back in the game" :)

In an attempt to get back on top of my blogging, I've just installed the latest release of Christopher's PostXING, all of its plugins, and configured the FTP support. If this post is successful, I (and you) will know I'm good to go.

[Currently Playing :: Louder Than Words - Greenwheel]

[Via Don Smith (dev4net)]

 Nice. So where's the Categories, Post, Post and Publish and Crosspost buttons at? Where's the post editing toolbar? When can we get our grubby little hands on it?

Since it appears you've decided to go with the whole sidebar idea, why not use that to list the cateogories checkboxes? Seems logical to me anyway.

Yex

Good questions! I've actually created a sidebar for the categories, and am currently studying a couple of the API's I want to support right away - it looks like I will be able to handle categories the same way that I do currently. I'm going to try and find a way to push categories into the file that is saved (er..File -> Save) for a better offline story too.

I'm also looking to remove the History dialog and replace it with a "view" on the main form - no reason other than trying to get rid of unnecessary dialogs. And it'll look cool :)

As far as all of the other buttons, my current plan is to have all of that plus some configuration details pushed off to a kind of "provider" - each api plugin should know what buttons it wants to add, what operations those buttons support, what kind of identifying information the api needs, etc.

I'm hoping that I'll be able to break things down to a common denominator and have something that will be able to tailor the UI to the current blog that is being edited.

And as far as the grubby hands, sorry - it's probably going to be a little while before this is ready for prime time. I'm not even ready to dogfood v2 yet. :(

[ Currently Playing : Would? - Alice in Chains - Unplugged (3:42) ]

Of course, I had to look at the script since it's just javascript and play with it to see if I could extend it a little bit.

As with most of my "embrace and extend" forays, it was just a simple change - I use a lot of labels in gmail, so when I'm reading via the web interface, I have some organization to the 50+ email lists I'm a member of. Every screen that has conversations listed on it has a delete button, including the search view, except for labels (until you hit the search mail button, but then the number of visible conversations goes from 50 to 20).

So, I popped open the "view frame info" context menu item from gmail and saw that the view querystring parameter for a label was tl. With that in mind:

if (document.location.search) {
	if (document.location.search.match(/search=inbox/)
		||
		document.location.search.match(/search=query/)
		||
		document.location.search.match(/view=tl/) &&
		!document.location.search.match(/search=trash/)
		||
		document.location.search.match(/view=cv/) && 
		!document.location.search.match(/search=trash/)
	) {
		setInterval('try{window._gd_place_delete_buttons();}catch(e){}', 25);
	}
}

I'm not sure if the  && !document.location... part that I added is necessary, but it doesn't hurt anything. Now I can delete posts in all of the views that I would want to in gmail.

Interesting aside: I didn't actually remove the commands, but since they are all written to a .bat file, you can use normal batch commands - like rem - to effectively disable the commands. An example that is currently disabled in the branch .csproj file but not in the main trunk:

rem COPY /Y $(ProjectDir)ReadMe.txt $(TargetDir)ReadMe.txt

This way, when I'm ready to actually dogfood my new creation, I just need to remove the rem's and I'm good to go.

I've only made progress on the UI so far, but if you want to see the progress, the code is always available on vaultpub. You can view everything on the web over here: the login is guest/guest.

As if you cared...

I'm still trying to work out how cross-posting should be implemented. I've decided to go with an interface-driven plugin model because I don't have an app.config with this app (no reason for that - just haven't needed it yet) and I've already got 2 types of interfaces loading as plugins. I have 3(1/2) different types of plugin/providers that I want to implement, all of which I have access to so I can at least test it a little bit. They will include providers using xml-rpc, webservices, and the Atomizer. On the UI side, I'm going to do away with as many dialogs as possible. I'm trying to have this app have only one or two dialogs where it makes sense. I think everything else should just be a "view" on the main form.

I've also imported a couple of controls to the project along with an IUI library so different "views" shouldn't be too hard to implement I think. Anyways, back to coding...

I don't know why I've opted to start at the top and go down...probably because I'm just procrastinating on getting to the meat & potatoes (!) problems. I also had to go into a different program to upload the file above...I'll be checking that as well.

To his credit, Craig has done an awesome job of making FlexWikiPad very testable - something I didn't think was all that easy to do in winforms. Apparently, his dialogs are very humble. He's using a pretty strict Model View Presenter (or controller, whatever) pattern throughout the application. I thought this was a lot of extra coding at first (it kinda is), but in the process Craig has made FlexWikiPad easier to maintain and update thru the use of mocks/stubs and tests with this pattern.

Currently, I've got this itch that I want to scratch with regards to PostXING that would have been so nice to be able to test my way thru. I'm just hacking thru it now, and I've done a pretty good job of messing everything up so far :) In my defense, I'm still learning unit testing and when it comes to winform applications I feel that there is a balance that I like to hit right on the line of usability and architectural beauty. Anyone who has looked at PostXING's source will soon see that my architectin' ain't so purty - it's still just a lot of different pieces from different places glued together. I don't validate everything that I should. I left fields that I intended to add functionality for disabled but visible. Even up to 1.1 versions. BUT...

...and this is a big but...

...it works. That was priority #2 for me with PostXING. Priority #1 was to make something useful that I could use to learn winforms.

Anyways, I'm hoping that I can glean some insight off of people like Craig that are way more knowledgable than me on this front. If I feel like the task for PostXING to be testable is too great, I may just try to apply this knowledge to future projects. So, thanks Craig for making FlexWikiPad follow a concise pattern that I did know about but have never seen implemented with tests in C# before.

I got one of these earlier and decided to write a little utility to convert that string back into an image using the .net framework. It was pretty simple once I got the namespaces right:

using System;
using System.Drawing;
using System.IO;
using System.Collections;

public class MyClass
{
	public static void Main()
	{
		string base64 = @"R0lGODlhSwDRAPYAAG9qb6mlqJwdJMzHy5qYm722vbS2zldTWKzK9smjabKPZfLVnL26vo
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		j7Y5g/hx4auv8xprkEEmoEquZUStpkAxRrrYGSjRoNYQMbbFXphtllbc1gFWyBAAA7";

		Bitmap map;
		
		using(MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream(Convert.FromBase64String(base64)))
		using(FileStream fs = File.Create(@"C:\tmp\img.gif")){
		
			map = (Bitmap)Image.FromStream(stream);
				
			map.Save(fs, System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat.Gif);
		}
		
		WL("Converted Image Successfully!");
	}
	
	private static void WL(string text, params object[] args)
	{
		Console.WriteLine(text, args);	
	}
	
	private static void RL()
	{
		Console.ReadLine();	
	}
	
	private static void Break() 
	{
		System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break();
	}
}

Slap that little snippet into Snippet Compiler and look at what is generated. I actually changed the image to something a little bit friendlier than the image I recieved in the email. Enjoy!

Looks like it's fixed for now, so the two of you can go about getting that there rss feed :)

[ Currently Playing : Karma Police - Radiohead - OK Computer (4:21) ]

These crazy new ideas I've been having are so different from the current architecture of PostXING that I have to branch it just in case someone comes to me with a nasty bug they found that I just overlooked (this has happened a few times already, although not for a while). I don't like having broken software with my name on it out in the wild.

Anyways, I thought I would keep tabs on my progress for this on my blog. I feel like there is something that I'm missing in the ideas that I'm having, so I'm taking this slowly, step by step. To be honest, I've always had this idea in my head for PostXING. It's why it's built the way it is - I've left extensibility points open at the expense of writing a bit more code on the onset. When I'm done, a developer that has a good handle on the API they want to post to will be able to author a plugin/provider, drop it into a subdirectory off of the application root, and be able to use PostXING as kind of a shell to post to their custom API.

[ Currently Playing : Sad Statue - System of a Down - Mezmerize (3:25) ]

Geez, I was such a dork...okay, maybe I'm still a dork. But that's a maybe. I admit nothing.

The other thing is that I want to expand the abilities of where PostXING can post - not just using the Metablog API, but being able to use different services. I don't want to use the "provider model" because I don't think that particular pattern fits what I have in my head to make this work. Close, as a matter of fact, very close, but not exactly what I'm looking for.

The basic idea that I have now is based on the fact that a lot of the functionality that PostXING uses now already sits in separate dll's in the application root. I think that I can factor out the API specific functionality into kind of a plugin - thereby expanding the end applications that can be posted to from PostXING. I haven't hashed out all of the details yet. This is still a brainstorm at this point. However it works out, it's going to be a major version change.

If this can work out the way I think it can, this could be a very cool addition to PostXING. Very cool indeed.

Welcome to my Website!

On this site you will find lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...

Earlier, I had tried using one of the new data controls in asp.net - namely the FormView. I ran into a few issues with this control, mostly having to do with having to know what ID I was using in the database to set or edit the FormView's contents - I'm sure I could have worked out a way to set the ID to use in some clever way, but then I looked at the actual content that comes stock with the PSKit and it hit me...

A DataList.

It's already separated by a horizontal rule - all I really need is to bind a good old DataList to a couple of database entries and I've got something that I can update, oh, say twice a year or whatever. heh.

I used a similar table structure to the one from before:

Content
ContentID
Heading
Content
IsVisible

I had to actually write code (gasp!) to get it working the way I wanted it to, but it was pretty stock stuff thankfully. I just set up a SqlDataSource pointing to this table's CRUD procedures:

                
	<asp:SqlDataSource ID="SqlDataSource1" 
                  runat="server" 
                  ConnectionString="<%$ ConnectionStrings:Personal %>" 
                  ProviderName="System.Data.SqlClient"
                  SelectCommand="GetContents" 
                  SelectCommandType="StoredProcedure" 
                  DeleteCommand="RemoveContent" 
                  DeleteCommandType="StoredProcedure"
                  InsertCommand="AddContent" 
                  InsertCommandType="StoredProcedure"
                  UpdateCommand="EditContent"   
                  UpdateCommandType="StoredProcedure">
		  <DeleteParameters>
		    <asp:Parameter Name="Content_ID" Type="Int32" />
		  </DeleteParameters>
		  <UpdateParameters>
		    <asp:Parameter Name="Content_ID" Type="Int32" />
		    <asp:Parameter Name="Heading" Type="String" />
		    <asp:Parameter Name="Content" Type="String" />
		    <asp:Parameter Name="IsVisible" Type="Boolean" />
		  </UpdateParameters>
		  <InsertParameters>
		    <asp:Parameter Direction="InputOutput" Name="Content_ID" Type="Int32" />
		    <asp:Parameter Name="Heading" Type="String" />
		    <asp:Parameter Name="Content" Type="String" />
		    <asp:Parameter Name="IsVisible" Type="Boolean" />
		  </InsertParameters>
                </asp:SqlDataSource>

Then the DataList itself:

			<asp:DataList ID="DataList1" 
                          runat="server" 
                          DataSourceID="SqlDataSource1" 
                          Width="100%" 
                          OnCancelCommand="DataList1_CancelCommand" 
                          OnEditCommand="DataList1_EditCommand" 
                          OnUpdateCommand="DataList1_UpdateCommand" 
                          OnDeleteCommand="DataList1_DeleteCommand"
                          OnItemCommand="DataList1_ItemCommand"
                          RepeatLayout="Flow"  >
				<ItemTemplate>
				<asp:Panel ID="contentPanel" 
                                  runat="server" 
                                  Visible='<%# Eval("IsVisible") %>'>
					<h3><asp:Label ID="HeadingLabel" 
                                              runat="server" 
                                              Text='<%# Eval("Heading") %>'></asp:Label></h3>
					<asp:Label ID="ContentLabel" 
                                          runat="server" 
                                          Text='<%# Eval("Content") %>'></asp:Label>
                                        <asp:HiddenField ID="hdnContentID" 
                                          runat="server" 
                                          Value='<%# Eval("Content_ID") %>' />
					</asp:Panel>
					<asp:Panel ID="Panel1" 
                                          Visible='<%# User.IsInRole("Administrators") %>' 
                                          runat="server" Height="50px" Width="125px">
					  <asp:LinkButton ID="LinkButton3" 
                                            runat="server" 
                                            CommandName="edit">Edit</asp:LinkButton>&nbsp;&nbsp;
                                          <asp:LinkButton ID="LinkButton4" 
                                            runat="server" 
                                            CommandName="delete">Delete</asp:LinkButton></asp:Panel>
				</ItemTemplate>
				<SeparatorTemplate>
					<hr />
				</SeparatorTemplate>
				<EditItemTemplate>
					<asp:TextBox ID="txtHeading" 
                                          runat="server" 
                                          Text='<%# Bind("Heading") %>'></asp:TextBox>
					<asp:CheckBox ID="chkVisible" 
                                          runat="server" 
                                          Checked='<%# Bind("IsVisible") %>' 
                                          Text="Visible" />

					ContentID:
                                        <asp:Label ID="lblContentID" 
                                          runat="server" 
                                          Text='<%# Eval("Content_ID") %>'></asp:Label>
					<asp:TextBox ID="txtContent" 
                                          runat="server" 
                                          Columns="40" Rows="20" 
                                          Text='<%# Bind("Content") %>'
					  TextMode="MultiLine"></asp:TextBox>
                                        <br />
					<br />
					<asp:LinkButton ID="LinkButton1" 
                                          runat="server" 
                                          CommandName="update">Update</asp:LinkButton>&nbsp;&nbsp;
					<asp:LinkButton ID="LinkButton2" 
                                          runat="server" 
                                          CausesValidation="False" 
                                          CommandName="cancel">Cancel</asp:LinkButton>&nbsp;&nbsp;
					<asp:LinkButton ID="LinkButton5" 
                                          runat="server" 
                                          CommandName="add">Create as New</asp:LinkButton>
				</EditItemTemplate>
			</asp:DataList>

Several points of interest in the DataList declaration:

• No more pesky DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "field") syntax - much leaner and meaner Eval() syntax for one-way binding.
• Two-way binding happens via the Bind() syntax - notice that Bind() only happens in the EditItemTemplate, since the ItemTemplate is readonly.
• I'm only showing the edit/delete buttons based on what role the current user is in. I wasn't sure if this (# User.IsInRole("Administrators")) would work at first because it's deceptively simple. But yeah, it does work. Works great!
• I did most of this visually - there is no longer a reason to fear the designer in asp.net (thanks Venus team!)
• I had to disable Page input validation because I want the Content to contain html, and by default, it don't like that.

As for the codebehind, I guess I could have refactored it a little bit, but since this is not a mission-critical application (it is just a personal site, after all!) I just went the easy route and duplicated a lot of code. Probably the best thing to do would be to handle just the ItemCommand because there is no default handler for add and use a clever mix of a switch statement and defaulting the value of EditItemIndex to -1. But this isn't about best practices, it's about getting the stuff to work, ya know? Anyway, here's the code:

  1 	protected void DataList1_CancelCommand(object source, DataListCommandEventArgs e)
  2 	{
  3 		this.DataList1.EditItemIndex = -1;
  4 		this.DataList1.DataBind();
  5 	}
  6 	protected void DataList1_UpdateCommand(object source, DataListCommandEventArgs e)
  7 	{
  8 		string heading = ((TextBox)e.Item.FindControl("txtHeading")).Text;
  9 		string content = ((TextBox)e.Item.FindControl("txtContent")).Text;
 10 		string isvisible = ((CheckBox)e.Item.FindControl("chkVisible")).Checked.ToString();
 11 		string id = ((Label)e.Item.FindControl("lblContentID")).Text;
 12 
 13 		this.SqlDataSource1.UpdateParameters["Content_ID"].DefaultValue = id;
 14 		this.SqlDataSource1.UpdateParameters["Heading"].DefaultValue = heading;
 15 		this.SqlDataSource1.UpdateParameters["Content"].DefaultValue = content;
 16 		this.SqlDataSource1.UpdateParameters["IsVisible"].DefaultValue = isvisible;
 17 
 18 		this.SqlDataSource1.Update();
 19 
 20 		this.DataList1.EditItemIndex = -1;
 21 		this.DataList1.DataBind();
 22 	}
 23 	protected void DataList1_DeleteCommand(object source, DataListCommandEventArgs e)
 24 	{
 25 		string id = ((HiddenField)e.Item.FindControl("hdnContentID")).Value;
 26 		this.SqlDataSource1.DeleteParameters["Content_ID"].DefaultValue = id;
 27 
 28 		this.SqlDataSource1.Delete();
 29 
 30 		this.DataList1.EditItemIndex = -1;
 31 		this.DataList1.DataBind();
 32 	}
 33 	protected void DataList1_ItemCommand(object source, DataListCommandEventArgs e)
 34 	{
 35 		switch (e.CommandName)
 36 		{
 37 			case "add":
 38 				string heading = ((TextBox)e.Item.FindControl("txtHeading")).Text;
 39 				string content = ((TextBox)e.Item.FindControl("txtContent")).Text;
 40 				string isvisible = ((CheckBox)e.Item.FindControl("chkVisible")).Checked.ToString();
 41 
 42 				this.SqlDataSource1.InsertParameters["Heading"].DefaultValue = heading;
 43 				this.SqlDataSource1.InsertParameters["Content"].DefaultValue = content;
 44 				this.SqlDataSource1.InsertParameters["IsVisible"].DefaultValue = isvisible;
 45 
 46 				this.SqlDataSource1.Insert();
 47 
 48 				this.DataList1.EditItemIndex = -1;
 49 				this.DataList1.DataBind();
 50 				break;
 51 		}
 52 	}

This is the quickest way I could figure out to make things work, and yeah, it does work. So, there you have it - even though there are only two items currently in the table, it's very easy to add content via in-place editing and change what is currently there as well. You can view it live over at www.bluefenix.net.

[ Currently Playing : Voices - Godsmack - Other Side (3:44) ]

Balls.

So I look around the program to see what I can see. Oh look! There's an irc client that is loaded as a plugin! I haven't been on an irc channel since like '98 or '99, but it can't have changed that much, right? /join, /msg, yeah, I think I'm good to go.

So I hop on the channel, fully expecting some random bs to be flying around like it used to be. How wrong I was. Myself along with about 4 or 5 others having issues with azureus got coached thru getting azureus running like a champ. In particular, two people helped me not only get az up and running correctly again, but also coached me on getting it set to its optimal settings for my cable internet link at home.

I'd like to thank martouf5 (no link given) and PhilKC for being such a big help with my n00b azureus hurdles. A couple of things that I learned thru this:

• The channel has a very helpful, friendly tone - this was even true when I returned later to ask permission to use these guys' nicks on my blog, so it wasn't a fluke afaict.
• You can test your connection speed on www.dslreports.com or www.testmy.net You gotta dig a little bit for the one on dslreports, but they both give you pretty much the same information.
• Installing the JRE v1.5 does not uninstall previous versions. It's been a while since I've done any kind of Java development, but I wonder if this is because they have a SxS story like there is with the .NETfx? If so, there must be a way to tell a program which runtime to use...
• There is a bot (AzBot) on the channel (irc.freenode.net, #azureus-users) that will tell you the optimal settings to use with azureus by typing a command like /msg AzBot upspeed 5008. I find that simply incredible. And incredibly useful.

I was told by martouf5 that the motto of bittorrent is "give and you shall receive" - he said that was pretty much the attitude of this particular channel, and they all volunteer and help out people as they can. Judging from the conversations that I saw briefly, they get pretty much the same questions over and over, so I guess that helps in its way. He also humbly claimed that he was not one of the channel's "heavyweights" - that there were others there that helped a lot more than he does - but he helped me darnit, so he gets the credit he deserves here. PhilKC is actually what martouf5 would call a "heavyweight" and they both helped me when I needed it...so thanks, y'all.

[ Currently Playing : Right Here, Right Now - Fatboy Slim - You've Come a Long Way, Baby (6:27) ]

I'm trying to keep any modifications simple, so I created a really simple table that would cover the very basic needs of the sections that are shown on the default.aspx:

Content
ContentID
Heading
Content
IsVisible

I then created the basic CRUD procedures that would go with this table, dropped a FormView onto the default.aspx, and created a SqlDataSource to supply it with data. Now, let me say that it is very...what's the word? liberating? to be able to do most of the work in the designer without worrying about the designer nuking stuff. It's almost there. One thing that I thought was missing was the ability to specify one of the connectionStrings from the web.config file as the connection string source - you've got to switch to source view to do that (afaict). Also, the friggin thing doesn't want to work unless I supply a DefaultValue for each <asp:ControlParameter/> in the markup - so what happens when my ID changes?

One other thing that I'd like to see (I know, give an inch, take a mile:) would be the ability to use the same SqlDataSource for many FormViews. As the default.aspx is laid out now, there are 3, maybe 4 areas that would be good candidates for being populated from the Content table outlined above. So if I had FormView2, FormView3, and FormView4, I would like to associate them all with the same SqlDataSource and vary the output based on a different ContentID for each. Right now, it seems like there is a 1:1 mapping between each SqlDataSource and FormView (as the ControlParameter has a ControlID associated with it.) Maybe I should try using a different type of parameter?

More to come...I'll get this eventually :)

ObjectDataSource - too cool, I've been waiting for something like this for a while. This is more my style than using stinkin' DataSets. You can see what I did at bluefenix.net . I built it based off of the Personal Site Starter Kit that comes with vwd on up, so there's still a lot of Lorem Ipsum text in there. Well, pretty much the whole site is Lorem Ipsum text right now, except for the Projects.aspx page.

The page consists of two DataLists, an ObjectDataSource and a SqlDataSource. For the ObjectDataSource, all I did was add a web reference to the website and point the SELECT part of the datasource to the method that had the info that I wanted to display. That worked off my local machine perfectly, but I needed to go thru a proxy at the host to make the webservice work correctly. Getting this working was a simple matter of creating a wrapper to the webmethod that included adding proxy info to the webservice stub class before calling the webmethod. Changing the ObjectDataSource's SELECT section to use the new class that was dropped into App_Code got everything working, locally and in production!

Very cool, indeed.

[ Currently Playing : Imagine - A Perfect Circle - eMOTIVe (4:48) ]

So, thank you Sir Wally!

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Topics discussed:

• So today's that "420" thing in the mainland, huh?
• Real-time argument with my co-worker if today is Bob Marley's birthday
• I'm back on the King Car Iced Tea
• You want to hear me open a drink?  What the hell is wrong with you people?
• Thanks to new friends for setting me straight on World Curling Championships
• Do Microsoft jockeys not know what podcasting really is?
• My good buddy Wally McClure deserves to be knighted
• I love Benny Hill, but I never really got Monty Python
• Public school kids just showed up and excpected a tour of KUAM's station
• The downside to podcasting: show contents can't be indexed by search engines& yet
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• I get > 10x more traffic from RSS aggregators than over the web for my blog
• Have you ever copied something on one PC and tried pasting it on another PC?  I did.  Duh.
  

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[Via Jason Salas' WebLog]

I was wondering why I hadn't been getting any comments lately. Mostly because nobody really reads this blog, but even for those other couple of you that are subscribed - you couldn't leave a comment without registering!

Who else out there likes a dock better than the standard windows taskbar? I have been using StarDock's ObjectDock for a few weeks now and I think I'm sold. I have hidden my taskbar and I only run a single visible dock at the bottom center of my screen.

<snip/>

[Via Wes' Puzzling Blog]

Big smile on my face from this one - I recognize the plainer looking icon in the picture above. I knew that Wes was running PostXING (heck, his CodeHTMLer is a big part of it) but it's really cool to see it really there, as one of the few programs he needs "docked".

Lynn had diabetes. He was kind of an odd character, but he was a good person. I often joked around with him in the office - he had a strange sense of humor, but we got along pretty well.

I knew him for a little over 3 years, and in that time I learned a few things about him: he was a good geophysicist, with a specialty in borehole research. He served in the army when he was younger. He doesn't have much family left. He took care of his neighbors. For me, personally, he was there to talk about the things that he knew and he taught me lots about the oil & gas industry.

Rest in peace, Lynn, you will be missed.

Now, from the Tools -> Options dialog, you can optionally set whether you would like to automatically create a new post when you hit Post or Post & Publish. I also made some minor UI consistency changes, and removed a superfluous message that showed up in the options dialog in the last release (oops :)

So, go grab the new PostXING. Enjoy.

Well, I woke up this morning and found myself back in Roswell, GA. It seems that the Google trip must have been a dream.

Don't you just love April Fools Day Wally?

But thanks for the congratulations from a few friends and bloggers (thanks Josh). I appreciate your thought that it might have been possible!

[Via The CoverYourASP.NET Blog ]

I got got. Good one, James. And yes, I thought it was possible, too - Dozing Dogs is a pretty good CMS.

See for yourself: "Here we go!" on The CoverYourASP.NET Blog .

Problem is, when you run the Cassini webserver from webmatrix, it picks up the latest version of the .netfx and will give you different errors based on which version is installed. To get around this and ensure that the WebServer.exe runs on version 1.1 of the .netfx, simply add a WebServer.exe.config file with the following contents:

<configuration>
	<startup>
		<requiredRuntime version="v1.1.4322"/>
	</startup>
</configuration>

If you want to ensure WebMatrix runs on version 1.1 of the .netfx, you can add the above startup element to WebMatrix.exe.config.

<MarkUp>
	<globalAttributes>
		<class enable = "true" />
		<align enable = "true" />
		<style enable = "true" />
		<id enable = "true" />
	</globalAttributes>

notice the style element? That cleared up the little non-formatted code issue that I had in my previous post.

First, I added a call to the Globals class to return a formatted url with the application path intact. This was in Components.SiteUrlsData.cs:

public virtual string FormatUrl(string name, params object[] parameters)
{      	

    if(parameters == null)
        return Globals.FullPath(this.Paths[name]);

    else
        return Globals.FullPath(string.Format(Paths[name],parameters));
}

But wait! This causes the rss feed to show up with something silly like http: / /localhost/cshttp://localhost/cs/blog... for the links in the RSS and Atom feeds produced by CSBlogs. So, I tried it without the "HostPath" to see if I could get the same results. This was in Blogs.Components.BaseWeblogSyndicationHandler:

/// 

/// Appends http://Host:Port to all blog urls
/// 
protected override string BaseUrl
{
    get
    {
        return ""; //return Globals.HostPath(Context.Request.Url);
    }
}

That's it right? Nope, not if you have galleries enabled. One of the methods (that I know of 😃 uses the modified FormatUrl above to try and get a MapPath to a directory. You'll find out really quickly that MapPath doesn't like fully-qualified urls passed to it...I know I did. So, I modified one more line to make sure that I've got a relative path passed into the photo gallery. This was in Galleries.Components.Picture:

/// 

/// This static method gets the location of the picture cache directory, mapped on the local filesystem.
/// 
/// string
public static string CacheDirectory()
{
	Uri uri = new Uri(GalleryUrls.Instance().PictureCache);
	return CSContext.Current.Context.Server.MapPath(uri.AbsolutePath);
}

After that, everything seems to be running as normal. I don't know if I'd recommend doing something like this on your install, especially if things are working well enough for you. I just use this particular feature of the Metablog API quite often, so it bit me a lot.

update: It looks like the trackback feature uses fully qualified urls as well as the rss/atom feeds. I'll post a fix tomorrow when I find out where the BaseUrl is set for the trackbacks.

update2: Found it :) I would've got it done last night, but I don't have the broadband yet. Any ways, like I thought it was just a removal of a baseUrl parameter (case notwithstanding). I found this in Blogs.Controls.TrackbackMarkup:

protected override void Render(HtmlTextWriter writer)
{
            
    if(IsValid)
    {
        string baseUrl = Globals.HostPath(Context.Request.Url);
	writer.WriteLine(tag,/*baseUrl+*/PermaLink,Title,/*baseUrl+*/PingUrl);
    }
}

[ Currently Playing : Rooster - Alice in Chains - Unplugged (6:40) ]

Brian, in the finest tradition of Microsoft, VDB's engineers have returned an error message  that has absolutely nothing to do with the problem at hand.   Time Steps should be in the range of 1 to 10.  Instead, of limiting the input (1 to 10). VDB's fine engineers, it seems, prefer to give a worthless message, then plow on with  a 10 millisecond TD-Chart.  I conclude, the only reason for this is that they are trying to kill me.   I will have the problem fixed.   Maybe we will replace all messages with one that says "Call Tom, we are trying to kill him, sorry for any inconvenience."

Anyway, I have attached a new release 2.8.4, it has some new features like ZOOM, Undo, and a way to graph Well markers (horizons). It will also launch the help guide from the help button, now there is a novel ideal.  Though not fully tested, I'm sure it has an entire new array of useless error messages designed to kill me.

Sorry for the problem

Tom

[ Currently Playing : I Just Wanna Love U (Give It 2 Me) - Jay-Z - The Dynasty Roc la Familia (3:47) ]

WARNING: The only thing to watch out for is that I like to copy my assemblies to my C:\bin folder so I can dogfood the output immediately. If you don't like that, go to the main PostXING project and clear out the build events. Also, the code that is now in the repository is more recent than the release on Project Distributor. It supports proxies for the web connection and has a couple of other bug fixes in it like handling FTP files with spaces. One more thing - not all of the projects in the trunk are either deployed to the world or active - the Client Template plugin project allows you to define a custom template on the client side (since dotText doesn't implement this particular metablog api feature) and the offline plugin was going to be the save/load posts feature but that got put into the main project instead. It's still there because someday I may decide to make it handle online/offline capabilities differently.

[ Currently Playing : Bombtrack - Rage Against the Machine - (4:04) ]

update: I'm such a jerk. I have this repository set up all bass ackwards. I'll fix it up lickety split.

[ Currently Playing : Born of a Broken Man - Rage Against the Machine - The Battle of Los Angeles (4:40) ]

Can I help you? I think maybe so :) In order:

• I did this in a very early build of PostXING, but got some feedback that asked to be able to immediately edit the post that was just, erm, posted - in case of typos or whatever. I guess I could make it configurable, that shouldn't be too hard. Since you are literally the first person to ask for this feature, I think I'll make the current behavior the default.
• I don't know how to tackle this one - PostXING is basically just a wrapper for SOME functionality of the Metaweblog API. Generally, the blog engine will handle the entry IDs. Sometimes it gives you an int, sometimes it gives you a string.
• I actually tried to do this at one point, but I'm not sure how stable it would be. Think about it this way: in order for this to work, images would have to be parsed out (not a problem) and each one uploaded one at a time using the FTP component. The resulting url would have to be pumped back into the post and then and only then could you finally post/publish the entry. If you have a lot of images, this could take a really long time and thus give the perception that PostXING performs poorly. I guess I could make this a config option too with the caveat that it could possibly take a really long time to make a post.
• This one is easy :) If you want it to be zippy, download the latest version of Vault from http://vaultpub.sourcegear.com . Login as the guest account (I think it's guest/guest) and go to the PostXING repository. Set a working folder and click Get Latest Version. The latest code release should be there, although it may be a little out of sync with the most current version that I'm dogfooding on my local machine. You can also find any plugins code that is associated with PostXING. If you don't want to install vault for whatever reason, I'm pretty sure you can download from their web interface using the same uid/pwd, but I'm sure it would be about 100 times more painful.

Thanks for the feedback, Tiernan.

[ Currently Playing : I'm done - Korn - Take a look in the mirror (3:23) ]

I was searching for something else and happened upon a tutorial for tunneling VNC on windows, which led me to another article that was inspiration for the first article I found. Here was the problem with both: the webserver that I wanted to get to is behind an OpenBSD firewall.

So, first things first: I added a rule to pf.conf that allowed ssh to be redirected to the private address of my webserver using rdr syntax:

rdr pass on $ext_if from any to $public_address port ssh \
-> $private_address

This rule passes ssh calls bound for the external address to be sent to the internal network address (192.168.1.blah).

But what about ssh running on Windows?

Well, if you don't already have cygwin installed on the server, I ended up using sshwindows (linked from the OpenSSH site under Windows) Just follow the instructions in readme.txt or quickstart.txt and you should be good to go there - it comes with an installer, so it was pretty easy to get up and running.

But what about the client on Windows?

See, before, when I needed to get into a firewalled computer, I would just add rules to the firewall to punch temporary holes while I did what I had to do remotely. I know, bad Chris. Using OpenSSH to tunnel the traffic that would normally be sent unencrypted over the wire makes me feel a lot safer, even tho the server in question doesn't have a whole lot of goodies to look at. It's still important to me.

So how does the magic happen?

Using the tunnel feature of PuTTY, I added a link to port 5901 and mapped it to localhost:5900. Here's the rub: localhost in this case refers to the ssh server, not the computer the client is running from. The 5901 refers to the machine that the client is running from. This wasn't clear to me in either tutorial that I read thru. So you add the tunnel link to the SSH/tunels node of PuTTY and when you fire up VNC, have it sent to localhost:1. This was also not very clear from either article (but that just probably means I'm dense).

Is that it?

This time, for the tunnel link I specified an arbitrary (but often used) high port in PuTTY: 8000. I also wanted to point to the internal server (say, 192.168.1.2) so instead of specifying localhost:80 (which is already exposed -duh!) I pointed it to 192.168.1.2:80.

Fire up PuTTY, login as some user that's configured for OpenSSH, and point my browser of choice to http://localhost:8000/dragnet. Nice!

1 H4v3 K1|}n4pp3|} y0U|2 p|23C10U5 "CH4nn3L 9 6Uy". 1f j00 3v4|2 w4n7 70 533 H1M 4L1v3 4641n, My |}3M4n|}5 MU57 83 M37 1n fULL. My |}3M4n|}5 4|23 45 f0LL0w5:

1) 0n3 M1LL10n |}0LL4|25.

2) M1C|2050f7 MU57 0p3n-50U|2C3 w1n|}0w5 50 17 C4n 83 53CU|23 L1K3 L1nUx. j00 H4v3 48 H0U|25 70 C0MpLy. Y0U w1LL f1n|} 7H47 1 4M v3|2y 53|210U5 1n 7H15 M4773|2.

516n3|},

31337 |-|4><0|2z

So as is usually the case with these events, I came away with a couple of golden nuggets of information, some of which is even relevant in v1.x of the framework! (Imagine that!) Here are a couple of the notes I took:

• Finalizers keep objects alive an order of magnitude (about 10) longer than objects w/o finalizers
• It's a really bad idea to throw an Exception from a finalizer.
• Check out Critical Finalizers in v2.0
• Finalizers are most appropriate for owned unmanaged resources (filestream, sqlconnection, etc classes are a case in point)
• It's kind of an "unwritten rule" that any object that has a Close method should implement the IDisposable pattern and they should do the exact same thing. i.e. Close should just call Dispose.

I brought my digital camera, but being the jerk that I am, didn't check to see if the batteries were working first (doh!). Thankfully, I've got a camera phone and was able to take a picture with Brad anyways (I'm the short one):

This is also where I got my Channel 9 guy along with a nice smattering of other cool swag. Sorry, Scoble, it was just a joke tho - I thought it would be more appropriate to write the ransom note in 1337 than have both of my subscribers download a bunch of newspaper-clipped letter images. I still want my million, tho 😃

[ Currently Playing : Napoleon Solo - At the Drive-In - In Casino Out (4:47) ]

This has been a serious pain to get migrated from v0.94 (all because I need to edit my posts w/ the metablog api - go figure!) but a lot of it has been due to errors on my part. When you try to add content, you've gotta keep those Identity fields intact or you end up with "Server returned a fault exception" when adding a new post. Yuck.

Update2: Continuing my battle with this engine: It looks like the entry.FeedBackCount doesn't like to be DBNull or whatever (Imagine that!). I think I just might be g2g w/ the v0.95 .Text installation. Geebus.

Always good to see a bunch of Asians "go crazy". (ahahahahah!) Bonus: It looks like it was filmed in good ol' H-Town - part of it at the Williams Trace (once Transco) Tower! w00t! And Wal-Mart. Gotta love Wal-Mart.

Which File Extension are You?

Quoting has just become 100 times easier for me.

I prefer to use the keyboard when posting/changing text attributes when possible, and this whole no tabbing business finally got me a little fed up. Wanna know the funny part? It ended up being about 8 lines of code, give or take for whitespace:

  1 protected override bool ProcessCmdKey(ref Message msg, Keys keyData) {
  2 	if(keyData == Keys.Tab){
  3 		this._designEditor.TextFormatting.Indent();
  4 	}else if(keyData == (Keys.Tab | Keys.Shift)){
  5 		this._designEditor.TextFormatting.Unindent();
  6 	}
  7 			
  8 	return base.ProcessCmdKey (ref msg, keyData);
  9 }

What other unsupported keyboard shortcuts would you like to see in PostXING (get em while I've got it fresh on my mind 😃

[ Currently Playing : Dazed And Confused - Led Zeppelin - BBC Sessions CD 2 (18:36) ]

<snip>Q: You mean you didnt kill 200K people or change the tilt of the Earth's axis? a: not yet </snip> [Via rains-N-brawn.com ]

Classic. I rather enjoyed the article, and think that a lot of people are missing the point. Not that my opinion matters anyways, but I thought it was kind of a neat POC.

Enterprise Library

Registration required for this download

[ Currently Playing : Get What You Need - Jet - Get Born (4:07) ]

Scott Densmore

The registration process is to help us better connect with you. I hope it doesn't detract you from downloading. I think you will love it.

I also plan to add proxy support soon - the only hold up right now is that I like to at least dry run what I'm releasing before I put it out there, and I have no idea how to test if proxy code is going to work. Is there a such thing as a free proxy server that I can test against? I'm pretty resolved to, er, 'borrowing' the functionality for proxy support from RssBandit simply because the code works and has been a good reference for me before. So, I'm not worried about how to implement it, just on how to test it. Any ideas?

[ Currently Playing : Move On - Jet - Get Born (4:20) ]