ASP.Net

ASP.Net and Active Directory: The authentication mechanism is unknown

Gerry Heidenreich — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:55:21 GMT

The authentication mechanism is unknown
I recently came across this issue when working with Active Directory in ASP.Net. Turns out I needed to fully qualify my AD access username with the domain name. When composing a DirectoryEntry([Domain], [Username], [Password]), precede the UserName with the Domain:

DirectoryEntry de = new DirectoryEntry("LDAP://domainName", "domainName\gerryheidenreich", "myPassword");

I'm not sure yet why this web app is behaving different from others I've written that use AD, but this fixed the problem.

GiveCamps: Geeks Giving Back

Gerry Heidenreich — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 19:24:59 GMT

Overview: A Give Camp is a gathering of professionals (developers, graphic designers, database ninjas) that volunteer their time and resources to design and implement solutions (websites, applications, content-management systems, etc) for various charities and non-profit groups. Proposals can be submitted by non-profit groups and charities before the camp, and they are reviewed and selected, and teams of volunteers are organized to represent a project, create a plan and execute it, all over the period of a single weekend.

Projects / Features:
Web sites, new sections
Access Databases
Mobility Projects
New Content Management System (Graftiti, DotNetNuke, Sharepoint)
Intranet
Membership Tracking App
Paypal integration
Hosting
Training
Social Media Presence & Advocacy

Volunteer Qualifications:
Most importantly: A desire to contribute
Development experience (any level of expertise)
Sharepoint
Database Administrators
Developers! (.Net, Java, C++, PHP, Excel, Html)
Flash Developers & Designers
Photography
Social Media

Other GiveCamps:
Upcoming:
- Indianapolis, Indiana, January 23-25, 2009
- Milwaukee, WI, TBD (Nov-Dec, 2008?), Scott's announcement
- Northwest Arkansas .Net UG, TBD, Jay's announcement

Past:
- Dallas, Texas, January 18-20, 2008
- Kansas City, April 25-27, 2008
- Ann Arbor, Michigan, July 11-13, 2008

Important URLs:
- Givecamp.org
- We Are Microsoft: 18 projects for charities (brief case studies! - click links to see project details)
- Jennifer Marsman's review of the Ann Arbor Give Camp
- Twitter chatter "givecamp"
- GiveCamp Facebook Group

People:
- Chris Koenig, Dev Evangelist @ Microsoft, Founder of first GiveCamp
- Jennifer Marsman, Dev Evangelist @ Microsoft
- Dave Bost, Dev Evangelist @ Microsoft
- Larry Clarkin, Architect Evangelist @ Microsoft
- Scott Isaacs, President of WI .Net Users Group, leading up GiveCamp MKE
- Paul Hacker, leading up Indianapolis GiveCamp
- Jay Smith, President, Northwest Arkansas .Net User's Group

Accomplishments to date:
- GiveCamp #1: "We Are Microsoft" 18 projects from the first GiveCamp in Dallas, TX
- GiveCamp #2: "Coders For Charities", Kansas City, Missouri (overview)
- - Boy Scouts Troop 813
- - Berean Bible Church
- - Task Force Omega of MO
- - Missouri Pit Bull Rescue
- - Metropolitan Org to Counter Sexual Assault
- GiveCamp #3: Ann Arbor, Michigan (15 projects, charity names only, no details found)

Getting Started:
The GiveCamp cookbook

Media Coverage, spreading the word:
- Local news (Kansas City Fox 4)
- Press Release (Kansas City)
- Radio (Kansas City, Dick Dale Morning Show)
- Twitter
- Blogs
- Camp homepages
- GiveCamp.org

This post will be updated as I find more info for each section, and I will have a series of posts on our Milwaukee GiveCamp as it comes together. I am sure I have missed people and news, but this should serve as a good start to encapsulate the GiveCamp movement as it takes off.

Large File Uploads For Clients

Gerry Heidenreich — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:32:46 GMT

Quick background: we have clients that occasionally need to send us very large files (up to 1gb). We need a secure, quick, and easy way to make this happen. FTP was designed for this, and HTTP still feels kludgy. I'm looking into 3rd party components, services, plugins, as well as considering a custom approach. At the end of this post are a few links out to some other HTTP solutions, and some blog posts on the topic. Here is my initial solution, which uses FTP, hands the control over to our users (as opposed to the help desk), and gives us responsibility for the process, but requires the end-user to download an FTP client for their transfer. Not sure yet if this is a good trade-off...

Business Process for Large File Transfers with FTP
Request: From lawyer, from their Marketing Dashboard:
- Client and Project ID
- Email of contact at client
- Duration to keep site active
- Additional Description/Instructions

Submit: (Use scriptable FTP server like FileZilla)
- Create FTP Directory for client: \\internetServer\FTPshare\clientProjectId
- Create user in FTP Server, add read-only privs to directory
- Create Destination Directory for File on File server \\fileserver\files\FTP\clientIProjectId
- Add a monitor for the file upload to complete (internal service we have running) and notify lawyer when done
- Email client with URL to page with FTP client download link & instructions

Receive: (FileWatcher service sees new file is complete)
- Move file into Destination Directory on file server
- Remove FTP directory, instance, external user acct
- Email lawyer to notify that file is transferred, with link to file on file server

Existing solutions and posts on the topic:
Interestingly, TechCrunch made 2 announcements today related to uploading large files over http, regarding drop.io, and YouSendIt.

Outlook (as of today!)
YouSendIt Outlook Plugin, [TechCrunch announcement]

HTTP Services:
YouSendIt
Drop.io

HTTP Custom controls:
AJAX Uploader
JFileUpload
NeatUpload ASP.Net Component
Telerik's RadUpload

Blog Posts:
File Upload With ASP.Net
Why Are Web Uploads So Painful?
The Dark Side of File Uploads
Large file uploads in ASP.NET

.Net now "Shared Source" NOT Open Source

Gerry Heidenreich — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 16:49:00 GMT

Scott Guthrie announced on his blog, a few hours ago, that .Net source code will be opened up to the public, under a ms-rl license (for reference, read-only).

Scott's announcement, already flooded with lots of comments & trackbacks, mostly positive, is here.

Starting with Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas), currently set to be released later this year, we will be able to reference the internal state of .Net objects as if they were local.

This means a few things:
1. F11 will step you into the actual .Net object being called, where you can reference in-state .Net classes.
2. You will see real objects, variables, line numbers in your call stack for the .Net classes being referenced.
3. (I assume) you will be able to “Go to definition“ and view actual .Net class source code instead of an interface. Of course, we've always had the ability to reflect on the libraries, and with a little work, figure out what was happening... but this will make things a lot more simple and accessible (have a look at Reflector to figure out the Asp.Net treeview control!)
4. WWBAD (What would Brad Abrams do?) Now we can see for real instead of reverse engineer it and spend our time figuring out what the variable datetime17 is doing. In other words, quality of code should improve. As we constantly reference the .Net library, some of the msft QA, v3.5 juju should rub off on us and help us fall a little more in line with standards, best practice, etc.

Anyway, it's read-only. It's not Open source. But it's another big step in what I think is the right direction for Microsoft...

Some good MS pages to check out on open/shared source initiatives:
- Open Source at Microsoft
- Microsoft Shared Source Initiative
- MS Developer Tools (A goldmine of open/shared source projects, most on CodePlex)

Profile your ASP.Net 2 apps with nProf

Gerry Heidenreich — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 15:15:00 GMT

I'm going to make this short and sweet - there's not much [non-Polish (?!) ] documentation out there for nProf, so here are my notes for getting it to hook into your ASP.Net 2 app and show you some bottleneckage:

Preparation:

1. Set processModel username:
Open your machine.config file (C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\CONFIG\machine.config), hit Ctrl+I (incremental search) and type processModel, hit F3 (~2 times) until you find the <processModel...> tag. Add the userName attribute within it: userName="SYSTEM"

2. Make sure your app is hosted in and accessible via IIS (nProf won't hook into Cassini) - ex: http://localhost/test

Install nProf:

There are a bunch of versions available, and they're all alphas... The one that worked for me is here (nprof-0.9.1-setup.exe on sourceforge).
Install the .exe, and when prompted go ahead and run nProf.

Profiling:

Note: DO NOT stop profiling via nProf. Instead, recycle your app pool, or restart IIS inside your IIS manager. nProf will see it's recycled and stop for you. If you use nProf's stop buttons, it will hang and you'll lose your profile data.

File > New, Create Profiler Project dialog opens, select ASP.NET radio button, click Create Project.

Click Project > Start Project Run (or just hit F5)

Open browser, browse to IIS-hosted asp.net app (use IIS address, ex, http://localhost/nProfTest). Browse through pages that are slow, or save separate profiles for individual pages. You will see nProf's Messages window start rolling with information.

Once again, don't click 'Stop Run' in nProf! Instead, go to IIS Manager, and either recycle your app pool, or restart IIS. This will properly stop nProf, and you will see your resulting profile data.

Analysis:

Back in nProf, you will see the threads called by your aspnet_wp.exe process, and when you select them, you will see the used namespace hierarchy below. Find the thread with your library profile. Uncheck the parent namespaces and re-check your own. On the right, you will see the method signatures called, number of times called, % time taken, and more. Click the '% of Total' header to sort, and you will see your bottleneck methods at the top.

Note: Saving & Opening is kludgy: You can try to save, but I've had no luck re-opening my profiles... instead I took a screenshot of my trouble methods just for reference.

Nice list of AJAX Libs, Implementing 'Suggest'-type searching...

Gerry Heidenreich — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 20:52:00 GMT

Found a good list of current open source libraries available: [Open Source,Ajax/DHTML Libraries]
- moo.fx
- rico
- swat
- script.aculo.us
- Mochakit
- dhtmlgoodies
- dojo
- Yahoo's UI Library
- cross-browser.com

dhtmlgoodies.com Dynamic List
I've played with most of these, but the one I got the most use out of is dhtmlgoodies.com AJAX Scripts, especially the Dynamic List stuff... easy & very cool to work with. The Dynamic List is the easiest, most flexible way to provide Google Suggest style searches to your site.

By logging searches, as well as allowing content providers to tag their content with specific terms, we can tie specific terms to their appropriate areas.
For example, as you're typing “property”, options should appear, ultimately:
1. property (Intellectual Property)
2. property (Real Estate Law)

IronPython/Dynamic language support in ASP.NET

Gerry Heidenreich — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 19:46:00 GMT

ASP.NET is going to support dynamic langues, starting IronPython's v1.0.1 release.

- Download Microsoft IronPython for ASP.NET CTP here
- The install (using VS05) requires a hotfix to update System.Web.dll
- Check out the 5 walkthroughs: Creating a web page, using Shared Code, Databinding, Debugging, and creating a User Control

David Ebbo [blog] has moved from Microsoft's ASP.NET group to the CLR dynamic integration team. He has posted a great article on getting dynamic language to work in ASP.NET.

The New Dynamic Language Extensibility Model for ASP.NET

IronPython homepage on CodePlex

Reliable Scheduled Services From ASP.Net

Gerry Heidenreich — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 18:04:00 GMT

I've come across this problem quite a few times in my years with ASP.Net: How can I rely on it to run stuff for me on a schedule?

I have always fallen back on Windows Services, running on my web servers to solve this, and the only Windows Services I've ever written were for executing tasks on a schedule for my web apps. Wrapping such a service up within ASP.Net (reliably) would have saved me a lot of pain and trouble, but it's simply not what the framework was designed for, and no matter how hard I looked, there was not solution in place to accomplish this - until now! :)

Simulate a Windows Service using ASP.NET to run scheduled jobs
By Omar Al Zabir

Omar explains how you can manually register a cache item into your web application by using Cache's Insert() to set a timeout (minimum 2 minutes), and a work method to delegate to when that timeout occurs. This is a keeper...

FCK!

Gerry Heidenreich — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 05:09:00 GMT

FCKeditor
For as much as I love .Text & DNN, I'm really getting frustrated with the FreeTextBox, and it's tendency to rewrite relative paths to absolute, and it's properties that seem to overlap and overcomplicate it's potentially useful feature-set. My new partner in crime - who some locals have already met, but for the meantime prefers to remain nameless (how's that for an introduction) - has been researching rich-edit textbox controls for a CMS implementation we'll be working on shortly. The best by far seems to be FCKeditor. How's this for simple: There's a single property called “basepath” that points to the single dir that all the control's functionality is encapsulated. However, it's not about the simplicity, the excellent documentation & platform support, or the extensive file management... it's all about the name. Frederico Caldeira Knabben knows how to make a product shine... he should come out with an entire line of FCKsoftware, and double the size of his Donate button.

[FCKeditor home] - [FCKeditor wiki] - [FCKeditor @ SourceForge] - [freshmeat]

Kill Trackback Spam in .Text

Gerry Heidenreich — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 04:44:00 GMT

After about 3 days, I've accumulated about 60 spam trackbacks. The quick fix is in SQL below, and a delete statement follows that to clean what's there already...

I shouldn't have to say: it's a good idea to backup your db before futzing with it.

Very easy, just a quick adjustment to the blog_InsertEntry sproc...

Be sure to replace {user} with the qualified username. Add the bolded text below into the sproc to wrap up the INSERTs:

blog_InsertEntry

CREATE Proc {user}.blog_InsertEntry
(
@Title nvarchar(255),
@TitleUrl nvarchar(255),
@Text ntext,
@SourceUrl nvarchar(200),
@PostType int,
@Author nvarchar(50),
@Email nvarchar(50),
@SourceName nvarchar(200),
@Description nvarchar(500),
@BlogID int,
@DateAdded datetime,
@ParentID int,
@PostConfig int,
@EntryName nvarchar(150),
@ID int output)
as

if(@EntryName is not null)
Begin
if exists(Select EntryName From blog_Content where BlogID = @BlogID and EntryName = @EntryName)
Begin
  RAISERROR('The EntryName you entry is already in use with in this Blog. Please pick a unique EntryName.',11,1)
  RETURN 1
End
End
if(Ltrim(Rtrim(@Description)) = '')
set @Description = null
if not(
@PostType = 4 and (
@Title like ('%casino%') or
@Title like ('%gambling%') or
@Title like ('%holdem%') or
@Title like ('%hold em%') or
@Title like ('%poker%') or
@Title like ('%roulette%') or
@Title like ('%slot machines%') or
@Title like ('%blackjack%'))
)
Begin
INSERT INTO blog_Content
(Title, TitleUrl, [Text], SourceUrl, PostType, Author, Email, DateAdded,DateUpdated, SourceName, [Description], PostConfig, ParentID, BlogID, EntryName )
VALUES
(@Title, @TitleUrl, @Text, @SourceUrl, @PostType, @Author, @Email, @DateAdded, @DateAdded, @SourceName, @Description, @PostConfig, @ParentID, @BlogID, @EntryName)
Select @ID = @@Identity
if(@PostType = 1 or @PostType = 2)
  Begin
   exec blog_UpdateConfigUpdateTime @blogID, @DateAdded
  End
Else if(@PostType = 3)
  Begin
   Update blog_Content
   Set FeedBackCount = FeedBackCount + 1 where [ID] = @ParentID
  End
End
GO

And of course a quick script to clean out the crap:
delete from {user}.blog_content where
title like ('%casino%') or
title like ('%gambling%') or
title like ('%holdem%') or
title like ('%hold em%') or
title like ('%poker%') or
title like ('%roulette%') or
title like ('%slot machines%') or
title like ('%blackjack%')