Leadership musings and hackery from the Perl generation...
NTLM Authentication for websites is a great addition to the bat-belt when writing ASP.Net sites. Additionally it is also a great to have support for it in Team Foundation & SharePoint portals. However as great as having support for NTLM authentication may be, having to enter & re-enter your credentials when surfing Intranet or Extranet sites can be an annoyance that is just not worth it.
My day-to-day job is always interesting to say the least. I work in an “Agency” atmosphere, where catch phrases, high budgets, high hopes and a lot of other hoo-hah take place on a daily basis. I am, however, a realist. I would prefer you to drop the f-bomb in a meeting if it meant the difference between clarity and shades of grey. It is because of this, that i am constantly mystified by a lot of my fellow agency brethren’s conversations when it comes to the topics of emerging media and the social media space in general. How much bullshit can these people spew before the world wakes up?
One of the continually high risk and sometimes fiddly operations in web deployment is a web application’s deployment, and yet a lot of people working in smaller teams seem to have become stuck in the land of cowboys because the task of automated deployments seems either too difficult, too time consuming to setup or is perceived as un-needed. I’m about to attempt to prove all of these things wrong, while at the same time allowing you to get back to doing what you do best: write code.
Earlier in the week i posted a Twitter post commenting on how if your not using the XMLSerializer class to you advantage, well, as Scott Hanselman puts it now and then: Your doing it wrong. I use the XML Serializer classes on a daily basis to refer to my XML in a strongly typed manner and often wonder why i see people go to so much effort in creating hard to maintain code just to get data from or send it to an XML file.
ASP.Net web applications are awesome most of the time. But there is a sad reality: ASP.Net applications are tuned to handle huge amounts of traffic, not 50 page views a day. This becomes an issue when you have limited traffic to your site, because if your it doesn’t keep being viewed, your application pool may recycle, and that important visitor number 1 gets screwed waiting as your site rebuilds or your app pool to fires up. Whether it’s a SharePoint site, an ASP.Net or your internal TFS 2008/TFS 2010 Server, you want it to be FAST… all the time.
With the launch of .Net 4.0 there have been a lot of excitement about some of the new features, Optional parameters being one of these. What a lot of people don’t realised it that with a bit of leg work you can pull this off with c# 2.0 – so those of you unable to deploy to a machine running .Net 4.0 can still join the party.
Microsoft’s Hyper V has really shaken the virtual machine industry up with it’s free virtualisation technology. The Hyper V/Virtual Server/Virtual PC product line is many things to many people, but as it is a growing technology, there are some things that the product can not do: Downsizing a VHD is one of those things – But there is an easy solution.
Another quick fix post for the day: In Windows 2008 R2 running IIS 7.5 an odd issue occurs when trying to view a PDF in Adobe Acrobat’s browser add-on. There appears to be a bug in Acrobat’s adherence to the RFC conventions, stopping your users from viewing PDFs in their browsers, and both sides’ responses are vague as hell. I’ll help you wade through the crap and get a working solution.
I’m currently involved in a new project for a client that involves a lot of user contributed video, that then gets viewed on the site. This means video encoding, and lots of it, and the budget and timeline involved mean that the client can’t afford to implement the dedicated hardware to do this themselves. Why not encode in the cloud you say? Why not.
Social networking has taken the world by storm, and added a new tool to web developers’ marketing arsenal (along with Digg, Reddit etc), in the form of link sharing. The problem is that it is nearly impossible to have a say in most social network link sharing, along with how you are promoted. However in Facebook’s case we have a few tricks up our sleave.