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Switch to use to conect to a Windows server console from various OS’s:
Remote Desktop (Vs. Client Connection Manager)
Windows XP < SP3
/console
Windows XP SP3
/admin
Window Vista [< sp1]
/Console
Windows Vista (Business) [sp1]
/admin
Windows 7
/admin
Windows Server 2003 (incl. R2) [sp2]
/console
Windows Server 2008
/admin
Note RDC 6.1 (6.0.6001) supports Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) 6.1
Connects to the console session of a server
Connects you to the session for administering a server.
Why the heck don’t they just put a check box on the login form?
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I just took the long silly way around to return a json result to a page. I kept trying to send a json string back as just that, a string and it just wouldn’t work. Whenever JavaScript received the string it didn’t know what to do with it, except treat it as a string of course. I banged my head against this one for too many hours. Though my persistence payed off.
As the night got later (I think it’s 03:00 about now) I decided to figure out how others are returning json object from ASP.NET MVC. It isn’t as simple as it should be, but not too difficult. The biggest issue, as with much in MVC land is the huge lack of documentation. So looking up something like JsonResult, yields a pretty useless help page. So more time had to go into discovering on how to actually use this cool new result type.
It turns out you can set up and action with a return type of JsonResult (it’s usually ActionResult) and have that action return a json object. I am not even going to pretend I can do this from other objects like json.net (from James Newton-King). I am using this to return a model as json which populates my form with on-demand instructions. This library rocks, but I digress.
The basic structure I used is a dictionary object
public JsonResult MyAction()
{
Dictionary<string, string> dict = new Dictionary<string, string>();
dict.Add("keya", "valuea");
dict.Add("keyb", "valueb");
return Json(dict);
}
That’s pretty much it in a nutshell. Json() is a new web helper in MVC3. You can find it at System.Web.Helpers.
I saw one example where you can build an object on the fly, but I couldn’t get it to work. It basically looks like this:
//....
return Json(new {keya = valuea, keyb = valueb};
The dictionary generic works for now. If you know of a better way, please let me know.
I learned something new over the last week which I not exactly sure of the benefit of. Probably because I still not entirely sure on how it is implemented.
It seems that in IIS7 that the default functionality is that the web.config in the root website is inherited to the child webs.
Of course I found this the hard way. I changed to a new web host and while setting up my base sites I wanted to try out a few new applications. I setup Umbraco under a sub-domain and played around with that for a while and remembered Orchard from MVConf. I setup a virtual directory, /orchard, and loaded up the site.
I kept receiving 500 errors when going to the site. There was a whole round of support emails around figuring out where the errors where steaming from. Once I found out I learned about the IIS7 inheritance.
For starters I want to list the ways I found to disable the inheritance and then move on to how this could be useful. (Man it’s always something)
First was the instructions from the Arvixe staff (which I think they found on SO)
<location path="." inheritInChildApplications="false"> <system.web> ... </system.web> </location> There is also three examples in the IIS.NET bog: http://blogs.iis.net/steveschofield/archive/2009/09/19/control-web-config-inheritance-with-iis-7-asp-net-options.aspx
- You can set the enableConfigurationOverride attribute to false for an application pool
- allowSubDirConfig=false (as above)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms689469.aspx
- inhertInChildApplications property
I haven’t tried all of these yet. If you have leave a comment on how it well worked. It seems this functionality is enabled when the AppPool is set Integrated mode.
I just read one suggestion to use <clear /> what was inherited in certain sections.
Now for some reasoning on why this functionality was added
For now I just have this link from ASP.NET MSDN library. It starts out with:
“You can distribute ASP.NET configuration files throughout your application directories to configure ASP.NET applications in an inheritance hierarchy. This structure allows you to achieve the level of configuration detail that your applications require at the appropriate directory levels without affecting configuration settings at higher directory levels.”
I have some reading to do…
Update (8/14/2011):
Reading an informative article on iis.net, Understanding Sites, Applications, and Virtual Directories on IIS 7
The only problem I have with the article is that there absolutely no details on any of the information provided. Yet it’s a good overview of what they have done in the new version.
Now here are the details I have been looking for: http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/243/aspnet-integration-with-iis-7/
IIS7 Configuration Reference on IIS.NET
Reading on…
I ran in to an interesting issue yesterday. In an IIS 6 web server we have a website set to run ASP.NET 4.0. I was configuring a virtual directory to run under ASP.NET 2.0 to run ScrewTurn Wiki. Our standard config has the DefaultAppPool configured with ASP.NET 2.0 applications which don’t require their own pool. The wiki was running without issue. I decided to put the wiki in it’s own pool for various other reasons.
So I proceeded to configure a new application pool templated from DefaultAppPool. Once the new application pool was assigned to the virtual web I started noticing some strange behavior. Anytime I requested a URL which didn’t include a page name my get request would include the file eurl.axd. For ScrewTurn this means everytime you request the main url, it says it cant find the page named eurl, very annoying.
I wrestled for a while trying to figure out why this was happening. At first I didn’t realize it had to do with the new app pool. After a some googling time I cam across a Microsoft article of .NET 4 breaking changes which contained the issue I ran into. (Very strange, http://www.asp.net is down right now with an error screen…). To test this further I changed another running web application to this app pool (which was running under DefaultAppPool) and it did the same thing, looked for eurl.axd on the request.
The article can be found here: http://www.asp.net/learn/whitepapers/aspnet4/breaking-changes#0.1__Toc256770153 and explains why this is happening. In a nutshell it has to do with the website running ASP.NET 4.0 and virtual webs running ASP.NET 2.0.
What I find very strange about this bug is that as long as I use the DefaultAppPool I don’t have this issue (and yes, the website itself has it’s own app pool). I only experience the bug when a new app pool is created for the virtual web which is running ASP.NET 2.0.
keys: eurl, eurl.axd,
Comcast Domain helper service, a DNS breaking service which shows you search results when you try to access a site which doesn’t exist on the Internet (e.g. http://blah.blah).
Ever since I noticed this “service” on my Comcast account I have disabled it. I don’t like it, I don’t want it, and basically it breaks the basic workings of DNS on the internet. If a site doesn’t exist, I want a cannot be found error, not search page which is cached in my browser and forever holds the bad domain as real in my history.
So this evening I jump on the internet and mistype mail.yahoo.com, as I so often do for some reason, and notice that the Domain helper service is enabled, AGAIN. This has to be the fourth time the service has reactivated itself on my account. So I go out to my Comcast account to shut it down and notice that the option to do so no longer exists! What!?
I call Comcast and the person on the phone is as befuddled as I am, plus not so happy that the option is missing from his home account also.
I have been on the phone for 33 minutes now while a resolution is trying to find a solution to this. The end result at this point is that an “IT” ticked has been opened and this support person is to call me back with a status.
I wonder if I will ever actually receive that call?
UPDATE:
It is now Friday, August 6th, basically one week since I called Comcast and I have not heard back from them at all. Not like I really expected to, though it would have been a nice change.
I am not looking forward to it, but I must fight my way through Comcast option-hold hell/support once more…
Update again:
Well the support joker never did call me. What did I expect, really support from Comast? No chance of that. The good news is that the place on the Comcast customer site again has the place to disable the service. YEAH
This is pretty nasty and will surly have a wide impact on home Internet users. I just read about an exploit which has the potential of affecting millions of home internet users. The exploit affects home routers and will be explained in detail next month at the Black Hat conference in Vegas.
http://blogs.forbes.com/firewall/2010/07/13/millions-of-home-routers-vulnerable-to-web-hack/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/19/home_router_hack/
I shouldn’t have to say this, but IF YOU HAVE NOT CHANGED THE DEFAULT PASSWORD ON YOUR HOME ROUTER, DO IT NOW!!!
Don’t think it really matters? Well here is how easy it is to get a list of default passwords.
If you don’t know what to do, call someone who does know what to do. If you don’t know who to call, call me (i.e. leave me a comment) I will be more than happy to help anyone secure their home network.
I have been using Planet SMB hosting for a year or more now, and find them to be an adequate host who give a lot of stuff for the dollar. I wouldn’t run a high availability application on them, but than again, I am not doing that, so it all works out. I highly recommend them for any developer who needs a place to showcase stuff and use as a staging site or fee-based hosting site for their clients. To clarify, when I say high availability, I don’t complain about them having downtime, because I really don’t experience much at all. The issue I do have is wait times. For applications to spin up, and the Plesk Panel which seems to always be painfully slow and times out. No phone support, though emails are usually answered in a decent amount of time.
The issue I had with Plesk is that when I setup my domains (I get 5!) an expiration date was set on them. So today at some time they just stopped working! WTF! I know I never set this date, is this some strange default which was set?
I set in a critical ticket to PlanetSMB and it’s been 15 minutes and no reply. In this case I figured out what happened, but I still want to see how long it takes to reply to my critical ticket.
UPDATE: So this is cool, I heard from PlanetSMB Support (Mike Eldredge actually, the owner) in 16 minutes with a good answer to my issue. So he was right on it with the critical ticket, Yeah Mike!
I have spent much of my professional career among the windows of MS Access. No matter where I am working or what type of work I am doing, it just seems to follow me. MS Access is surly one of the most important business application to ever hit the market. I really don’t think too many people would argue that point. Well, it’s great until you get big, but its a wonderful way to get there.
So tonight I spent a good 4 hours trying to export an MS Access report to RTF. It wasn’t a complicated report by any means and it’s driving data source is pretty basic too. Though for the life of me I could not print a clean report. Either the lines would wrap in strange ways, or I would get blank pages, or the worst one, footer text landing on the next page.
I tried every grouping, ungrouping I could imagine, moved objects around and I just couldn’t get a clean report where footer text didn’t land on the next page.
What finally fixed my report is to leave some footer after the footer text objects. About the same amount of space as the text objects themselves. Once I did this, I did not experience footer text on the next page again.
It’s always something like this when working in MS Access. You get real far in an app, and then hit some crazy snag that lays you up for some time.
Truly a love/hate relationship
My trip through ruby has been an interesting one. It’s a pretty straight forward language. I need some ideas to build so I can get more practice.
I have starting into rails to try that out, and it’s amazing how much of ASP.NET MVC seems to modeled off of it. I really do love the MVC pattern. What I am not loving is the total pain in the ass it is to work with rails configurations. It’s like everything Linux, config, config, config. Granted I really don’t know what I am doing when it comes to Apache, but things should not be this cumbersome, and not have a straight answer on setting up things like .htaccess files.
I am using my Dreamhost account to run my rails apps and I took a break from trying to get the static stuff to show on the site and not be sent through rails. Items like css files, image file, etc.
I am assuming it’s something I need to do in an .htaccess file or something, but I am no positive, and there are direct configuration instructions on what to do. So its trial and error, and there are a lot of it. Shit, I can’t build anything because I am too busy configuring my server. So sure Ruby on Rails may be great for rapid development, but if I can’t get it running, I am not getting anywhere.
Well, enough ranting, back to it….
Had another thought. This really is where Microsoft shines and why they are used over other options, their stuff works.
I can remember back in July of 2008 or so when ASP.NET MVC was in beta one or three and I was tyring it out, I made it a hell of a lot further in a couple of days then I did with rails. One thing to note is that I know IIS pretty darn well, and don’t know Apache that well at all, and perhaps that is the difference here. Working with IIS for so many years much of is just natural, you don’t think about it.
Ah but wait, that is not it, because when I was writing ASP.NET MVC I was in VS2008 and the browser being used was cassini web server (built into Visual Studio). In this note, I guess that is the same as using WEBRick which I have not had issues using. So perhaps all of this is due to my lack of knowledge of Apache?
