I am heavily involved in designing, building some large intranet and internet Microsoft based web hosting platforms. Many of these platforms are designed to allow consolidation of existing applications on to a load balanced web farm. As the quality of the source code is unknown , and many employ file upload techniques I extensively use a CIFS backend for web content, once you get past all the smoke and mirrors with IIS connecting to content on the UNC share. You have to consider how this UNC path is managed. To reduce any future implications of file server changes DFS provides an excellent way to alias in the REAL UNC path in a manner which is understood by all of the modern windows operating systems. But then you have to create and possibly destroy DFS links on the fly , as part of your automated site creation processes.
Version 1 of my automation scripts, used a SHELL to call DFSCMD.exe, while this works it is less than ideal,
After many hour of internet searching, I came across http://pinvoke.net and a few articles on calling netapi32.dll from c#
http://jkhines.com/blogs/code/archive/2007/12/15/access-dfs-from-net-posted.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb524805(VS.85).aspx
A FEW hours later I have a working .net 3.5 assembly to add and remove DFS links, Sorted
Download the source here
After going the full duration, 3 interviews and an assessment day over 3months
I had “the Call” from Microsoft HR consultants this morning
Unfortunately it is a “NO Hire” that makes it the first job (ever) I have applied for that I have not got ! BUM
Got some good feedback, no surprises for me though
Good points
- General Technical knowledge is good, particularly in web services area
- Presentation content was well researched and has ALL of the appropriate points
Bad points
- Technical knowledge not deep enough in some areas AD GPO, and high end security got tripped up in duel vendor firewalls, I may have even been tripped up on SQL log shipping recovery process (I need to check), I also struggled to explain some of the decision points when I have built HUGE intranet platforms
- Some of the business stuff is outside my comfort zone , which limits my ability to talk to business people
- Presentation style. In hind sight (the wonderful tool that it is) I spent too long researching the content, and not enough time rehearsing, end result is I will TOO reliant on my notes and came across as reading a script,
Just not quite what they are looking for at in a consultant at the moment
I can’t help feeling, the presentation delivery is totally my fault , and I KNOW I can do better
It is not my normal style to be dependent on notes, and running out of time to prior to the event rehearse is totally my fault and in excusable
I will now be wondering if I would have been better missing a few points and get the delivery right
One of the most hotly requested features for IIS is now available! Yesterday Microsoft shipped the first technical preview of a new URLrewrite module for IIS7. It is free for all IIS7 users and available for download x86 and x64
May be Time to POC Wordpress MU on IIS7
For a while now many Cold Fusion app have been doing LDAP auth using a JRUN Call.
ntauth = createObject(”java”, “jrun.security.NTAuth”);
As Blue Dragon Runs on J# and .NET a JRUN call fails
After refereing to the BlueDragon Deploying CFML on .net Guide and a Microsoft article on AD Authenication,
I created a ADAuth DLL (an assembly which goes in the bin folder) from the MS code, and used the following CFML Component code to call it
<cftry>
<cfscript>
//create the object
ntauth = createObject(”.net”, “FormsAuth.LdapAuthentication”);
//Call the contructor
ntauth.init(”LDAP://DC=xxxx,DC=yyyy,DC=zzzzz,DC=com”);
//do the Auth
ntauth.IsAuthenticated(arguments.domain, arguments.userid, arguments.passwd);
auth = true;
</cfscript>
<cfcatch>
<cfset auth = false>
</cfcatch>
</cftry>
Now to write a CFML Component which detects the CFML engine and call the correct method !
Due to the fact it is on my task list, I have been pondering the decision points for deploying a new web based application and supporting infrastructure. At a first stab there must be 400 questions which may be in the mix. The trick is to work out which ones are Critical to success, which ones have no impact, which ones can be linked and therefore become a single decision with many results. Does the implementation mean some of these decisions can be made after Go live (VMware lets you add extra resource to a guest operating system)
How much input can the business customer provide?
How much input can the application developer provider?
What assumptions can you make?
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Guess who has just been had by the date format thing between the Queens English and Microsoft English
Query Error: The conversion of a char data type to a datetime data type resulted in an out-of-range datetime value.
The statement has been terminated. Datasource: PINBACK Native Error Code: 242 Executing SQL:
Data was ‘14/05/2008 13:47:30′
the Fix was the Language for the SQL user
The use of Cold fusion is wide spread in many Internet and intranet environments. www.myspace.com is Cold Fusion based for example. It is an interesting thing to setup, the Adobe Cold Fusion server runs in a J2EE container, typically adobe JRUN. So what you have is a J2EE app, which instead of producing the HTML responses, interprets the CFML tags to render the HTML is a dynamic manor.
The use of J2EE makes it somewhat interesting when you have to track down rogue code inside and application. When you look into the J2EE process with standard windows tools yoiu can only see the J2EE code, not the CFML. This makes fine tuning and fixing a suspect application a bit of a black art.
Enter the (Blue) Dragon from New Atlanta. Written in J# (so still java based) it allows CFML 7.01 tags to be interpreted by an ASP.NET engine, will all the .NET benefits around process monitoring, and managing run away CPU and memory.
Time for a POC!
According to The Register, Morgan Sparks, inventor of the first “practical” transistor and one of the reasons your cell phone doesn’t use vacuum tubes, died this week at the age of 91
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/08/morgan_sparks_obituary/
Over the past 4 years I have had to work with some of the best web application developers I have ever met, unfortunately I have also had the miss-fortune of working with some of the worst developers on the planet.
With this in mind, while attending the Microsoft 2008 launch event, I was very impressed to pick up a book entitled “the Developer Highway code : The drive for safer coding!”
This book is fantastic, and has hundreds of coding guidelines and server configuration recommendations. And absolute MUST read for any ASP, ASP.NET developer and / or web server support staff.
The best bit, it is available as a free ebook, from Microsoft:
http://download.microsoft.com/documents/uk/msdn/devdave/mic472_dev_highway_all.pdf
Carrying on from my IIS admin via a web service work, i needed to apply IPSecurity restrictions to some of the sites that would be created.
Plently of googling revealed some information about an IISIPSecurity class in .NET 3.0 and above, but i could only rough c# sample code here , and that was for a console app
so after many failed attempts to convert to VB.NET to work with my web service, and even tried the ADSIIIS.dll com interop, i gave up and converted the c# code into an assembly , which works. I know hind sight is 20:20, but i shodul have just done that in the first place
my code is here
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