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
I am busy designing and building infrastructure for various “as a Service” service offerings
Web as a Service (IIS)
Data as a Service (SQL and Oracle)
Middleware as a Service
So I thought I would float a few questions
What is High Availability?
When do you need it?
How do you create it?
How do you measure it?
DISCUSS !!
[UPDATE]
Here is my two penneth,
Historically many bespoke application are developed on the same servers the prodcution application runs on. Often this server was built by the developers with little regards for consistancy. After all developers develop applications for a living, not build server infrastructure.
Developing an application on the production server can lead to many problems, particularly if that server build is not quite right or the developer is a little wet behind the ears and does not considure scaling issues and hard coded resource refernces. Then of course it is always possible to cripple the production server by testing rogue application code at the whim a developer. I could witter on for ages about this, bit i want to get on towards what needs to be done to consolidate these applications to central managed infrastructure. Putting to one side the issues of supporting the, often extremely large, consolidation platform, many problems need to be over come to ensure the successful migration / consolidation of bespoke applications in the enterprise.
<UPDATE>
It is worth pointing out that these applications should be consolidated to a well defined, well managed platform, where each appliaction exists in a logical container where ALL interfaces and features are defined and controlled by the infrastructure. Hopeful reducing or even eliminating many of the future gotchas
It should also be noted the technology is only a small part of the battle. Accurate recording of succesfull migration, ownership, and reporting of KPIs also need to be considered. i am not talking a few spreadsheets, it needs to be a fully operation CMDB. spreadsheets are not searchable on MASS, so without a proper CMDB you still only have a huge quantity of unstructure data which is be out of data before you can use it
</UPDATE>
So this is my list of check points and Gotchas
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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
Life is full of tools, tips, tricks and technology. However most people fail on the “When to” and “When NOT to” use a particular piece of technology.
For example you would not use a pair of scissors to cut the lawn, or a lawn mower for a hair cut , yet they are both cutting / triming devices !
So why it is we see some people use a full on SQL database to manage the population of a TEN item drop down box and other use MSAccess (and the MSACCESS GUI not a web app) to run a million pound revneue generating mission critical business application for 100 users over 20 sites
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!
