General

Upgrading to subtext 2.0-fail

Brendan Kowitz — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:55:40 GMT

It's been a long time in between updates for subtext, but, has it actually been worth it? Well, kinda. Compared to the 1.9.5 release this one seems a little rough around the edges.

If you're on a shared host WITHOUT full trust, beware! Things will break in multiple places, including:

~~DTP.aspx (The homepage) (tag "st" undefined, needed to add back 'Register TagPrefix="st" Namespace="Subtext.Web.UI.WebControls"')~~ (My web.config merge error)
/admin/Posts/ (EnclosureMimetypes config section missing requirePermission="false" attribute)
/admin/Feedback/ ("FeedbackStatusFlag" undeclared, needed to prefix with the namespace)
Subtext.Framework.UrlManager.UrlReWriteHandlerFactory.GetHandlerForUrl(string url) also breaks from a security permission when calling UrlAuthorizationModule.CheckUrlAccessForPrincipal(), had to recompile Subtext.Framework to get around this.

EDIT: I don't mean to blast subtext, but I might as well lay a few more issues out there:

The call to "/Admin/Services/Ajax/AjaxServices.ashx?proxy" throws an "Operation could destabilize the runtime" exception, haha I must say this is the first time I've seen that, fixed by generating the AjaxServicesProxy.js file locally.
In the Feedback admin area, when hovering the URL icon the "title" tag shows the email address.
Forgot to add this last night: Had to remove the OpenID stuff from the login page, errors with "Cannot be called from Untrusted assembly".

The problems in this upgrade mostly appear to be stemming from carelessness regarding restrictions in medium trust. I guess the question is - "Is subtext venturing away from medium trust on purpose?"

Looking to the future. From what I recall I don’t think it’s actually possible to run .net 3.5 applications without full trust, features such as anonymous types simply don’t work.

How to Import Data From MindManager 7 Lite Into Project 2007

Brendan Kowitz — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 21:52:31 GMT

MindManager is a very slick product, it looks and feel like every other Office application. I've used this product for a few university project management assignments to create things such as work breakdown structures (WBS) as well as just general information organisation.

The version I'm using is the Lite version (heaps cheaper) which still carries a lot of features but lacks the integration to other office products. It also lacks the additional information you are able to attribute to the topic nodes such as start, finish dates, time estimates and resources. Although these would also be nice to have from a project point of view, I guess I can live without doing it directly in MindManager as they sound a lot more like scheduling tasks to me. Which is where MS Project Integration would be awesome.

To bridge this gap for the Lite version I've decided to write a plug-in for Microsoft Project to import the information directly out of MindManager.

Then viola, you can even use the relationship links between the nodes to create task predecessors automatically. As much as I've enjoyed using Mind Manager, re-entering this task information would be a real negative to actually using it productively. So you should be able to use this little plug-in if you're unsure you want to spend the additional $250US right away but still want some form of Project Integration. Oh and its only one way, no pushing information back.

The plug-in can be downloaded here, should work with both MindManager Lite and Pro. Of course, this is a free util, no warrenty or support.

[Download]

NHibernate Compatible Shared Hosts

Brendan Kowitz — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 13:21:04 GMT

NHibernate is a remarkable ORM, however with all the magic comes a few caveats, these being the difficulties running NHibernate apps in a shared hosting environment. I'm still convinced that it's entirely possible, so I've decided to start compiling a list of success and failures that others (and myself) have had in getting things working.

Compatible Shared Hosts

Host Name	Comment	Reference
Webhost4life	Reportedly works with "no hacks"	[ref]
DiscountAsp	I think this should work with IIS7 / Win 2008	[ref]
XHostSolutions	Simply email support and ask to have your application run as Full Trust	This is the host I use.

Shared Hosts known not to work

Host Name	Comment	Reference
Godaddy		[ref]
Crystaltech		[ref]

Untested / Unknown

Host Name	Comment	Reference
DiscountAsp

Useful References / Alternate Ideas

Lazy Loading with nHibernate Under Medium Trust

Work more play less with Kimai

Brendan Kowitz — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 21:22:03 GMT

Over the past few days I've decided to start recording my time with an open source program called Kimai. I'd have to say, I'm not liking the results to far. Kimai has recorded that I've spent 24 hours at work over the last 48 hours. Now, I do realize that other people are working even LONGER hours than me, I personally feel they are crazy, they are the ones that should be hooking up Kimai, and they probably wouldn't even have to bother going and turning the recorder off. All the hours have come about because of the looming deadline of a major project, so it'll be also interesting to see what normal working hours look like, when they return.

Netgear SC101 (finally) does Vista

Brendan Kowitz — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 10:14:08 GMT

I just couldn't resist sharing the news with all those who have been burned with the Netgear SC101 network storage device. Call it what you like NAS, SAN, Hard drive with blue cable plugged in, doorstop, whatever. Netgear has finally after a few delays (6+ months), released a Vista driver, which, yey, I can verify works on my Vista Business Edition. I still haven't had any luck with getting it installed on Windows Server 2008 (errors with "Failed to install the Z-SAN SCSI miniport driver" whatever that is), but hey, 1 out of 2 ain't bad.

So if you're one of the people who upgraded to Vista and had to put your SC101 back in the box for a few months, head on over to the support page and grab the latest driver attempt. Good luck.

Safari treks onto windows

Brendan Kowitz — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 21:39:55 GMT

I've mentioned previously, there has been some experimentation around with getting WebKit to work on windows. I just didn't really expect Apple to release a full Safari for Windows. So naturally owning a MacBook that I use to run both OSX and Windows, I downloaded both versions. Although the Windows version gives you a taste, it just doesn't 'feel right'. Not sure what it is, but Safari just seems so much smoother in it's native OSX. I'm sure future versions will improve on this, but wow, cool.

Another feature of Leopard that I'm pretty impressed with is the ability to have 'Piles' or 'Stacks' of icons and files. This is not entirely a new idea, but I'm not aware of a decent usable implementation that has full integration into a consumer desktop. Knowing Apple, it's probably pretty smooth with all the appropriate transition effects and bling.

Another SubText Blog

Brendan Kowitz — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 11:14:22 GMT

Yes, I'm one of the crowd now, all because my old host Jumba is turning off the last of their Windows boxes, and coincidentally, the one I was hosted on. This has happened previously when they shut down some legacy Windows servers and forced everyone on it to upgrade.

Since Jumba is now no longer offering HELM windows hosting they have recommended xHostSolutions who have pretty comparative deals to what I was previously on, only better. This now gives me access to an MS Sql Server database, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to install SubText.

I still think that Single User Blog is a great place to start when you want to start sinking your teeth into ASP.NET 2.0, its very easy to get your head around and start using all the cool features that ASP.NET has to offer. This is one thing, but I'm now itching to try something a little more feature rich such as SubText. I do admire what wordpress has achieved in the blogging world, but I just can't seem to stray away from .NET, and not to mention the fact that wordpress is written in PHP.

Stopping ASP.NET web.config inheritance

Brendan Kowitz — Wed, 16 May 2007 03:11:23 GMT

If you are only ever running one ASP.NET application on a website this is not an issue. However, if you are running a site which may have an application at the root and other separate applications running in sub or virtual directories, then Settings inheritance could be a problem.

You can read more about how config files get inherited on msdn but here's a tip for stopping settings in the root app from getting inherited. The <location> tag is the only tag I've come across which has the inheritInChildApplications attribute. So to target the main <system.web> just wrap it in the location tag as seen below.

<location path="." inheritInChildApplications="false">
<system.web>
 ...
</system.web>
</location>

Other Notes:
Although I think the inheritance is in general a good feature to have, especially for inheriting down things such as security settings. It can even support locking certain settings for child applications, but things can be problematic if the child application doesn't share the same libraries, modules, handlers, masterpages or themes.

Most collections in the web.config have the <remove> tag or <clear> tag to remove irrelevant modules or handlers in the child app. The problems I've found occur with settings relating to the <pages> tag, which most items in it don't support <remove>. This means if your child applications doesn't share or have the same registered controls, masterpages or themes then you are probably going to have issues or be forced to specify the settings on a per-page basis. This is where the inheritInChildApplications="false" really comes in handy.

ERROR: 42601: a column definition list is only allowed for functions returning record

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 11:30:35 GMT

Since the postgres forums appear to be a little quite, I'll post my error here as well.

This error is in regards to the postgres .net npgsql driver and seemed to only occur when using stored procs.

The Error
The behavior I experienced happens when using stored procedures started out with me getting the following error:
ERROR: 42601: a column definition list is only allowed for functions returning "record"

After checking and double checking the stored proc and the parameters I was sending in I turned Npgsql's debugging on. The error appears to be coming from a statement that looks like the following:
select * from sitemenus_ins(68::int4,34::int4) as (psitemenuid int4, prowstamp timestamp )
This line of sql fails.

However the following will work:
select * from sitemenus_ins(68::int4,34::int4)
The only difference being that the second one has the 'as(...' clause taken off.

Strange Observation:
The snippet in question is executed automatically by the provider after the NpgsqlCommand.cs class does some other queries to try and match the list of the parameters that are in the stored procedure it is about to execute. However, the 'select' it uses to determine if it should append the 'as(..' clause is queried from the pg_proc table but is matched on the parameter types that are passed in, and not on those of the actual proc.

For example, this means that if I passed in say a 'Text' type (25) as opposed to the defined datatype on a proc (eg. 'Varchar' 1043) The select will fail and the extra 'as (...' on the end of the statement in question will not be appended. So the function call will work

Resolution:
I have no idea what the ideal solution is, I don't have a firm understanding of the ins and outs of the provider, but after downloading the source and removing the check so the 'as (...' never gets appended, all CRUD operations in my unit tests pass.

Another suggestion by Al is that maybe it is a piece of code left in there that was needed from a previous version of postgres (since the code has been around for a few years now). Whatever the reason, it causes errors, I've checked the source for another postgres provider and it doesn't attempt to do the append. The only concern I have if this is an actual bug is that it looks as though the same code has been copied into the branch for the npgsql2 provider, so those wanting to use stored procs on postgres in the future may find the same error I have.

The C# @ String Literal

Brendan Kowitz — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 15:10:56 GMT

C# is a pretty sweet language, and there are many, many, many little things that just make the code that much nicer. Have you ever been in a situation where for some reason you NEEDED to have a string/code fragment/js fragment/sql statement inline in your code because you don't believe in resource files or stored procedures?

Aside from whatever great debate about "if you should or shouldn't". If you are going to, please, please, learn to take advantage of what C# has to offer, yes I'm talking about the '@' string literal.

Now I'm not going to target anyone in particular, but my feeling is that VB as a language seems to be more notorious for having hundreds of lines of String.Append()s. String.Append is the absolute worst, hardest and most illegible way of possibly including your fragment inline in code.

There are also the programmers that 'know of' the @ symbol and prefix all their strings with it because it looks cool or something. Doing this without reason may actually alter the behaviour you excepted because it causes escape sequences to NOT be processed.
Eg. "c:\\my\\file.txt" could be done as @"c:\my\file.txt"
This means your \n and \t or whatever it is will also not be processed.

I'd say the most precious and special super power of a string literal is its multi-line ability. So instead of writing code that may look something like:
var1 += @"some text" + Environment.NewLine;
var1 += @"some more text" + Environment.NewLine;
var1 += @"even more text" + Environment.NewLine;

You could just use the @-quoting and write:
var1 = @"some text
some more text
event more text";

And yes that will compile perfectly fine. Best of all, even without going into the debate of "having inline fragments" at least I can read it and change it.