Via Matt Reynold’s blog, we have ProggyFonts – a collection of small, clean fonts for use in big fat IDEs like VS 2005.
It makes a big difference to have small, readable fonts that don;t take up the whole screen, or degrade nastily at 7pt.
Blog
Oracle on AJAX
AJAX has received a lot of hyperbole over the last year or so, with some people renaming the web to “Web 2.0” [groan] in its honour. It allows websites to present a richer, more interactive interface, breaking the “click Next” sequential, disconnected web paradigm.
Personally, I believe that – in moderation – a bit of AJAX can be a good thing (think: Goole Maps) but that there is a danger of really breaking the normal web programming model. Google has thought about this, and have some useful guidelines for AJAX applications, along with a nice AJAX toolkit, which allows you to build applications in Java which are then compiled down to JavaScript. Anything which auto-generates compliant and working JavaScript, and therefore saves me from writing the stuff by hand, has to be A Good Thing. Writing JavaScript makes me feel unclean 😉
AJAX is here to stay, though, at least for the next couple of years. Oracle have put together a series of articles on AJAX from a JSF perspective, which explain the basics of AJAX rather nicely.
Grey Matter Workout
I spent part of today scratching my head and dredging up long-forgotten details of the .Net Framework and C# over at BrainBench.com – to my relief, I didn’t disgrace myself: a test score average of 4.25 puts me in good stead for my forthcoming MCP exam later in June.
Some of the tricky areas:
- C# strings live in the
intern pool - Structs vs. Classes – particularly with reference to how Structs get auto-boxed when casting to an interface
- The difference between readonly variables and constants – illustrated by the ilasm generated
- A Remoting refresher – the issue of Remoting and GC is particularly non-obvious
- Some info on valid Type Conversions – crucially, casting anything to a
charis invalid, which gets over some naaasty C-style hacks - Items that can be serialized by XmlSerializer:
- The following items can be serialized using the XmLSerializer class.
- Public read/write properties and fields of public classes.
- Classes that implement ICollection or IEnumerable. (Note that only collections are serialized, not public properties.)
- XmlElement objects.
- XmlNode objects.
- DataSet objects.
- Forcing the compiler to check for CLS-compliancy –
[CLSCompliant(true)] - A whole bunch of stuff on Code Access Security – though the basic idea is quite simple: establish security requirements at compile time, and DEMAND that running code has those permissions before allowing execution (as opposed to running as far as possible with the current credentials/rights)
- Dynamic Methods and Assemblies – use types in
System.Reflection.Emit - Some details on XSD.exe: workarounds, and an improved version – I discovered that even then VS2005 version of XSD.exe has some serious bugs, such as eating memory when presented with a multi-table SP-based dataset.
- Finally (as it were) we have Non-deterministic finalization, and destructors/
Dispose()– often safely ignored in simpler code, but can lead to Bad Things if abused in enterprise applications
Microsoft Application Blocks
Microsoft Application Blocks form a collection of ready-built ‘clumps’ of code which solve common problems such as security management, data access, logging, etc. They are the tangible result of the Microsoft Patterns and Practices advice: all of it sound and solid.
John Jakovich, one of the 4 Guys From Rolla, gives a useful An Introduction and Overview of the Microsoft Application Blocks. He summarises the utility of the Application Blocks thus:
…you don’t have to worry about the tedious details required to return a DataReader or write an exception to the System Log. This allows us to concentrate on the business logic in our applications.
I have written too many logging frameworks in the past: it’s boring above all else. I just want to log exceptions in a thread-safe manner, with a unique ID.which I can display to the user if necessary. If someone (i.e MS) has already written code to do (most of) this, then fine – I’ll use it.
The Security block is particularly useful for ASP.NET 1.1, where security and profile management is not as simple as in version 2.0. All that boring stuff about storing Role information in cookies? Solved! Better still, any security holes will be fixed by MS. Again, more time to concentraste on business logic.
Design Guidelines for Class Library Developers
The Application Blocks tie in nicely with a set of guidelines from MS on class library development. They include advice on:
- array usage
- exposure to COM
- casting
- threading
and several other subjects. This is basically just a gloop of Common Sense, but well worth a read.
MBR BootFX Application Framework
An alternative to the MS Application Blocks comes from Matt Baxter-Reynolds (he of DotNet247) in the form of BootFX:
The MBR BootFX Application Framework is a best-of-breed application
framework that we offer to all our clients who engage us to develop
software applications or software components for them. It’s designed
to give us a “leg up” on new projects by providing a tried and tested
code base for common software development activities.
There are lots of goodies there, including Object Relational Mapping (ORM), and support for SQL Server, Oracle, and MySQL databases. To top it all, it’s open source, via the Mozilla Public Licence 1.1. I met Matt 18 months or so back at a seminar run by Iridium; very personable guy.
Mail: Enabled
At this point, I am inclined to decide that SMTP stands for “Stoopid Mother Truckin’ Program”, after some frankly bizarre shenanigens with SMTP on one particluar server. Thankfully, MailEnable came to the rescue. This is a well-engineered bit of software, and best of all, it’s free, even for commercial use (Enterprise users pay for high-end features).
The difficulties arose with a DotNetNuke installation, incombination with some stubbornly unconfigurable SMTP services. FOr example, the main SMTP server on the machine could not be configured to talk to web applications, and a second SMTP server program was available to do this, on another port (i.e. not port 25).
HOWEVER, it turns out that DNN does not allow you to specify an SMTP server on a port except port 25. In other words, a setting like this will not have the desired effect:
localhost:587
The port is ignored by the System.Web.Mail.SmtpMail class as used by DNN. I checked the source for DNN 3.2.2, and the port number is NOT parsed out from the servername string. This seems to me to be a serious limitation. A line or two of extra code would enable mail sending on alternative ports: parse out the port number, and if its there, set the port explicitly for the mail message before sending:
' line 152 or Mail.vb:
' external SMTP server
If SMTPServer "" Then
' TODO: parse out port number here
Web.Mail.SmtpMail.SmtpServer = SMTPServer
Select Case SMTPAuthentication
Case "", "0" ' anonymous
Case "1" ' basic
If SMTPUsername "" And SMTPPassword "" Then
objMail.Fields("http://schemas.microsoft.com/ cdo/configuration/smtpauthenticate") = 1
objMail.Fields("http://schemas.microsoft.com/ cdo/configuration/sendusername") = SMTPUsername
objMail.Fields("http://schemas.microsoft.com/ cdo/configuration/sendpassword") = SMTPPassword
' TODO: Insert port here...
End If
Case "2" ' NTLM
objMail.Fields("http://schemas.microsoft.com/ cdo/configuration/smtpauthenticate") = 2
End Select
End If
So I was left having to use a server on the default port 25, but with only a single machine it’s tricky to get SmartHost relaying working properly (in fact, it might be impossible – I haven’t checked the RFCs).
In the end, I disabled the two existing SMTP servers, and installed MailEnable from http://www.mailenable.com/standard_edition.asp – it is very easy to use and configure. Crucially, it can listen on two different ports, and had no limitation with respect to web applications.
I highly recommend it if you are having similar problems.
Matthew Skelton 