Very early this morning I fixed an issue we were having with sending messages over a HTTP-transport. As the final step in the orchestration the result was posted back to an existing application. Although the entire chain worked, larger messages would be sent by Biztalk but would never be picked up by the application.

Initially we assumed that this was the result of IIS limiting the maximum number of bytes in a single request. After changing a lot of different settings, we finally found the reason:

• When the message-size is over 48Kb Biztalk uses chunked encoding to post the messages
• The receiving application was written in 'classic ASP'; ASP does not deal with chunked encoding very well.

After installing Biztalk SP1 it is possible to disable chunked encoding for the HTTP-transport. Look at this article for more details on how to do this.

Windows Vista Beta 1 is available on MSDN subscriber downloads. The download is 2478 Mb, so just 3 hours and 42 minutes to go before I can burn the DVD.

At http://www.groktalk.net/blog/ you'll find a few dozen groktalks. I have watched a few sofar. Because they're 10 minutes or less, it is easy to 'browse' the different subjects that are covered. These range from AJAX in ASP.NET 2.0 to recompling stored procs in SQL Server. I recommend looking the one by Jackie Goldstein on Winforms and databinding.

 

Scoble gets to have a short chat with Steve Ballmer on channel 9. Although Steve is very focussed on winning, he seems to be fairly relaxed about competitors and their innovations. IBM and Oracle aren't regarded as being innovative.

The registration for the '05 PDC has opened; there are also more details on the different tracks and sessions that will be available. If PDC03 is anything to go by, it'll difficult to choose the sessions to attend and which sessions to skip. Avalon, metro, IIS7, Monad, C# 3.0, SQL 2005 ... one thing is certain:

http://lee.vlogs.it/wp-content/2005/May/Priceless_Master_Card.asf

Game-consoles used to be something for teenagers who didn't have enough money to buy a real PC. The specs and videos that have been released on the Xbox360 are awesome. Now the question becomes: why doesn't my PC look like that? Why doesn't my PC perform like that?

Imagine Microsoft moving into the mainstream PC-market and combining soft- and hardware into something like "WinBox2006 (tm)".

The result will probably be a decades worth of lawsuits. (Although nobody seems to mind Apple doing just that)

Check out the videos at: ftp://ftp.planet.nl/pub/planet/games/multimedia/xbox360vid.zip and http://www.xbox360.com

 

Biztalk comes with a fair amount of functoids included; recently I encountered a situation where the function I needed wasn't available in the collection of functoids. Although I haven't created any custom functoids for the old versions, I must say that creating a functoid for BTS 2004 is very simple.

The function I was looking for, was being able to apply a Regular Expression to a value and to return the first match. The actual code that provides this function is very simple, but it might be a nice starting point for creating your own functoids. The sources can be found here: RegExFunctoids.zip (16,59 KB)

Very little effort to protect your users: http://blogs.tamtam.nl/paulb/TurningOffAutoCompleteForTextBoxesInIEAndFireFox.aspx

 

<post>
<note_to_self>
When adding the MSMQT-adapter, a message is shown that it's not possible to uninstall the adapter. This doesn't seem to be very important ... what you should remember is that this will torch the 'regular' MSMQ. Save a couple of hours and think this over.
</note_to_self>

<note_to_self>
Enterprise SSO - When this happens:
SSO AUDIT
Function: GetConfigInfo
Tracking ID: fb5fe349-6437-4773-ac42-5582a6114aea
Client Computer: pareto53 (BTSNTSvc.exe:3616)
Client User: PARETO53\BtsService
Application Name: {B57ABA8F-AB28-4BE8-A759-90516B8EFFB2}
Error Code: 0x80070005, Access is denied.

Do this:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\
Create the following Registry Key [RPC]
Under that create a new DWORD value called [EnableAuthEpResolution]
Set the value of this new value to [1]

</note_to_self>
</post>

The next PDC is starting to get more attention; one of the things being discussed is the planning and how to prevent sessions from being overfilled.

There are a number of ways to prevent overfilling:

• Drastically reduce the number of attendees and do this in such a way that the number of attendees approaches the number of seats in one of the smaller rooms.
  
• Have everyone sign up for the specific sessions they want to attend and (try to ) control access to the rooms

Neither of the options seem viable. I attended the last PDC and although it got a little crowded at certain sessions, I think they did a great job. Getting thousands of people to move around from session to session must be a logistical nightmare.

For creating (and learning) regular expressions I find The Regulator to be a great help. The tool itself is free but it does have some rough edges:

• It doesn't work when running as non-admin; this can be overcome by starting it with Run As, but this seems a bit much for the task that it is supposed to perform.
  
• Today I ran into a different problem: for some reason it threw a System.TypeInitializationException when I tried to start it. After a quick google I found an entry that suggested reinstalling the entire thing. This also seemed a bit much; because there hadn't major changes to the configuration of my machine, I tried a more deductive approach: something had to have changed since I last ran it. The only files in the folder that had changed were the config-files. After removing the config-files, it automagically started working again.

Don't be fooled into thinking The Regulator isn't worth the effort: I've found it to be a valuable tool in developing and learning about regex. I especially like the interactive manor in which you can create an expression and test it. If you haven't used it, you should give it a try.

After running the latest batch of updates, I got the following error when trying to open a webapp from Visual Studio: ASP.NET version mismatch (screenshot)

Although “aspnet_regiis -lv” reports that framework 1.1 is installed on the webserver, running “aspnet_regiis -i” seems to fix the problem.

With the arrival of my new laptop I have decided to give running (and developing) as a non-admin a try. This is one of those things that everybody agrees on as being important, but very few people actually do.

I've discovered that there are quite a lot of things that you would do on a daily basis require elevated privileges. These include: updating virus-definitions, changing the type of paper in the printer settings and renewing the IP Address. There are situations where selections that I've made didn't stick. One of the most annoying cases was the MS AntiSpyware tool: every time I logged on I was required redo all of the selections I had made. Although this particular product is still in beta, it does show that more people need to start running their systems as non-admin. (Or - at the very least - start testing their applications as one)

Most of the times it is very easy to circumvent the lack of privileges by using “runas”. The biggest problem I encountered was trying debug an ASP.NET-application; because the process that you are trying to debug runs under a different account, access is denied. The way I ended up solving the problem, was configuring the worker process to run under my own user account. This isn't a really elegant solution, but at least I can now debug again. I read somewhere that with Whidbey this would be solved by not using IIS to debug applications. VS would start its own webserver when trying to debug an application. One more reason to look forward to VS2005.

Just recently we've been looking into using one or more of the code blocks that are available from Patterns and Practices. Because of the work that was needed to integrate the different blocks, we decided to wait for the new release of the enterprise library. I just received an email from Pascal with the news that MSDN Patterns and practices just released the new/public version of the Enterprise Library; quite a bit sooner than we had expected.

This release should integrate the following blocks: “Caching Application Block, Configuration Application Block, Cryptography Application Block, Data Access Application Block, Exception Handling Application Block, Logging & Instrumentation Application Block, and Security Application Block“.

Download can be found here.