Mike Sax mentions the ridiculous fees for setting up Passport to use for authentication into your site. We looked into this for a customer at one point and found it pretty much prohibitive.  It would have fit quite well for this customers target market but it just was not feasible for this company who had a few hundred customers/trading partners.  Sure helps to understand why you see so few passport enabled sites.

Tuesday, March 02, 2004 10:28:44 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [3]  

One step closer to my goal of being able to build our compact framework applications with NANT: http://blog.opennetcf.org/ncowburn/PermaLink.aspx?guid=6a7abb76-8d59-4dfa-b31c-0a2e1c1d781e

Monday, February 23, 2004 9:37:01 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [2]  

Check it out!  I am on .NET Rocks talking about some of the work we have been doing over the last couple of years.

Thursday, February 19, 2004 11:40:46 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

This is a great tip that I picked up from a random blog:  How to Make ActiveSync Default To Guest

Wednesday, February 11, 2004 10:56:26 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

An application I was working on recently required the ability to send a fax of a PDF. I have done fax integration in the past using Brooktrout hardware and FacSYS and other servers.  I must admit not only was I dreading doing the integration I worried that the client would balk at the startup cost. 

Then I came across Interfax. This is a faxing Web Service!  Reasonable at .07/page for nationwide faxing.

Check them out.

Thursday, January 22, 2004 2:35:04 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

It appears that I will be speaking at the Seattle DevDays 2004 on March 28, 2004.  Should be fun.

Tuesday, January 20, 2004 10:17:05 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

We have been using quite a number of the blocks that the PAG team is putting out and while on the whole we like them quite well they definitely have some rough edges.   Minimal documentation, messy code that looks like it was done in an incredible rush, etc...

Today however I ran across something that drives me nuts.  We are using the Asynchronous Invocation Block to push web service requests off our web servers.  To make async requests we are required to place a value in the web.config that the Request object provided by the block uses.  This is a connection string to the service database.

Did they create their own section handler and put it in there?  No.

Did they create at least a name that indicated this was a connection string for the Async block?  No.

They called it, TADA, “ConnectionString”!  Are these guys insane?  How many applications do you suppose already have a setting called ConnectionString that doesn't point at the service agent database that this block needs?

Have these guys written any applications before?  Did they integrate this into any of their applications?

Friday, January 16, 2004 10:28:32 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

Interesting article from www.theserverside.net on calculating load: Calculating Load.

Tuesday, January 13, 2004 8:15:10 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

Found a little gotcha today.  Didn't realize that the message of an event log entry was limited.  Looked at the docs and of course it mentions a 16K limit.  Odd thing is that I found the limit really appears to be ~32K not 16K.  I say approximately because I found that 32767 fails but 32700 works. Very, very odd.

Monday, January 12, 2004 10:56:04 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

I frequently get the question, “How can I retrieve arguments from the URL that was used to launch my no-touch deployment application?” 

This has been hashed around several times but I finally found a great summary of all the things you need to do to make it work.

Read On: Parsing Web Command Line Args Example

Thursday, January 08, 2004 9:02:48 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]