Sometimes technical, sometimes not, never a kitty

Sweet!

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Last night was probably the worst Buffet show I've ever seen (this made 7 or 8 for me).  To start with, it took over an hour just to get through the gates at PNC Park (arguably the best stadium for baseball).  A spokeswman was quoted in an article in today's Post Gazette saying the crowd thronged the entrances just before the show.  I'm not sure where this woman was between 4 and 6, but that crowd was huge long before "just before the show", and PNC's pathetic crowd moving ability was partly to blame.  All the tickes were printed saying enter at the home plate entrance, and PNC made absolutely no effort to indicate the left field gates were open.  Next year, go back to Starlake (our outdoor amphitheater, similar to Blossom or Ravinia, although much larger than Ravinia), who can actually move a crowd.  Numerically, the show was a sell-out, but there were a lot of tickets for sale before the show.  Because of the way the stage was placed in the park, none of the far outfield seats were sold.  Even though there were seats on the field, the total crowd in attendance shouldn't have been siginficanly more than a sell out Pirates game, and PNC should have been able to move the crowd better.

Speaking of stage placement, Jimmy was some 400 feet or so from where we were, and looked like a little green bug.  The video monitors were delayed, so the show looked like a bad Godzilla overdub on those.  $100 tickets were way too overpriced to watch a little green bug, or a big head out of sync with the band.  There's no lawn mojo in cramped stadium seat rows, so dancing with the wifeys was just about out of the question.

Finally, why does a guy who has over 20 albums need to make half the second set covers of other songs?  We could have done without an OK cover of a lousy James Taylor song that was the inspiriation for your worst book.  Part of the second act was so slow that the best part was watching the River Patrol move all the boats away from the Clemente Bridge so the after-concert fireworks could be launched safely.

Jimmy, go back to Starlake and play your own music.

Daniel Eagan's (from DotNetDoc) book Building Websites with VB.NET and DotNetNuke 3.0 is now shipping.  The publisher is also offering a free chapter and chapter summaries.

A practical guide to creating and maintaining your own website with DotNetNuke, the free, open source evolution of Microsoft's IBuySpy Portal Create and manage your own website with DotNetNuke Customize and enhance your site with skins and custom modules Extend your site with forums and the best of third-party add-ons Complete coverage of setup, administration, and development

 

 

 

Packt Publishing is offering a free chapter on module development from Building Websites With VB.NET and DotNetNuke 3.0, as well as chapter summaries for the rest of the book.  Building custom modules for DNN has a learning curve, so this is a valuable chapter in itself.  Since this is probably the most complicated aspect of working with DNN, the free chapter will give you an idea of how good the rest of the book is.

When upgrading the BADNUG site, I encountered the following error:

DotNetNuke Upgrade Error
The Assembly Version ( [ASSEMBLYVERSION] ) does not match the Database Version ( [DATABASEVERSION] )

ERROR: Could not connect to database.

The stored procedure 'dbo.GetPortalAliasByPortalID' doesn't exist.

I found a solution that works at http://forums.asp.net/958251/ShowPost.aspx.  What worked for me was changing UseDnnConfig to false.  Once I made that change, the upgrade completed normally.

Microsoft MVP Susan "The SBS Diva" Bradley gives a short overview about sending encrypted e-mails.  In her post, she says you have to purchase a digital certificate.  From some certificate authorities, you may have to do so, but Thawte offers free certificates for e-mail through their Web of Trust program.  When your certificate is issued, the name on the certificate is "Thawte Freemail Member".  In order to have your name appear on the certificate, you need to get yourself notarized.  Basically, you meet up with a Thawte notary (I am one), who looks at two forms of identification and assigns you points.  You need 50 points to be notarized (I can assign up to 35, the maximum allowed), and then your certificates will contain your name.  There's more information at the WOT site at http://www.thawte.com.wot.

Back in March or April, Microsoft held a strategy summit for information officers here in Pittsburgh.  One of the sessions I attended had to do with the nerxt versions of SharePoint Portal Server (SPS v3) and Office System ("Wave 12").  Here are some of the notes I took at that presentation.  This was all publicly presented, no secret side conversations involved.  The main foci of Wave 12 are knowledge worker collaboration and data centralization/management.  As always, features and dates are subject to change.

Microsoft's research indicates a person receives between 50% and 75% of their job-related information from other people, and about 80% of a corporation's knowledge is stored in "personal storage" (file servers, My Documents, PST files, etc).  This shows a large need to a collaboration platform, and that's how Microsoft views the next wave (Wave 12) of the Office System.  "Office System" is a collection of servers (such as SharePoint Portal Server), clients (Word, Excel), and services (such as SQL Server Reporting Services).  An enhanced Live Communication Server will be the presence and instant messaging provider to enable real time collaboration on demand.  Enhanced digital rights media (already included in Windows Server 2003) can be used to limit the use of e-mail and documents.

As has already been announced, Office clients will consume a custom XML schema and make use of custom web services.  For instance, utilizing Smart Tags in a Word document will allow for a mail-merge via a web service accessing an enterprise database.  The workflow platform can be managed by non-developers, giving more control of operations to each business unit.  The data satys centeral, but can be used by each knowledge worker as they need to.

Document approvals and versions will be managed via SPS, and include metadata to set retention and expiration/deletion policies.  Document approval will use Outlook, which will route approvals via Exchange in order that e-mail addresses are specified.

Office Web Parts will be enahnced.  Excel can be used to create a dashboard, then publish it as a web part to SPS.  When the dashboard is loaded, the data are refreshed, providing a timely view of information.  End users will have more control to create office web parts to suit their business needs.

Outlook 12 will have improved task and time management tools.  Tasks can be associated with the a day and time, and can appear as appointments to improve time management.  OneNote, SharePoint and Outlook will be able to share tasks.

As with Office 2003, there will be an Access Conversion Toolkit for migrating Access projects to from earlier versions.

A tecnhical beta of Wave 12 is planned for Q4 CY 2005 (Oct-Nov-Dec of 2005), and a public release one year later.

100 years ago today, the movie theater was born.  The first modern movie theater opened this day in 1905 on Smithfied St. in Pittsburgh, entertaining thousands (96 at a time) for a nickel.  You can read more about it at http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05170/522854.stm.

Another Pittsburgh movie tradition is coming back this week also.  George Romero's Land of the Dead opens this week, premiering Wednesday in downtown Pittsburgh.  Romero's first movie, the original Night of the Living Dead, was filmed in a cemetary and farm in Evans City, just a little south of where I live, and premiered in downtown Pittsburgh.

More reasons to attend BADNUG's Basics of DotNetNuke meeting next week.

WROX Press is donating two copies of Professional DotNetNuke ASP.NET Portals.  In case they don't arrive in time, we'll raffle off an IOU and get the book to you when it does arrive.  Thank you Jim Minatel from WROX press, and Pat Santry who hooked us up.

Secondly, we're receiving permission for more and more goodies in our resources CD.  So far, the CD will have the DotNetRocks show with Shaun Walker and Jim Duffy from May 9, all the webcasts and slidedecks from Stan Shultes and Russ Faustino, and Solutions Partners' DNN3 Menu Module.

Finally, Corporate Solutions is donating pizza and covering the expense for the night.

In a recent posting to the aspnet-security group at ASP Advice, Julie Lerman asked:

Since the site is hosted on someone else's server, I don't believe that I can use DPAPI to encrypt the connection strings

Actually, you can, and I use DPAPI on a number of sites in shared hosting environments.  I typically use the machine store as the data protection store, rather than the user store, but that's a personal habit when looking at the shared hosting environment.

One downside to the machine store is that anyone who has access to the same server can decrypt your application settings, unless you set an entropy value.  In my sample project, I set the entropy when the DPAPI helper is instantiated.

I mentioned I had a small project I use to encrypt connection strings using Carl Franklin's DPAPI helper.  All I do is upload two DLLs and my ASPX to the site I'm working on, enter the connection string (or whatever), click Encrypt, and copy the output to the web.config.  When I'm done, I delete the DLLs and page so no one accidentally finds them.  You can find my little project at http://rjdudley.com/projects/dpapi_example.zip.

To use my little project:

1. Download and unzip Carl's DPAPI helper from http://franklins.net/dotnet/.
2. Download my dpapi example from http://rjdudley.com/projects/dpapi_example.zip.  Unzip it to c:\inetpub\wwwroot\dpapi.
3. Create an IIS application named dpapi (address will be http://localhost/dpapi) that points to c:\inetpub\wwwroot\dpapi. 
4. Open the solution file in VS
5. Add a reference to the DPAPI Helper DLL, found at <install>\DPAPIHelper\bin\DPAPIHelper.dll.  Make sure to use the dpapihelper.dll!  There is also a dpaphelper.dll (missing an 'i' in the name), and I'm not sure what that's for.
6. Recompile the project.
7. Deploy the dpapihelper.dll and dpapi.dll to the site's BIN folder, and dpapi.aspx to the site's root folder.
8. Load the dpapi.aspx page, and encrypt on!

Drop me a line or leave comments with any Q's.

<update 2005-06-16>To use the DPAPI encrypted strings in your application, you need to include two lines of code, one is the constructor that starts “DIM dp...”, and the other is the dp.decrypt method call.  In the constructor, there is a short string passed in as a function argument.  This argument(sometimes called an “initialization vector“ or “secondary entropy“ or just “key“, I'm not 100% sure of the exact correct term so anyone works for me) has to be exactly the same in your app as in the DLL used to encrypt your strings.  Otherwise, you won't be able to properly decrypt the information in your app.  I recommend changing the entropy if you use this example, and use a different one for each site.  Remember also to leave the DPAPIHelper.dll on your site if you plan to decrypt the encrypted values.</update>

This must be how the Harry Potter crowd feels.  I pre-ordered Professional DotNetNuke ASP.NET Portals way back in February, and it arrived just today (fortunately in time for my DNN Basics presentation).  I'm on the fourth chapter, and aside from the usual WROX under editing (e.g. page 57: "Pages are a relativity new concept..."), the book is packed with useful information, and reads very easily.  So far, the overview has been very informative, and I'm looking foward to the moew advanced chapters.  Updates later...

This guide is a hands-on guide covering various real-world scenarios for developing and administering DotNetNuke. It covers hands-on step by step configuration options on Windows 2003, and discusses some of the issues (Webfarms, capacity planning, databases) when setting up DotNetNuke.

After configuring DNN it provides a step by step instruction on administering DNN and applying DNN in different real-world hosting situations.

The second part of the guide is aimed at DotNetNuke development. DotNetNuke provides the developer with a highly flexible architecture for rapid application development (RAD) of Web applications using the module provider. The book introduces the DotNetNuke application architecture, and then gets into developing modules for the framework. In addition to module development it covers developing skins for your DNN web site using some of the common tools available.