Monthly Archives: October 2004

I finally stuck my toe in the deep end of the distributed architecture pool – WSE2 to the rescue

WSE

I have been racking my brain trying to figure out how to pass info from one managed application to another that is in a separate process. I’m thinking of all of the tools that I know how to work with and none of them make me happy. The information is user information as I have the user login to one app and then that app starts up another app in a separate process – but I don’t want the user to have to log in again.

I started thinking about this over the weekend and mentioned the problem in this post, thinking that it was just because I have limited knowledge, but the solution was probably just out of my reach, yet common knowledge to many others.

Some of the paths my brain has gone down…

 – persist the info – using some type of encryption, temporarily write the info into a file and then read that file from the second process. I dno’t like this because I come up with way too many what-ifs.

– pass the info as args within the startprocessinfoclass. No way. Too easy for someone to then start up the 2nd app on their own without credentials.

– pass the login and password as args and then force the new app to quickly re-authenticate the user. No – I have no clue how secure or inaccessible the command line args are.

– get a securitycontexttoken within the first app (that is already doing wse2) and pass it to the 2nd app. Hmmmm… that could work – although since my client won’t have x509 certs on the server (don’t ask, please!) this won’t be as easy as I would like.

However, I think that this last thing is going to be my best chance. Hooray WSE2.

Now to figure out how to accomplish this. Oh – it is never ending…

TabletDev.com

Tablet

Michael Gerfen and Andy Gray have started the www.TabletDev.com website which contains a [community] blog, forum and resources. It is targetted to TabletPC development. There are not a whole lot of people writing about TabletPC development yet. Loren Heiny and Casey Chesnut are probably the most prolific tablet development bloggers (that I know of). Shawn van Ness writes a lot of articles for the Tablet Developer Center on MSDN online and then we have occasional posts from a few other well-knowns like John Robbins, Jon Box and Jeff Richter.

I know they have wanted to do this for a while so I look forward to seeing what comes of it.

Geek happiness is…

Community Cheerleading

Rich & I visited a good friend in the hospital yesterday who is a .NET programmer. She was waiting for her next pain meds and was feeling pretty crappy when we got there, but she’s a total trooper. I brought a handful of my favorite novels and a newly minted tech book. Even in her pain, her face completely lit up when I showed her “Best Kept Secrets in .NET” by Deborah Kurata. I mean, she had been very happy with the chocolate croissant I brought, but the book definitely took the cake for her!

Tech Blog Readers’ Choice Awards

Community Cheerleading

by way of The Daily Grind

Do you read tech blogs? We’re looking for you to tell us which are the best of the best. Right now, it’s your chance to nominate your favorite independent tech blogs.

What kinds of tech blogs are eligible?
All blogs that cover technology and are published independently of a major publishing company are eligible.

Here are some examples of the types of weblogs you can nominate.
1. Personal weblogs, discussing technology from one individual’s perspective
2. Personal weblogs, digesting and disseminating technology news
3. Group weblogs, digesting and disseminating technology news

Ten finalists, one winner, $500 worth of coffee, a whole bunch of promotion.
Ten finalists will be announced on November 1 and will receive a "2004 Best Tech Blog Finalist" logo and six months of promotion across TechWeb Network sites. Voting begins on November 1 and on November 15 the winner will be announced. The winner receives a special "2004 Best Tech Blog" logo and (to keep those blogging juices flowing late into the night) a $500 coffee card from Starbucks.

600 Vermont Army National Guard Deployed

Vermont

From today’s Burlington Free Press

About 600 Vermont Army National Guard soldiers were mobilized Friday morning to provide security in support of the U.S. war in Iraq, but Vermont’s soldiers are not scheduled to go into the turbulent country. They report for training Nov. 15.

Also two soldiers with Vermont ties died in the past few days in Iraq.

Norwich University graduate U.S. Army Maj. Charles Robert Soltes was killed in Iraq this week when the Humvee he was riding in was ambushed. He becomes the 14th with Vermont ties to die in Iraq.

Michael Voss, 35, moved to North Carolina nearly 20 years ago; many of his family members remain in Enosburg Falls. Voss was killed near Tikrit, Iraq, on Oct. 8. The service is to be held in North Carolina.

Updater Block Roadblock

Tools

I have made some pretty good headway with my complex App Updater Block needs, which I wrote about the other day here.

However I have run into a roadblock. One of the things I was trying to accomplish is actually doing authentication and authorization before the user even got the updates. I have a reason for this. However, I realize that now getting the user info to the new process that my stub application starts up is going to be a task which is not what I want to start hammering on. Although…maybe a combination of reflection and getcurrentprocess and then adding in a method to my main exe to pass an object in and then I can invoke that method and …and…and.. oh I’m too tired for this tonight! 🙂 I have used reflection with assemblies but never with a process, so I could just be on drugs with that idea.

.NET 2.0 ‘s version of the ProcessStartInfo class actually has username and password as well as  LoadUserProfile (boolean) properties that will help me do this next year, but not now. And of course, we’ll have ClickOnce then anyway…

I will probably have to rethink my architecture again and another way to accomplish the result I was after that was the reason for putting the authentication right up front in the stub application.

Name 5

Just Rambling

Quick – name the first five “famous“ women developers (authors/conference speakers) you can think of (sql server included…)

Let’s see – I go: Deborah Kurata, Kathleen Dollard (my VB roots are showing), Kate Gregory, Michele Leroux Bustamante and Kimberly Tripp.

Now quick name the next 5 that come to mind…

New .NET Show

Community Cheerleading

uh oh, this picture looks like it spells trouble… 🙂 Click on the picture to read about the latest “The .NET Show” on Connected Systems. For those of you who have not had the privelege…this is Doug Purdy (left) and Don Box  (right). And no it’s not trouble, I’m kidding. Doug and Don have a very unique way (it’s a good one … if you are not grokking my tongue in cheek, here) of delivering information on this topic that will drive the future (and for many of us, the present) of how we write software while delivering their message …well, on any topic, actually. If you need a map to figure out that very convoluded sentence…just leave a comment. Next time I’ll try to write it with Indigo.