Monthly Archives: July 2005

VS2005 Short Checklist for ASP.NET, Web Services and WSE 3.0

dotNET

Here are a few things that keep biting me when I return to working on a web services app using wse3.0. I have blogged about some of these before, but need to keep them in the front of my mind!

  1. ASP.NET Project NTLM Authentication: If NTLM Authentication is on and you are not set up to use it, you will get a 401 Unauthorized error (“The request failed with HTTP status 401: Unauthorized.”) when trying to start up a web page or access a web service.  This was a new project property setting as of Beta2.
  2. Using File System and not IIS? Check your port #.  When trying to hit a web service and the port # of the Development Server has changed, you will get an error message saying “Stream was not writable”. This happened to me when I moved a solution from one computer to another and I needed to change the port # in the web reference.  In an ASP.NET application you will get this message “No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it” when your port # has changed.
  3. Permissions to read certificates Depending on your environment, a particular windows account will need READ access to the web server certificate. Normally, it would be the ASP.NET account. I found that when developing with a non-admin account, I needed to give that non-admin account access to the certificate (in a development environment). If you have not set this up properly, you will see a message indicating “Bad Key” in the soap fault when looking at the trace info. This will come back in the TraceInput of the client application. The Security Hands on Lab for WSE3 (found on this page) has instructions for setting permissions on certificates.


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Damir Tomicic now heading up INETA Europe

Ineta

When INETA began, Christian Nagel was our man in Europe. When INETA was divided up into the five regions (North America, Latin America, Asia Pacific, Middle East Africa and Europe) he took the lead of Europe. Now that region is very organized. Christian did a fantastic job and also brought a lot of great people on board to help him out all across Europe. As with the recent evolution with INETA NORAM, Christian decided it was time to let someone else step up to the plate and the obvious choice was Damir Tomicic who was already on the INETA Europe board. Damir lives in Bavaria where he runs a .net user group and is an MSDN Regional Director. He blogs at www.tomicic.de and you can read his bio here.

I know he’s already doing a great job!

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Re-Thinking Ink with Shawn van Ness

Tablet

If you have done any work with the TabletPC SDK, you are probably aware that there is a COM API and a managed API, but that the managed API is really just a wrapper to the COM API. You are also probably aware that the Tablet API is VERY tightly bound to the windows API. Everything that you do is through windows handles. If you have tried to add ink to your web pages, you probably learned this lesson well also.

Shawn van Ness was fortunate enough not only to have been born with a pretty good brain, but he was also lucky to be working at the Leszynski Group when they got very involved with doing TabletPC development hand in hand with Microsoft. Do you know that it was the Leszynski Group that wrote the super cool Physics Illustrator app? And that Shawn was one of the authors of that program? Shawn has also authored a great many Tablet PC development articles for MSDN Online.

So I was definitely not surprised to learn in February that he had finally gotten scooped up by Microsoft to ink-enable Avalon. And I was not surprised when his recent blog article came out talking about ink being baked directly into Avalon.

What is interesting is how differently it is all going to work. Because Avalon tosses our dependence on Windows handles, working with ink had to be rethought from the ground up. Shawn is a very good teacher and he offers a great explanation of how and why this will work and how it is compares to our current Tablet PC SDK development experience.

And no, I have NOT played with Avalon yet. Aaargh!

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Nice mention in Vermont Business Mag article on Vermont Software Developer Alliance

Just Rambling

One of the projects I have been involved with for the last year is the formation of the Vermont Software Developers Alliance. The Vermont Business Magazine just published a great article on the organization and I was very happy to see this paragraph.

Included in that number is a one-woman software consulting firm with an international reputation. Julia Lerman, who does some of her business via thedatafarm.com, works with Microsoft on software development projects while giving speeches around the country and serving as a mentor to young software companies. She moved to Huntington six years ago from the New York City area because of the state’s skiing and riding opportunities. Lerman says she had wanted to relocate to Vermont sooner, but it took her a while to realize “how much tech is going on up here.”

There are a lot of awesome companies (vertical, consulting, large and small) in our area. Not just the .NET folks that have made Vermont.NET such a success, but many technologies. We are darned lucky to have our cake (live in this beautiful place) and eat it too (do the work we love).

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