I have noticed a pattern that when I have worked on a WinForms project for a while (weeks…months) and then start on a new ASP.NET project, I have two problems:

1) I forget about the darned postback. It takes a couple of “hey where’d my value go?” to do one of those “could’ve had a V-8” D’OH forehead slaps.

2) I don’t notice that the fact that new web form pages are in grid mode is an issue. I start placing controls on the page where I want them until this nagging thought in the back of my head says “something is not right with this picture”. Oh yeah – it’s not a windows form, I want flow layout mode. I know that there is a nice little message with really subtle faint grey text when you create a new web form – but do YOU read it? I don’t. Happily this default is changing in Whidbey.

I should have a mechanism that kicks in when I create a new Web App project that pops up a window with big red letters and maybe even a little bell that reminds me of these two things.

Boy “catastrophic”… Sounds pretty horrible, huh? It’s really just a little problem created by Win2000 SP4 if that SP is implemented before installing ASP.NET on a remote server. This was my case because I only recently (finally) put .NET 1.1 on my in-house webserver.

So anyway, I didn’t waste too much time with my little “catastrophy” before I just hit google, got to KBAlertz which had the MSDN solution listed. Here:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q827559

This is surely old news, but it was new to me so I thought I’d just stick it in here.

I just pulled a login page from an ASP.NET app I wrote last year into a new ASP.NET application. These are applications that live on my domain that are web based utilities for some of my clients or just myself and I haven’t had to write one in quite some time. When I opened up the login page I saw something that I had put in there which I had completely forgotten about. I had written a login web service that I can implement in any of my applications. I have one table in my domain’s sql database that has the logins for users of my various little applications. That way I can use the same login page in any of these applications. The web service requires authentication before it will even attempt to validate the user login/pw. That way I don’t have to worry about anyone else using my web service.

So here is the  code I discovered (yes, I surprised myself!)

Private Sub LogIn_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.Web.UI.ImageClickEventArgs) Handles ImageButton1.Click
 Dim sResults As Boolean
 Dim auth As New mydomain.Authenticator() 
 auth.UserName = “IAmanAuthenticatedApplication”  
 auth.Password = “IAmThePassword”
 Dim objService As New mydomain.WebServices()
 Try
 With objService
   .AuthenticatorValue = auth ‘this attaches the auth object as SOAP
   .Credentials = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials
   sResults = .ValidLogin(Me.txtLogin.Value, Me.txtPW.Value)
 End With
 If sResults Then
   Dim FormsAuthentication As New Web.Security.FormsAuthentication()
   FormsAuthentication.RedirectFromLoginPage(txtLogin.Value, False)
 Else
   msg.Text = “Invalid User: Please try again“
 End If
 Catch ex As Exception
   msg.Text = ex.Message & vbCrLf & ex.StackTrace
 End Try
End Sub

This may not be the best way (and it makes me nervous to have my code available for certain people to possibly look at and have a chuckle) but it’s darned useful.

It’s funny to look at this having just written a little about Indigo going to message based transactions. Because doesn’t that mean that my little “auth” object that I’m passing in to my webservice will go away? Of course! This is what they (ok Don Box but I’m not going for google hits, here) were talking about when saying that even security is going to be a LOT less complicated to handle. I remember when I first tried to get my head around how all of that was working – soap , my authentication object, etc. Though it all seems so obvious to me now, I remember how incredibly confusing it was for me back then.

(edited this because there seemed to have been a little drag and drop action that messed up my original post, oops…)

I’m always interested to see what Sam Gentile and Robert Hurlbut are working on together. Always BIG projects that seem to have the scope of large architectural blueprints which demand that they dig deep into the roots of the tools and languages they are working with. My projects are so teeny in comparison and I don’t touch half of the tools that they talk about.

Today Sam writes about a “grand managed (.NET) distributed architecture for one of my clients and my team that will take the next 18-24 months to do and deploy.” Wow, THAT is impressive. And also that he and Robert converted all of their build processes to NAnt this weekend. NAnt is a frequently blogged about tool that builds your .NET projects rather than letting Visual Studio .NET build them — and there is a new release out. I haven’t spent time with it, but I am guessing it allows you to have more granular control over the build.

Sam has teased me about the fact that I have mentioned this before – that I’m impressed. There’s also a (small) part of me that would like to be involoved in projects like that. I say small because they sound daunting! “It’s all just programming” he has told me. I guess that I get to play with new stuff too, such as working with tablet applications. But I just don’t have some of the big challenges in my projects that these guys are out to solve. So all of this stuff that people do down deep is really impressive to me, that’s just the way it is and the way it will remain.

Also, Sam talks about ShadowFax which let’s you do in .NET today what Indigo will be bringing us tomorrow. This was one of the big buzz concepts at PDC – that we will move from object oriented design to service oriented architecture which is message based. It’s awesome to keep having these messages constantly coming in (via blogs of people who are really out on the edge) so that when I’m ready to start playing with that stuff (which I am not at the moment) I won’t be totally clueless.