Our team will be going to the Microsoft Executive Briefing Center (EBC) at the end of the month. I think I'v worked up a great program with our ADC and we even secured Rich Turner who gave a great presentation [reg req] at VSLive! Indigo Day on developing Service Oriented applications with today's technology while preparing for Indigo.
Topics we'll cover
- Day One Morning: SOA and Indigo
- Day One Afternoon: Enterprise development with VSTS, MSF and Enterprise Library
- Day Two Morning: .NET 2.0: Smart Clients, ASP.NET 2.0 and VSTO
- Day Two Afternoon: Miscellany: SQL Server 2K5, C# 2.0, and SharePoint Futures
Our company is moving to Windows Server 2003 and, thus, IIS6. One business unit is toying with the idea of standardizing on load balancers or at least fail-over clusters. One problem is testing that in development environment without incurring the cost for the extra equipment.
I happened across a posting by Eric Bowens that has a low cost solution: Change the Web Garden setting from 1 to 2, which round-robin's request between two isolated applications. Sweet!
So you wrote this real cool web application that used automatic pop-up windows in interesting ways. Unfortunately, XP SP2 was installed on people's machines and your application doesn't work. What to do?
First understand Pop-up Blocker:
User perspective information here and here.
Detailed TechNet intro is here as a topic of a larger intro to XP SP2.
Upshot is that if your program uses program-driven pop-ups you should rewrite your application to pop up in response to user input, which is not blocked. If you can't do that, you can set the following registry setting to allow pop-ups from your server.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER \Software\Microsoft \Internet Explorer \New Windows\Allow
Here is more information on the pop-up blocker registry settings.
Finally, if you are using AD to control the desktop machine, such as for a corporate intranet application, for example, you can make changes to your Active Directory Group Policy. Go to this link, download the spreadsheet and search for “pop-up” The policy names “Use Pop-up Blocker” and “Pop-up allow list” are good places to start. More info here.
Back in February, Brad Abrams posted a query of whether Microsoft should publish Win32 API PInvoke wrappers. I argued that they should. Later, Brad posted a link to this PInvoke FAQ. Ho hum. Well, now he's posted a link to a PInvoke community Wiki, pinvoke.net, maintained by the PInvoke deity Adam Nathan. It's much better than nothing, I will have to say that. However, if even Charlie Kindel is worried over his Interop declarations, isn't high time Microsoft bite the bullet and hand out uniform wrappers?
Update: Adam explains himself.
Once upon a time in C++-land I had a NT Service base class. Now that .NET has a fine base class, it's no longer needed. However, my old class had a nice feature that would run the app as a console app unless it was started by the SCM. It used the trick of having a command line parameter that the SCM was configured to send when it started the application. I'm wanting to add this kind of functionality to my .NET Windows Services. The command line option seems much harder with the new .NET Installer functionality so I thought I would Google Groups around for a more intrinsic solution.
Here's that less than 100% solution as Win32 code. It's SID code so it may be hard to P/Invoke.
As MS employee described
As C-code implemented
Here's a heuristic way