I've been battling some crazy ASP.NET 1.1 code the past couple of days. First, I was calling some web services with entirely hand written SOAP protocol management. That's always fun. While tedious and too low of a level to be mucking around, it was the fastest means to an end with a crotchity ol' Apache/AXIS web service. Even though I'm fresh off the WCF training regimen; that new stuff wouldn't have helped me here. Perhaps just having the new stuff in my head pushed me in the right direction to tackle this challenge - a man can dream, can't he?

Then, just to rub it in a little, the HTTPWebRequest object decided to give me a swift kick in the shorts. You see, in .Net 1.1, there's a tiny little unknown (unanswered) bug.

I have two instance methods and each make a single call over HTTP with their own HTTPWebRequest object, there's no sharing here. Every time, the second request would hang and throw a "System.Net.WebException : The operation has timed-out." error. The same code runs great in .Net 2.0 so I figure its a framework bug.

I call one method and return a string which is used as an input argument for the second method. Both calls go to the same top level domain, but call to different end points on the domain.

After much thought, trial and error, as well as reading about the same problem other folks were having, I finally figured out the workaround.

It turns out that calling the Abort() method on the HTTPRequest instance after completing the request is sufficient to break up the clog that is preventing subsequent calls. The following code block shows the working helper method. If I comment out the calll to Abort(), it no worky.

private string ExecuteHttpWebRequest(
   string url, RequestMethod method, string message)
{
   HttpWebRequest request = 
      (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(url);

   request.Timeout = 30000;
   request.KeepAlive = false;
   request.Headers.Add("Cache-Control", "no-cache");
   request.Headers.Add("Pragma", "no-cache");

   switch( method )
   {
      case RequestMethod.Get :

         request.Method = "GET";

         break;

      case RequestMethod.Post :
         
         request.ContentType 
            = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
         request.Method = "POST";
         request.ContentLength = message.Length;

         StreamWriter sw = 
            new StreamWriter(request.GetRequestStream());
         sw.Write(message);
         sw.Flush();

         break;
   }

   string html = null;

   using( HttpWebResponse response 
      = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse() )
   {
      Stream rs = response.GetResponseStream();
      StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(rs);
      html = sr.ReadToEnd();
      response.Close();

      // subsequent calls fail without this abort in .Net v1.1
      request.Abort();
   }

   return html;
}	

I've developed this phenomenal practice recently of rising early with The Wife (as a high school math teacher, she gets up wicked early) and donning my ratty old pair of Uggs, I make some bacon & eggs and a pot of coffee while I read the newspaper.

I usually come away with two or three great stories that I can use for conversation when I find myself in front of a non-developer.

Today, I came across this gem in The Oregonian:

Caught in a web of stupidity
In a recent Edge, we told you that the approximate time it would take you to visit every site on the Web if you spent one second at each one was 1 day, 9 hours, 46 minutes and 34 seconds. See, we were so busy visiting this one Web site (hey, we thought they meant TURKEY breasts!) that we left out a line. The actual figure is 3 years, 2 months, 1 day, 9 hours, 46 minutes and 34 seconds, according to The Chicago Sun-Times. Hey, Persnickety McPickypants, we were only off by 3 years and 2 months!

Huh... After thinking about it, I suppose they mean just the home page of every site. Even so, its easy to see how a large array of computers can successfully scan the entire web quickly. Then, it occurred to me the truly hard part was returning "the right" results quickly on a search result page.

I saw this post on Jeff Atwood's blog about a new tool from SlickEdit, the makers of SlickRun; easily the most frequently used program on my laptop day-in and day-out.

The Command Spy
Whenever you click on a menu item or toolbar button in Visual Studio, you are executing what is known as a "command". Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to tell what command is linked to which menu items or toolbar buttons. The Command Spy monitors command execution and allows you to see exactly what commands you've run, how many times you've run them and what key bindings are used to invoke those commands. The main purpose of this tool is to allow you to learn what commands are bound to which keystrokes, so that you can work faster within the IDE.

I installed Command Spy over the Thanksgiving holiday. It totally rocks! Just run the VS.Net add-in while you're coding for a couple of hours and then take a look at your metrics. Command Spy will tell you how many times you've run a command without using the short-cut keystrokes. Its a great way to improve on your productivity.

I started using the RSS reader in Microsoft Outlook 2007.

I was using SharpReader for as long as I've ever had an RSS reader and subscribed to feeds. I really like having just one application running for my communications and work items (email, tasks, calendar, RSS feeds...). Its super easy to add a feed when you're visiting a web page too. I used folders quite a bit in SharpReader to categorize feeds, but I'm trying the "one big folder" approach for now in Outlook.

Sometimes, I got lazy and didn't open SharpReader on my laptop for a while. The posts would get way out of control. Sure, I could add it to my Start Up programs, but one of my quirks is to keep that list short, if not empty. Some weeks I even tell SQL Server to not startup automatically. Perhaps that's one of the old carry overs from living too long with too little RAM on a weak laptop.

Outlook 2007 as an RSS reader is nice, but I miss some of the basics, like identifying the URL to a blog I've already subscribed to. There's probably a way to display that information easily in Outlook, but I haven't discovered it yet.

To date, the most frustrating thing has been refreshing feeds. It gets joined at the hip with my email send/receive request. So, when someone comes by my desk in a general freak-out mode and asks how to solve a problem raised in a recent e-mail, I click on Send/Receive if I haven't gotten it yet. Now, thanks to the additional RSS feeds, I have to wait much longer as everything is updated. There must be a way to decouple these requests from each other in Outlook.

Overall, I'm very happy with the switch so far.

I've been using http://www.internetfrog.com/ for a few months now, but I read Doug Purdy's blog about http://www.speedtest.net/. I think this will be the new default speed test tool for me. Its awfully shiny.

I saw this link on Don Box's blog about a new Workflow book coming out. Since I'm considering WF, I'm going to take his advice and get the book.

This is a nice parlay for me after a session at the recent Seattle Code Camp. I sat in on a Windows Workflow Foundation talk by Paul Mehner, the South Sound .Net User Group Leader in Olympia, WA.

I could tell this guy is a professional trainer; he had a thorough understanding of Windows Workflow Foundation, solid content and a ton of energy. Not a sleepy eye in the whole audience!

The Seattle Code Camp 2 was a great weekend. It was held at Digipen, the world's first video game university. Its a cool office, and judging by all of the labs, the auditorium, and extensive media clippings framed on the wall, its a fantastic place to learn 2D and 3D animation, game programming, art and anything else related to game development. Jason Mauer did a great job of pulling everything together. I'd love to help out and organize the next Portland or Seattle gathering.

My presentation on DotNetNuke and web content management went well; I think its got some legs. Here's the zip file of my presentation and the code I was talking about. This was the first time I've presented this material and it went fairly well. I really believe in the concepts that I've been whittling on and DNN has just been the delivery vehicle of the moment. I think it'd be a lot of fun to take this one on the road and hit up a couple of code camps in other cities. I wonder what The Wife would think of that?

One of my favorite presentors last weekend was Bill Vaughn. He's with Beta V, and a prolific author; he's written a couple of SQL Server books recently. I took advantage of the opportunity to learn quite a bit about SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition and Reporting Services from him.

The XNA team was also on hand to present some brand new material. The new beta is due very soon, if its not out already. Charles Cox was on hand (a Digipen graduate) to give a great demo on building a XBox 360 game with C#.

I forgot to mention that we we're linked by makezine.com the other day for our efforts in building a large scale labyrinth game.

My friend Dave Selden is the master mind. He had the idea to make the game based on his sweet eBay purchase. He called up some friends and we've been helping Dave build it over the past couple of weeks in the hopes of winning a mini-golf contest. We're up against our neighbors at Wyden & Kennedy, the ad agency for Nike. They are purportedly making a giant whale with the ball shooting out of the blow hole; rumors to be sure but I would expect they have a larger budget too.

The game begins by placing the golf ball in the start position on the board surface. One or two players turn two giant knobs on the sides of the game to manipulate the x and y axis of the board surface. If the player succeeds in moving the ball to the finish hole, the ball descends through a tube, out the side, and directly (hopefully) into the cup. Otherwise, the ball drops out on the far side of the game; where the player must then putt the ball around the rectangular green to the side with the hold. Got to love the mini-golf game!

Thanks Drew! He submitted us to makezine.com. He has millions of hundred dollar ideas.

I was accepted to speak at the next Code Camp, the weekend of Oct 28th, in Seattle! Hooray!! I thought for a little bit on (A) what would be a fun topic and (2) what do I have to say about said fun topic. I finally settled on talking about something I do on a daily basis: balancing the needs of the web designer, leveraging sufficient power of a great platform (read that as using the base class libraries and everything else given to me), along with the needs of the client and the overall budget.

Our designers at Pop Art are top shelf. They've come up with some fantastic ideas for sites. They're on the leading edge of what's possible with today's browsers and giving consideration to the downlevel browser folk.

Given that, they have some high demands on the HTML emitted by anything on the server. It absolutely, positively must be W3C compliant. It doesn't matter if its HTML 4.01 Transitional, or HTML 1.0 Strict; so long as it conforms to the given specification. Gone are the days of using menu server controls that emitted glorious reams of <table>, <tr> and <td> tags. Enough for you to knit a small blanket. Amen for the CSS Control Adapters.

The designers have a lot to say on usability too. There are just some things that developers will step right over like a country boy; where as the country boy's college roommate visiting for the weekend will stop, stare, point, hold their nose and give it a wide birth.

Enter DotNetNuke. Out-of-the-box, DNN is a developers playground. They know there's so much capability under the hood that they're (and I'm generalizing here) too busy envisioning what they're going to build next instead of rethinking the user interface that a client would need to maintain a site. That seems like small potatoes next to the glorious reams of code we can write.

So, I've settled on presenting the issues, challenges, arguments, counter-points and three-point-takedowns that we've had to address over the past 18 months with DNN. That would be a little too gloomy, so the remaining 67% of the discussion will contain some solutions that bridge the gap and keep the web site looking beautiful long after it launches. My presentation is in no way the rule; simply my experiences in dealing with this issue since I came to Pop Art in 2002. As with most things, I'm sure they are lots of ways to handle them, and I'm as open minded as the next guy; providing the next guy is sans jerk.

A basic introduction of DotNetNuke would be better served by a different session, but people who've never downloaded the bits from www.dotnetnuke.com will still get a reasonable insight into the problem sets and ways to deal with them.

My basic fear is probably the same as any other presenter who ever presented in all of presentation-land: getting slotted in the same time slot as ScottGu or anyone else in the rock star line up. What a problem to have!!   :)

I recently upgraded my laptop to 2GB of memory. I've been really pleased with my new ability to leave Internet Explorer, Outlook, SharpReader and SQL Server open when I want to use Visual Studio.Net and write some code.

As a negative side affect, I noticed some problems when I put my laptop into stand by or hibernation mode.

Stand by mode is where the laptop is still technically "on" and its drawing a tiny little charge out of the battery. All of my programs are still in memory but the machine is in a reduced state which preserves the battery until I'm ready to turn it on again. This mode the fastest way to pack up when I need to run for the bus as well as power back up again when I reach my destination.

Hiberation mode is similar to stand by except the machine is actually turned off. The laptop persists everything in memory to disk so I can even swap batteries if I like; a great trick to making long plane trips go by quickly. When I power up again, the laptop restores the contents of the memory and the CPU comes back to life.

It takes a little longer to go into and come out of hibernation since there's more stuff to do than when using stand by mode. Hence, my preference was to use stand by unless I knew I would be swapping batteries. The other day on a podcast I heard either Carl Franklin or Scott Hanselman mention that stand by mode can behave poorly because applications have the option of supporting it. Hibernation doesn't suffer from that since the contents of memory are dumped to the disk. Everything supports hibernation, but some apps may choose not to support stand by and therefore, when you start up again, an app may run aground.

I might have seen that on my laptop, but it hasn't been painful enough for me to care too much; until the 2GB memory upgrade.

In the best scenario, I would start the stand by or hibernate process and it would immediately come back and tell me this message:

Insufficient System Resources Exist to Complete the API

At first, I would smile and say to myself, "That's cause I got two gigs, baby!!" That wore off though. My harddrive is a paultry 40GB and I usually have somewhere between 8 and 0.5 GB free on any given day. So a few days ago, I deleted all of my Office and Battlestar Galactica episodes that I downloaded from iTunes and made sure I had enough room for the memory to dump to disk.

In the worst scenario, it would "take" for at least 2 minutes, enough for me to believe it worked, only to start up again inside my laptop bag. I would get to my destination and grab my laptop only to find it a little too warm. I'd frown. Sometimes, in the past, I would forget that it was on and chuck it in my bag only to find a hot laptop waiting for me later. The same frown occurs.

So this morning, I thought, what if there were some glorious place that existed where people would store and share their knowledge? I fired up my browser and did a Google query for "dell latitude cannot hibernate with 2GB ram". The first hit was this one:

http://translocator.ws/2005/11/06/hibernation-insufficient-system-resources

This page talks about my exact problem and an patch that is supposed to fix the problem. Only in his case, he has four computers that still exhibit the behavior after the patch was applied. There was a note on there that the latest patch of August 2006 was released. I suspected his problem was before this latest patch came out.

I downloaded the patch (WindowsXP-KB909095-x86-ENU.exe), installed it and lo-and-behold it worked! Well, I hibernated for at least two minutes. I'm excited to see if I get my stand by working again. I'll add a comment in a few days with the results.

This is the knowledge base article link and title for this issue:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/909095

The computer occasionally does not hibernate and you receive an "Insufficient System Resources Exist to Complete the API" error message in Windows XP with Service Pack 2

Jason Mauer's blog let me know that Seattle Code Camp is coming up at the end of the month! Ack!

I'm thinking about heading up with my buddy Kelly. I told myself at the Portland Code camp, I said "Self," that's what I call myself, "you should present at the next code camp." Well, this is the next one, but its right around the corner!

I could do the DotNetNuke presentation, but seeing as how they just incorporated combined with their proximity to Seattle, there's a good probability that a DNN big shot will be there doing a far better show than I could. I was very impressed at the last Portland Code Camp at the quality of the "simple" talks. Things that you should already know, but are fun and refreshing to go over again. For example, the Subversion discussion was really well attended and you always end up learning some new trick or insight. I love that.

I'll put my thinking hat on and see what I come up with.

No matter how complex the Internet becomes, it refreshing to see that right and wrong are still easy to decipher. Here's the lesson that Six Apart has to pay for.

Holy Crap! Here's a site built by MOSS 2007 using their web content management capabilities. Its called www.hedkandi.com and at first blush, its makes use of a very elaborate design to brand the site. I did fire up the validation service on the homepage only to find an excess of 100 compliance errors; yet it did look fine in my IE7 browser, so *shrug*.

The site feels almost "too pop" and a little risque for an MSDN site; but if you've got a product to sell, I guess you go ahead and sell it, eh?

The flash page transition effect is pretty sweet. The ant-drug ad banner at the top makes me wonder what kind of site I've stumbled across, given the seemingly stark contrast with the body content.

At the end of my 3 minute analysis, I don't think the site has decided what it is. It wants to be sexy & super hip; on the edge of pop. The iPod ads and anti-drug ads leave a subtle taste of an after school special. *Bleigh* That's so 16 months ago. The fact that's its built with MOSS 2007 is the coolest thing I can see at this point.

Sweet goodness. Hearts and bunnies, as The Wife and her sister would say.

I'm authoring this post from Windows Live Writer, a Windows client application that provides a place to author a post offline and then send 'er up the tubes to my blog site.

DasBlog has long provided alternatives to the HTML form based post, such as email based submission, but I've never delved into them. I read about Windows Live Writer on a couple of posts, nothing too detailed, just a quick mention and on a lark I looked it up online.

It seemed interesting, lots of features too. I downloaded a small .msi file, and it was running great in seconds on my laptop. Right off the bat, it asked for the URL to my blog and my credentials. It proceeded to chat with my blog to learn some things about it; I didn't have to do anything.

Sweet!

Then a window opens and prompts me to enter a blog post. I think I'm going to really like this.

The other day I fired up TortoiseSVN and it politely informed me that I might enjoy the latest release.

Hurrah!

A few days ago, DotNetNuke® announced a new corporate entity. The new firm is based in Seattle, WA.

An snippet from the announcement:

In the four years since the DotNetNuke project was launched, it has seen its registered user ranks swell to 335,000 members and demand for its flagship product surpassing 2 million downloads worldwide. This worldwide adoption of DotNetNuke has created significant economic value both for the project and also the commercial ecosystem that it has spawned.

This sounds like a big step forward for them. I've seen other people indicate that DNN is no longer a framework for the hobby developer; this move seems to bear that out.

Congrats Shaun!

As a treat to myself for the new office move, I strategically ordered 2GB of RAM for my laptop so it would arrive on the first day in the new office. My Dell Latitude D610 has been a nice work horse for a while, but the paultry 512KB RAM just had a hard time compiling large VS.Net solutions.

I eagerly printed out the memory install instructions and patiently waited for the DHL driver to show up with my package. By using the DHL online tracking tool, I could see the package arrived in Portland on Friday and the driver had it by 9:25AM on Monday. Around 4PM, I couldn't wait anymore and I was being to wear a path in the carpet past the front desk; so I called the DHL line. They had a very good call system in place. I typed in my tracking code and the live person on the phone answered my question quickly. Basically, they knew exactly where they were delivering the package and no problems were reported. Drat!

Then, my (new) phone rang! It was the front desk calling to inform me that my package had arrived at the front desk. Figures, as soon as I call, the dude walks off the elevator to the office. I should have called a noon!

So, as my first feat of strength, I fired up VS.Net and pointed it to a DotNetNuke v4.3.4 solution that we have in the works. With just 512KB of RAM in my laptop, it took several minutes to compile the entire source code comprised of many thousands of lines. Now, with 2GB of RAM, I slammed through those 33 projects in about two minutes. A marked improvement indeed!

At just a measely 2GHz, my CPU is the dog now; the image of my task manager window bears that out. This is the processor churning through all those lines of DotNetNuke code in VS.Net; at least its not pegged at 100%! 

The holidays are coming soon, perhaps I'll see a new laptop soon? :)

Its Monday and we're unboxing and organizing. Lots of work to do, but the new place is looking great! I can't wait to get everything in place and start building great solutions here!

The long awaited time has come; the office move. The old place has served us well and I can't wait to get the boxes unpaced and setup shop in the new place. Here's some photos of the hard day of moving.

I've just finished the book Death By Meetings written by Patrick Lencioni. Its a non-fictional gem on how to run effective meetings in a company. The author took a nice approach by telling a fable about a company, Yip Software, and how they were driven to change their meeting style in order to survive; a compelling story that wasn't too contrived. The value of his approach was clearly stated and I bought into it right away. Probably not to any small degree because we're already doing most of it.

We have a five minute huddle every day with the department. We exchange a few pleasantries and dive into one minute updates on our work for the day, or what is creating a road block for the team. Every other week, we have tactical meetings that address short term goals for 60 to 90 minutes. The executive team has quarterly strategic meetings that allow the company to reaccess goals and what has changed in the market. The company has two day offsite meetings every 14 to 18 months too. I've been to three offsite meetings so far. They're great for letting your mind step back, take a broad context and dive into a passionate discussion about the business.

It was interesting to listen to a story that could have come directly from Pop Art. Our Chief Operating Officer, Tom Paul, has been an avid sponsor of this type of meeting approach for a while. This was my first book I've digested in this isle. I'm usually stuck by the tractor beam of the technical aisle. I feel our biweekly tactical meetings can use a bit more passionate debate, but we're pretty close on most of the points. If you haven't ventured down this aisle before, I thoroughly recommend this book. This book doesn't contain anything new; yet I find it very refreshing to periodically digest the fundamentals to keep me grounded. I'm sure several other books cover this topic well, so its kind of like 8th grade biology class. Its doesn't matter where you go to school, so long as you pass the class.

I picked up a copy of Professional DotNetNuke 4 from Wrox Press yesterday. Chapter one was so interesting, I couldn't put it down. It was quite fortunate that I started reading it, given my earlier troubles the same day with iTunes.

The first chapter is by Shaun Walker and he paints a really interesting picture of the history of the product, some if his biggest mistakes, strokes of luck and gems of wisdom he discovered along the way. Its a very interesting chapter and I highly recommend, if not require, reading it if your involved at any level with DNN.

I admit that I've been a little disappointed with some features in DNN. Perhaps I've been swayed by some nay sayers, but after reading that rah-rah chapter, I'm back on board. I feel its an outstanding product for its niche. I'm sure other applications can fit similar niches quite well, but to be sure, DNN does what it says, very well. I'm sure that I'll also pursue a custom WCM route at the same time for a variety of reasons, but I sure do appreciate all that DNN does.

If you're waffling on using DNN, here are next questions you need to ask yourself:

1. Are you susceptible to the Not-Invented-Here syndrome?
2. Does XHTML 1.0 mean that much to you over HTML 4.01?
3. Are you willing to work with an existing framework, including its constraints, or to you think your time is better spent creating a new framework, with new constraints?
4. Are you planning on using any of the core modules, commercial modules, or custom built modules?

Here are some interesting points I learned in the first chapter:

1. Page 15 - DNN is ADA and Section 508 compliant
2. Page 24 - DNN was a mere 15K lines early on, ballooned to 46K lines, and now is well over that metric
3. Page 31 - DNN found its way into Fortune 500 companies, the military, goverment websites, and international vendors
4. Page 31 - DNN has over 30 language packs, now that's local!
5. Page 33 - A important part of DNN 3.0 was the inclusion of Forum, Blog and Gallery modules
6. Page 36 - Hosting companies integrated DNN offerings into SW-Soft (Plesk), WebHostAutomation (Helm), and Ensim
7. Page 37 - DNN will happily run on a web farm
8. Page 40 - When DNN 3.1 was released, the core team believed it will be some time before DNN can be considered a market leader in Content Management offerings
9. Page 48 - In November, 2005 they had 200,000 registered users. They currently have over 350,000.
10. Page 49 - By the end of 2005, www.dotnetnuke.com had achieved an impressive Alexa ranking of 6,741 and a SourceForge.Net ranking of #75 out of all open source projects.

I heard that DNN 4.3.5 is due out shortly. Its a stabilization release, so don't look for new features. Kelly submitted a bug fix to them yesterday and was concerned about the complexity. I can imagine the core team is so close to the system that they can't see the difficultly that new recruits would have in understanding this organization and contributing. I told Kelly that perhaps he and I can write a Wrox Press book on how to contribute to the DNN source!