October 2006 - Posts

Windows Vista Talks - Links
26 October 06 08:13 | Simon Phillips | with no comments

Thanks again to Dave for coming up and talking about Vista last Tuesday. He's listed the web sites that he mentioned.

Link to Dave Northey's Blog : Windows Vista Talks

Filed under: , ,
My first Vista Sidebar gadget
24 October 06 08:49 | Simon Phillips | 1 comment(s)

A while ago I did build a Konfabulator Widget (now Yahoo Gadgets) for World of Warcraft (Slaine's WoW Realm Status Widget). This widget went off to the Blizzard - Realm Status pages and returned the status of your favourite server.

With playing around with Vista of the last couple of weeks I've been looking at the Sidebar Widgets that are now part of the Vista desktop and have been hard at work converting my widget into a Gadget :).

Now Microsoft use the term Gadget as a over term to discribe Live Gadgets (That are basically web-parts for Windows Live) and Side-bar Gadgets which are for the Vista desktop.

I havn't quite got my head around the physical differenced between the two as the documentation at the moment is a little lacking on MSDN and the Windows Gadget site.

However what I have determined is that you can write the gadgets either in HTML / Javascript or as a Componant using Visual Stuido.

As the Konfabulator widget was a mixture of XML and Javascript, I've built the Vista widget using the HTML / Javascript way.

 

What the Gadget is doing is once it loads up it does a AJAX call to the one of the Blizzard Realm Status pages depending on which Region you've selected in the settings page, Either US or Europe (En, Fr or De). The response is read back in a AJAX callback function and a regular expression is used to select the correct Realm and pull out the status, the server type and the current population size.

If you move the move over the icon the Realm information bars fade in and then fades out when you move the mouse away.

I've got a little bit more work to do on it before I release it, as you miht see that there is a purple borader around the widget. This is to do with having transparancy on top of another transparant image. I'll have to re-design how I build the graphics up. If anyone want to do a spot of testing for me then drop me a line.

Filed under: , ,
IEBlog : Details on our CSS changes for IE7
24 October 06 08:13 | Simon Phillips | with no comments

Now IE7 is nearly ready for release, it's important to understand the changes that the IE team has made to the way that IE renders HTML and CSS. Link to IEBlog : Details on our CSS changes for IE7

There has been alot of changes especially around the CSS compliency of IE. This means that the IE css hacks that alot of us have used in the past will not work, and potenitially could mess up your page layouts.

If you havn't done so, get your self a copy of IE7 ASAP. Word of warning IE7 does stop some things working. I use a few ActiveX / Java based VPNs to connect to clients and these just don't work as they stand at the moment. Don't worry about this too much as IE7 un-installs ok. If you have a problem then build yourself a Virtual PC and put IE7 on that.

Laptop Graphic Drivers on Vista RC2
23 October 06 09:46 | Simon Phillips | with no comments

I've got a Dell Latitude D820 @ work and I was a little disapointed with the Windows Aero performance once I installed Vista RC1 and RC2. According to my Windows Experience Index I was only getting a 2.1 which was the score I was getting for the graphics.

Now these things have GeForce GO 7300 which honestly should be working much better. After i installed RC2, I thought that I would have a look at updating the drivers. Nvidia have released a new set of drivers for Vista RC2, but these wouldn't install saying that my graphic card was not supported (So much for Unified Drivers). After a bit of digging on the web I found  http://www.laptopvideo2go.com which modify (mainly the driver information file) the driver pack and allows the Nvidia drivers to be installed. They also reduce the footprint of the driver pack (removing the file that you don't really need).

These worked a treat and increase my graphic score from 2.1 to 3.6 :). The performance is really noticable.

I have just read this morning on Sam Gentile's Blog, that he had the same problem, but he got around it by using the Update Driver in the Device Manager.

Filed under:
Windows Mobile Device Center
20 October 06 02:26 | Simon Phillips | with no comments

In upgrading to Vista I noticed that ActiveSync isn't supported in Vista. It looks like ActiveSync is going to be replaced with the Windows Mobile Device Center it's not part of the current Beta 2 RC 1 or RC2 however you can download the latest beta 3 from the link above.

It does  the same thing as ActiveSync in a nice new interface. It found my SPV C600 without any problems.

Filed under: ,
Everything you wanted to know about vista but were afraid to ASK!
20 October 06 12:04 | Simon Phillips | with no comments

Just a reminder, next TUESDAY (not monday) is NIMTUG's next meeting. We've got Dave Northey from Microsoft coming up from Dublin to give us a "Techy Tour of Vista".

You can register for the event here

I've got my Laptop all Vista'd up with RC2!!

Filed under: ,
Top 10 Web 2.0 Attack Vectors
10 October 06 12:29 | Simon Phillips | with no comments

I've been playing around with the new Atlas framework for a couple of weeks now as I thought I better get into this Web 2.0 stuff.

Bascially for those who don't know Atlas and other AJAX frameworks use methods such as calling Web Services from the browsers using sets of Javascript functions called asyncronously.  Once the calls are returned then the HTML is updated. Of cause this is nothing new. I was doing this sort of thing using native ASP with the remote proceedure call applet that came with Visual Studio 6.

I been working through the Atlas samples, and I got thinking that there is nothing stopping a user / hacker from working out the XML payload to these web services and calling the functions directly.

Now this isn't really a problem if you are just using the web services to return lists of data unless you're being carless and returning information that you are not intending to be shown but could be used by hackers to indentify the internal workings of your application. (For thoses who were at Dominick Baier event @ NIMTUG, you can apply the same issues to Web 2.0). The biggest problems occur if you are using the web services to modify the data in some way.

Now there are alot of good practices for building and securing web services. If I have time I'll try and get a list of these. However I would definantly turn off the Web Services documentation (the dynamically built pages that describe the web service) and use the security modules that come as part of WSE (Web Services Enhancements)

In the mean time Help Net Security have posted an article about the Top 10 Web 2.0 Attack Vectors. Link to HNS - Top 10 Web 2.0 Attack Vectors

MS Sandcastle - Sept 2006 CTP Technical Refresh
09 October 06 05:39 | Simon Phillips | with no comments

Microsoft have released a Technical refresh for the September 2006 CTP version of Sandcastle which is a help file generator simular to nDoc.

Download Link http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?fa...

You can find out more about Sandcastle at the Sandcastle wiki http://www.sandcastledocs.com

And more about what is in the TR at the follwoing link Announcing September Sandcastle CTP Technical Refresh

The FRED SCRIPT v2.0 (FOR DAVID AND MARK)
06 October 06 11:25 | Simon Phillips | with no comments

Years ago while I was with Parity, we were always having to truncate the log file on our development servers as we were always running out to disk space.

We wrote a small little script which would truncate and shrink the log file and for some reason we called this script 'Fred'. Fred became a little star of a script being sent off to clients to get them out of problems.

I was trying to clean my machine down in order to clean some space for Vista the other night and realised that my log files were hitting ~ 1GB on my Dev machine (don't ask).

I came across this script posted on http://textsnippets.com by Sergey Okhotny.

DECLARE @ssql nvarchar(4000) SET @ssql= ' IF ''?'' NOT IN (''tempdb'',''master'',''model'',''msdb'') BEGIN PRINT ''SHRINK LOG FILES FOR ?'' USE [?] DECLARE @tsql nvarchar(4000) SET @tsql = '''' DECLARE @iLogFile int --Loop Though all the LogFiles for the Database DECLARE LogFiles CURSOR FOR SELECT fileid FROM sysfiles WHERE status & 0x40 = 0x40 OPEN LogFiles FETCH next FROM LogFiles INTO @iLogFile WHILE @@fetch_status = 0 BEGIN --Try to Shrink Log File to 1MB SET @tsql = @tsql + ''DBCC SHRINKFILE('' +cast(@iLogFile AS varchar(5)) +'', 1)'' + CHAR(13) + CHAR(10) FETCH next FROM LogFiles INTO @iLogFile END CLOSE LogFiles DEALLOCATE LogFiles --TRUNCATE LOG FILE and Try to Shrik the Log file again SET @tsql = @tsql + ''BACKUP LOG [?] WITH TRUNCATE_ONLY'' + CHAR(13) + CHAR(10) + @tsql --PRINT @tsql EXEC(@tsql) END' EXEC sp_msforeachdb @ssql

I like this script so much that I've named this Fredv2.0

It uses one of the undocumented stored procedures called sp_MSforeachdb . This is great little stored proc which allow you to run a number of scripts against all the databases server.

exec @RETURN_VALUE = sp_MSforeachdb @command1, @replacechar, @command2, @command3, @precommand, @postcommand

Where:

  • @RETURN_VALUE - is the return value which will be set by "sp_MSforeachdb"
  • @command1 - is the first command to be executed by "sp_MSforeachdb" and is defined as nvarchar(2000)
  • @replacechar - is a character in the command string that will be replaced with the database name being processed (default replacechar is a "?")
  • @command2 and @command3 are two additional commands that can be run against each database
  • @precommand - is a nvarchar(2000) parameter that specifies a command to be run prior to processing any database
  • @postcommand - is also an nvarchar(2000) field used to identify a command to be run after all commands have been processed against all databases.

There was a lot of talk at the SQL talk the other week about undocumented functions and stored procs about these being a thing of the past. However this is still not documented, which probably means that it might not appear in the next verison of SQL (be warned!!!).

Filed under:
Presentation Files from last week's TechNet SQL Server Events
02 October 06 04:19 | Simon Phillips | with no comments

TechNet Ireland have posted the presentations from last weeks TechNet events.

Source: Presentations from: Microsoft's SQL Server 2005 Dublin & Belfast Events
Originally published on 02/10/2006 16:15 by ieitpro

Filed under: ,

This Blog

Applications / Addons

Irish Community

Microsoft Ireland Blogs

My Articles

Syndication