Scott Hanselman

It's official. I'm totally Vista'ed. My main machine at home was running Vista RTM the nanosecond it released, but the Wife and the TabletPC were running RC2 until yesterday.

Here's some tips to make your Vista upgrade suck less, especially if you're upgrading the Whole Family.

• Back stuff up. Don't skip this step.
• Buy New Hard Drives: Upgrading to Vista is also a great opportunity to get a new Hard Drive. Go one, treat yourself. I got a 10,000RPM Raptor X and let me tell you, in the words of Atwood, the difference is not subtle. Move your C: to D: and start fresh.
• ReadyBoost: Buy one Apacer Handy Steno HT203 for each computer. Get the 2gig. You can find them for under $50. There's literally NO reason for you to not pop this USB stick into the back of your machine, configure it for ReadyBoost and forget about it. It makes my wife's 512megs of RAM actually tolerable.
• Plan what Vista SKUs you need. I got Ultimate for my main machine, Home Basic for the Wife's machine, and Business for my Tablet. You can always do an "Anywhere Upgrade" if you really made the wrong choice.
  • If you aren't ready to pay, you can install Vista without a Product Key and use it for 120 days by extending the grace period before ponying up.
• Get your Drivers Ready. Everyone's releasing drivers this week. Do the work ahead of time and download the drivers you need to the USB sticks (before you use them for ReadyBoost). ATI just released their drivers today.
• Get PowerShell for Vista. It's out, and it's using the new Vista Installer technology - basically "Windows Update Local." This is an OS add-on, not an "extra app" and its fully supported.
• Think seriously about OneCare. Early betas I tested were poo, it's true, but Windows OneCare has come a long way, and you can't beat $49 total for 3 PCs. All our home PCs are running it now. If you can get a Beta User's key/link, it's $19 for 3 PCs for the next week or so. It's a shame OneCare isn't built into Vista.
• Get your Home Network ready for Home Server. It's going to rock.

Are you upgrading or waiting?

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I have some static files - RSS XML in fact - that have been served by IIS as static files for a while. I consider them permalinks, and I don't want to change that for now, but I wanted to do some testing with FeedBurner (similar do what I did before with FeedBurner in DasBlog) letting them serve the RSS for a while, gathering statistics. If it went well, I'd go with FeedBurner full time for those files - but not all.

So, given a directory with: foo.xml, bar.xml, bat.xml and others all served statically by IIS, I wanted a quick and dirty way to maintain the permalinks while handling a few of the files dynamically, and a few as redirects to FeedBurner.

There's a number of ways to solved this depending on your version of IIS and ASP.NET; here's an easy way, and the way I'm doing it now.

By default IIS will serve XML files as static files with the text/xml mime type and ASP.NET will never hear about it. As XML files aren't handled by ASP.NET, first I need to configure IIS to pass all requests for XML files for this VDIR to ASP.NET. Do this from the Configuration button under Home Directory in the Properties pages of the app/vdir. I've pointed ".xml" to aspnet_isapi.dll as seen in the figure at right.

Note that you need to be explicit if you want IIS to check if the file exists. For example, if foo.xml is a real static file on disk, but bar.xml is going to be dynamically created, don't select "Verify that file exists." Setting this checkbox wrong is the #1 developer-error that you'll hit when creating HttpHandlers to handle custom extensions.

Next I'll add a handler in web.config for *.xml (or just foo.xml, etc, if I want to be more restrictive).

   1:  <httpHandlers>

   2:  <add verb="GET" 

   3:  path="*.xml"

   4:  type="Foo.Redirector,FooAssembly"

   5:  />

   6:  </httpHandlers>

Now I'll create a VERY simple HttpHandler that will fire for all .xml files (or just the ones you want, if you only associated a few files in your web.config.

This is your chance to:

• Redirect elsewhere
• Dynamically generate the file they asked for
• Pick up the file off disk and serve it statically

The example below checks to see if the UserAgent requesting the files foo.xml or bar.xml is FeedBurner. (You could check other things of course, like IP subnet, etc.) If it isn't FeedBurner's bot, we currently redirect them temporarily with an HTTP 302. There's commented code for a permanent redirect, which RSS Readers respect, that would cause the client to update their bookmarks and never return. For now, I'll do a temporary one.

   1:  using System;

   2:   

   3:  namespace Foo

   4:  {

   5:      public class  Redirector : System.Web.IHttpHandler

   6:      {

   7:          void System.Web.IHttpHandler.ProcessRequest(System.Web.HttpContext context)

   8:          {

   9:              string userAgent = context.Request.UserAgent;

  10:              if (userAgent != null && userAgent.Length > 0)

  11:              {

  12:                  // If they aren't FeedBurner (optional example check)

  13:                  if (userAgent.StartsWith("FeedBurner") == false)

  14:                  {

  15:                      string redirect = String.Empty;

  16:                      string physicalpath = System.IO.Path.GetFileName( 
                                    context.Request.PhysicalPath).ToUpperInvariant();

  17:                      switch (physicalpath)

  18:                      {

  19:                          case "BAR.XML":

  20:                              redirect = "http://feeds.feedburner.com/Bar";

  21:                              break;

  22:                          case "FOO.XML":

  23:                              redirect = "http://feeds.feedburner.com/Foo";

  24:                              break;

  25:                      }

  26:                      if (redirect != String.Empty)

  27:                      {

  28:                          context.Response.Redirect(redirect); //temporary redirect

  29:   

  30:                          //context.Response.StatusCode = 
                                    (int) System.Net.HttpStatusCode.MovedPermanently; //permanent HTTP 301

  31:                          //context.Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently";

  32:                          //context.Response.RedirectLocation = redirect;

  33:                          return;

  34:                      }

  35:                  }

  36:              }

  37:              context.Response.ContentType = "application/xml";

  38:              context.Response.TransmitFile(context.Request.PhysicalPath);

  39:          }

  40:   

  41:          bool System.Web.IHttpHandler.IsReusable

  42:          {

  43:              get { return true; }

  44:          }

  45:      }

  46:  }

If they ARE FeedBurner, that means their bot is returning to get fresh data from the foo.xml or bar.xml files. If so, we call the new ASP.NET 2.0 TransmitFile API, that supplements/improves on the earlier WriteFile. Transmit file doesn't buffer to memory and solved a number of problems seen when writing out files and buffering.

We also fall to this default code path if any other XML file has been requested, if that file is hooked into ASP.NET via the web.config. In my example, *.xml is hooked up, so all other requests end up in the TransmitFile API.

TransmitFile doesn't pass the request back to IIS, as some folks believe, nor does it handle caching for you. If you need that support you'll need to write it by following the HTTP spec and handling the headers yourself.

To recap:

• Tell IIS to pass handling of your extension to ASPNET_ISAPI
• Map files or extensions to Assembly Qualified Names in the web.config httpHandlers section - i.e. What class handles what files dynamically?
• Create, redirect or serve your files

I'll try to writeup some other ways to solve the same problem, depending on what version of ASP.NET and IIS you're using. If you've got clever ways (there are many) leave them in the comments.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I've always thought it was the height of classiness when an application lets me know that there's a new version available. Even little applications with no installer like Lutz's Reflector update themselves automatically.

There's lots of ways to implement an automatic update check in your application, and many products that say they'll do it automatically.

From my point of view, there's a number of levels of "coolness" in auto-updating. Now, all this assumes you're NOT using ClickOnce.

Cool:

• Add a "Check for Update" menu that just launches the default browser like www.foo.com/update.aspx?version=3.3.4.4 where 3.3.4.4 is your own Main Assembly Version. Then the requested page just lets them know if they've got the latest or not.
  • You can get your app's version number via System.Windows.Forms.Application.ProductVersion() or System.Reflection. Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly(). GetName().Version.ToString(). Whew!

Cooler would be:

• Add a "Check for Update" menu that retrieves via a programmatic HTTP GET some XML from www.foo.com/update.aspx?version=3.3.4.4. Then report INSIDE your app if the user needs to upgrade.

Cooler still would be:

• Add a "Check for Update" menu that retrieves via a programmatic HTTP GET some XML from www.foo.com/update.aspx?version=3.3.4.4. Then report INSIDE your app if the user needs to upgrade, THEN ask them if they want to download the current version. If they say yes, do so, then close your app while shelling out to run the new updater/setup.
  • Bonus points for checking once a day/week/month for updates, silently, gracefully.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Here's a few upcoming local events that you might be interested in. I think that being a good developer is a start, but getting involved in the local developer community - whatever language or OS you're into - really helps make a technologist more well-rounded.

• Tonight at 6:30pm at the Microsoft Portland Office Jason Mauer will be talking about XNA Game Studio Express. I'm watching Z tonight so I'll stop by to give away a Wrox Box and hang out until he cries.
  • "XNA is the future of game development with all the comforts of managed code, and it's here today for the PC and Xbox 360. Come see how much easier XNA makes it to build a game for Windows, and run it on your 360 in the living room."
• Tues, Feb 6th at 7:30am at the Governor Hotel in Portland, I'll be on a panel discussing "Why Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) is Important to Your Product Success" with Joe Daly, Director of SOA at Intel and Gordon Ferlitsch (my old boss), VP of Technology at Transcore. Should be a spirited (!) talk and you'll still make it to work on time.
• Saturday, Feb 10th at 10:00am at Willamette University in Salem, there's an event that's open to the public on Future Potential in Computing. While this event is primary focused on getting college students to consider a career in geekery, check out folks (plus me) that are on the panel and presenting. It might be worth the short drive down from Portland and making a day of it, we are. Don't tell anyone I only have a B.S. in Software Engineering.
  • Paul E. McKenney - Distinguished Engineer at IBM
  • Kathleen O'Reilly - Computer Animator from LAIKA
  • Karen Ward, Ph.D. - Assistant Professor of Computer Science in UP's School of Engineering
  • Mike Bailey, Ph.D. - Professor of Computer Science at Oregon State
• Thu, Feb 15th at 11:30am at Microsoft's Portland Office, Stuart Celarier and I will be talking about CardSpace and the Laws of Identity. Stuart has created an excellent deck on this topic with some great Beyond Bullets designs that really lend themselves to the topic. Hopefully I'll have some demos of DasBlog running CardSpace along for the ride.

See you there!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Well, my wife's iPod actully. I've still got it on my To-Do list to get my wife's Honda Civic Hybrid hooked up with proper iPod integration, but until then she'll have to use an FM Transmitter to listen to her tunes. It's always such a hassle to find a decent free frequence to transmit on.

Travis pointed out this incredibly useful Radio-Locator that finds the best radio frequencies in your area for this very reason. There's also amore limited Canadian Radio Frequency Search and International Search.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

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